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 The Dictionary
of Twentieth-Century
British Philosophers

THOEMMES
This page intentionally left blank
 THE
DICTIONARY OF
TWENTIETH-CENTURY
BRITISH
PHILOSOPHERS

Volume 1
A-L

GENERAL EDITOR
Stuart Brown

SUPERVISING EDITORS

Hugh Bredin Jon Pike

Stuart Brown Patrick Rysiew
Diane Collinson David Scott
Anthony Ellis Alan PR Sell
John M. Lynch Robert Wilkinson
WJ. Mander

thoemmes
 First published in 2005 by

Thoemmes Continuum
11 Great George Street
Bristol BS1 5RR, England

http://www.thoemmes.co.m

The Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers

2 Volumes : ISBN 1 84371 096 X

© Thoemmes Continuum, 2005

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record of this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any way or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Typeset in Sabon at Thoemmes Continuum.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd.
This book is printed on acid-free paper, sewn, and
cased in a durable buckram.
 CONTENTS

Introduction vii

How to use the Dictionary xiii

General bibliography xv

List of contributors xvii

Biographical entries A-Z 1

Name index 1191

Supplementary list 1209

V
This page intentionally left blank
 INTRODUCTION

The Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers is the fourth in a series of

Thoemmes dictionaries of British philosophers. Volumes have appeared already on the
British philosophers of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The general
character of this dictionary, as well as its aims and style, is intended to follow those of its
predecessors so far as this is possible given the changes associated with the twentieth
century.
As with its companions, the entries in this dictionary are of varying lengths, ranging from a
few hundred words to several thousand, depending on considerations such as the importance of
the subjects in the context of philosophy, the range of their philosophical interests and the
volume of their significant publications. Each entry is divided into three parts. (1) There is some
biographical information about the subject: dates and places of birth, where known, education
and career. As many of the subjects of the entries are either still living or only recently deceased,
this information may be limited by considerations of confidentiality. (2) There is an account of
the subject's thought and contribution to philosophy, based upon his or her published work.
This is the main section of each entry. (3) There is an often highly selective bibliography,
including the subject's main philosophical works, other related writings and secondary
literature, if any.
The intention has also been to be fairly comprehensive and to include individuals who had a
substantial publication, in some cases no more than a book. This policy means that, at one
extreme, major figures on whom entire books have been written are dealt with relatively briefly
and reference given to the existing secondary literature, whilst, at the other extreme, the entries
on minor figures have mostly had to be researched almost entirely from primary sources and
may be the first pieces of secondary literature of their kind on the subjects with whom they deal.
As with the earlier dictionaries in this series the intention is that the entries should be of interest
both to the general reader who wants to find out about British philosophy of the period and
also that they should serve as starting points for those who want to make a further study of
individual philosophers.
The division of history into centuries is, of course, arbitrary. Many of the most significant
developments both in philosophy and affecting philosophy in the twentieth century go back to
the previous century. There are three external changes, for instance, that affected the
development of philosophy, and no doubt other established academic subjects, in the twentieth
century. These are (1) the growth of academic societies and journals, (2) the expansion of
universities and of student numbers and (3) professionalization. These changes all take their
beginnings in the nineteenth century.

vn
Introduction

1. The two most prestigious philosophical societies in twentieth-century Britain were the
Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society. The Aristotelian Society was founded in 1880
and its first President, Shadworth Holloway Hodgson (1832-1912) was a layman. After a
few years it faltered and it was refounded in 1900, and the new series of the Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society date from that year. The Aristotelian Society was, and remains, first
and foremost a London-based organization that promotes philosophical discussion by
regular meetings. For some years it had a largely lay membership, including a significant
number of women, though this had greatly declined by the latter decades of the century. The
journal Mind was founded in 1876 by Alexander Bain and was financially supported by him
in its early days. When G.F. Stout took over the editorship in 1891, a new series was begun
which continued through the whole of the twentieth century. After Bain's death in 1903 the
Mind Association was established mainly to support the journal. Since 1918 there has been a
conference, normally each year, where these two societies have come together, and whose
proceedings have been published as a supplementary volume of the Aristotelian Society. This
conference, known as the Joint Session, has been the pre-eminent philosophical conference in
Britain for much of the twentieth century and retains its leading position as a general
philosophy conference, even though there has been a burgeoning of specialist conferences in
the last few decades of the century.
During the early twentieth century other new philosophical institutions emerged. Firstly
there were two organizations that sought to present philosophy to the general public: the
Philosophical Society of England, which was founded in 1913 and publishes The
Philosopher•; and the British (now Royal) Institute of Philosophy, which was founded in 1926
and which publishes the journal Philosophy. More for professional philosophers is Analysis,
founded as an organ of analytic philosophy in 1933 and run by a Committee whose activities
now extend beyond the publication of the journal. The Scots Philosophical Club, founded in
1900, became the sponsor for another major journal, The Philosophical Quarterly', in 1951.
Since 1960 specialist philosophical societies with their own journals have proliferated,
including the British Society of Aesthetics and the British Society for the Philosophy of
Science, both founded in 1960, the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (1964),
the British Society for Phenomenology (1970), the Society for Applied Philosophy (1982), the
British Society for the History of Philosophy and the Society for Applied Philosophy, both
founded in 1984.

2. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were eight universities in the British Isles:
two in England (Oxford and Cambridge), four in Scotland (St Andrews, Aberdeen, Glasgow
and Edinburgh) and one in Ireland (Trinity College Dublin). In the first half of the nineteenth
century three new universities were founded: University College London (1826), Durham
(1826) and Queen's University, Belfast (1845). By the end of the nineteenth century,
however, every major city had institutions of higher education and either had or aspired to
having a university, for example, the Victoria University of Manchester (1880), and there
was a spate of Royal Charters granted in the first decade of the twentieth century:
Birmingham (1900), Liverpool (1903), Leeds (1904), Sheffield (1905) and Bristol (1908).
This process of expansion was set back by two world wars but picked up again in the 1950s
and 60s. Originally it was a matter of course that a new university would have a chair of
philosophy round whom a teaching department would be formed. This ceased to be true
after the 1970s and there were even closures of philosophy departments in some institutions.
Even with these losses, however, there were more than fifty departments of philosophy in

viii
 Introduction

Britain at the end of the century. This represents, over the century, a huge increase in the
number of teachers of philosophy and, of course, of students studying the subject in the
context of preparing for a degree.

3. The expansion of universities and in the numbers of those teaching philosophy has
resulted, to some extent, in a professionalization of the subject. Gilbert Ryle once observed
that he and his contemporaries were proud to be professional philosophers, earning salaries,
and performing to professional standards and contrasted the early analytic philosophers
favourably with the amateur 'missionary' philosophers who had previously dominated the
subject in Britain. But, while professionalization has inevitably affected the ethos of
philosophy in Britain, the extent of it is a matter of some dispute. Societies in which laypeople
are active continue to exist and there has been a surge in recent years of publications of
journals catering for their interest in the subject. British philosophers have, moreover, been
reluctant to clothe their discourses in the technical jargon that marks out publications that
are designed for professionals. Classics of twentieth-century philosophy, such as Kyle's
Concept of Mind (1949), are entirely free of jargon and indeed are works of literary merit.
Nonetheless, far more of those for whom there are entries in this dictionary were professional
philosophers, teaching philosophy as an academic subject, than is the case for British
philosophers of previous centuries.

These three changes are ones that began in the nineteenth century and the rate of change did
not begin to accelerate significantly until the 1960s. There has been a vast expansion in the
participation in philosophy compared with previous centuries, if participation is measured by
the number of people teaching or studying the subject, or the number of people producing
substantial publications on philosophical topics. In this philosophy is not different from other
academic subjects in which, especially in the period after World War II, there has generally been
a massive expansion. This has the consequence that a twentieth-century dictionary that sought
to be as inclusive in its criteria as were those for the previous three centuries would need to be
several times the size of this one.
As it happens this problem is offset in some measure by another set of problems. The
twentieth century is still in the very recent past from the point of view of those writing the
entries in this dictionary. A great many of those who should certainly be counted as 'twentieth-
century philosophers' - on a parity with the reasoning used to decide who was a
nineteenth-century philosopher - are still alive, are still engaged in writing what may turn out to
be major contributions or indeed have yet to produce their most significant work. For a variety
of reasons there are many philosophers of the late twentieth century whom it would be
premature to attempt to cover in the kind of entry that has characterized this series of
biographical dictionaries.
In the face of these difficulties it was agreed that, with a small number of exceptions, only
those who were born on or before 1935 would have entries in this dictionary. The year 1935 is
a slightly arbitrary choice, of course, in much the same way that sixty-five is a slightly arbitrary
age for compulsory retirement, as it has been in recent years for British university teachers. But,
though many of those included by this criterion are still actively pursuing their philosophical
interests, it seems a reasonable assumption that most will already have made their main
contributions to the subject. The choice of 1935, however, was also influenced by the intention
that this dictionary should be roughly of the same character and size as its predecessors. With a
later date, such as 1960, the dictionary would have had to be either much more selective or very

ix
Introduction

much larger. By choosing such an early date it has been possible for this dictionary to be nearly
as comprehensive as were the earlier dictionaries in the selection of subjects for entries. To that
extent there is a case for retaining a title that makes it look like the sequel to the Dictionary of
Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers, as indeed it is, rather than call it the 'Dictionary of
Recent British Philosophers' even though, strictly speaking, the latter title may be more correct.
For these reasons it was a general rule that individuals, to justify including them here, should
have been born by or before 1935, lived a significant part of their lives in the twentieth century
and have published substantially in philosophy. We have made exceptions to this rule both by
excluding a number of minor figures for whom there are entries in the Dictionary of
Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers and including a number of significant figures who
were born after 1935. It would have been difficult, for instance, to defend the absence of an
entry for individuals who were born after that date but who died before 2000 having made a
significant contribution to the subject. And in a few other cases it was judged that readers
would expect to find an entry in a dictionary of twentieth-century British philosophers and one
ought to be included, even if it could only be provisional in its assessment of the individual's
work. The intention in doing this is to ensure, as far as possible, that readers will find entries for
the individuals for whom they can reasonably expect to find an entry in this dictionary.
Individuals have been included in this dictionary who either were or are 'British' in a straight-
forward sense or had a strong association with Britain. In the latter category are a number with
a strong alternative national identity (Irish or American, for instance), but who spent an
important part of their lives in Britain or were in other ways associated with British philosophy.
Individuals have been included as 'philosophers' here who would be thought of primarily as
practitioners of some other subject but whose writings have a philosophical content or interest:
scientists, art critics, sociologists and theologians, to mention but a few of the other categories.
Nonetheless, by comparison with earlier dictionaries, the majority of those for whom entries
are to be found here were professional philosophers. Compared with earlier dictionaries there
are disappointingly few entries on laypeople. This reflects a characteristic of twentieth-century
intellectual life in Britain and, indeed, elsewhere: a tendency to increased specialization and pro-
fessionalization.
There are also surprisingly few women philosophers included here. There were, to be sure,
some lay women philosophers who presented a paper or papers to the Aristotelian Society and
who are included in the concluding chapter of Volume 4 of Ellen Waithe's monumental History
of Women Philosophers (1995). A few of these do not have entries here but rather more are
included who were not picked up by Waithe's research. The relative shortage of entries for
women seems to be a consequence, not of an editorial bias, but of the choice of 1935 as a birth
date, which excludes the significant number of women who joined the philosophical profession
in the 1960s and later. In the earlier part of the century there does not seem to have been the
steady increase in the participation of women in philosophy that one might have expected,
given the steady increase of women attending universities. Indeed the professionalization of
philosophy seems, at least in its earlier years, to have had a negative effect on the participation
of women. Few women held academic posts in philosophy outside the women's colleges in the
first half of the century. By the end of the century there had been a great change, with women
outnumbering men not only in classes but also on the staff of some academic departments.
Even then, as in other subjects, the relative numbers of women professors were embarrassingly
small for institutions that had for some years embraced equal opportunities. Nonetheless it is
clear that a revised version of this dictionary such as might be attempted a few decades hence
would include a better representation of women.

X
 Introduction

The process of deciding on whom to have entries has been fraught with pitfalls. To begin
with, the list of 'candidates' does not exist anywhere and itself had to be constructed by
reference to a wide variety of sources. The application of the criteria used created a large
number of marginal cases and sometimes individuals have been excluded because they already
had entries in another dictionary or included because someone was available who was ready
and willing to write on them. In the former category, and listed in the Supplementary List on
page 1209 of this dictionary, are some of those included in the Dictionary of British Classicists
whose work, though primarily philological, is of philosophical interest. In the latter category
are some of the 'expatriate' British philosophers of the earlier part of the century.
It is hoped that, for the most part, readers will find the entries they look for in this dictionary.
It is, however, predictable that some will find what they may rightly regard as regrettable
omissions even by the criteria here given. They may not find them either on the Supplementary
List appended to this dictionary of names of others who might, if only marginally, be classed as
twentieth-century British philosophers, for whom entries are to be found in other Thoemmes
dictionaries. Regrettable omissions there are bound to be. The General Editor has his own
private list of those for whom he would have quite liked to see an entry but where, for one
reason or another, the project of including them was defeated. Others will construct their own
lists. It is an unfortunate consequence of this form of publication that such omissions will give
the impression of permanence unless or until a revised edition is produced. But the publishers
have already established an on-line encyclopedia (www.thoemmes.com/encyclo.htm), which
already includes people who have entries in existing biographical dictionaries and may be
expanded to incorporate new entries, as it is to be hoped it will. Readers who wish to suggest
new entries are encouraged to contact the publisher.
It would be wrong to end with an emphasis on omissions. Included here are nearly 500
entries on not only the main British philosophers of the period covered but a very large number
of interesting but less well-known ones. A team of supervising editors has been responsible for
finding contributors to write entries, which has not always been easy, and for vetting what has
been prepared. More than 200 contributors have been involved and between them they have
made a massive collective effort in researching their entries, many of which are entirely new
contributions. John Slater was kind enough to make available at the outset a huge list of
twentieth-century philosophers from the English-speaking world, which made a useful starting-
point for the project. The whole project would, of course, have been unthinkable without the
support and encouragement of Rudi Thoemmes himself and his colleagues at Thoemmes Press,
of whom three must be specially acknowledged: Merilyn Holme, who has managed the project
with wonderful efficiency and patience; Katia Hamza, who has been an exemplary copy-editor;
and Alan Rutherford who has done much to keep the production on track.

Stuart Brown, 2005

General Editor

xi
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 HOW TO USE THE DICTIONARY

The Dictionary contains entries on nearly 500 individuals. The title of each entry gives the
subject's full name and, in brackets (where appropriate), the name by which they were
known, if this was different. Biographical details are usually concentrated in the opening
paragraph(s) of each entry. They will contain, where this is known, the place and exact date
of birth, details of education, degrees and career of the subject, and where relevant and
known, the place and exact date of death. This is followed by what is usually the most
substantial part of each entry, which is concerned with the subject's writings and with a
critical account of their thought.
Each entry concludes with a select bibliography which gives the subject's main
philosophical publications and, in rare cases, all of them. Often there is a section entitled
'Other Relevant Work' which will contain other writings by the subject, such as less
important contributions to philosophy or writings in related subject areas. Where suitable
secondary source material is available on the subject of the entry, this is given in a third
section entitled 'Further Reading'. In the case of some of the longer entries this list, even
though selective, may be considerable. But for many, especially shorter, entries the authors
will have worked only with primary sources and themselves be producing the first significant
piece of secondary literature on the subject, at least as a philosopher. Dates of publication are
given and also the place, but only where that place is other than London.
The name of the author is given at the end of each entry and their title and institutional
affiliation is given in the 'List of Contributors'.
Within the text of the entries there is a cross-referencing system for drawing attention to
other entries. Names that appear in small capitals (e.g. COOK WILSON) refer to subjects for
whom there is an entry elsewhere in the Dictionary, to which the reader may go for further
information.
Some of the individuals who might be looked for in this dictionary have entries in other
dictionaries published by Thoemmes. In particular the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century
British Philosophers included many who lived and continued to publish philosophical works
well into the twentieth century. There are also some overlaps with the Dictionary of Irish
Philosophers, the Dictionary of British Classicists and with the Dictionary of Modern
American Philosophers. Only some of those, including the most important ones, have entries
here: sometimes an existing entry has been used or revised and at other times a new entry has
been produced for this dictionary. The reader who is looking for a particular subject and is
disappointed not to find an entry in this dictionary may refer to the Supplementary List of
other twentieth-century British philosophers at the end and may find the subject has an entry
in one of these other dictionaries.

xiii
How to use the Dictionary

An Index of Proper Names is also to be found at the end of the Dictionary. This includes
names of individuals, mostly philosophers but also other relevant intellectual figures. It also
includes names of academic and especially philosophical institutions, such as places with
universities where philosophy is taught, philosophical societies and journals.

xiv
 GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following are general reference works which may be of use in finding out more about
individual British philosophers of the period or, more broadly, about British philosophy in
the twentieth century.

Works on Individual People

The Academic Who's Who: University Teachers in the British Isles, Arts, Education and Social
Sciences: 1973-74 (1973, 2nd edition 1975).
Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers, ed. Stuart Brown, Diane
Collinson and Robert Wilkinson (1996).
Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sydney Lee, first published in
1885. Dated and now overtaken by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols
(2004), also accessible on-line.
Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulson Gillespie, 16 vols (New York,
1970-80).
International Directory of Philosophy and Philosophers (New York, 1965; 12th edn, 2001).
Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, ed. Roland Turner (Chicago, 2nd edn, 1987).
Who's Who (annual).
Who Was Who (10 vols). See Who Was Who: A Cumulated Index 1897-2000 (2002).
Who's Who in Education, ed. Robert Bradfield (1974, 3rd edn c. 2001).

Histories of Twentieth-Century British and Anglophone Philosophy

Dummett, Michael, Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
Metz, Rudolf, ed. J.H. Muirhead, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy (1938).
Passmore, J.A., A Hundred Years of Philosophy (1957).
, Recent Philosophers (1988).
Paul, Leslie, The English Philosophers (1952).
Philosophy of the English-speaking World in the Twentieth Century: Logic, Mathematics and
Science (Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. 9), ed. S.G. Shanker (1996).
Philosophy of the English-speaking World in the Twentieth Century: Meaning, Knowledge
and Value (Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. 10), ed. John Canfield (1995).
Sell, Alan P.P., The Philosophy of Religion: 1875-1980 (Bristol, 1988).
Urmson. J.O., Philosophical Analysis: Its Development between the Two World Wars (1956).
Waithe, Ellen (ed.), A History of Women Philosophers: Contemporary Women Philosophers,
1900 to Today (Vol. 4) (Dordrecht, 1995).
Warnock, G.J., English Philosophy since 1900 (1963).

XV
General Bibliography

Some Useful Collections

British Analytical Philosophy, ed. B.A.O. Williams and Alan Montefiore (1966).
British Philosophy in the Mid-Century: A Cambridge Symposium, ed. C.A. Mace (1957).
Contemporary British Philosophy, ed. J.H. Muirhead, (1st series, 1924, 2nd series, 1925),
ed. H.D. Lewis (3rd series, 1956).
Essays in Conceptual Analysis, ed. A.G.N. Flew (1956).
Linguistic Analysis and Phenomenology, ed. W. Mays and S.C. Brown (1972).
Logic and Language, ed. A.G.N. Flew (Oxford, 1st series, 1951, 2nd series, 1953).

Works Relating to Academic Institutions

Commonwealth University Yearbook (annually, with gaps, from 1914).
Proceedings of the British Academy (periodical containing memoirs of deceased Fellows).

Several individual universities, including Aberdeen, Cambridge, London and Oxford pub-
lish or have published periodic registers of graduates. Though it is now discontinued, there
have been three twentieth-century supplements to the Oxford Historical Register, which
contains an index of honours degrees granted by the university as well as chairs, readerships
and some other university appointments.

xvi
 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Mark Addis
Lecturer in English, School of English Philip de Bary
University of Central England The Policy Press
Birmingham Bristol

Douglas Adeney Michael Beaney

Lecturer in Philosophy, Department of Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy
Philosophy The Open University
University of Melbourne Milton Keynes
Victoria, Australia
Andrew Belsey
Andrew Aitken Lecturer in Philosophy
PhD Student, Department of Historical and Cardiff University
Cultural Studies Cardiff, Wales
University of London
London Jan Olof Bengtsson
St Cross College
Leslie Armour Oxford
Research Professor of Philosophy
Dominican College of Philosophy and Daniele Besomi
Theology and University of Independent Researcher
Ottawa Gola di Lago, Switzerland
Ottawa, Canada
Talia Mae Bettcher
Robin Attfield Assistant Professor, Department of
Professor of Philosophy, ENCAP Philosophy
Cardiff University California State University
Cardiff, Wales Los Angeles, California, USA

Paul Badham Mark Bevir

Professor of Theology and Religious Assistant Professor, Department of Political
Studies, Department of Theology and Science
Religious Studies University of California
University of Lampeter Berkeley, California, USA
Ceredigion, Wales

xvii
List of Contributors

Purushottama Bilimoria S.A.M. Burns

Senior Fellow, Philosophy Department Professor of Philosophy, Department of
University of Melbourne Philosophy
Victoria, Australia Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
George Botterill
Department of Philosophy Darragh Byrne
University of Sheffield Lecturer, Department of Philosophy
Sheffield University of Birmingham
Birmingham
David Boucher
Professorial Fellow, School of European Robert R. Calder
Studies (Formerly) Tutor in Philosophy, CCE
Cardiff University University of Strathclyde
Cardiff, Wales Hamilton, Scotland

Emily Brady Robin Cameron

Senior Lecturer, Centre for Philosophy Research Professor of Logic Emeritus,
Lancaster University Department of Philosophy
Lancaster University of Aberdeen
Old Aberdeen, Scotland
Hugh Bredin
Senior Lecturer in Scholastic Philosophy, David Campbell
School of Philosophical Studies Lecturer in Philosophy, Department of
Queen's University Philosophy
Belfast, Northern Ireland University of Glasgow
Glasgow, Scotland
Thom Brooks
Postgraduate and Founding Editor, Journal Keith Campbell
of Moral Philosophy Challis Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus)
Department of Philosophy University of Sydney
University of Sheffield New South Wales, Australia
Sheffield
David Carr
Robert Brown Professor of Philosophy of Education,
Visiting Fellow, Social and Political Theory Department of Educational Studies
Program University of Edinburgh
Australian National University Edinburgh, Scotland
Canberra, Australia
Benjamin Carter
Stuart Brown Visiting Lecturer in History
Professor of Philosophy (Retired) University of Bristol
The Open University Bristol
Milton Keynes

xvm
 List of Contributors

David Carter John W. Clarke, Jr

Associate Lecturer/Research Associate in Sessional Lecturer, Faculty of Divinity
Religious Studies University of Toronto
The Open University Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Milton Keynes
Patricia Clarke
Peter Cave Lecturer in Philosophy (Retired with
Associate Lecturer, The Open University Honorary Status), School of Divinity,
and Visiting Lecturer, City University History and Philosophy
London University of Aberdeen
London Old Aberdeen, Scotland

Mark D. Chapman Alan Cohen

Vice-Principal Medical General Practitioner (Retired)
Ripon College Pinner, Middlesex
Oxford
Diane Collinson
Enrique Chavez-Arvizo Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, The Open
Associate Professor, Philosophy University (Retired)
Department Kingsbridge, Devon
City University of New York
New York, New York, USA Lee Congdon
Professor of History, Department of
Joshua L. Cherniss History
Graduate Student in Modern History James Madison University
Balliol College Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA
Oxford
Charles Conti
Christopher Cherry Lecturer in Philosophy, Co-ordinator MA
Honorary Emeritus Senior Research in Literature, Religion and Philosophy
Fellow, University of Kent and Christ University of Sussex
Church University College Brighton, Sussex
Canterbury, Kent
Neil Cooper
George D. Chryssides Professor Emeritus of Philosophy
Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies University of Dundee
University of Wolverhampton Dundee, Scotland
Wolverhampton
B. Jack Copeland
Stephen R.L. Clark Professor of Philosophy and Director of the
Professor of Philosophy, Department of Turing Archive for the History of
Philosophy Computing
University of Liverpool University of Canterbury
Liverpool Christchurch, New Zealand

xix
List of Contributors

Andrew Coulson J. Dybikowski

Senior Lecturer, School of Public Policy Previously at University of British
University of Birmingham Columbia
Birmingham Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Martin Cressey Anthony Ellis

Retired Principal Chair, Department of Philosophy
Westminster College Virginia Commonwealth University
Cambridge Richmond, Virginia, USA

David Crook Richard K. England

Lecturer in the History of Education Assistant Director, Bellavance Honors
University of London Program
London Salisbury University
Salisbury, Maryland, USA
Garrett Cullity
Associate Professor of Philosophy, Michael A. Fahey, SJ
Department of Philosophy Emmett Doerr Chair of Theology
University of Adelaide Marquette University
Adelaide, Australia Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

Fred D'Agostino Frederick Ferre

Associate Professor of Philosophy, School Research Professor of Philosophy
of Social Science (Emeritus), Department of Philosophy
University of New England University of Georgia
Armidale, New South Wales, Australia Athens, Georgia, USA

Jane M. Day Phillip Ferreira

Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy
Lady Margaret Hall
Oxford
Cora Diamond
William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of
Philosophy and Professor of Law
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia, USA
Associate Professor, Department of
Philosophy
Kutztown University of Pennsylvania
Kutztown, Pennsylvania, USA
William Fish
Lecturer in Philosophy
Massey University
Palmerston North, New Zealand

Thomas Duddy Erin E. Flynn

Department of Philosophy Philosophy Department
National University of Ireland Ohio Wesleyan University
Galway, Ireland Delaware, Ohio, USA

Michael Dunne Katrina Ford

Lecturer, Faculty of Philosophy Stratford
National University of Ireland Taranaki, New Zealand
Maynooth, Ireland

XX
 List of Contributors

R. Forsman Jerry Goodenough

Professor of Philosophy (retired) Tutor and Honorary Lecturer in
Acadia University Philosophy, School of Economic and Social
Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada Studies
University of East Anglia
Michael Allen Fox Norwich, Norfolk
Professor of Philosophy, Department of
Philosophy Geoffrey Gorham
Queen's University Assistant Professor, Department of
Kingston, Ontario, Canada Philosophy
St Olaf College
NJ. Fox North Field, Minnesota, USA
Former Researcher at The Open University
Tavistock, Devon Jonathan Gorman
Professor of Moral Philosophy and Head,
R.G. Frey School of Philosophical Studies
Professor of Philosophy, Department of Queen's University
Philosophy Belfast, Northern Ireland
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, Ohio, USA Gordon Graham
Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy,
Peter Gallagher Department of Moral Philosophy
Lecturer in Philosophy University of Aberdeen
Heythrop College Aberdeen, Scotland
London
Peter J. Graham
Jonardon Ganeri Assistant Professor of Philosophy,
Reader in Philosophy, Department of Department of Philosophy
Philosophy University of California, Riverside
University of Liverpool Riverside, California, USA
Liverpool
Robert Grant
Hilary Gatti Professor of Cultural and Political Thought,
Professor of English Literature, Faculty of Department of English Literature
Philosophy Glasgow University
Universita de Roma 'La Sapienza' Glasgow, Scotland
Rome, Italy
Margareta Hallberg
Mihaela Georgieva Department of History of Ideas and Theory
PhD Candidate and Part-time Teaching of Science
Assistant, Department of Government Goteborg University
University of Manchester Goteborg, Sweden
Manchester

Robert A. Gilbert
Director, R.A. Gilbert
Bristol

xxi
List of Contributors

Oswald Hanfling Cindy L. Holder

Professor of Philosophy (retired) Assistant Professor, Philosophy Department
The Open University University of Victoria
Boars Hill Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Oxford
Adam Hood
Calvin Hayes Dean of Research
Great Books/Liberal Studies The Queen's Foundation for Ecumenical
Brock University Theological Education
St Catharines, Ontario, Canada Birmingham

John Hayes Joseph Houston

Head, Department of Philosophy Professor of Philosophical Theology
Mary Immaculate College Emeritus
University of Limerick University of Glasgow
Limerick, Ireland Glasgow, Scotland

Scott Hendricks Bruce Hunter

Assistant Professor, Department of
Philosophy
Clark University
Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
Thomas Heyd
Lecturer, Department of Philosophy
University of Victoria
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Department of Philosophy
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Sarah Hutton
Professor of Early Modern Studies, School
of Arts
Middlesex University
London

Andrew M. Hill August A. Imholtz, Jr

Minister Executive Editor, Readex Digital
St Mark's Unitarian Church Congressional Serial Set
Edinburgh, Scotland Beltsville, Maryland, USA

Wilfred Hodges Andrew D. Irvine

Professor of Mathematics, School of Professor of Philosophy, Department of
Mathematical Sciences Philosophy
University of London University of British Columbia
London Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Melinda Hogan Nick Jardine

Instructor
Kwantlen University College
Surrey, British Columbia, Canada
Professor of History and Philosophy of the
Sciences, Department of History and
Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge
Cambridge

xxn
 List of Contributors

Christopher M. Jones A.H. Lesser

Chaplain and Fellow Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Centre for
St Peter's College Philosophy
Oxford University of Manchester
Manchester
Carol A. Keene
Emerita Associate Professor Samuel S. Levey
Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville Associate Professor of Philosophy,
Edwardsville, Illinois, USA Department of Philosophy
Dartmouth College
Innes Kennedy Hanover, New Hampshire, USA
Lecturer in Cultural Studies
UHI Millennium Institute Harry A. Lewis
Orkney, Scotland Senior Fellow, Department of Philosophy
University of Melbourne
Fergus Kerr Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Regent
Blackfriars Hall Peter B. Lewis
Oxford Senior Lecturer in Philosophy
School of Philosophy, Psychology and
Simon Kirchin Language Sciences
Lecturer in Philosophy, Department of University of Edinburgh
Philosophy Edinburgh, Scotland
University of Bristol
Bristol B.I.B. Lindahl
Researcher, Department of Philosophy
Max Kolbel Stockholm University
Senior Lecturer, Philosophy Department Stockholm, Sweden
University of Birmingham
Birmingham Eugene T. Long
Distinguished Professor Emeritus of
A.R. Lacey Philosophy, Department of Philosophy
Senior Lecturer (Retired), Department of University of South Carolina
Philosophy Columbia, South Carolina, USA
King's College
London Steven Lukes
Professor of Sociology, Department of
Peter Lamb Sociology
Research Fellow, SPIRE: Politics, New York University
International Relations New York, New York
Keele University
Keele, Staffordshire Colin Lyas
Senior Lecturer (retired)
Lancaster University
Lancaster

xxiii
List of Contributors

John M. Lynch Esther Mclntosh

Barrett Honors College Lecturer in Gender, Ethics and Religion,
Arizona State University School of Theology and Religious Studies
Tempe, Arizona, USA University of Leeds
Leeds
TJ. Lynch
Lecturer in Scholastic Philosophy, D.L.C. Maclachlan
Philosophical Studies Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus),
Queen's University Department of Philosophy
Belfast, Northern Ireland Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Nick McAdoo
Associate Lecturer and Researcher WJ. Mander
The Open University Fellow
Milton Keynes Harris Manchester College
Oxford
Mark L. McCallon
Associate Professor Pete Mandik
Abilene Christian University Assistant Professor of Philosophy,
Abilene, Texas, USA Department of Philosophy
William Paterson
Elizabeth McCardell University of New Jersey
Independent Scholar Wayne, New Jersey, USA
Palmyra, Western Australia
Mathieu Marion
Joseph McCarney Associate Professor, Department of
Tutor in Philosophy (Retired) Philosophy
University of Sussex University of Ottawa
Lewes, East Sussex Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Graham McFee David J. Matheson

Professor of Philosophy Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of
University of Brighton Philosophy
Eastbourne, Sussex Carleton University
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Katherine McGowran
Lecturer, School of English Susan Mendus
University of Leeds Professor of Political Philosophy, Politics
Leeds Department
University of York
Leemon McHenry York
Lecturer in Philosophy, Department of
Philosophy Rosemary Mitchell
California State University Lecturer in History
Northridge, California, USA Trinity and All Saints College
Leeds

XXIV
 List of Contributors

J.N. Mohanty Timothy O'Hagan

Professor of Philosophy, Department of Professor of Philosophy, School of
Philosophy Economic and Social Studies
Temple University University of East Anglia
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Norwich, Norfolk

Michael Morris Alex Oliver

Hamilton, Lanarkshire, Scotland
John Morrow
School of Political Science
Victoria University of Wellington
Wellington, New Zealand
Benjamin E. Murphy
Assistant Faculty, Humanities Division
Florida State University - Panama
Panama, Republic of Panama
Laurence L. Murphy
Temple University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Francis Neary
Centre for History of Science, Technology
and Medicine
University of Manchester
Manchester
University Senior Lecturer, Faculty of
Philosophy and Fellow of Gonville and
Caius College
Uuniversity of Cambridge
Cambridge
LJ. O'Neill
Senior Fellow, Department of Philosophy
University of Melbourne
Parkville, Australia
Christine Overall
Professor of Philosophy and Associate
Dean, Faculty of Arts and Science
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Alan G. Padgett
Professor of Systematic Theology
Luther Seminary
Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA

Raviel Netz Christopher Partridge

Professor of Classics, Department of Senior Lecturer in Theology and
Classics Contemporary Religion, Department of
Stanford University Theology and Religious Studies
Stanford, California, USA Chester College
Chester
G.M. Newlands
Professor of Divinity, Department of Mark W.O. Paterson
Theology and Religious Studies Lecturer in Cultural Studies, School of
University of Glasgow Cultural Studies
Glasgow, Scotland University of the West of England
Bristol
Tim Oakley
Senior Lecturer, Philosophy Program Ray Scott Percival
Latrobe University Writer on Science and Philosophy and
Victoria, Australia Designer of Abstract Reasoning Tests
Bolton, Lancashire

XXV
List of Contributors

D.Z. Phillips Andrew John Pyle

Danforth Professor of Philosophy of Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy
Religion, Claremont Graduate University, University of Bristol
California, USA and Rush Rhees Professor Bristol
Emeritus and Professor of Philosophy
Emeritus, University of Wales Swansea Stephen Read
Swansea, Wales Reader in History and Philosophy of Logic,
Department of Logic and Metaphysics
Robert Piercey University of St Andrews
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, St Andrews, Scotland
Department of Philosophy
University of Regina Robert Reay-Jones
Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada PhD Student in Philosophy, Department of
Philosophy
Jon Pike Cardiff University
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy Cardiff, Wales
The Open University
Milton Keynes Daniel Rees
Librarian
Kathryn L. Plant Downside Abbey
Associate Lecturer Stratton-on-Fosse, Somerset
The Open University in Wales
Cardiff, Wales Adrian Rice
Assistant Professor of Mathematics,
Robert Pope Department of Mathematics
Lecturer in Contemporary and Applied Randolph-Macon College
Theology Ashland, Virginia, USA
University of Wales, Bangor
Bangor, Wales Richard E. Rice
Florence, Montana, USA
Jeffrey R. Post
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Anna M. Robbins
Philosophy Director of Training and Lecturer in
Rider University Theology and Contemporary Culture
Lawrenceville, New Jersey, USA London School of Theology
Northwood, Middlesex
Michael Potter
Teaching Assistant and PhD Candidate, Richard H. Roberts
Department of Philosophy Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies,
McMaster University Department of Religious Studies
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Lancaster University
Lancaster
Elizabeth Pybus
Honorary Lecturer in Moral Philosophy
University of St Andrews
St Andrews, Scotland

xxvi
 List of Contributors

G.A.J. Rogers Brian Scarlett

Professor Emeritus of the History of Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy
Philosophy, Department of Philosophy University of Melbourne
Keele University Victoria, Australia
Keele, Staffordshire
Peter Schmidt
John David Root Program in the History of Science, Tate
Professor of History, Lewis Department of Laboratory of Physics
Humanities University of Minnesota
Illinois Institute of Technology Minnesota, Minneapolis
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Gordon Schochet
Philip Rose Edison, New Jersey, USA
Assistant Professor, Department of
Philosophy Malcolm Schofield
University of Windsor Professor of Ancient Philosophy
Windsor, Ontario, Canada St John's College
Cambridge
Michael Rosen
Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy David E. Schrader
Lincoln College Professor of Philosophy, Philosophy
Oxford Department
Washington & Jefferson College
Tracey S. Rosenberg Washington, Pennsylvania, USA
PhD Candidate, Department of English
Literature David Scott
University of Edinburgh Associate Professor, Department of
Edinburgh, Scotland Philosophy
University of Victoria
Pedro Ruiz-Castell Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
D Phil Student in History of Science
St Cross College William Seager
Oxford Professor of Philosophy, Department of
Humanities
Alan Ruston University of Toronto at Scarborough
Editor, Transactions of the Unitarian Scarborough, Ontario, Canada
Historical Society
Watford, Hertfordshire Alan P.F. Sell
Visiting Professor
Patrick Rysiew Acadia University College of Divinity
Assistant Professor, Department of Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada
Philosophy
University of British Columbia Lisa Shapiro
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Assistant Professor, Philosophy Department
Simon Eraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

xxvn
List of Contributors

Jeremy Shearmur Timothy Smiley

Department of Philosophy Emeritus Knightsbridge Professor of
Australian National University Philosophy
Canberra, Australia Clare College
Cambridge
Anna Sherratt
Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute de Nicholas H. Smith
Investigaciones Filosoficas Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Macquarie University
Mexico North Ryde, New South Wales, Australia
Mexico
Elmer Sprague
Joseph H. Shieber Professor Emeritus
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Brooklyn College (CUNY)
Department of Philosophy Brooklyn, New York
Lafayette College
Easton, Pennsylvania, USA Julia Stapleton
Senior Lecturer in Politics, Department of
John R. Shook Politics
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Durham
Philosophy Department Durham
Oklahoma State University
Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA John Stephens
Director, Robin Waterfield
Peter Simons Oxford
Professor of Philosophy, School of
Philosophy M.A. Stewart
University of Leeds Honorary Research Professor in the
Leeds History of Philosophy
Universities of Lancaster and Aberdeen
Anthony Skelton Edinburgh, Scotland
Lecturer, Department of Philosophy
University of Toronto Dustin R. Stokes
Toronto, Ontario, Canada PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy
University of British Columbia
I.K. Skrupskelis Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Distinguished Professor Emeritus of
Philosophy Philip Stratton-Lake
University of South Carolina Lecturer in Philosophy, Department of
Lancaster, South Carolina Philosophy
University of Reading
John G. Slater Reading
Professor Emeritus, Department of
Philosophy Eric Susser
University of Toronto Lecturer, The Barrett Honors College
Toronto, Ontario, Canada Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona

xxvm
 List of Contributors

William Sweet I.C. Tip ton

Professor of Philosophy, Department of Honorary Research Fellow, Department of
Philosophy Philosophy
St Francis Xavier University University of Wales Swansea
Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada Swansea, Wales

James Tartaglia John C. Travell

Lecturer in Philosophy, Philosophy Minister, Penge Congregational Church
Programme (Retired)
Keele University Dorchester, Dorset
Keele, Staffordshire
Elizabeth Trott
Andrew Tate Full Professor of Philosophy, Philosophy
Lecturer, Department of English Department
Lancaster University Ryerson University
Lancaster Toronto, Ontario, Canada

C.C.W. Taylor Elizabeth R. Valentine

Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy and Professor of Psychology, Department of
Professor (Retired) Psychology
Corpus Christi College Royal Holloway
Oxford Egham, Surrey

Michael W. Taylor Alan Vincelette

Head, Banking Policy Assistant Academic Dean
Hong Kong Monetary Authority St John's Seminary
Hong Kong Camarillo, California, USA

Elizabeth Telfer Andrew Vincent

Reader in Philosophy (Retired), Professor of Political Theory
Department of Philosophy Sheffield University
University of Glasgow Sheffield
Glasgow, Scotland
A.D.M. Walker
Anthony Charles Thiselton Lecturer in Philosophy (Retired),
Emeritus Professor of Christian Theology Department of Philosophy
in Residence, Department of Theology University of Hull
University of Nottingham Hull
Canon Theologian of Leciester Cathedral
and of Southwell Minster Martin Warner
Nottingham Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Department
of Philosophy
Tim Thornton University of Warwick
Lecturer in Philosophy, Division of Medical Coventry
Education
University of Warwick
Coventry

xxix
List of Contributors

George Watson S.G. Williams

Fellow of St John's College Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy
Cambridge Worcester College
Oxford
Stephen Watt
Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy, Christopher Andrew Winch
Department of Philosophy Professor of Philosophy of Education
University of Edinburgh University College Northampton
Associate Lecturer, The Open University Northampton
Edinburgh, Scotland
Richard Woodfield
Michel Weber School Research Professor in Art and
Centre de Logique Design
Universite Catholique de Louvain Nottingham Trent University
Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium Nottingham

Mark Weblin Andrew Wright

John Anderson Senior Research Fellow, Programme Director for Philosophy and
Philosophy Department Ethics, Department of Humanities, Arts
University of Sydney, New South Wales, and Languages
Australia London Metropolitan University
London
John Webster
Professor of Systematic Theology, Divinity Cameron Wybrow
and Religious Studies Lecturer in Biblical Greek
University of Aberdeen McMaster Divinity College
Aberdeen, Scotland Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Ralph Wedgwood Keith E. Yandell

CUF Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Julius R. Weinberg Professor of
Oxford Philosophy, Department of Philosophy
Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, Merton University of Wisconsin at Madison
College Madison, Wisconsin
Oxford
James O. Young
Donald Wiebe Professor of Philosophy, Department of
Professor of Divinity, Trinity College Philosophy
University of Toronto University of Victoria
Toronto, Ontario, Canada Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Robert Wilkinson
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy
The Open University in Scotland
Edinburgh, Scotland

XXX
 A
AARON, Richard Ithamar (1901-87)
R.I. Aaron was born in Seven Sisters on 6
November 1901, but brought up in Ynystawe
in the nearby Swansea Valley. He died in
Aberystwyth on 29 March 1987. Aaron
received his secondary education at Ystalyfera
Grammar School before going on to University
College, Cardiff, where he took honours
degrees in history (1921) and philosophy
(1922). In 1923 he was awarded the degree of
MA for a dissertation entitled 'The Relations of
History and Science', and in the same year he
was elected to a fellowship of the University of
Wales which enabled him to enter Oriel
College, Oxford to study for the degree of
DPhil. In Oxford, he met and admired W.D.
Ross, H.A. PRICHARD and H.H. JOACHIM. He
also established lifelong friendships with Gilbert
RYLE, A.C. EWING and Michael FOSTER.
Aaron's thesis on 'The History and Value of the
Distinction between Intellect and Intuition'
gained the DPhil, and he was now appointed to
his first teaching post, back in Wales, but under
A.E. Heath in Swansea.
Aaron's first book, The Nature of Knowing
(1930), was based upon work done in connec-
tion with his DPhil topic, although, as he said
in the Preface, the book, unlike the thesis, con-
tained 'few historical references' of the sort on
which, ultimately, Aaron's considerable repu-
tation was to be based. With hindsight, then,
his early paper entitled 'Locke and Berkeley's
Commonplace Book' (1931) might strike one
as more significant. In it Aaron examined
1
Berkeley's two early notebooks, now known as
the Philosophical Commentaries, reasoned
about their dating, and considered what might
have led Berkeley to immaterialism. Aaron was
most unhappy about the accuracy of the then
most recently published edition of the note-
books, and he appended a list of around a
hundred corrections to that, but his own judi-
ciousness is apparent throughout. His conclu-
sion that Malebranche was the primary inspi-
ration for Berkeley's immaterialism anticipated
A.A. LUCE'S well-known dictum that 'Locke
taught [Berkeley], but Malebranche inspired
him', although, in Aaron's view, Locke's
posthumously published An Examination of
P. Malebranche's Opinion of Seeing All Things
in God may have provided the spur. Even now,
one finds this early paper by Aaron impres-
sive, and a good early example of Aaron's
strengths.
In 1932, when still only thirty, Aaron was
appointed Professor of Philosophy at
Aberystwyth, a position he held until his retire-
ment in 1969. Aaron was, indeed, very much a
Welshman, with a strong commitment to
Wales, and to its language, yet he combined this
with a generous and outward-looking spirit
that made him an ideal mentor for all his
students, whatever their background, and gave
them a clear sense of his stature in the wider
intellectual world. In and for Wales, he pub-
lished his second book Hanes Athroniaeth: O
Descartes i Hegel (1932) and edited the Welsh-
language Efrydiau Athronyddol [Philosophical
Studies] for thirty years, as well as acting in
AARON
various other capacities that led a compatriot
obituarist to describe him as one of the out-
standing Welshmen of his day. In 1973 the
University of Wales recognized his stature by
awarding him the honorary degree of DLitt.
Outside Wales, Aaron was elected fellow of
the British Academy in 1955, he was President
of the Mind Association for 1955-6 and of the
Aristotelian Society for 1957-8, and he was a
visiting professor at Yale University in the year
1952-3 and, for one semester in 1970, at
Carlton College, Minnesota.
John Locke, the book for which Aaron's
name is certainly best known, was published in
1937. The book was hugely successful. It saw
a third (revised) edition in 1971, and remained
the standard introduction to Locke for gener-
ations of students worldwide. In many ways it
was a pioneering study - although Aaron was
quick in his Preface to indicate his indebtedness
to 'a colleague in the University of Wales',
James GIBSON'S, Locke's Theory of Knowledge
- and it combined scholarship with readability
in a way that remains quite exemplary. As one
reads Aaron on Locke and his predecessors
and contemporaries (Descartes, Gassendi and
the Gassendists, Hobbes, Boyle and others),
and on topics such as innatism, the represen-
tative theory of perception (for Aaron, Locke
did hold that 'defective' theory), and knowl-
edge, it is always clear that he is grappling with
the views of a philosopher he respects, but with
whom he is prepared to disagree because, for
Aaron too, the issues mattered. Much water has
flown under the bridge since Aaron published
this book but, allowing for the fact that, even
now, the interpretation of Locke's philosophy
remains controversial, it remains a book that no
serious scholar of Locke should ignore. Many
would still be happy to see it in the hands of
students.
Aaron's next book, The Theory ofUniversals
(1952), once again evidenced his concern with
the history of philosophy, but also Aaron's
own concern with the root philosophical issues.
In it Aaron examined the views of Locke,
Berkeley and Hume at length, as well as what
2
he called the 'rationalist recoil', before detailing
his reaction to suggestions that the 'problem' of
universals may be no real problem at all, and
how we should approach what he took to be
the deep and underlying questions. It was a
topic that had long interested Aaron (his
Aristotelian Society paper of 1933, for
example, had been entitled 'Locke's Theory of
Universals' and the Annual Philosophical
Lecture that he delivered to the British
Academy in 1945 was 'Our Knowledge of
Universals') but so, too, was the general issue
of knowledge which he returned to from time
to time throughout his life, including in his last
book, Knowing and the Function of Reason,
published in 1971, after his retirement. This
book received somewhat harsher reviews. In
general, it is his contributions to Locke studies
that leave Aaron with a lasting reputation.
Aaron was, for example, one of the first to
gain access to what is now known as the
Lovelace Collection of Locke's papers, and in
the third edition of his John Locke he reports
on his excitement when, back in 1935, he came
across the draft of Locke's Essay that we now
call 'Draft A', which he edited with Jocelyn
Gibb in 1936, a year before his magnum opus,
John Locke. Aaron's philosophical interests
did extend well beyond Locke, as a glance at
even our select bibliography will show, yet,
philosophically, he remained recognizably a
child of the 1920s and 1930s. There was justice
in Peter GEACH'S comment, even back in 1954,
in a review, that Aaron's Theory of Universals
'illustrates the Oxford philosophical style of
some twenty or thirty years ago', and in O.R.
JONES'S comment that his Knowing and the
function of Reason showed 'something of the
style of philosophizing in Oxford in his student
days' (Jones, p. 389). Aaron might perhaps
have been disappointed by the criticism that
was at least implicit in such comments. He
would, however, have been proud that, well
after his death, his John Locke could still be
described as a 'standard and now classic com-
mentary', and that his Theory of Universals
remained a respected work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Nature of Knowing (1930).
Hanes Athroniaeth: O Descartes i Hegel
[History of Philosophy: From Descartes to
Hegel] (Cardiff, 1932).
(Ed. with Jocelyn Gibb), An Early Draft of
Locke's Essay, together with Excerpts
from his Journals (Oxford, 1936).
John Locke (Oxford, 1937; 3rd edn, Oxford,
1971).
The Theory of Universals (Oxford, 1952;
2nd edn, Oxford, 1967).
Knowing and the Function of Reason
(Oxford, 1971).
Other Relevant Works
'Locke and Berkeley's Commonplace Book,
Mind, vol. 40 (1931), pp. 439-59.
'Great Thinkers: John Locke', Philosophy,
vol. 12 (1937), pp. 19-32.
'How may Phenomenalism be Refuted?',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
39 (1938-9), pp. 167-84.
'Our Knowledge of One Another',
Philosophy, vol. 19 (1944), pp. 63-75.
'The Rational and the Empirical', in H.D.
Lewis (ed.), Contemporary British
Philosophy: Personal Statements, 3rd ser.
(1956).
'The Common Sense View of Sense-
Perception' [Aaron's presidential address to
the Aristotelian Society], Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 58 (1957-8), pp.
1-14.
'Epistemology', in Encyclopaedia Britannica,
15th edn (1974).
further Reading
Jones, O.R., 'Richard Ithamar Aaron,
1901-1987', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 73 (1987), pp. 375-90.
I. C. Tipton
3
ABERCROMBIE
ABERCROMBIE, Lascelles (1881-1938)
Lascelles Abercrombie was born in Aston-upon-
Mersey, near Manchester on 9 January 1981
and died in London on 27 October 1938. He was
educated at Malvern College and studied science
at Victoria (later Manchester) University. He
then worked as a journalist until World War I,
during which he worked as a munitions
examiner. During this period he also began to
write poetry, becoming a leading member of the
Georgian group. After the war, he was appointed
to the first lectureship in poetry at the University
of Liverpool (1919-22), Professor of English
Literature at the University of Leeds (1922-9),
Hildred Carlisle Professor of English Literature,
University of London, Bedford College
(1929-35) and reader in English literature at
Oxford (1935-8).
Abercrombie was active in the fields of poetry,
literary criticism and aesthetic theory, his major
contribution being perhaps as a poet. In all these
areas his work is currently neglected. His aesthetic
theory suffers as philosophy from being insuffi-
ciently detailed and rather dogmatic, and may be
best viewed as the handmaid to his literary criti-
cism, which, though insightful, is itself often
rather grand in style. As the approving comment
of the 1929 edition of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica has it, Abercrombie was concerned
more with 'the essential greatness of the writers
with whom he dealt than with the details which
are apt to encumber overmuch the study of lit-
erature' (vol. 1, p. 35).
Apart from the philosophical aspects of his
critical works, two volumes are more narrowly
devoted to aesthetic theory: An Essay towards a
Theory of Art (1922) and Principles of Literary
Criticism (1932). In these works Abercrombie
puts forward a theory of art as the communica-
tion of aesthetic experience from artist to
audience. In the former, Abercrombie describes
his theory as eclectic, but mentions Croce as a
particular influence. The aim of art is to fulfil the
central desire of the mind, which is 'the desire to
be living in and a conscious part of a significant
world' (An Essay, p. 102). Although aesthetic
ABERCROMBIE
experience without art can give us a view of the
world as significant, art provides a less transient,
more intense access to such an experience. There
are two stages in the creation of art. First, there
must be a unified experience, this experience
being 'both of the substance which the world
contributes by being experienced and simultane-
ously of the value which the mind contributes by
experiencing' (ibid., p. 50). This stage is that of
the 'conception' of the work of art. Second, the
artist constructs an artwork which provides the
occasion for arousing a similar experience in the
mind of the audience - the stage of 'technique'.
Beauty lies not necessarily in the original experi-
ence itself, but results from the 'manifest appear-
ance of means adapted to an end' (ibid., p. 69)
In the case of an artwork, this end lies in the suc-
cessful use of technique to communicate the
artist's experience to the audience.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An Essay towards a Theory of Art (1922).
The Theory of Poetry (1924).
The Idea of Great Poetry (1925).
Principles of Literary Criticism (1932).
Other Relevant Works
Thomas Hardy (1912).
The Epic (1923).
Romanticism (1927).
The Poems ofLascelles Abercrombie (1930).
Poetry, its Music and Meaning (1931).
Lyrics and Unfinished Poems (Newtown,
1940).
The Art of Wordsworth (1952).
Further Reading
Elton, Oliver, Lascelles Abercrombie (1939).
'Lascelles Abercrombie', in Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 14th edn (1929), vol. 1, p. 35
(with amendments in later editions).
Powell, Neil, 'Lascelles Abercrombie', in Ian
Hamilton (ed.), The Oxford Companion to
Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 1994),
p.l.
Stephen Watt
4
ACKRILL, John Lloyd (1921-)
John Lloyd Ackrill was born in Reading on 30
December 1921. He attended Reading School
and St John's College, Oxford, where he was a
scholar, from 1940 to 41, and again from 1945
to 1948. During the intervening years he did
war service in the Royal Berkshire Regiment,
where he held the rank of captain. His first
appointment in philosophy was as assistant
lecturer in logic at Glasgow University, a post
which he held in the academic year 1948-9.
From 1951 to 1952 he was lecturer in ancient
philosophy at Oxford University, and was sub-
sequently appointed to a tutorial fellowship at
Brasenose College, where he remained until
1966. In that year he took up the Professorship
of the History of Philosophy at Oxford, from
which he retired in 1981. He is now emeritus
professor of philosophy and emeritus fellow
of Brasenose College. His other distinctions in
philosophy include having been the General
Editor of the Clarendon Aristotle series from
1962 to 2001; a member of the Institute of
Advanced Studies at Princeton University
during the academic years 1950-51 and
1961-2; and visiting professor at Princeton in
1955 and 1964.
In his Introduction to Essays on Plato and
Aristotle (1997), a collection of his articles orig-
inally published in various journals, Ackrill
outlines the developments in the study of
ancient philosophy at Oxford University from
the 1950s until the 1990s. In Oxford, ancient
philosophy was usually taught as part of
Greats, an integrated course which included
Ancient Greek. Thus there were many Oxford
scholars who were well placed to undertake a
wider range of more accurate translations of
Aristotle's works than had hitherto been
familiar. These included, from 1962, the
Clarendon Aristotle series of which Ackrill was
the General Editor. Whereas there had once
been an exclusive focus on Plato and Aristotle,
studies in ancient philosophy began to extend
to other thinkers such as Plotinus and the
Neoplatonists, who in turn provide a bridge

into medieval philosophy. In Greats, there were
examination papers in both ancient and
modern philosophy, which fostered a beneficial
cross-fertilization of ideas and critiques. A
further trend at Oxford was the prominence of
the 'ordinary language' approach to philoso-
phy, which, even if not wholeheartedly
endorsed, fostered clarity in written work and
debate amongst staff and students alike.
Throughout his long and distinguished
career, Ackrill was of course a part of, and
benefited from, these developments at Oxford.
His interest in ancient philosophy was schol-
arly, wide and original. In his many articles on
Plato and Aristotle, he wrote on the connection
between language and reality in Plato, on
Aristotle's theory of definition, and his concepts
of eudaimonia and virtue. He contributed to
the ongoing attempt to clarify problematic
issues in Aristotle, such as the apparent tension,
in the Nicomachean Ethics, between Aristotle's
view that the best life for humans is consti-
tuted by good action, and his assertion in Book
10 that the best life is one of self-reliant con-
templation. His interests included the investi-
gation of the relative dating of Aristotle's works
and the development of his thought, and he
produced, with minor textual emendations,
under the title Aristotle's Ethics (1973), a
heavily annotated edition of selections of
Aristotle's works on ethics and psychology
originally published in the Clarendon Aristotle
series.
Over the past fifty years, there have been
major developments in the study of ancient
philosophy at Oxford and in many other
centres in the English-speaking world, and J.L.
Ackrill has been one of their most distinguished
contributors.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle's Ethics (1973).
Aristotle's Categories (1975).
Aristotle on Eudaimonia [the Dawes Hicks
Lecture] (1975).
'Aristotle's Definitions of psuche\ in
Jonathan Barnes, Malcolm Schofield and
5
ACTON
Richard Sorabji (eds), Articles on Aristotle:
Psychology and Aesthetics (1979).
'Aristotle on Eudaimonia' and 'Aristotle on
Action', in A.O. Rorty (ed.), Essays on
Aristotle's Ethics (19&0).
Aristotle the Philosopher (1981).
Essays on Plato and Aristotle (1997).
A New Aristotle Reader (1987).
Other Relevant Works
A Festschrift for J. L. Ackrill (1986).
Kathryn L. Plant
ACTON, Harold Burrows (1908-74)
H.B. ('Harry') Acton was born in London on 2
June 1908 and died in Edinburgh on 16 June
1974. He was educated at St Olave's Grammar
School in London before going up to Magdalen
College, Oxford to read PPE. He graduated
with a first, and remained at Oxford for the
DPhil, which he wrote on BoSANQUET's logic.
After a brief period as assistant lecturer in phi-
losophy at the University of Wales, Swansea,
Acton moved in 1935 to Bedford College,
University of London where he remained until
1964, with an interruption for war service at
the Ministry of Supply. He moved in 1964 to
the University of Edinburgh, where he became
Professor of Moral Philosophy.
Acton served as President of the Aristotelian
Society from 1952 to 1953 and as Editor of
Philosophy from 1956 to 1972. He was
Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy
from 1962 to 1964. The Institute holds an
occasional lecture series in his memory.
Acton's initial publications were on
'Phenomenology' (1932), 'The Correspondence
Theory of Truth' (1934) and 'Concrete
Universals' (1936 and 1937). But his most sub-
stantive contributions in philosophy were in
moral and political philosophy and in the
ACTON
history of philosophy. He had a particularly
good knowledge of nineteenth and early twen-
tieth-century philosophy, notably German and
French philosophy, to the study of which he
made useful contributions, and upon which he
also drew to good effect in his critical work on
Marxism and in his own work on social theory.
Acton is best known as a trenchant critic of
Marxism. The Illusion of the Epoch: Marxism-
Leninism as a Philosophical Creed was first
published in 1955. In it Acton criticizes
Marxism as a piece of philosophy, rather than
as a body of economic doctrine. Acton holds
that the fundamental flaw of Marxism is its
combination of anti-metaphysical positivism
with Hegelian metaphysics. Historical materi-
alism is held to be fundamentally flawed: for
example, the base-superstructure distinction is
held to be untenable (The Illusion of the Epoch,
p. 258). For Acton, the theory reduces to a
simplistic and distorting technological deter-
minism. This has the implication that Marxists
inflate their predictive claims. Marxism's
attitude to ethical thinking is also criticized.
For Acton, Marxists are simultaneously com-
mitted to seeing ethics as a mere disguise for
economic interests and as an object of reform.
The book concludes with a dialogue between
author and reader in which 'the whole miser-
able business' of historical materialism is criti-
cized and Marxism is condemned as 'a philo-
sophical farrago' (ibid., pp. 259, 271).
Reviewing The Illusion of the Epoch in the
British Journal of Sociology, John PLAMENATZ
called it 'lucid and well-balanced' and it became
a standard source of critical arguments directed
against Marx's work. As such, it was produc-
tive, providing some of the impetus behind
G.A. COHEN'S Karl Marx's Theory of History
- A Defence (1978) and Stephen Lukes's
Marxism and Morality (1987) - both works
that explicitly respond to Acton's criticism.
Cohen engaged Acton in debate at the Joint
Session, in an exchange reported in the
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. In doing
so, Cohen and Lukes's work helped to inau-
gurate a new rigour in the philosophical expla-
6
nation of Marxism, helping to found the new
school of analytical Marxism.
Nonetheless, it is hard to agree with
Plamenatz's assessment, at least in one respect.
Acton explicitly endorses the idea of an 'apos-
tolic succession' from Marx and Engels them-
selves, through Lenin to Stalin and the spokes-
men who have succeeded him' (p. 3) As such,
Acton holds that 'it is not inappropriate to give
the name Marxism to the whole tradition that
Marx and Engels inaugurated and which Lenin
and Stalin have continued'. Contemporary
commentators would be critical of this attempt
unproblematically to bring together nineteenth-
century theory and twentieth-century practice.
In this respect The Illusion of the Epoch clearly
bears the stamp of its own epoch, as a product
of the Cold War. Acton also produced a shorter
criticism of Marx entitled What Marx Really
Said (1967), which extended some of the crit-
icisms contained in The Illusion of the Epoch
to cover empirical matters as well as philo-
sophical ones.
Acton's other works were less influential.
Kant's Moral Philosophy (1970) is an intro-
duction and qualified defence of Kant's account
of the moral law. The qualifications include
the distinction between hypothetical and cate-
gorical imperatives and the neglected distinction
between laws which do and do not admit of
choice.
The Morals of Markets (1971) is a more
popular work, which was sponsored by the
Institute for Economic Affairs, a free-market
think-tank. In it Acton sets out 'to examine,
from the point of view of morality the merits ...
and the defects ... of the system under which
goods are produced for sale at a profit in free
markets' (The Morals of Markets, p. 1). Acton
defends the idea of a private enterprise system
against the objection that it rests essentially on
selfishness as a moral motivation, and condemns
the 'egalitarian collectivist' alternative.
Acton was unlucky in when he died. Not
only would there have been a much more
obvious market for his ideas with the growth in
popularity of market-oriented conservatism in

the late 1970s and early 1980s, but he would
have been in a good position to respond to the
demand for such ideas because of his willing-
ness to work with market-oriented public
policy groups and his trenchant but scholarly
criticism of Marxism. In addition, if one puts
together his writings on moral and political
themes, they offer an interesting picture of a
market-friendly conservatism which by contrast
with Hayek is genuinely conservative, with a
concern for tradition and moral authority in
society, rather than classical liberal, in its under-
lying character. If he had lived and had had the
opportunity to integrate his ideas on these
themes into a self-contained study, he could
have made a real mark on British political
thought in this period. As it is, it is fitting that
his Morals of Markets (together with some
related essays and a select bibliography which
gives publication details for many more of his
publications than are referred to here) has been
republished by Liberty Fund, in an attractive
but reasonably priced edition (1993), and that
they have also reprinted his Illusion of the
Epoch (2004).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'The Materialist Conception of History',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
52 (1951-2).
The Illusion of the Epoch: Marxism-
Leninism as a Philosophical Creed (1955;
repr. Indianapolis, 2004).
What Marx Really Said (1967).
Kant's Moral Philosophy (1970).
'Some Criticisms of Historical Materialism',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 44 (1970), pp. 143-56.
The Morals of Markets: An Ethical
Exploration (1971); repr. in The Morals of
Markets and Related Essays (Indianapolis,
1993).
Other Relevant Works
'Phenomenology', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 11 (1932),
pp. 101-15.
7
ACTON
The Correspondence Theory of Truth',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
35 (1934-5), pp. 177-94.
The Theory of Concrete Universals F, Mind,
vol. 45 (1936), pp. 417-33.
The Theory of Concrete Universals IF, Mind,
vol. 46 (1937), pp. 1-13.
'Is Ethical Relativity Necessary?', Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 17
(1938), pp. 170-82.
The Alleged Fascism of Plato', Philosophy,
vol. 13 (1938), pp. 302-12.
'Philosophy of History', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 40 (1939-40), pp.
75-88.
'Moral Ends and Means', in A.H. Hannay
(ed.), Philosophical Studies: Essays in
Memory ofL. Susan Stebbing (1948), pp.
5-19.
'Rights', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 24 (1950), pp. 94-110.
'Comte's Positivism and the Science of
Society', Philosophy, vol. 26 (1952), pp.
291-310.
'Prejudice', Revue Internationale de
Philosophie, vol. 6, fasc. 3 (1952), pp.
323-36.
Tradition and some Other Forms of Order',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
53 (1952-3), pp. 1-28; repr. in The Morals
of Markets and Related Essays
(Indianapolis, 1993).
'Political Justification', in H.D. Lewis (ed.),
Contemporary British Philosophy (1956),
pp. 23-44.
The Philosophy of Language in
Revolutionary France', Proceedings of the
British Academy 45 (1960), pp. 199-219.
'Principles of a Free Society: Objectives', in A.
Seldon (ed.), Agenda for a Free Society
(1961), pp. 69-84; repr. in The Morals of
Markets and Related Essays (Indianapolis,
1993).
'Negative Utilitarianism', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 37 (1963),
pp. 83-94.
'Introduction: The Philosophy of
ACTON
Punishment', in H.B. Acton (ed.), The
Philosophy of Punishment: A Collection of
Papers (1969), pp. 9-38.
'Distributive Justice, the Invisible Hand and
the Cunning of Reason', Political Studies,
vol. 20 (1972), pp. 421-31; repr. in The
Morals of Markets and Related Essays
(Indianapolis, 1993).
(Ed.), John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism,
Liberty, Representative Government.
Selections from 'Auguste Comte and
Positivism3 (1972).
The Ethics of Capitalism (1972); repr. in The
Morals of Markets and Related Essays
(Indianapolis, 1993).
The Right to Work and the Right to Strike
(1972).
'Strikes, Trades Unions and the State', in B.
Parekh and R.N. Berki (eds), The Morality
of Politics (1972), pp. 136-47.
'Hegelian Political and Religious Ideas', in
P.P. Weiner et al., Dictionary of the
History of Ideas, vol. 2 (New York, 1973),
pp. 407-16.
'Ginsberg's Philosophical Outlook', in
Ronald Fletcher (ed.), The Science of
Society and the Unity of Mankind (1974),
pp. 39-50.
The Idea of a Spiritual Power (1974).
'Moral Futurism and the Ethics of Marxism',
in P.A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of
Karl Popper (La Salle, 1974), pp. 876-88.
The Morals of Markets and Related Essays,
ed. David Gordon and Jeremy Shearmur
(Indianapolis, 1993).
Further Reading
Cohen, G.A., 'On Some Criticisms of
Historical Materialism F, Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 44
(1970).
, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A
Defence (Oxford, 1978).
Lukes, S., Marxism and Morality (Oxford,
1974).
Jon Pike and Jeremy Shearmur
8
ALDWINCKLE, Russell Foster (1911-92)
Russell Aldwinckle was born in Leicester and
died in Hamilton, Canada. He was educated at
the University of London (BA Hons), Oxford
(MA) and the University of Strasbourg (D Th).
Ordained to the Baptist ministry in 1939, he
served churches in London and Coventry. He
was active on many boards and committees,
including the Theological Education Fund and
the Faith and Order Commission of the World
Council of Churches. He was Professor of
Systematic Theology at McMaster Divinity
College, Hamilton, Canada from 1947 until
his retirement in 1977. He was visiting profes-
sor at Eastern Baptist Seminary (1977),
American Baptist Seminary of the West
(1978-9) and Southern Baptist Seminary
(1979-80).
Aldwinckle's fundamental theological aim is
to show that Christian faith involves rationally
defensible cognitive claims. Its central affirma-
tion, as expressed in the classical creeds, make
or presuppose metaphysical and empirical
claims which are supportable by evidence and
argument and can reasonably be held as true.
He rejects the view that theology consists of a
set of propositions to be accepted solely on the
authority of Scripture or church. He also rejects
all forms of reduction in theology on the
ground that in the long run they strip Christian
faith of reference to realities which transcend
what can be described and explained in
physical, psychological, sociological or political
terms alone. Such theologies can preserve the
language of faith, but only at the cost of turning
it into discourse about human self-fulfilment.
For Aldwinckle, the task of theology is to elicit
the convictions underlying religious belief and
practice, and determine the degree to which
these are reasonable. Theology does not yield
logically coercive results, but exhibits the con-
ditions on which one is rationally entitled to
affirm the articles of Christian faith, and argues
that these conditions can be satisfied. What is
possible in rational theology is not unques-
tionable support of dogmatic propositions, but

practical conviction which is not epistemolog-
ically blameworthy in a person who is able to
live and act in a reasonable manner in all other
interactions with the world and other people.
His basic strategy is to state a position, for
instance that Jesus is the unique saviour (to
cite just one example), and then launch a critical
discussion of relevant major scholarship,
thereby uncovering issues that must be
addressed. He advances his theses on the
grounds that they provide a better account of
the historical, religious and biblical data than
do the views he is assessing, and do not involve
the conceptual and evidential difficulties he
finds in them.
Aldwinckle is sensitive to epistemological
issues raised by theology, regarding both the
justification of interpretive categories in terms
of which to articulate Christian faith, and the
justification of specific assertions. Although he
does not engage in technical philosophical dis-
cussion of such matters to any great extent, his
work exhibits three convictions which function
as basic epistemological principles. First, he
holds (particularly in More than Man, 1976)
that if one is 'compelled' to employ a certain set
of categories (e.g., 'divinity5 talk) to speak of a
given person or event, then one is epistemo-
logically justified in doing so. Second, the prin-
ciple that one is entitled to hold a belief until it
has been shown to be unworthy of acceptance
by a reasonable person significantly shapes
some of his arguments, for example in Death in
the Secular City (1972).
Third, he appeals to the notion that a broad
interpretation of experience is worthy of belief
if it is not contradicted by experience, supports
a coherent set of values, and facilitates devel-
opment of human potentialities. In The Logic
of the Believing Mind (1995) he argues that
Christian theism provides a coherent interpre-
tation of universal human experience when it
takes seriously the claim of practical faith,
namely that only in commitment to divine love
in Christ does the believer experience God's
presence and power. 'Christian experience
provides the data for doctrine rather than
9
ALEXANDER
formal proof for dogma' (Logic of the Believing
Mind, p. 480).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Death in the Secular City (1972).
More than Man: A Study in Christology
(Grand Rapids, 1976).
Jesus - a Savior or the Savior? Religious
Pluralism in Christian Perspective (Macon,
Georgia, 1982).
The Logic of the Believing Mind, ed. John E.
Thomas (Lewiston, NY and Lampeter,
1995), posthumously published.
R. Forsman
ALEXANDER, Peter (1917-)
Peter Alexander was born in Ashford,
Middlesex on 2 January 1917, but was raised
in Canada, first in Edmonton and then in
Vancouver, returning to England in 1932 as a
cabin boy on the SS Romanby. After working
for some years as a laboratory assistant and
assistant chemist in the food industry, he gained
a BSc in chemistry with physics in 1940 from
the Polytechnic at Regent Street in London. In
1947 he graduated with a BA in special phi-
losophy from Birkbeck College, London, before
gaining his first academic post in 1949 at the
University of Leeds. In 1957 he left Leeds for
Bristol, where he held posts of lecturer
(1957-60), reader (1960-71) and professor
(1971-82). He also held visiting appointments
at the universities of Pennsylvania (1959),
Maryland (1966) and Cincinnati (1970-71).
He was treasurer of the Mind Association
(1964-70), President of the Aristotelian Society
(1984-5) and President of the British Society
for the Philosophy of Science (1987-9).
The focus of much of Alexander's early work
is the nature of scientific explanation. The pre-
vailing orthodoxy in the philosophy of science
ALEXANDER
of the 1950s and 1960s was logical positivism,
a school that derived its account of science
from the sensationalism of Ernst Mach. Such
philosophers either rejected explanation
outright as a goal for science, arguing that it
offers only an economical redescription of the
phenomena, or sought to explain explanation
as no more than deduction from established
empirical generalizations, as in the famous
'deductive-nomological' model of Carl Hempel.
Alexander sought both to understand the
sources of this conception of science and to
show its inadequacy. He wrote a series of
important articles (on Duhem, Hertz, Mach,
PEARSON, Poincare, conventionalism and sen-
sationalism) for Paul Edwards's great
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967), and con-
tributed a chapter on 'Philosophy of Science,
1850-1910' to DJ. O'CONNOR'S History of
Western Philosophy (1964). In Sensationalism
and Scientific Explanation (1963) he attacked
the sensationalist's account of science as failing
to do justice to the crucial explanatory role
played by theory (and thus very often to the
postulation of unobservable theoretical entities)
in scientific explanations worthy of the name.
Alexander's work thus made a contribution to
the decline of the positivist orthodoxy in phi-
losophy of science and its replacement by the
doctrines of scientific realism, in which infer-
ence to the best explanation plays a crucial
role.
In the 1970s Alexander's attention turned
to the philosophy of John Locke. At that time,
a strange parody of Locke's views (largely
derived from Berkeley's often unfair criticisms)
was taught to undergraduate students, who
were left with the impression that Locke held
an inconsistent and muddled sort of semi-
empiricism, hardly worthy of serious philo-
sophical engagement. Returning to the text of
Locke's Essay, Alexander became convinced
that Locke's views on many topics, but most
notably on the natural world (material sub-
stance, corpuscles, primary and secondary qual-
ities, explanation of the qualities and powers of
bodies), had been seriously misrepresented, and
10
were far more coherent and defensible than
generally reported. In a series of important
papers Alexander set out to set the record
straight. On the distinction between primary
and secondary qualities, Locke is generally rep-
resented as having characterized red, hot and
sweet as secondary qualities. When they turn
out to be mind-dependent ('in the mind', in
Berkeley's notorious phrase), we have the
beginnings of a slippery-slope argument leading
to idealism. But, Alexander reminds us, Locke
consistently distinguishes qualities in bodies
from ideas in the minds of perceivers. Red, hot
and sweet are mind-dependent, and are there-
fore not secondary qualities but ideas of sec-
ondary qualities. The secondary qualities them-
selves are perfectly objective powers in bodies
to cause those sensations in appropriate
observers, those powers being themselves
grounded in perfectly objective 'textures'
(arrangements of corpuscles) in the bodies. This
reading of Locke both sets him in his proper
historical context (as a contemporary of Boyle
and Newton), and enables us to see the close
affiliation between his views and those of later
scientific realists. This argument is most fully
presented in the book Ideas Qualities, and
Corpuscles: Locke and Boyle on the External
World.
In addition to these two major areas of
research, Alexander has also written on a
variety of other subjects: logic and humour
(e.g., in Lewis Carroll), absolute versus rela-
tional theories of space, the nature of explana-
tion in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, and
the significance of Utopian thinking in political
philosophy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sensationalism and Scientific Explanation
(1963; repr. Bristol, 1992).
A Preface to the Logic of Science (1963;
Japanese trans. Tadeo Nishikatsue, Toyko,
1969).
An Introduction to Logic: The Criticism of
Arguments (1970; Japanese trans. Tadeo
Nishikatsu, T. Kobayashi and H.

Taranaka, 1976).
Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles: Locke and
Boyle on the External World (Cambridge,
1985).
Other Relevant Works
'Pragmatic Paradoxes', Mind (1950).
'Other People's Experiences', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 51 (1950-51).
'Cause and Cure in Psychotherapy',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. (1955).
'Complementary Descriptions', Mind (1956).
Theory Construction and Theory Testing',
British Journal for the Philosophy of
Science (1958).
'Rational Behaviour and Psychoanalytic
Explanation', Mind (1962); repr. in
Richard Wollheim (ed.), Freud (1974).
'Subjunctive Conditionals', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. (1962).
'Speculations and Theories', Synthese (1963).
The Philosophy of Science, 1850-1910', in
D.J. O'Connor (ed.), A Critical History of
Western Philosophy (1964).
'On the Logic of Discovery', Ratio (1965).
Seven articles (on Duhem, Hertz, Mach,
Pearson, Poincare, conventionalism and
sensationalism) in Paul Edwards (ed.),
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York,
1967).
'Inferences about Seeing', in G.A. Vessey
(ed.), Knowledge and Necessity [Royal
Institute of Philosophy Lectures, vol. 3,
1968/9] (1970).
'Are Causal Laws Purely General?,
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. (1970).
'Boyle and Locke on Primary and Secondary
Qualities', Ratio (1974); repr. in Ian
Tipton (ed.), Locke on Human
Understanding (Oxford, 1977).
'Curley on Boyle and Locke', Philosophical
Review (1974).
'Wishes, Symptoms and Actions IF,
Symposium with Frank Cioffi, Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol.
11
ALEXANDER
(1974).
The Names of Secondary Qualities',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
77(1976-7).
'Locke on Substance-in-GeneraP, 2 pts, Ratio
(1980, 1981); repr. in Richard Ashcraft
(ed.),John Locke: Critical Assessments
(1991), vol. 4.
The Case of the Lonely Corpuscle', in R.
Healey (ed.), Reduction, Time and Reality
(Cambridge, 1981).
'Grimm's Utopia: Motives and Justifications',
in Peter Alexander and Roger Gill (eds),
Utopias [Colston Symposium no. 35]
(1984).
'Incongruent Counterparts and Absolute
Space' [presidential address], Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 85
(1984-5).
'Locke on Language and Meaning', in
Christopher McKnight and Marcel
Stchedroff (eds), Philosophy and its
Variety: Essays in Memory of Francois
Bordet (Belfast, 1987).
'Locke on the Mind' and 'Biography of
Locke', in Richard Gregory (ed.), Oxford
Companion to the Mind (Oxford, 1987).
'History of Philosophy: The Analytical Ideal
IF [symposium with Christopher Janaway],
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. (1988).
'Locke on Solidity and Incompressibility', in
Indira Mahalingham and Brian Carr (eds),
Logical Foundations (1991).
'Microscopes and Corpuscles', in D.
Jamieson (ed.), Language, Mind and Art
[Paul Ziff Festschrift] (Dordrecht, 1994).
'Solidity and Elasticity in the Seventeenth
Century', in G.A.J. Rogers (ed.), Locke's
Philosophy, Content and Context (Oxford,
1994).
'A New Introduction to the Works of the
Honourable Robert Boyle', in photo-
graphic repr. of the 1772 edition of Boyle's
Works (Bristol, 2002).
'How Could a Respectable British Empiricist
be Influenced by Robert Boyle?', paper
ALEXANDER
read at a Locke conference at CNRS
(January 2004).
Andrew John Pyle
ALEXANDER, Samuel (1859-1938)
Samuel Alexander was born in Sydney,
Australia on 6 January 1859 and died in
Manchester on 13 September 1938. The fourth
and youngest child of Samuel and Eliza
(Sloman) Alexander, on 13 January he was
brought into the Covenant of Abraham, that
is to say he was circumcised. His father was
born in England and had moved to Australia
as a young man; his mother was born in Cape
Town, where her family had settled around
1820, having emigrated there from Chatham
in Kent. Alexander never knew his father, who
was a saddler, since he died of tuberculosis just
before Samuel was born. Some five years later his
mother moved her children to St Kilda, a suburb
of Melbourne, where her mother and sisters
were living. Samuel grew up in this extended
family, which, although not rich, had sufficient
resources to engage governesses and private
tutors to educate the children. One of these
tutors founded a private school to which his
mother sent Samuel and his brothers, but the
man proved to be unbalanced, issuing an adver-
tising poster which claimed that Samuel 'wrote
like the Muses and did other wonderful things'
(Philosophical and Literary Pieces, p. 2), so she
and other parents withdrew their sons and the
school came to an end.
In 1871, after some years of study in a col-
legiate academy, Alexander was sent to Wesley
College in Melbourne. Its Headmaster was
Martin Irving who had been Jowett's pupil at
Balliol and after graduation had emigrated to
Australia to become the Professor of Classical
Comparisons and Philosophical Logic at the
University of Melbourne, a position he
12
resigned to become Headmaster of Wesley.
The school was a very good one,' Alexander
recalled in 1928, 'giving us a broad education
in classics, mathematics, English (which was
made a point of), French, and some science. I
have always felt grateful to it, for its efficiency
and many-sidedness - Irving was a man of
character, rather stern but very kind' (ibid.).
After two years' study at the University of
Melbourne, where he proved to be an excellent
student, his mother was persuaded to send
him to England to try for a scholarship at one
of the ancient universities. Arriving in late
August 1877 after a voyage of 108 days, he
made his way to Oxford, having taken Irving's
advice to try for Balliol. He hired a coach and
arranged to sit the scholarship examinations.
To his great relief he was successful. Little has
come down to us about his undergraduate
years. Jowett was one of his tutors, and
Alexander noted two pieces of advice he gave
him. The first concerned his writing: 'Your
style is too flowery. The Chinese like a flowery
style. We don't.' The second concerned Hegel:
'Once on returning from a Long Vacation I
told him I had read all Hegel. He said, "It's a
great thing to have read the whole of Hegel;
but now that you have read him, I advise you
to forget him again"' (ibid., p. 6). Many years
later Alexander offered this judgement of
Jowett: 'It may indeed be doubted whether
Jowett really believed in philosophy for its
own sake, or except as a form of wisdom. He
rather restrained the enthusiasm of his pupils
than incited it' (ibid., p. 117). In his reminis-
cences Alexander never mentioned having
studied with either T.H. Green or R.L.
Nettleship, both of whom were then teaching
at Oxford. A.C. Bradley, a literature don at
Balliol, had perhaps the greatest influence on
him. Alexander dedicated his first book to
him, stating that his 'teaching inspired me to
pursue the study of ethics'. Through Bradley he
got to know his brother, F.H. BRADLEY, who
was kind enough to read an early draft of his
first book. In later years they sometimes vaca-
tioned together.

After taking his degree, with firsts in math-
ematical and classical moderations (1879) and
in literae humaniores (1881), Alexander
decided to try for a fellowship at Lincoln
College. Why he chose that college rather than
Balliol is not known. In 1882 he was elected,
becoming the first professing Jew to hold an
Oxford (or Cambridge) fellowship. Until
Parliament altered the regulations in 1871 only
Anglicans could be awarded degrees or be
elected fellows at these universities. Part of the
first year of his fellowship was spent in
Germany experiencing its university life; he
attended lectures but did not work towards a
degree. Upon his return to Oxford he was
made a philosophy don and taught at Lincoln
and Oriel colleges for the next several years.
Once he had mastered Darwin's works he tried
his hand at interpreting Hegel's writings in
Darwinian terms, an occupation he soon
abandoned, finding it more fruitful to develop
an ethical theory along evolutionary lines. In
1887 he won the Green Moral Philosophy
Prize on the set question: 'In what directions
does Moral Philosophy at the present time
seem to you to admit or require advance?' His
essay formed the basis for his first book, Moral
Order and Progress: An Analysis of Ethical
Conceptions (1889), which offered solutions to
three problems: '(1) What is it that is good? (2)
Why is it good, or what does its goodness
mean? (3) How does goodness come into
being, how is it maintained, how does it
advance?' (Moral Order and Progress,
pp. 16-17). Ethics being a science, it is to be
studied by using the scientific method. The
researcher begins by analysing its central
concepts - Alexander's examples are good and
bad, right and wrong, the common good, self-
sacrifice, perfection, happiness - clarifying their
meaning and their interrelationships with one
another and revealing the facts to which these
conceptions correspond. In the case of ethics
this leads to a study of the moral order:
All these conceptions I group together under
the head of moral order, because the inquiry
13
ALEXANDER
will show that the idea of good or right
implies nothing more than an adjustment
of parts in an orderly whole, which in the
individual represents an equilibrium of dif-
ferent powers, in the society an equilibrium
of different persons.
(Moral Order and Progress, p. 18)
Alexander arrived at the moral order through
the analysis of goodness, which necessarily
involves an answer to the problem of 'how
the individual agent is related to the society in
which he lives' (ibid., p. 81). One's acts depend
upon one's feelings, emotions and impulses,
and a good act 'implies an order or system of
acts which are regulated by reference to one
another' (ibid., p. 99). 'The good life as a
whole is a system of conscious acts, where
each function has its limits prescribed to it by
the demands of all other functions, so that no
faculty shall perform its functions to the detri-
ment of another' (ibid.). Equilibrium is
achieved in the case of the individual by
reason, 'the regulative principle of morality'
(p. 102). Each new challenge faced by a person
demands a readjustment of the elements of his
or her character to restore equilibrium among
them. In the case of society where there is a
fairly constant flow of fresh moral ideas, it is
the principle of natural selection which sorts
them out. Using their reason, the members of
society debate among themselves and gradually
dispose of moral ideas that cannot be brought
into equilibrium with those already accepted.
Only the fittest survive and become, for a while
at least, part of the ever-changing moral ideal;
the others simply fade away. It is obvious from
this account that there is no single moral ideal
towards which mankind is tending. Moral
ideals are subject to revision. Alexander's
reliance on reason as the regulative principle of
morality appears to contradict his claim that
ethics is a descriptive science rather than a
normative study. This summary conveys only
the merest outline of his system, which is
meticulously expounded in plain, everyday
language. The book was very well received
ALEXANDER
and was reprinted twice. When the publisher
proposed issuing a fourth impression in 1912
Alexander vetoed it on the ground that the
book had 'served its turn both in its author's
development and in the development of British
ethical theory' (ibid., p. 20).
By the time his book was published
Alexander had taken leave from Oxford to
live in London and pursue private study. His
work on ethics had underscored the impor-
tance of recent developments in biology and
psychology for his thinking. After C. Lloyd
MORGAN published a very favourable review
of the book, the two men met and formed
what proved to be a lifelong friendship.
Morgan was just beginning to develop his
theory of emergent evolution and Alexander
followed his work with growing enthusiasm.
Emergence plays a central role in his great
metaphysical work. Alexander's developing
interest in experimental psychology led him
to spend a year studying under Hugo
Miinsterberg in Freiburg and working in his
laboratory. In 1891 he returned to his teaching
duties and delivered a set of lectures on the new
psychology, a first for Oxford. He repeated
them the following year, but he was no longer
satisfied with his Oxford post and began to
apply for vacant professorships. Despite strong
letters from many prominent figures, including
Bernard BOSANQUET, A.C. Bradley, F.H.
Bradley, Benjamin Jowett, Gilbert Murray,
Leslie Stephen and John COOK WlLSON, he
was unsuccessful in his first three applications.
Given the times, anti-Semitism may have been
a factor, but there is no way of knowing
whether or not it was. On his fourth attempt,
in 1893, he was elected to the Sir Samuel Hall
Chair of Philosophy in Owens College, later
transformed into the University of Manchester;
he taught there until his retirement in 1924. He
was allowed an assistant and over the years he
gave a number of young men, who later gained
prominence, a start in the profession. One of
them, T.H. Pear, instituted a course of study in
experimental psychology at Manchester.
For the next two decades Alexander taught
14
and, in his reading and thinking, prepared
himself for writing Space, Time, and Deity >
which was not published until 1920, although
the Gifford Lectures on which it is based were
delivered at the University of Glasgow between
1916 and 1918. The articles he published during
these relatively barren years furnished hints of the
direction his thinking was taking him, but they
were only hints and provided his readers with
only the slightest indication of the grand meta-
physical system he was evolving.
Throughout his working life Alexander held
firm to the belief that there was no essential dif-
ference between philosophy and science, even,
as we have seen, applying scientific method in
ethics. In introducing his great work he
remarked: 'Philosophy, by which I mean meta-
physics, differs from the special sciences, not so
much in its method as in the nature of the
subjects with which it deals. They are of a
peculiarly comprehensive kind, and are
revealed to the most superficial glance cast at
the things or existences in the world' (Space,
Time, and Deity, vol. 1, p. 1). As regards their
common empirical method, he remarked:
Since, then, philosophy differs from the
sciences nowise in its spirit but only in its
boundaries, in dealing with certain compre-
hensive features of experience which lie
outside the purview of the special sciences,
its method will be like theirs empirical. It will
proceed like them by reflective description
and analysis of its special subject-matter. It
will like them use hypotheses by which to
bring its data into verifiable connection. Its
certainty like theirs will extend no further
than its efficiency in providing a reasoned
exhibition of such system as can be discov-
ered in these data. But the word empirical
must not be too closely pressed. It is
intended to mean nothing more than the
method used in the special sciences.
(Space, Time, and Deity, vol. 1, p. 4)
Thus his elaborate metaphysical system sup-
posedly rests on an empirical foundation, but

exactly what 'empirical' means is not easily
stated.
Theory of knowledge is treated as merely a
part of the metaphysical system. A mind is
said to know an object when they are in the
relation of compresence with one another.
Compresence is the most elementary of all
relations, and all that knowing as such
implies is the compresence of a mind and an
object at a lower level. The mind and the
object are but two existents amongst others,
or if we designate the enjoyed by capital
and the contemplated by small letters, it is
the compresence of A and b.
(Space, Time, and Deity, vol. 2, p. 102)
He stressed that an instance of compresence
which leads to knowing does not differ at all
from instances of the relation holding between
two material objects. 'Thus the relation of the
mind to its object b the table is precisely of the
same order as that between the floor and the
table. Only the floor is not conscious, and
consequently is only affected by the table so
far as it can be' (ibid., p. 103). A mind is an
existence that enjoys itself. 'Enjoyment' is a
technical term for Alexander. The mind enjoys
its own acts as part of its life and whatever is
compresent with it is perceived or contem-
plated but is strictly external to the mind.
Enjoyment and contemplation are not two
separate mental acts.
The mind, in enjoying itself, has before it,
and therefore contemplates, the object.
Contemplation is a name for the same act of
enjoyment, only in reference to the object.
The enjoyment is at once a state of being of
the mind itself, and that to which the object
is revealed, and so is an act of knowing.
Reciprocally, in knowing the object I know
myself, not in the sense that I contemplate
myself, for I do not do so, but in the sense
that I live through this experience of myself.
(Space, Time, and Deity, vol. 1, p. xxx)
15
ALEXANDER
Even though he thought the labels 'idealism'
and 'realism' should be banished from philos-
ophy (ibid., pp. 7-8), commentators have often
made the point that he espoused a direct
realism, since he insisted that the object of
contemplation is external to the mind.
The foundation of his metaphysical system
is 'Space-Time', the ultimate 'stuff of the
world. At times (ibid., p. xxvii) he describes
Space-Time as Motion, not of course the
motion we associate with physical objects,
since in the beginning (so to speak) there is no
matter. The Motion is pure motion and is the
basis of everything else. As an aid to under-
standing his system, Alexander offered his
readers an elaborate analogy:
Time is the mind of Space and Space the
body of Time. According to this formula
the world as a whole and each of its parts is
built on the model with which we are
familiar in ourselves as person, that is as
union of mind and body, and in particular
as union of mind and brain. But as this may
lead to the misapprehension that we are the
standard and exemplar of things, the state-
ment is better made in the reverse and truer
form that we are examples of a pattern
which is universal and is followed not only
by things but by Space-Time itself.
(Space, Time, and Deity, vol. 2, pp. 38-9)
The motion inherent in Space-Time first gives
rise to the categories, the a priori aspects of
experience. 'Everything has being and is a sub-
stance, every event has a cause, everything is
related to something else by way of quantity or
causality or difference or otherwise.' Mind
itself is not exempted: 'The mind being a highly
developed spatio-temporal complex, that is to
say being in its simplest and ultimate expres-
sion such, is an existent, a substance, a cause,
numerable, and its acts have intensity, and
affect each other causally and reciprocally'
(vol. 1, p. 330). But before mind can manifest
itself there must be matter. Matter is Space-
Time organized categorically and its emer-
ALEXANDER
gence brings qualities - first primary and then
secondary - into the world. In due course some
parts of matter become organized in such a
way as to give rise to life, and later brains of a
certain complexity and neural activity give rise
to minds. In every case something novel
emerges from a lower level of organization.
The process has no end. Alexander hypothe-
sizes that deity, which is a quality of a god, is
the latest emergent. Alexander found that
many of his critics misunderstood his position
on deity, and in a Preface written in 1927 he
attempted a correction:
I do not say, as has been thought, that God
never is, but is always yet to be. 'What I say
is that God as actually possessing deity does
not exist, but is an ideal, is always becoming;
but God as the whole universe tending
towards deity does exist. Deity is a quality,
and God a being. Actual God is the forecast
and, as it were, divining of ideal God.'
(Space, Time, and Deity ^ vol. 1, p. xxxix).
His attempt to preserve God's transcendence
has left most of his commentators unconvinced.
In weaving his system Alexander used ideas
from a number of disparate sources. His empiri-
cism is taken from Hume, but he avoided
espousing Hume's scepticism. The notion of
'Space-Time' came from Einstein's work,
although Alexander admitted he was stymied
when he attempted to read Einstein's writings on
the theory of general relativity. Emergence, as
already noted, was due to Lloyd Morgan, but the
way Alexander used it was very reminiscent of
Bergson's use of elan vital. There is a difference,
however, because Alexander's 'force' was only
pure motion. His theory of knowledge was that
of the American new realists, but unlike them he
made it an integral part of his metaphysics,
rather than its foundation. The idea of develop-
ing an evolutionary philosophy he took from
Spencer, but his version avoids Spencer's agnos-
ticism. Finally, the analytic and synthetic skill
with which his system is constructed is due to the
man himself. It is an impressive achievement.
16
Alexander's book was one of the last by a
British philosopher to advance a fully devel-
oped speculative world-view. Only two of his
contemporaries, John McTaggart Ellis
McTAGGART and Alfred North WHITEHEAD,
were later to publish competing systems.
McTaggart's The Nature of Existence (1921,
1927) took its inspiration from Hegel, but
followed its own path, especially in its treat-
ment of time. Whitehead's Process and Reality:
An Essay in Cosmology (1929) arose out of a
background very similar to that of Alexander's
book. Indeed, when Whitehead's book was
announced Alexander, according to Dorothy
EMMET, 'thought that his work would be super-
seded by Whitehead's. He remarked that he
could say, as Dr. Johnson said of himself with
regard to Burke, that he had "rung the bell" for
him' (Space, Time, and Deity, vol. 1, p. xvii).
But when Alexander read Whitehead's book,
he realized that they had taken very different
approaches to the problems of metaphysics.
Whitehead had taken a Leibnizian path,
whereas he had followed Spinoza. Their dif-
ferent approaches, plus Whitehead's bewilder-
ing neologisms and his unusual uses of ordinary
terms, make comparison of the two systems
nearly impossible. Thus Alexander's system
stands quite alone in the history of twentieth-
century philosophy. Alexander was not a
philosopher who encouraged disciples, and so
he had none. Like Socrates he thought of
himself as a gadfly. In a letter written to Susan
STEBBING in 1930 he stated his aim in this way:
The fact is I believe I am rather provocative
than anything else; and I've made up my
mind that my business is to make people
think, even if their reflections condemn me.
I'm very deficient in soundness and thor-
oughness. And you know what W. James
said, that any fool can be original.
(Philosophical and Literary Pieces, p. 73n.)
Alexander's provocative speech was never
uncivil, and few, if any, ever felt offended by
anything he said to them.

One of those he provoked was G.F. STOUT,
his close friend for over fifty years. After
Alexander's death Stout published a charming
set of reminiscences of the man and the
philosopher in Mind, as well as an extensive
critique of his philosophy. Stout spent a year
with Alexander in Oxford during which they
joined forces 'in pushing the claims of
Psychology against the strenuous opposition of
Oxford philosophers who, following T.H.
Green, maintained on speculative grounds that
there could not be a "natural science of man"'
(ibid., p. 127). This dispute almost certainly
contributed to Alexander's decision to leave
Oxford; in a letter to G. Stanley Hall, the
editor of The American Journal of Psychology,
Alexander charged that 'the subject of psy-
chology is the most glaring weakness of the
Oxford teaching of philosophy' ('To the Editor
...', p. 121). Stout and he were interested in the
same philosophical problems and spent much
time over the years discussing them. Stout
sensed 'a basis of agreement which facilitated
mutual understanding' until 'the conception
of his space-time system dawned upon
Alexander's mind as a dazzling revelation and
led him to refashion all his previous views'
(Philosophical and Literary Pieces, p. 127).
After that their philosophical positions
diverged. In his critique of Alexander's phi-
losophy Stout advances several telling criti-
cisms, among them the place of mind in the
universe, the relation holding between mind
and its object in knowing, and the analysis of
sense perception. Some of them follow from
Alexander's decision to make epistemology
subservient to his ontology. Stout and other
critics have targeted this reversal of the usual
order as perhaps the weakest link in
Alexander's grand design. Despite his finding
that Alexander's system is seriously flawed,
Stout insisted that Alexander 'was a great
philosopher - perhaps the greatest of his gen-
eration' (ibid., p. 126). The reason is that 'the
critic in finding reasons to reject Alexander's
answers to the questions he raises is led to
appreciate more deeply the nature and impor-
17
ALEXANDER
tance of the questions themselves and is stim-
ulated and helped to find alternative answers
for himself (ibid., p. 127).
Alexander's last book was Beauty and Other
Forms of Value (1933). He begins with an
analysis of the highest values - beauty, truth
and goodness - and then applies his conclusions
to those 'found lower down in the scale of
values in general' (p. 3). An example of a lower
value is a non-moral good, such as food. His
general conclusion with regard to the three
highest values is that their value is 'found to lie
in a relation, in the satisfaction which these
creations of man give to certain specific
impulses (call them desires or passions or what
you will), which it has been my object to
identify and to affiliate with their animal begin-
nings' (ibid., p. 277). In the case of beauty, he
identifies the motive that leads to its production
or discovery as 'the satisfaction (the objective
satisfaction) of the impulse to or motive of
material constructiveness when that impulse is
diverted from practice and treats the materials
of its construction for their own sake' (ibid.,
p. 191). In the case of truth, the motive satisfied
is curiosity; and in the case of moral goodness,
the motive is sociality. When these motives are
satisfied, the mind is pleased in a certain way
'and the characters in question are referred to
the objects as qualities' (ibid., p. 268). Before
turning to a discussion of the lower values, he
indicates the way in which each of the three
highest values includes the other two.
Alexander is one of the most revered figures
in the history of British philosophy. Everyone
who has written about him from personal
knowledge has presented us with a man of
many virtues and almost no faults, and the
faults that have been recorded are of the
harmless variety, such as an indifference to
dress and personal appearance. His favourite
form of locomotion was a bicycle, and he was
known to ride great distances - from
Manchester to Liverpool, say - to keep
appointments. Once, so the story goes, he
arrived, after a long bicycle trip during which
he was caught in a storm, wet and muddy at
ALEXANDER
the home of friends who had invited him to
dinner. When the maid answered his knock,
he asked if he might have a bath. Since he
looked every inch a tramp, the maid curtly
turned him down and shut the door in his
face. Only after he knocked again and told her
who he was, did she admit him. His students
and his colleagues in Manchester University
were prepared to overlook such matters as
his dress, because he was such an important
asset to the university. A superb teacher and
an untiring colleague, Alexander contributed
greatly to the transformation of Owens
College into the University of Manchester.
The university honoured him by commission-
ing Jacob Epstein to sculpt a bust of him,
which is prominently displayed there. In his
speech at the unveiling of the bust Alexander
remarked:
though I shall be glad if it is said of me 'He
was known for a certain gaiety of speech,'
I prefer to have it said of me, 'He contrived
for some years to persuade people that he
could think.' For, my Lord, in spite of
appearances to the contrary, I am really
and truly and fundamentally a very serious
man; it is only that I find it difficult to be
dull.
(Philosophical and Literary Pieces, p. 73)
Very few can make such a claim about them-
selves. In the same speech, he attempted to
account for the great affection shown him
during his lifetime:
I cannot tell how I have won this affection;
unless it be that I possess a fair stock of
affection myself, which extends to all
children and to dogs and cats and other
animals. Apart from that, after careful self-
examination, I can only conclude that there
must be something in me which in the eigh-
teenth century they used to call a je ne sais
quoi.
(Philosophical and Literary Pieces, p. 72)
18
In 1930 Alexander was honoured by King
George V with induction into the Order of
Merit, a very select society limited to twenty-
four living persons. Other philosophers who
have shared this honour are F.H. Bradley,
Isaiah BERLIN, G.E. MOORE, Bertrand RUSSELL
and Alfred North Whitehead.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Moral Order and Progress: An Analysis of
Ethical Conceptions (1889).
'To the Editor of the Journal of
Psychology', The American Journal of
Psychology, vol. 5, no. 1 (October 1892),
pp. 120-22.
Locke (1908).
Space, Time, and Deity, 2 vols (1920; repr.,
with a new foreword by Dorothy Emmet
and Alexander's 'Preface to the 1927
Impression', New York, 1966).
Beauty and Other Forms of Value (1933).
Philosophical and Literary Pieces, ed., with
a memoir, John Laird (1939).
Other Relevant Works
'Professor Samuel Alexander: A Great
Philosopher', The Times (14 September
1938), p. 12.
Stout, G.F., 'The Philosophy of Samuel
Alexander', Mind, vol. 49 ns (1940), pp.
1-18, 137-49.
, 'S. Alexander (1859-1938):
Personal Reminiscences', Mind, vol. 49
ns (1940), pp. 126-9.
John G. Slater
ALISON, Mona, see Caird

ANDERSON, John (1893-1962)
John Anderson was born on 1 November 1893
in the village of Stonehouse, 30 miles south-
west of Glasgow, and died in Sydney on 6 July
1962. He was the third born and second son of
the marriage of Alexander Anderson, the
Headmaster at the local school with radical
political tendencies, and Elizabeth Brown, also
a school teacher but with literary interests. John
attended his father's school until 1907, when he
attended the Hamilton Academy to 1910,
coming first in the All Scotland Bursary
Competition, a feat not repeated by any
Scottish philosopher of his generation. He
entered Glasgow University in 1911 and
studied Greek, Latin, mathematics and natural
philosophy, winning the Cunninghame Medal
in mathematics in 1915. He then studied for an
MA in moral philosophy, logic and political
economy, winning the Caird Medal in Moral
Philosophy in 1917. During this period
Anderson was exposed to a wide range of intel-
lectual influences, including William James,
John BuRNET, Dostoevsky, Vico, Ibsen,
Matthew Arnold, James Joyce, Georges Sorel,
Freud, Marx, G.E. MOORE and Bertrand
RUSSELL, although the predominant influence
was the Australian philosopher Samuel
ALEXANDER. Following graduation, John
accepted a visiting lectureship to Cardiff but
returned to Glasgow on a Shaw Fellowship in
1919, where he remained until his move to
Edinburgh University as a lecturer in 1922. It
was in this year that he married Janet (Jenny)
Baillie, whom he had known since childhood
and had courted during and after his university
days. Their only child Alexander (Sandy) was
born in the following year.
Anderson arrived in Australia in 1927 to
take up the Challis Chair of Philosophy at
Sydney University, from which he eventually
retired in 1958. He remained in Australia until
his death in 1962, departing the country on
only one occasion, 1938, when on a sabbatical
year he visited Scotland, England and America.
Although he was a regular contributor to the
19
ANDERSON
Australasian Journal of Psychology and
Philosophy during this time, Anderson pub-
lished only one book in his lifetime, a slim
volume Education and Politics in 1931. At the
time of his death, he was working on the index
for Studies in Empirical Philosophy', which was
published posthumously in the same year, with
an Introduction written by John Passmore.
Since his death, three more books of
Anderson's writings have appeared, Art and
Reality (1982), Education and Inquiry (1980)
and A Perilous and Fighting Life (2003),
dealing with his aesthetic, educational and
political writings respectively. During this time,
there have been three books written on
Anderson, Anderson's Social Philosophy,
Australian Realism and A Passion to Oppose.
Anderson had a substantial and wide-ranging
influence, both in terms of university studies in
Australia and overseas, and the general cultural
and intellectual life of Sydney and Australia.
His academic influence extended into many
university subjects ranging from philosophy to
psychology, sociology, anthropology and law.
His more general influence in Australian social
life permeated into a wide range of social insti-
tutions including the law, journalism, the arts,
education, public administration, medicine and
economics. He was also influential in the intel-
lectual formation of the Sydney Push which
later included such figures as Germaine Greer,
Barry Humphries, Clive James and Robert
Hughes.
Based on certain early articles such as
'Realism and Some of its Critics' and
'Empiricism', Anderson's philosophy is often
regarded as a doctrinal philosophy which was
unchanging during his lifetime and included
such descriptions as empiricism, positivism,
realism, objectivism, naturalism, pluralism and
determinism. Although Anderson's philosophy
is most commonly described as realist, it is sig-
nificant that the first and last articles he wrote
in Australia were 'Empiricism' and 'Empiricism
and Logic', and his major work was titled
Studies in Empirical Philosophy. Empiricism
can be regarded as the most general description
ANDERSON
of Anderson's philosophy, although this term
should not be confused with the empiricism of
Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Anderson's empiri-
cism, being derived from Alexander, was a
theory of existence, not a theory of knowledge.
Central to Anderson's philosophy of empiri-
cism was his contention that Space-Time (the
'togetherness' of Space and Time) was infinite
and not as Alexander had held, a finite 'stuff
which constitutes the universe. Indeed
Anderson rejected the very notion of 'the
Universe', arguing that if Space-Time is infinite
then there can be no term which expresses the
'totality of things'. The existence of a thing is
simply its occupation of a spatio-temporal
location, and in so existing, will also have a
number of categorical forms such as particu-
larity, universality, quality, quantity, identity,
difference, order, number and relation. Central
to his empiricist ontology were the doctrines of
pluralism and determinism. Anderson rejected
both the monism of BRADLEY and the atomism
of Russell, arguing for a pluralism where any
object is both a simple related to other simples
making a complex or is itself a complex com-
prised of various simpler elements. He also
rejected any duality of ways of being or levels
of existence (e.g., the natural and the super-
natural), arguing the relation between any two
such levels must itself be real and spatio-
temporal. Anderson's analysis of causation
rejected both the claim that there is indetermi-
nacy between things occupying spatio-temporal
locations and Mill's linear 'one-track' analysis
of causation, arguing that causation always
occurs within a causal field where any object
within a field will be caused by a set of neces-
sary and sufficient conditions and will also
itself be part of a set of necessary and sufficient
conditions which cause the existence and qual-
ities of other objects.
Another doctrine commonly used to describe
Anderson's philosophy is that of positivism,
although this should not be confused with the
logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. Whereas
the logical positivists regarded experiment as
the criterion of truth and falsity, Anderson
20
believed that it is simple experience which
determines the truth and falsity of proposi-
tions. He said, for example, that love may be
something that cannot be studied in a labora-
tory. Anderson's positivism was a positive
account of logic which held that all proposi-
tions or judgements are either true or false inde-
pendent of the context of judging and hence
rejected any conception of logic as relative or
absolute, such as that of the idealists such as
Bradley and BOSANQUET where 'the Absolute'
determines the truth or falsity of propositions,
or F.C.S. SCHILLER'S claim that the particular
context of judging determines the truth of
propositions and judgements. As a consequence
of this view of the proposition, Anderson also
rejected any theory of dialectic - whether
Hegelian or Marxist - which stated that a
proposition could be both true and false.
Anderson's theory of the proposition was inti-
mately related to his empiricist ontology and he
argued that the copula of the proposition - 'is
or is not' - is to be explicated in terms of Space-
Time. He also adopted Russell's theory of
propositional function, arguing that the subject
places or locates the thing under consideration,
while the predicate characterizes or qualifies
the thing under consideration. The combination
of propositional function and the spatio-
temporal analysis of the copula yielded the
propositional form'S is or is not P', an expres-
sion central to Anderson's logic. Further,
Anderson argued that the proposition could
also be analysed in terms of quantity, and
treating 'All' and 'None' as universal proposi-
tions, he arrived at the four forms of the propo-
sition: 'All S are P' (SaP), 'All S are not P' (SeP),
'Some S are P' (SiP) and 'Some S are not P'
(SoP). These four propositional forms were the
basis of his defence of syllogistic logic, a
position which makes him distinctive amongst
twentieth-century logicians.
The most common description of Anderson's
philosophy is that of realism. As a realist,
Anderson was probably influenced by Moore's
The Refutation of Idealism', although unlike
Moore, Anderson rejected the notion of 'self-

contradictory propositions', arguing that con-
tradiction could only occur between proposi-
tions. However Anderson did regard idealism
as 'unintelligible', thereby approximating the
intent of Moore's 'refutation'. For Anderson,
realism had two closely connected meanings.
The first, derived from the early Moore and
Russell, was the epistemological meaning that
the object of knowledge exists independently of
either the subject of knowledge or the relation
of knowing. Anderson argued further that if the
thing that is the object of knowledge is inde-
pendent of the relations that it has then the
qualities that a thing has must also be inde-
pendent of its relations, thus implying that no
qualities are relations and no relations are qual-
ities, a view which led Gilbert RYLE to attribute
to Anderson - although Anderson himself
denied it - that he held to only two categories
- quality and relation. The second meaning,
derived from the American new realists, was
the logical doctrine of external relations
whereby in any relationship 'a/R/b', the terms
of the relation are independent from each other
and of the relation between them.
These closely connected conceptions were at
the basis of some of Anderson's most incisive
philosophical criticism and particularly his
rejection of the term 'consciousness'. Anderson
argued that the conception of consciousness, as
both a quality of mind and a relation that it has,
must, if realism is true, be false, for no thing can
be both a quality and a relation. Accepting that
consciousness is a relation of 'awareness', he
argued that the quality of mind which has this
relation is emotion or feeling, a view he
expressed as 'mind is a society of emotions'. In
arguing so, Anderson not only rejected the
common-sense and intuitive account of con-
sciousness as a quality of our minds, but also
the logical basis of the phenomenological
movement, Husserl's notion of 'ego' or 'con-
sciousness'. Anderson's affective theory of mind
was strongly influenced by Freud's psychoan-
alytic theories, although he rejected Freud's
conception of mind as structured in terms of id,
ego and superego, arguing that these are struc-
21
ANDERSON
tures which apply to any emotion whatever, but
do not constitute mind in general. One short-
coming of Anderson's affective theory of mind
is that he never offered even a preliminary
account of what these affects or emotions might
be or how they might be related to each other,
and thus neglected precisely the area where
phenomenology has done the most productive
work. The materialist development of
Anderson's theory of mind by David
Armstrong in his Materialist Theory of Mind
has likewise neglected a descriptive, phenome-
nological account of the emotions.
Another central doctrine of Anderson's phi-
losophy is that of objectivism. This is the
doctrine that any subject is objective, i.e.
existing, and hence contradicts the belief in an
'irreducible' subjectivity. For Anderson, the
'subject' is as objective as any other spatio-
temporal thing and, in being so, is pluralistic
and determined. Anderson's objectivism, and
hence his rejection of any form of subjectivism,
was particularly relevant to his ethical, aes-
thetic and historical theories, where concerns
with subjectivity are most predominant.
Anderson's realist ethical theory treated
goodness as a quality of things and obligation
(the 'ought' or 'should') as a relation, and
thereby clearly distinguished ethics from
morality. This distinction between ethics and
morality implied two important conclusions
for Anderson: the rejection of any absolute
moral obligation and of any relational defini-
tion of goodness. In terms of the former, he
argued that any theory - whether Christian,
Kantian or Marxist - which postulates an
obligation which is absolute or categorical must
be rejected because since an obligation is a
relation there must always be a subject - a
specific social or psychological force - which
proposes the obligation. All imperatives, on
this account, are hypothetical. In terms of the
latter, Anderson rejected any relational defini-
tion of goodness such as utilitarianism, for if
utility is a relation then it cannot itself be a
definition of the quality of goodness. However,
contra Moore, Anderson did believe that
ANDERSON
goodness could be defined and he did so in
terms of Sorel's notion of the 'producer ethic'
- consuming in order to produce - while
badness was defined in terms of the 'consumer
ethic' - producing in order to consume.
Anderson's conception of the productive nature
of goods was closely related to his acceptance
of Marx's view that society is organization for
production - that production is socially fun-
damental - although he also held that industrial
production, scientific inquiry and artistic creation
are the three broad categories of social culture,
thereby suggesting that they are ontologically
equal. Although this distinction between pro-
duction and consumption was a general char-
acterization of the distinction between good and
bad, Anderson included many other qualities as
'goods' including intellectual inquiry, artistic
creation and appreciation, disinterestedness,
communication and cooperation. The place or
location of goods was particularly problematic
for Anderson, for apart from his locating of
good in social culture, he also held that psycho-
logical motives were themselves good or bad,
thereby suggesting that they were both psycho-
logical and social. This ambiguity over the
precise locating of good has led some critics to
argue that Anderson was proposing a distinct
region of the 'psychosocial' where goods could
be said to reside. This conception of the psy-
chosocial is particularly relevant to Anderson's
theory of social movements or 'ways of life',
which he emphasized had both psychological
and social constituents, although the conclusion
that goods only occur in such movements was
not explicitly drawn by Anderson. Anderson's
objective treatment of good is in marked contrast
to John MACKIE'S Ethics: Inventing Right and
Wrong, where a subjective interpretation is
given.
A realist treatment of aesthetics would
appear to imply that beauty is a quality of
things, although Anderson never used this
expression, preferring the term 'character'.
However his criticisms of subjectivist and rel-
ativist theories of aesthetics proceed from the
realist doctrine of external relations: any
22
account of beauty in terms of the subject or the
relation between the subject and the work of art
must be rejected in favour of recognizing the
objective beauty of the work of art itself.
However, in his 1942 Lectures on Ethics and
Aesthetics, Anderson explicitly rejected the view
that beauty is a quality and argued that we can
speak of the beauty of any quality whatever in
recognizing the structure that it has. On this
account, anything is beautiful insofar as it has
a structure which we recognize. Central to
Anderson's aesthetic theory was his concep-
tion of theme, and although he spoke on many
occasions about the theme of certain works of
art, he rarely defined the term itself. His general
characterization of theme was as 'the develop-
ment of the phases or moments of a work of
art', although he gave no detail of what this
might mean. Also in his 1942 lectures he argued
that structure is a more general term than
theme, capturing both the temporal aspect of
theme and the spatial aspect of structure,
although again this claim is not developed in
any detail and when coupled with his neglect of
the notion of theme Anderson's formal aes-
thetic theory is left incomplete and empty.
Apart from his formal aesthetic theory,
Anderson wrote literary critiques on a number
of authors including Dostoevsky, Melville and
Ibsen, although his favourite work was Joyce's
Ulysses, in which he praised the theme of
secular damnation, self-exile and redemption.
From the time of his arrival in Sydney,
Anderson had a general theory of history and,
in keeping with his empiricist presuppositions
of determinism and pluralism, he argued that
history is a determined and complex process,
and rejected voluntarism, individualism and
collectivism as theories of history. From 1941
he had accepted Croce's view that the subject
or theme of history is liberty, although he
regarded liberty or freedom as a positive quality
and not a mere absence of restraint. The subject
of history was the predominant interest during
the last decade of his life.
Another common description of his philoso-
phy was that of naturalism, which implied the

rejection of any supernatural account of things.
This doctrine was closely allied with his con-
ception of freethought, the view that there is no
subject - 'the sacred' - which cannot be studied
Anderson's view of freethought was much
broader than the traditional conception of anti-
religion and was applied to the popular rever-
ence of such 'idols' as war memorials and patri-
otism. However, freethought was not simply a
social doctrine and he argued that the denial by
philosophy of the notion of 'the sacred' implied
that it was itself freethinking. Anderson defined
freethought as the primacy of science, the
support for the widest possible extension of
knowledge and opposition to every form of
censorship. A consistent feature of Anderson's
public intellectual activity was his opposition to
censorship. He argued that censorship was
unscientific in restricting discussion, and unde-
mocratic in denying certain sections of the pop-
ulation access to information. He argued
further that in the three main classes of cen-
sorship - obscenity, blasphemy and sedition -
the attempt is made to define these concepts in
terms of degree without determining their qual-
itative distinctions. He was particularly con-
cerned with the question of obscenity, arguing
that the depreciatory and sadistic view of
women expressed in English obscenity was
related to the empiricist and mechanistic char-
acter of the English mind.
The conflict between education and religion
was a continued interest throughout
Anderson's life. He argued that education is
liberal insofar as it is a critical liberation of the
mind opposed to the utilitarian emphasis of
vocational training and is freethinking in
treating any subject as suitable for educational
discussion. Opposed to this liberality and free-
thinking is the credulous nature of Christian
faith, which, by erecting 'idols' which cannot be
examined, hinders inquiry at its source.
Developing the views of Feuerbach, Bosanquet
and Vico, Anderson articulated a secular
critique of religion whereby religion is to be
explained in human terms, and history articu-
lated in terms of its own immanent laws. He
23
ANDERSON
was particularly critical of the philanthropic
ethic of Christianity, arguing that philanthropy
weakens the existence of independent social
movements.
In contrast to the apparent constancy of
Anderson's philosophical views, his political
theories went through a series of distinct phases
- communism, Trotskyism, liberal democracy
and anti-communist conservatism, although
these can be reduced to two: proletarianism
(1927-37) and anti-proletarianism (1939-62).
Anderson's proletarianism was characterized
by his adherence to some but not all the tenets
of classical Marxism. He accepted the distinc-
tion between base and superstructure, the
economic interpretation of history, the class
theory of society, the state as the organ of the
dominating class and the repressive role of
ideology in civil society. However his views
were distinctive in his belief that liberty was the
motivating force of the working class, and in his
rejection of dialectical materialism and social
and historical relativism. During the early part
of this period he believed that Russia was an
existing communist society, although after
1932 he accepted Trotsky's thesis that Russia
was under the temporary domination of the
Stalinist bureaucracy. By 1937 he had rejected
this view, arguing that the domination by Stalin
was permanent. In 1935, in a statement of the
unity of purpose of the realist and proletarian,
he argued that 'the "'intellectual levelling" of
the realist philosopher is "an integral part of
social levelling"' (Studies in Empirical
Philosophy, p. 313).
After his return from sabbatical in 1939, he
began to articulate a theory of liberal democ-
racy which occupied his attention during the
war. He defined democracy in terms of
openness and publicity which included the
extension of political enterprise and participa-
tion throughout the community. He now
rejected the view that the state is the organ of
the dominating class and argued that it was a
'balance of power', a system of rights and priv-
ileges which adjust social differences. However
he argued that liberty is not the legislation of
ANDERSON
certain 'freedoms', but is an attitude of oppo-
sition to the servile attempt to propose such leg-
islation. He concluded that opposition to the
state is essential for democracy, except, curi-
ously, when it breaks up this balance of power
altogether.
After the end of the war he became increas-
ingly opposed to communism, describing it as
'the disease of the modern times', although he
opposed the attempts to ban the local
Communist Party. In 1952 he denied the pos-
sibility of egalitarian society and defended the
importance of independent traditions as main-
taining civilized life, with these traditions pos-
sessing special privileges. These views are at
the basis of the description of Anderson as a
'conservative', although in no sense was he a
conservative who based his politics on
moralism. In 1962, in contradiction to his 1935
claim, he argued that the 'social levelling' of the
realist philosopher has no bearing on the
demand for 'social levelling' typical of
Communist and egalitarian ideology.
The key question regarding Anderson's intel-
lectual life is whether his changing political posi-
tions were the result of a stricter working out of
his philosophical position to his political theories
in light of changing political events, or whether
his philosophical position also went through a
process of change and development, resulting
in the rejection of a simple doctrinal conception
of philosophy. While it is true that Anderson's
political development can be partly explained by
his more consistent working out of empiricism
as a socio-political theory, overemphasizing this
view obscures the fact that Anderson's own
understanding of the nature of philosophy was
also changing and developing. This changing
conception of philosophy was most in evidence
in his 1958 retirement address 'Realism', where
his support for realism as a definition of philos-
ophy is ambiguous, although as early as 1947 he
had written of his 'Idealism' and 'rediscovered
Hegelianism' in correspondence with his lover
and colleague, Ruth Walker.
After his retirement in 1958 Anderson's most
significant cultural writing was his 1960 article
24
'Classicism'. In this article, he argued that clas-
sicism is the objective and unified treatment of
all the subjects of culture, and criticized the
piecemeal analysis of cultural questions typical
of the twentieth century 'surrender to science'.
He criticized the entire modern period of phi-
losophy as overly concerned with questions of
epistemology, although he found in the work of
Hegel a classical and objective treatment of
philosophy which was unique in the modern
period. Further, while recognizing that culture
only exists in the struggle with superstition, it
was only in the Hellenic period that Anderson
found philosophy concerned predominantly
with objectivity, and he particularly empha-
sized the importance of Heraclitus in articulat-
ing an objective theory of existence and
Socrates in developing a critical method in phi-
losophy.
The place of John Anderson in twentieth-
century philosophy lies midway between the
realist origins of Anglo-Saxon philosophy (but
not the analytic or linguistic tradition which
followed it) and the systematic nature of con-
tinental philosophy (but not its phenomeno-
logical or existential presuppositions). In strictly
philosophic terms, Anderson's empiricism and
positivism were his most important contribu-
tions, rejecting any division of reality or descrip-
tion of the universe as a thing and the associ-
ated doctrine that truth is determined other
than by the existence of things themselves.
However his more important cultural contri-
bution was in the working out of the details of
this metaphysic into psychological, social, polit-
ical and cultural activity. Anderson developed
a deterministic and pluralistic theory of culture
which is not true because it expresses a certain
historical moment or maintains an arbitrary
conception of classical work, but because it
attempts to describe the way cultural and social
life actually operates.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(with Sydney Robertson), Education and
Politics (Sydney, 1931).
(with Sydney Robertson), Studies in

Empirical Philosophy (Sydney, 1962).
Education and Inquiry', ed. D.Z. Phillips
(Oxford, 1980).
Art and Reality, ed. Janet Anderson, G.
Cullum and K. Lycos (Sydney, 1982).
A Perilous and Fighting Life: From
Communist to Conservative - the Politica
Writings of Professor John Anderson, ed.
M. Weblin (Melbourne, 2003).
Further Reading
Baker, A.J., Australian Realism: The
Systematic Philosophy of John Anderson
(Cambridge, 1986).
Baker, A.J. and Angus Robertson,
Anderson's Social Philosophy: The Social
Life and Political Thought of Professor
John Anderson (Sydney, 1979).
Kennedy, B., A Passion to Oppose
(Melbourne, 1995).
Mackie, J., The Philosophy of John
Anderson', Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 40 (1962), pp. 265-82.
Passmore, J., 'John Anderson and Twentieth
Century Philosophy', in Studies in
Empirical Philosophy.
, 'Russell and Bradley', in R. Brown
and C.D. Rollins, Contemporary
Philosophy in Australia (1969).
John Anderson website, http://setis.library.
usyd.edu.au/oztexts/anderson.html,
accessed October 2004.
Mark Weblin
ANSCOMBE, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret
(1919-2001)
Elizabeth Anscombe was born in Limerick,
Ireland on 18 March 1919 and died in
Cambridge on 5 January 2001. She was
educated at Sydenham High School and St
Hugh's College, Oxford, where she read
25
ANSCOMBE
Greats. She held research studentships at St
Hugh's and at Newnham College, Cambridge,
and research fellowships at Somerville College,
Oxford. From 1964 to 1970 she was a fellow
of Somerville, and from 1970 to 1986 Professor
of Philosophy in Cambridge. She taught regu-
larly at the University of Chicago and at the
University of Pennsylvania, and was a visitor at
other American universities. She was elected
to the British Academy in 1967. The Roman
Catholic religion to which she was converted
while still in her teens profoundly shaped her
life and her philosophical thinking. Another
central influence on her thought was
WITTGENSTEIN, whom she met while she was at
Newnham. She became a pupil of his and a
close friend, and was one of his literary execu-
tors. Her translations of his writings, most
notably that of Philosophical Investigations,
are unmatched. Anscombe was married to the
philosopher Peter GEACH. They thought
through and discussed innumerable philo-
sophical problems together over the years, and
collaborated on an English edition of
Descartes's writings. Their book Three
Philosophers includes a long essay of
Anscombe's on Aristotle. She also wrote
Intention (an extremely original and influential
study of action, intention and practical rea-
soning) and An Introduction to Wittgenstein's
Tractatus. Her Collected Philosophical Papers
(referred to hereafter as CPP) contains most of
the papers she had written by 1979. Subsequent
papers have appeared in various journals and
books.
Anscombe's range as a philosopher was
extraordinarily wide. She made outstanding
contributions to philosophy of mind and
action, metaphysics, philosophy of language,
philosophical logic, ethics and political philos-
ophy, philosophy of religion, epistemology and
the history of philosophy. Her philosophical
writings are marked by their distinctive spirit,
a spirit which perpetually questioned things
which were taken for granted, things which
were repeatedly said, but which were accepted
simply because (so it appeared to her upon
ANSCOMBE
consideration) they kept being said (CPP, vol.
3, p. 9). Thus, for example, she wrote about
causation that it is 'over and over again
assumed that any singular causal proposition
implies a universal statement running "Always
when this, then that"' (CPP, vol. 2, p. 147).
The hold of the thesis on people's minds seemed
altogether undisturbed, she noted, by the 'recal-
citrance' of examples. 'Such a thesis', she con-
tinued, 'needs some reason for believing it!'
(ibid.). The spirit in which she challenged the
assumptions of philosophers about causation is
evident in her questioning of the orthodox view
of the distinction between fact and value (in
'On Brute Facts', CPP, vol. 3, pp. 22-5), and
even more clearly in her criticism of prevalent
ideas about moral obligation (in 'Modern
Moral Philosophy', CPP, vol. 3, pp. 26-42).
One of the threads running through her
philosophical thought is that of response to
Hume. Features of his philosophy inclined her
to think that he was 'a mere - brilliant -
sophist' (CPP, vol. 3, p. 28), but she was forced,
she said, not to reverse that judgement, but to
add to it:
although he reaches his conclusions ... by
sophistical methods, his considerations con-
stantly open up very deep and important
problems. It is often the case that in the act
of exhibiting the sophistry one finds oneself
noticing matters which deserve a lot of
exploring: the obvious stands in need of
investigation as a result of the points that
Hume pretends to have made ... hence he is
a very profound and great philosopher, in
spite of his sophistry.
(CPP, vol. 3, p. 28)
The only philosopher about whom Anscombe
has more to say in CPP is Aristotle. Hume's
thought, she believes, exhibits forms of error
and confusion that deeply attract us; his ideas
have been enormously influential in shaping
our philosophical problems, influential also in
forming what she describes as our
Weltanschauung. Anscombe took it to be
26
extremely important to make clear what is
wrong with what Hume says, and so she comes
back to him repeatedly. Several of her most
interesting essays, including 'Hume and Julius
Caesar' (CPP, vol. 1, pp. 86-92), and 'Times,
Beginnings and Causes' (CPP, vol. 2, pp.
148-62), focus on specific arguments of his.
Whether or not he is explicitly mentioned, his
views and later ideas that reflect his influence
can frequently be seen to be the target of her
writings. Hume is central in her discussion of
causation, for example, which criticizes the
idea that '[i]f an effect occurs in one case and
a similar effect does not occur in an apparently
similar case, there must be a relevant further
difference' (CPP, vol. 2, p. 133). She took that
Humean view to be generally accepted within
analytical philosophy and in much non-ana-
lytical philosophy, and to be influential as well
in non-philosophical thought about causation.
The 'cast of mind' shaped by the Humean con-
ception 'is characteristic of our whole culture'
(ibid.); hence the importance she sees in a
critical examination of the underlying ideas.
She gave even more attention to Hume on prac-
tical life: on ethics and practical reasoning. She
noted that, on the whole, her interest in ethics
'has been more in particular moral questions
than in what is now called "meta-ethics"'
(CPP, vol. 3, p. viii). One of the main stimuli,
though, to her writing in meta-ethics was
Hume's argument - which she takes on in 'On
Brute Facts' - that one cannot infer an 'ought'
from an 'is'. Much debate in ethics takes for
granted that one can more or less straightfor-
wardly distinguish between 'moral' and 'non-
moral' properties, and can then discuss how
exactly they are related. Anscombe undermined
the assumptions underlying such debates, of
there being a difference between two 'realms'
(of the moral and the non-moral), and hence of
there being a philosophical question how one
gets from facts in one realm to a description of
something in the other. Her philosophical
instincts led her to shift from the case of 'ought'
to that of 'owes'. She showed what is involved
in reasoning from such facts as that someone

has supplied one with potatoes to the descrip-
tion 'I owe him such-and-such sum of money'.
There is no need, she argues, to think in terms
of a 'gap' between 'is' and 'owes'. Her
argument casts doubt on the supposed gap
between 'is' and 'ought', and on the idea of the
moral as a kind of autonomous realm with a
problematic relation to the realm of non-moral
facts. What we have instead is a variety of cases
in which facts of one sort are, as she puts it,
'brute' relative to some kind of description.
Criticism of Hume's ideas can also be recog-
nized in many of the arguments in Intention
and her other discussions of practical rational-
ity and truth in action.
Through her editions and translations of
Wittgenstein and commentaries on his works,
Anscombe has done more than anyone else to
make his thought accessible. Many of her
essays also serve as fine illustrations of what can
be achieved using methods derived from
Wittgenstein. His influence is evident in various
ways in, for example, her essays on causation.
A central part of the method of 'Causality and
Determination' (CPP, vol. 2, pp. 133-47) is
the attention she gives to the ways we learn to
use 'a host of causal concepts' (ibid., p. 137) -
such concepts as eat, squash, push, knock over,
hurt, purr. She asks how one shows that one
grasps the concept cause, and notes that the
capacity to use words like 'cause', which may
indeed demonstrate that one has the concept,
depends on one's already being able to use
more specific causal concepts of the sort which
are learned first. She identifies, as the 'core' of
the various kinds of cases of causation the
'derivativeness of an effect from its causes'
(ibid., p. 136). This is not intended as a philo-
sophical analysis of causation; there are many
different sorts of relation that would exemplify
derivativeness. Indeed, the insistence that we
need a general philosophical explanation of
causation, of the sort that Hume or neo-
Humeans give, is exactly what she is rejecting:
she is not going below the surface of the various
cases of causation to explain how a cause
explains its effect. She does not deny that there
27
ANSCOMBE
may be discoverable causal mechanisms in
some cases of causation; her point is that there
being such mechanisms is not part of what is
involved in a correct causal judgement. In
'Memory, "Experience" and Causation' (CPP,
vol. 2, pp. 120-30) she takes the case of our
wanting an explanation as to how it is that
someone knows such-and-such, supposing this
to be a surprising fact. Suppose we are then told
that he was there and witnessed the thing; now
we understand how he knew. Here we have,
she argues, one sort of case of causation, one
kind of derivativeness: someone's knowing
something, derived from his having witnessed
it. She argues that we do not need a general
account of causation into which this kind of
case would have to be fitted: rather, this is
what she describes as 'an original phenomenon
of causality: one of its types' (ibid., p. 127).
Here she is operating with the idea of the
concept of cause as itself involving a variety of
different sorts of case, no general explanation
needing to be given. What is Wittgensteinian in
her approach to causation is not only such
features as the appeal to how we learn a
concept and how we tell whether someone has
mastered it, but also her implicit identification
of what is difficult in the philosophical discus-
sion of causation: what is difficult is to see the
significance of what is before one's eyes; what
is difficult is to recognize the appropriate point
at which to stop, the point at which the demand
for a 'because', for a general theory covering the
variety of cases, for an analysis getting at what
supposedly underlies the cases, can itself reveal
philosophical confusion.
Anscombe's most controversial papers are
The First Person' (CFP, vol. 2, pp. 21-36), in
which she questioned whether T is a referring
expression, and 'Modern Moral Philosophy',
her most important contribution to ethics. In
the latter she explained and defended three
theses. The first was that moral philosophy
could not profitably be done without an
adequate philosophy of psychology, and should
be set aside until there was such a philosophy
of psychology. She argued that we could not,
ANSCOMBE
for example, begin to explain why an unjust
man is a bad man in the absence of an account
of what it is for justice (or any other charac-
teristic) to be a 'virtue', and in the absence of an
account of how a virtue is related to the actions
which are instances of it. We lack the very
beginnings here: an account of what a human
action is, and how a description of it as the
doing of such-and-such is connected with its
motive and with the intention in it. Her argu-
ments for her first thesis contributed to a great
increase in interest in the central topics of philo-
sophical psychology, including intention,
motive, action, desire and practical reasoning.
The second thesis was that the main concepts
of moral philosophy as then practised - the
concepts of 'moral obligation' and 'moral duty',
of the 'morally right' and 'morally wrong', and
of what we 'morally ought' to do - should be
given up, because they were survivals from a
divine law conception of ethics, and made no
real sense without it. Anscombe held, further,
that in the absence of the divine law conception,
the concepts in question were positively
harmful in that they contributed to corruptions
of thought, as when someone wonders, in dif-
ficult circumstances, whether some admittedly
unjust act is morally right. She argued, through
a discussion of Aristotle's ethics, that the
suspect concepts are by no means essential to
ethics. An approach which resembled his and
made no use of them is still a possibility for us.
At its heart would be the idea of a connection
between human nature and the status of certain
characteristics as human virtues, as character-
istics that we need from the point of view of 'the
activity of thought and choice in regard to the
various departments of life' (CPP, vol. 3,
p. 38). Her discussion of her second thesis did
not succeed in persuading philosophers to
abandon the concepts she criticized but did
give a great stimulus to the development of
virtue ethics. Anscombe's third thesis was that
English moral philosophers from Sidgwick on
differed from each other only superficially.
They all hold, she said, that an action is right
if the consequences it produces are the best
28
possible. She introduced the term 'consequen-
tialism' for the view these moral theorists share.
It may seem odd of her to have lumped people
such as W.D. Ross with utilitarians as conse-
quentialists. To see her point, we need to see
why she counts Ross as a consequentialist, and
here we need to distinguish clearly between her
use of the term 'consequentialism' and its sub-
sequent philosophical use. After the publication
of her essay the term took on a life of its own,
and 'consequentialism' is now frequently con-
trasted with so-called 'deontological' views such
as those of Ross and H.A. PRICHARD. What
mattered for Anscombe was that these philoso-
phers leave it open whether it might, in certain
circumstances, be objectively right to do some
gravely unjust action (her example is procuring
the condemnation of the innocent). Ross explic-
itly treats prima facie Tightness as something to
be maximized, and such a view, she thinks,
does not differ significantly from that of utili-
tarians such as Sidgwick. It is a consequential-
ist view in her original sense. If we read her crit-
icism of consequentialism as directed only
against views that are consequentialist in the
later sense (the sense in which utilitarians are
and deontologists such as Ross are not conse-
quentialists), we shall miss her point. Her third
thesis was the thesis of superficial differences;
it concerned the mode of thinking prevalent
within the culture, and was meant to bring that
mode of thinking to attention, and get it dis-
cussed (at least). The identification of 'conse-
quentialism' with a particular form of conse-
quentialism (in her sense) has made it easy to
ignore the issue she took to be central.
Anscombe's criticism of moral philosophy as
then practised was not intended to be 'morally
neutral'. She rejected the prevalent idea that
moral philosophy should be practised in an
'ethically neutral' way, and that it involved no
first-order moral thinking, but rather only a
second-order investigation of moral concepts.
Like Iris MURDOCH, she thought that Oxford
moral philosophy, despite its official 'ethical
neutrality', reflected the moral views of those
engaged in it. She certainly thought that the

views she rejected were inimical to Christian
belief, but also that there were sound argu-
ments against them, independent of any appeal
to Christian or other religious beliefs.
Throughout her life, Anscombe wrote on
such topics as war and murder, euthanasia and
contraception. For most analytical philosophers
in the mid twentieth century, discussion of such
topics did not count as philosophical, but here
again Anscombe differed from her contempo-
raries. Her approach to these topics is well
illustrated by the three essays on war in CPP
(originally from 1939, 1957 and 1961). All
three reflect the importance she attached to
clarity about action and intention, and in all
three her reasoning depends on the principle of
double effect. Many of her most interesting
discussions of moral issues were published after
CPP. They include 'Action, Intention and
"Double Effect"' and the parts of 'Murder and
the Morality of Euthanasia: Some Philosophical
Considerations' which she wrote. Her papers
on issues of life and death constitute an impor-
tant body of criticism of prevalent modes of
thought about such matters. She was commit-
ted to the idea that there should be good
reasons for any Catholic moral teaching, good
reasons which are independent of Catholic
theology; her essays are attempts to lay out
what she takes those reasons to be. Thus, for
example, her rejection of the idea that there is
an important moral conception of personhood,
where being a person is 'something that gets
added to a human being who develops
properly, and that may disappear in old age or
imbecility' (Twenty Opinions Common among
Modern Anglo-American Philosophers', p. 49),
can be shared by non-Catholics and does not
depend on accepting Catholic ideas.
Anscombe's most important body of work is
on action and intention. Her book Intention is
sometimes described as the founding work of
action theory. But in some ways that is a mis-
leading description. Intention was published
in 1957, when there was much discussion of
philosophical psychology - of topics such as th.
will and the relation between motives and
29
ANSCOMBE
causes. Earlier views were being criticized, in
particular the traditional view that actions were
preceded and caused by internal mental acts.
The stimulus to these discussions in the 1950s
was the work of Wittgenstein, the publication
in 1949 of Gilbert KYLE'S Concept of Mind,
and J.L. AUSTIN'S ideas. Anscombe's book is
deeply original and groundbreaking, and has
had a lasting influence, but should not be
thought of as having come out of the blue. The
description of the book as the founding work
of action theory may also give a false picture of
the kind of influence the book has had. Those
elements of Anscombe's thought most easily
accommodated within the world-view that she
herself repudiated have had most influence,
including in particular her introduction, into the
discussion of action, of the idea of the multi-
plicity of descriptions that may be given of an
action, under only some of which it will be
intentional. This idea is important for Donald
Davidson's account of action, and he credits
Anscombe with its introduction. But for
Davidson the topic is linked to the idea of the
individuation of actions and events, and the
way they can be fitted into what he refers to as
a 'world of causality' (Davidson, p. 88). His
account is meant to fit in with a general neo-
Humean picture of causation, of exactly the
sort Anscombe rejected. Further, he rejects alto-
gether the very idea of a project such as hers.
Confronted with the fact that we do sometimes
explain why we had done something by saying
(for example) what we had tried to get, she
provides an account of that phenomenon: an
account of the use of 'Why?' that is in question,
and of the sorts of answers that may be given.
This is a particular phenomenon that does not,
on her view, need to be explained or analysed
in other terms. In particular, we do not need to
account for the 'because' that gives our reasons
as a case of a Humean or neo-Humean causal
'because'. For Davidson, the 'because' is pre-
cisely what needs analysis, what needs an
account in terms of something we understand,
in the way we understand the placing of an
event in a causal pattern (Davidson, p. 10).
ANSCOMBE
Most contemporary action theorists have
shared Davidson's assumptions about the
'world of causality' which action theory must
accommodate, and those assumptions have,
for the most part, shaped the kind of influence
Intention has had. Equally important in deter-
mining the kind of influence the book has had
is the relation of Anscombe's views about philo-
sophical psychology to different possible con-
ceptions of how ethics and more generally prac-
tical rationality fit into the natural world. She
herself rejected the prevalent philosophical idea
that there is a problem regarding how features
of nature (including the nature of human
beings) can constitute reasons for doing some-
thing. Her conception of practical rationality
has had a deep influence on those, such as
Philippa FOOT and Michael Thompson, who
share (or who treat as worth taking seriously)
the idea that human beings have a nature, and
that what constitutes a good reason for doing
something can be understood only in relation
to our nature. Many of Anscombe's ideas about
practical reasoning, such as the idea of a 'desir-
ability characterization', a description of some-
thing that makes clear how it is understood as
desirable, have passed into general philosoph-
ical currency, but often entirely separated from
the conception of choice in relation to our lives
which gives them their depth in Anscombe's
own account. Her own conception can be seen
fully only if Intention is read with her other
treatments of practical thought and practical
truth, and with relevant parts of her papers on
ethics.
In reviewing CPP, Alan WHITE noted that,
while there are 'main tenets' underlying
Anscombe's approach, each problem is 'tackled
very much on its own merits and without much
preconception' (White, p. 196). He also sees
philosophical logic as a main thread running
through the collection. One might further note
that Anscombe's work shows how philosophy
of logic can be at the heart of the enterprise of
critical thought about a whole culture. This is
a respect in which her thought resembles
Wittgenstein's. There is another thread running
30
through her work. In 'Existence and Truth'
Anscombe questions an approach to truth that
emphasizes the supposed importance of what is
there ('out there') to be true. In her papers on
causality, she questions any understanding of
causal thought that looks for what is there to
underlie it: perhaps necessities 'out there', or (in
the supposed absence of such necessities) con-
nections of universal law. 'On Brute Facts' crit-
icizes a picture according to which what there
is there is natural facts (facts of things having
these or those natural properties or relations),
presenting us with the problem of how such
facts are related to what we ought to do. The
ideas that she questions in these and other cases
are ideas of great cultural significance, ideas of
what is or is not there, and of what supposedly
follows from the being there of certain things,
or from their not being there. What she is reject-
ing could be described as a metaphysics in
which reason and value cannot be found in the
world, or perhaps better as a kind of false
picture. We remain in the dark when such a
picture shapes our thinking, for it stops us
looking at (what one could call) the formal
characteristics of the world in which we live
and think and talk and do things. Philosophy
of logic, in Anscombe's practice, can be seen as
an attempt to turn us back to awareness of the
multifarious forms of things, to enable us to see
what lies under our noses. In that way the
thread of philosophy of logic in her thought is
interwoven with the thread of opposition to
philosophical misuses of conceptions of what is
there. Because her thought is so deeply opposed
to many of the assumptions of the modern age,
much of her philosophy has not yet been assim-
ilated.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Intention (Oxford, 1957; 2nd edn, 1963,
repr. Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
An Introduction to Wittgensteins Tractatus
(1959; subsequent edns, 1963, 1971; repr.
South Bend, Indiana, 2001).
'Aristotle', in G.E.M. Anscombe and P.T.
Geach, Three Philosophers (Oxford,

1963), pp. 1-63.
Collected Philosophical Papers (Oxford,
1981), vol. 1: From Parmenides to
Wittgenstein, vol. 2: Metaphysics and the
Philosophy of Mind, vol. 3, Ethics,
Religion and Politics.
Other Relevant Works
(Trans.), Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations (Oxford, 1953; several
subsequent edns).
(Ed. and trans, with P.T. Geach), Descartes:
Philosophical Writings (1954).
'Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt
Youth?', The Listener, vol. 57, no. 1455,
14 February 1957, pp. 266-71.
'Who is Wronged?', Oxford Review (1967),
pp. 16-17; repr. in Haber, Absolutism and
its Consequentialist Critics.
'On the Form of Wittgenstein's Writing', in
R. Klibansky (ed.), Contemporary
Philosophy: A Survey (Florence, 1969),
vol. 3, pp. 373-8.
'Contraception and Chastity', Human World,
no. 7 (May 1972), pp. 9-30; with
Correspondence, Human World, no. 9
(November 1972), pp. 41-51.
'Prolegomenon to a Pursuit of the Definition
of Murder: The Illegal and the Unlawful',
Dialectics and Humanism, no. 4 (1979),
pp. 73-7.
'What is it to Believe Someone?', in C.F.
Delaney (ed.), Rationality and Religious
Belief (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1979), pp.
141-51.
'A Theory of Language?', in Irving Block
(ed.), Perspectives on the Philosophy of
Wittgenstein (Cambridge, Mass., 1981),
pp. 148-58.
'Action, Intention and "Double Effect"',
Proceedings of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association, vol. 56 (1982),
pp. 12-25.
'On Private Ostensive Definition', in W.
Leinfellner et al. (eds), Language and
Ontology: Proceedings of the Sixth
International Wittgenstein Symposium
31
ANSCOMBE
(Vienna, 1982), pp. 212-17.
'The Causation of Action', in Carl Ginet and
Sydney Shoemaker (eds), Knowledge and
Mind: Philosophical Essays (New York,
1983), pp. 174-90.
'Sins of Omission? The Non-Treatment of
Controls in Clinical Trials', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 57
(1983), pp. 223-7.
'Truth: Anselm or Thomas?', New
Blackfriars, vol. 66 (1984), pp. 82-98.
Critical notice of Saul A. Kripke,
Wittgenstein on Rules and Private
Language, Canadian Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 15 (1985), pp. 103-109.
'Paganism, Superstition, and Philosophy',
Thoreau Quarterly, vol. 17 (1985), pp.
20-31.
'Were you a Zygote?', in A. Phillips Griffiths
(ed.), Philosophy and Practice (Cambridge,
1985), pp. 111-15.
'Wittgenstein on Rules and Private
Language', Ethics, vol. 95 (1985), pp.
342-52.
'Why Anselm's Proof in the Proslogion is not
an Ontological Argument', Thoreau
Quarterly, vol. 17 (1985), pp. 32-40.
Twenty Opinions Common among Modern
Anglo-American Philosophers', in A.
Ansaldo (ed.), Persona, verita e morale
(Rome, 1986), pp. 49-50.
'Existence and Truth', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 88 (1987-8), pp.
1-12.
'The Simplicity of the Tractatus', Critica.
Revista Hispanoamericana de Pilosofia,
vol.21 (1989), pp. 3-16.
'On a Queer Pattern of Argument', in Harry
A. Lewis (ed.), Peter Geach: Philosophical
Encounters (Dordrecht, 1991), pp.
121-35.
'Wittgenstein: Whose Philosopher?', in A.
Phillips Griffiths (ed.), Wittgenstein
Centenary Essays (Cambridge, 1991), pp.
1-10.
'Knowledge and Essence', in Josep-Maria
Terricabras (ed.), A Wittgenstein
ANSCOMBE
Symposium (Amsterdam, 1993), pp. 29-35
The Origin of Plato's Theory of Forms', in
R.W. Sharpies (ed.), Modern Thinkers and
Ancient Thinkers, the Stanley Victor
Keeling Memorial Lectures, 1981-1991
(1993), pp. 90-98.
'Russelm or Anselm?', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 43 (1993), pp. 500-504.
'Murder and the Morality of Euthanasia:
Some Philosophical Considerations', sects
1-4, 7-9, in Luke Gormally (ed.),
Euthanasia, Clinical Practice and the Law
(1994), pp. 37-43,46-51; volume
originally published as Euthanasia and
Clinical Practice (1982).
'Practical Inference', in Rosalind Hursthouse
et al. (eds), Virtues and Reasons: Philippa
Foot and Moral Theory (Oxford, 1995),
pp. 1-34; originally in P.A. Schilpp and
L.E. Hahn (eds), The Philosophy ofGeorg
Henrik von Wright (La Salle, Illinois,
1989), pp. 377-404.
'Cambridge Philosophers II: Ludwig
Wittgenstein', Philosophy, vol. 70 (1995),
pp. 395-407.
'Grammar, Structure, and Essence', Arete,
Revista de Filosofia, vol. 12, no. 2 (2000),
113-20.
'"Making True"', in Roger Teichmann (ed.),
Logic, Cause & Action (Cambridge,
2000), pp. 1-8.
further Reading
Baier, Kurt, 'Radical Virtue Ethics', Midwest
Studies in Philosophy', vol. 13 (Notre
Dame, Indiana, 1988), pp. 126-35.
Conant, James, 'Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and
Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility', in
D.Z. Phillips (ed.), Religion and Morality
(Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 250-98.
Davidson, Donald, Essays on Actions and
Events (Oxford, 1980).
Diamond, Cora, 'The Dog that Gave Itself
the Moral Law', Midwest Studies in
Philosophy, vol. 13 (Notre Dame, Indiana,
1988), pp. 161-79.
, 'Consequentialism in Modern Moral
32
Philosophy and in "Modern Moral
Philosophy", in David S. Oderberg and
Jacqueline A. Laing (eds), Human Lives
(Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 13-38.
-, 'Finding One's Way into the
Tractatus\ Sats, vol. 4, no. 2 (2003), pp.
165-81.
Diamond, Cora and Jenny Teichman (eds),
Intention and Intentionality: Essays in
Honourof G.EM. Anscombe (Brighton,
1979).
Gormally, Luke (ed.), Moral Truth and
Moral Tradition: Essays in Honour of
Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe
(Dublin, 1994).
Haber, Joram Graf, Absolutism and its
Consequentialist Critics (Lanham,
Maryland, 1994).
McDowell, John, 'Referring to Oneself, in
Lewis E. Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of
P.P. Strawson (La Salle, Illinois, 1998), pp.
129-43.
Mliller, Anselm, 'G.E.M. Anscombe
(1919-2001)', in A.P. Martinich and
David Sosa (eds), A Companion to
Analytic Philosophy (Oxford, 2001), pp.
315-25.
Richter, Duncan, Ethics after Anscombe:
Post 'Modern Moral Philosophy'
(Dordrecht, 1999).
Teichman, Jenny, 'Gertrude Elizabeth
Margaret Anscombe, 1919-2001',
Proceedings of the British Academy, vol.
115 (2001), pp. 31-50.
Teichmann, Roger (ed.), Logic, Cause &
Action: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth
Anscombe (Cambridge, 2000).
Thompson, Michael, Life and Action
(Cambridge, Mass., forthcoming).
Vogler, Candace, 'Anscombe on Practical
Inference', in Elijah Millgram (ed.),
Varieties of Practical Reasoning
(Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 437-64.
, Reasonably Vicious (Cambridge,
Mass., 2002).
White, Alan. R., 'Anscombe's Collected
Papers', Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 33

(1983), pp. 192-6.
Winch, Peter, 'Professor Anscombe's Moral
Philosophy', in Lilli Alanen et al. (eds),
Commonality and Particularity in Ethics
(Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 177-96.
Cora Diamond
ATKINSON, Ronald Field (1928-)
Ronald Atkinson was born in Leeds. He was
educated at Cockburn High School, Leeds
and at Keble College, Oxford, where he
studied PPPE and graduated BA with first
class honours in 1951 and BPhil in 1953. In
1953 he was appointed assistant lecturer at
the University College of North Staffordshire
(later Keele University), in its Department of
Political and Moral Philosophy and stayed
there as lecturer (from 1956), senior lecturer
(from 1962) and reader (from 1966). He
became Professor of Philosophy at the
University of York in 1967, and Deputy Vice-
Chancellor there in 1969. In 1979 he became
Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Exeter, where he taught first in the philosophy
department and, after its closure, under the
wing of theology. He had married in 1951
and had one son and two daughters.
Atkinson belonged to the empiricist tradition
of British analytical thought fostered at Oxford
at the time of his studies. He believed that
philosophical analysis was of practical rele-
vance and might enlighten our moral
approaches to everyday problems. He resisted
the analytical philosopher's temptation to use
artificially simple or trivial practical problems,
and this attitude and his liberal vision informed
his first book, Sexual Morality, published in
Hutchinson's 'Philosophy at Work' Series
(1965). Here, following a presentation of ele-
mentary logical and philosophical matters, he
discussed 'for their own sakes' (Sexual
33
ATKINSON
Morality, p. 180) problems of free love,
divorce, homosexuality, contraception and
artificial insemination. These problems he
thought morally important and also interesting
in the then current moral climate. Yet, char-
acteristically of his analytical approach, he saw
as indirect the importance of moral philosophy
to such practical problems. It enabled us to
detect 'absurdities, ambiguities, non sequiturs,
honest confusion and cynical propaganda'
(ibid., p. 10). As to the moral substance of hi
attitude, his admitting to being a species of
utilitarian (although one holding that there
was always a presumption in favour of the
received moral code) was admitting to his
'personal bias and prejudice' (ibid., p. 10)
rather than to any contribution from moral
philosophy. Conduct: An Introduction to
Moral Philosophy (1969) restated and rein-
forced his view that the philosopher's concern
was not with matters of substance but with
conceptual analysis.
Drawing on the work of W.H. WALSH,
W.H. Dray and W.B. GALLIE, Atkinson turned
his analytical skills to the philosophy of his-
torical writing in his widely read Knowledge
and Explanation in History: An Introduction
to the Philosophy of History (1978), distin-
guishing clearly between the analytical and the
substantive approaches but nevertheless per
mitting some interaction between them. The
work argued that statements about the past
can be firmly established on the basis of
evidence rather than being especially depen-
dent on memory or testimony; argued against
metaphysical doubt about the reality of the
past; analysed the varying temporal references
of historical statements; and analysed the rela-
tionships between selection and the limits of
objectivity. He examined lawlike explanations,
narratives and the idea of historical progress,
concluding with a consideration of matters of
value. Atkinson's later study of Kant's philos-
ophy of history (1981) drew on his substantial
knowledge of Kant and displayed again his
analytical clarity, scholarship and distaste for
taking speculative risks in philosophy.
ATKINSON
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sexual Morality (1965).
Conduct: An Introduction to Moral
Philosophy (1969).
Knowledge and Explanation in History: An
Introduction to the Philosophy of History
(1978).
Jonathan Gorman
AUSTIN, John Langshaw (1911-60)
J.L. Austin was born in Lancaster on 26 March
1911 and died in Oxford on 8 February 1960.
From a middle-class family, he was educated at
Shrewsbury School and gained a scholarship to
read classics at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1933
he secured a fellowship at All Souls College, a
research position; in 1935 he moved to a fel-
lowship at Magdalen College, a teaching
position. Austin from early on admired
Bertrand RUSSELL for his genius and clarity, but
of his direct philosophical acquaintances it was
H.A. PRICHARD who received his greatest
respect - for his meticulous rigour. With schol
arship and linguistic accuracy to the fore,
Austin initially lectured on Aristotle and other
historical figures, but his academic life was
interrupted by World War II. He was commis-
sioned in the British Intelligence Corps, where
his intelligent eye led Lieutenant Colonel
Austin, as he became, to be awarded the OBE,
the French Croix de Guerre and the American
Officer of the Legion of Merit. Returning to
Oxford, he gained the White's Chair in Moral
Philosophy in 1952 and a fellowship at Corpus
Christi, positions he held until his premature
death. During the 1950s he also lectured in the
United States - at Harvard and California. He
was a private and upright man of routine,
though he was not without humour - not
without, indeed, silly jokes - and not without
a wife (Jean Austin, another philosopher) and
34
four children. Although very much an
academic, he regretted having been neither
engineer nor architect; and the work that made
him famous, ordinary language philosophy,
displays a practical interest in linguistic nuts
and bolts.
Austin's lifetime's published work was scant
and before the war promised little of what was
to come, though his early 'Are There a priori
Concepts?' contains sceptical questioning of
philosophers' meanings, a questioning already
orally prominent in his encounter with A.J.
AYER'S logical positivism which set the then
philosophical agenda. Returning to Oxford
after the war, Austin edited H.W.B. JOSEPH'S
Leibniz lectures and translated Frege's
Grundlagen der Arithmetik, but his own dis-
tinctive work, with its general empiricist back-
ground, lay with ordinary language distinc-
tions, both as pointers to philosophical solu-
tions and as subject-matter for a science of
language in use. By his death, although he had
merely seven papers published, he was the
dominant Oxford philosopher - somewhat to
the chagrin of Gilbert RYLE, the more senior
figure, and to Ayer, the more attention-seeking.
The tall, bespectacled Austin - 'an inscrutable
crane' - spoke with an assumed authority that
no other at Oxford matched. This ascendancy
was manifest in his Saturday Mornings, classes
at which he influenced, for example, H.P.
GRICE, P.P. STRAWSON and G.J. WARNOCK.
Posthumously his influence spread through his
lecture notes, published as Sense and Sensibilia
and How to do Things with Words.
Plain clear prose marks Austin's writing, a
prose displaying ingenuity, wit - witness his
lectures' title, 'Sense and Sensibilia' - and a
concern for accuracy, though not always
accuracy itself. He was the heart and head of
the 1950s Oxford School of Ordinary
Language Philosophy (a label applied by others
to his work) and many continue to admire him
- but no programme ever bound his admirers,
save careful attention to everyday language and
specific cases. This attention was no novelty,
being found in Plato's early dialogues (though

Austin sought no Socratic definitions), Aristotle
and G.E. MOORE, the latter two's plain
approach receiving his praise. Austin attends to
details, idioms (though he criticizes some col-
loquialisms as loose) and striking examples as
few others; he hounds down the minutiae in
order to incite. His results, though, are often
coloured by etymological conviction and dis-
tinctions he, a classicist, makes; yet his tech-
nique manifests skill, patience and an escape
from hallowed examples and abstractions.
When investigating responsibility, he discusses
mistakes, inadvertences and accidents; when
considering aesthetics, we encounter dainty and
dumpy milk jugs; and when discussing philoso-
phers' 'material objects', he goes beyond tradi-
tional 'moderate sized specimens of dry goods'
to wondering about rainbows, shadows and
flames. Thus he served subsequent philoso-
phers a rich smorgasbord upon which to dine,
and dine some did, be it through the speech act
theory of his pupil, John Searle, or the legal phi-
losophy of his colleague, H.L.A. HART.
Although proving a valuable stimulus to dis-
cernment, Austin's work led some to trivial
logic-chopping with doubtful philosophical sig-
nificance - a criticism sometimes levelled at
Austin himself.
Austin wrote little about his philosophical
method - the main source is 'A Plea for
Excuses' - and one element of that little should
be disregarded, when he speaks mysteriously of
prising words off the world to view it unblink-
ered. Austin's belief is that every distinction
appearing in ordinary language (that is, the
non-philosophical), having survived the test of
time, has some justification and is likely there-
fore to be philosophically helpful. This leads
Austin neither to think that no new distinc-
tions could profitably be drawn nor to eschew
technical terminology; but old habits of
Gleichschaltung - 'the deeply ingrained
worship of tidy-looking dichotomies' - need
abandoning and Austin delights in playing Old
Harry with dichotomies such as fact/value,
appearance/reality, truth/falsity. His piecemeal
linguistic investigations and recommendation to
35
AUSTIN
'work the dictionary' fit well with his promo-
tion of philosophy as a cooperative endeav-
our, with participants forming a disciplined
investigating team, working on common
speech's nuances, exposing errors of simplifi-
cation and half-studied facts. When rules were
discussed, participants were to study different
rule books; discussions of aesthetic judgements
were once based on analyses of industrial
design manuals. Despite the informality of the
Saturday Mornings, the teamwork smacked of
the military or civil service: Austin preferred all
to be seated round a table, reaching agreement
on some subtle linguistic distinction.
The ordinary language investigation is
intended as a prelude to - an under-labouring
for - solving particular philosophical problems,
particularly in epistemology and action theory.
It is neither the be-all nor the end-all, but, as
Austin quips, the begin-all. It runs the danger
of a paralysing effect - in never risking hunches
and hypotheses until all niceties are examined.
Further, the relationship between linguistic
evidence and philosophical tasks remains unex
plained; and Austin himself, as he acknowl-
edges, makes little philosophical progress
beyond the preparation of the evidence. His
lecture series, How to do Things with Words,
a series polished over the years, ends with the
comment that the fun of applying what has
been said to philosophical problems is yet to
come. Despite lack of immediate philosophical
pay-off, Austin certainly held that philosophi-
cal progress could be made; he was traditional
in understanding philosophy to be in the same
dimension as the sciences. Not for Austin
WITTGENSTEIN'S view of philosophical problems
as grounded in linguistic bewitchments. Not
for Austin the rejection, in philosophy, of all
theories. For Austin, there was no fear of
drowning within hidden depths of perplexities.
Indeed, he held Wittgenstein somewhat in
disdain and, in his published works,
Wittgenstein is mentioned only once - though,
in discussion, parts of his Philosophical
Investigations received minute examination.
Unlike Wittgenstein, Austin exhibited none of
AUSTIN
the anguished soul-searching and almost reli-
gious bafflement with philosophy. Unlike
Wittgenstein, Austin writes in straightforward
continuous prose.
Austin's name is probably most associated
with speech acts in general and performatives
in particular. Although others, such as
Wittgenstein, certainly drew attention to the
importance of different uses of language,
including performing uses, such as 'I mourn
...', it is Austin who aspires to a theory and who
led others to develop speech act theory within
linguistics, literary theory and philosophy. The
paradigm that Austin first focuses upon is one
that troubled Prichard: how, in saying 'I
promise', am I doing the promising and not
saying that I am doing it? Austin's questioning
of what the doing is when saying something had
its first published outing in his 1946 'Other
Minds', the detailed systematic treatment
appearing later in How to do Things with
Words, where his delight in assembling
Linnaean-type classifications is on full display.
Without the taxing taxonomy yet to come,
'Other Minds' suggests that as saying 'I promise'
can perform an act of promising, so saying 'I
know' can also perform: I give others my word,
my authority for saying whatever is in question.
Just as with promising, one needs the right
setting for the performance to come off, and
people are then entitled to act on what has been
said, so too with knowing: one needs the right
circumstances to be justified in making the per-
formance, and people are then entitled to act on
that performance. This assimilation of knowing
and promising to a performing conceals signifi-
cant differences. You might promise, yet not do
what you promise, but you cannot know, yet
what is known not be true. Another can report
that you promised to do something but are
unlikely to pull it off; someone cannot report that
you both knew but that what you knew was
false. Austin, underplaying these differences,
finds philosophers guilty of a descriptive fallacy
in ignoring the performative heart of 'I know'.
Thus it was that 'performative' became the
watchword for many philosophers when any
36
descriptive analyses struck philosophical brick
walls. In view of this approach, Austin was
expected to have stressed a performative under-
standing of 'is true'; and others, such as
Strawson, doubting the value of 'correspon-
dence' and 'facts', promoted such an under-
standing. Curiously, although Austin recog-
nized 'true's performative features, he remained
wedded to a correspondence theory, wedding
facts to true statements. Truth bearers must be
statements, yet, using the statement that France
is hexagonal, he reminds us of rough descrip-
tions and of the more or less true. He looks to
common uses of 'true', adding the less than
common thought that in vino, possibly,
'veritas\ but in sober symposium 'verum\
Austin's claim, that 'I know' is a performa-
tive parading as descriptive, accords with the
backdrop that indicative sentences are some-
times nonsense parading as sense or emotive
whoops as factual assertions: Austin has in
mind logical positivist views of metaphysical
and ethical assertions. In How to do Things
with Words Austin extends his search for such
passing-off; he investigates common or garden
indicative sentences which grammatically look
like statements, yet which lack truth value,
stating nothing at all. In using such sentences
one is doing something more than just saying.
It is here that Austin explicitly and formally
christens such uses 'performatives', thus per-
forming his own performative. He uses
humdrum verbs in the first person singular
present indicative active — 'christen', 'advise',
'salute' - to display a doing that is not solely a
saying - bringing out similarities with typical
imperatives. Saying, for example, 'I christen
this ship "Poppy"' would seem to be neither
true nor false, though it could be happy or
unhappy. Appropriate circumstances are
required, otherwise misfirings - infelicities other
than falsehoods - occur whereby nothing, or
only something inappropriate, gets done.
Appropriate intentions and beliefs are required,
otherwise abuses occur: a promise is made all
right, but ought not to have been. In some
striking cases, as with 'I promise ...', the utter-

ance explicitly reveals what is being performed.
'I bet...' can show a betting. The possibility of
a 'hereby' insertion is a test for spotting such
explicit performatives. As Austin progresses
through these lectures, performatives pop up
everywhere: even in stating that the minister
lied, one is doing something - a stating. Indeed,
the speaker might more formally have used the
form 'I state that the minister lied' or even 'I
hereby state that the minister lied'. Constatives
(statings) - and here they resemble performa-
tives - can have infelicities which do not
amount to logical inconsistencies: stating that
p when I lack belief that p is no logical contra-
diction, yet possesses an unhappiness. Indeed,
performatives - and here they resemble con-
statives - can generate something remarkably
like logical contradictions: 'I promise, but I am
not bound to perform'. Austin, despite his scep-
ticism of big dichotomies, remains determined
to install some classifications; and so - curi-
ously, halfway through the lecture series (even
after many revisions) - he announces that he
will start again.
The fresh start leads to a terminological
battery. Taking the case of someone speaking
literally, the speaker makes noises, that is
performs the phonetic act; he speaks in a
language (not much discussed by Austin) with
a vocabulary and grammar; hence, the noises
are words making up a sentence - this he labels
a 'phatic act'. A phatic act might, of course, go
wrong: it might be ungrammatical; it offers
scope for ambiguity. These issues sorted out,
the speaker thus says something - and this
saying is the rhetic act, an act that is identified
in terms of what he means, covering both ref-
erence and sense. In performing this trinity
(phonetic, phatic and rhetic acts) - and now
Austin switches nomenclature from Greek to
Latin based - we perform a locutionary act; but
there remains the question of how we are using
the locution. My saying what I say typically has
effects on the audience, speaker and others,
effects not necessarily uniform or conventional.
I might frighten one listener, by saying There's
a policeman', yet reassure another. Producing
37
AUSTIN
such effects (intended or not), one has per-
formed a perlocutionary act. Between the locu-
tionary and perlocutionary lies the illocution-
ary. Performing a locutionary act, I might, for
example, warn, advise or christen - and these
are examples of illocutionary acts. To warn,
advise and christen are not my doings' effects
that depend on how the audience takes them,
but are what I am doing. I might say as such,
whatever the results on the audience. I might
have meant my remark as a warning, and a
warning it be, even if listeners fail to take it this
way. Its being a warning is grounded in con-
vention and circumstances. This is sometimes
explicitly shown, as when the words 'I warn
you ...' are used; and, in using those words,
intrinsically I warn you. That there are these
different types of function - warning, under-
taking, ordering - shows the existence of dif-
ferent illocutionary forces, yet with the possi-
bility of common content. Although Austin's
own attempts to establish simple criteria for
drawing these distinctions fail, his outlined dis-
tinctions have stimulated much research and
theory concerning how utterances give rise to
locutionary acts with various illocutionary
forces. Austin certainly demonstrated how
understanding language use extends well
beyond understanding the meaning of words
and grammatical rules.
Austin drew closest to handling directly some
traditional philosophical problems in his pub-
lished papers such as 'A Plea for Excuses' and
'Ifs and Cans'. These - at the most general level
- raise questions of what it is to do something,
an understandable Austinian interest, given his
fascination with linguistic performings.
Philosophers have been blind to the complex-
ity of doings, according to Austin. To open
our eyes, he examines how things can go wrong
in doings; how we can do things unwittingly,
unintentionally, recklessly, negligently, mis-
takenly, inadvertently, carelessly, accidentally -
and he explains in detail how these differ from
each other. In his paper 'Pretending' there is a
similar concern with how doings might not be
quite as they seem. Doing something 'freely'
AUSTIN
might suggest that there must be some feature
present to justify the 'freely' accolade, but this
puts the dialectical boot on the wrong foot.
We need some particular reason for suggesting
that a person failed to be acting freely: perhaps
he acted under duress or by mistake. If there are
no specific reasons for thinking that the person
acted under duress or by mistake or in some
other way suggestive of failing freely to act, it
does not follow that the person was acting
freely. The motto is 'no modification without
aberration': in everyday cases, if there are no
special reasons to raise questions, then no mod-
ifying expression is properly deployable - be the
modification of the aggravating or excusing
ilk. To yawn is just that - to yawn, neither vol-
untarily nor involuntarily.
Philosophers traditionally connected ques-
tions of responsibility with whether people
could have acted otherwise. Moore had tenta-
tively proposed, with variations, that to say
that I could have acted otherwise amounts to
saying that I could have acted otherwise, if I
had chosen; such a proposal secures the com-
patibility of determinism and being able to act
otherwise. Austin digs away at Moore's
analyses, at the 'could's, 'should's and 'would's,
at the 'can's and 'if's, asking whether an 'if is
in the offing when we speak of what we could
have done. Austin argues that, while some 'if's
can be introduced, showing a condition on my
being able to do something -1 could have done
that, had I been fully fit - often we are saying
what we are able to do simpliciter. Any intro-
duced 'if I had chosen' sets no more a condition
on my ability than 'if you want them' sets a
condition on there being biscuits on the side-
board when I tell you that there are - 'if you
want them'.
Moore makes other proposals, namely that
the correct analysis of a 'can' or 'could'
sentence, in the relevant contexts, is that one
will do something, if one chooses - or if one
wants or tries - or would have done some-
thing, if one had chosen, wanted or tried.
Austin dismisses these suggestions pretty
quickly. After all, having missed a very short
38
putt, it might yet be true that I could have
holed the ball easily; yet that does not amount
to the truth that I should have holed it, if I
tried - for I did try.
Austin's writings in this area - as ever - stim-
ulated others to further work, to careful
analyses of the 'can' and 'could' and related
idioms, but that work, while in Austinian spirit,
has been critical of his accuracy and has not
made the significant progress with the philo-
sophical problem that Austin anticipated.
Austin himself doubted compatibilist manoeu-
vres such as those of Moore, believing the
problem to be with what is meant by 'deter-
minism', claiming never to have met a deter-
minist even though having met people who
insisted that they were determinists.
Much of Austin's work, although itself
preparatory, is often suggestive of new
approaches; but his Sense and Sensibilia
lectures, while displaying his fondness for novel
examples, are largely negative, arguing against
Ayer's The Foundations of Empirical
Knowledge, challenging Ayer's use of the
argument from illusion to show that we never
directly perceive material objects, but only
sense-data (coloured patches seen, hardnesses
touched). Austin has fun, checking out our use
of 'deception', 'delusion' and 'illusion' and
when it is appropriate to use 'real', 'directly'
and 'certain'. He has no difficulty in showing
that the frequent oddness of the claim that we
do directly perceive material objects matches
the oddness of the claim that we do not. We
might well, though, rightly assert on occasions
that we can, for example, directly see the
speakers or directly hear their voices. In line
with his 'no modification without aberration',
Austin points out that when we assert that
something is a cigarette, we should need specific
reasons to generate legitimate questions such as
whether the cigarette is real, is directly seen or
is certainly a cigarette. Unless special doubt-
raising reasons are given, the ordinary language
user would rightly treat the sceptic's implied
doubt as nonsense. 'If that's not a real cigarette,
I don't know what is.' Although Austin is right

about ordinary expectations here, he appears
insensitive to the distinction between the
'nonsense' ascribed because of the pointless-
ness of a comment and that ascribed because of
some meaninglessness. He also offers no justi-
fication why the only good reasons for doubt
must be specific. The sceptic does offer reasons
and the only reason they are not specific is
because, according to the sceptic, they apply in
most cases and sometimes in all cases of a
certain type.
Austin's appeals to ordinary language specif-
ically miss their target where Ayer is concerned,
for Ayer is highlighting the implications of
statements such as 'I hear a coach' and, to
achieve greater perspicuity, introduces the term
'sense datum' and revised understandings of
the ordinary terms 'directly' and 'certain'.
Where Ayer remains vulnerable to Austin is in
his justification for preferring sense-datum
language over ordinary language. Whatever
Ayer might say about choosing between lan-
guages, he writes as if we really only ever
perceive sense-data. For Austin 'real' and
'directly' - as with 'freely' - secure whatever
sense they have from contrasts with their oppo-
sites; their opposites wear the trousers. The
issue of whether you are directly seeing the
ship might hang on whether you are viewing it
through a periscope; whether the duck in front
of you is real might depend on whether some
toy ducks are mingled with the flesh and blood.
Even here it is arguable whether the hotch-
potch of examples concerning 'real' - and
Austin claims that no general criteria exist for
distinguishing the real from the unreal - have
much to do with the epistemological concern of
what is going on when we distinguish what
seems to be so from what really is so. Where
Austin significantly challenges Ayer is over the
incorrigible. Ayer uses his sense-datum
language in the hope of finding some incorri-
gible statements, statements about which we
cannot be mistaken. Austin questions whether
first-person reports of sensations or sense-data
are incorrigible. If we can be certain of
anything, it is equally that, under the right con-
39
AUSTIN
ditions, there is a pig slap-bang in front of us.
In such a case, we make no inference from
evidence to justify our judgement. We just
know things are thus and so. This returns us to
Austin's 'Other Minds', where he reminds us
that while we might be asked how we know,
we should not be asked why we know - con-
trasting with what can be asked of beliefs.
Austin's approach, as well as aiding the
movement against sense-data, is in the spirit of
J. COOK WILSON and Prichard, both of whom
argued that knowledge is a kind of mental state
distinct from belief, a view that reappeared at
the end of the twentieth century in Timothy
Williamson's work.
Austin stretched philosophers' eyes. The
Austinian landscape has donkeys being shot -
are they being shot by mistake or by accident?
- and people with false teeth, yet artificial limbs.
There are at least three different ways of spilling
ink - and we meet suitors for young ladies'
hands being asked whether their intentions,
not their purposes, are honourable. There are
goldfinches - we are sure that they are real -
but they might yet explode quoting Mrs Woolf;
and we encounter thieves pretending to be
cleaning the windows, while eyeing the jew-
ellery, yet still cleaning those windows a treat.
Austin's writings are pregnant with vivid
examples; yet his insistence on the dominance
of ordinary language runs the risk of sterility.
When new things need to be said - by a Freud
explaining behaviour or a Schrodinger describ-
ing subatomic structures or even an Austin
challenging philosophical platitudes - living
initially with apparent conceptual confusion
might be a price worth paying.
Ayer complained that Austin was like a grey-
hound who, fancying no running himself, bites
the other greyhounds so they too give up the
race. Austin's promise has been seen by some
as nothing but linguistic performance with no
philosophical promise and no importance at all
- though Austin himself mused that what is
important is not importance but truth. And it
is the truth that Austin sought.
AUSTIN
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Philosophical Papers, ed. J.O. Urmson and
GJ. Warnock (Oxford, 1961; 2nd exp.
edn, 1970; 3rd exp. edn, 1979).
How to do Things with Words (Oxford,
1962; 2nd edn, rev. by J.O. Urmson and
Marina Sbisa, 1975; 3rd edn, with new
index, 1980).
Sense and Sensibilia, reconstructed from
manuscript notes by GJ. Warnock
(Oxford, 1962).
Further Reading
Berlin, Sir Isaiah et al., Essays on J .L. Austin
(Oxford, 1973).
Fann, K.T. (ed.), Symposium on]. L. Austin
[contains Ayer's reply to Austin] (1969).
Hanfling, O., Philosophy and Ordinary
Language (2000).
Warnock, GJ.J. L. Austin (1989).
Peter Cave
AVELING, Francis Arthur Powell
(1875-1941)
Francis Aveling was born in St Catherine's,
Ontario, Canada on 28 December 1875 and
died in London on 6 March 1941. He was
educated at McGill University, Montreal, Keble
College, Oxford, the Canadian College, Rome,
the University of Louvain, and University
College London. After a fellowship at Louvain,
the remainder of his career was spent at the
University of London, where he became
Professor of Psychology at King's College.
Most of Aveling's early writings were purely
philosophical and strongly Thomist in charac-
ter. The God of Philosophy (1906), although
not a commentary on Aquinas, amounts to an
exposition in contemporary language of
Aquinas's 'five ways' (of proving God's exis-
tence). The Immortality of the Soul (1905) is a
40
similar attempt to present an updated account of
the Aristotelian and Thomistic view of the soul
as a substantial principle which determines,
instead of being determined by, the body.
While in Louvain, Aveling studied with the
distinguished psychologist Albert Michotte,
from whom he acquired a lifelong dedication to
psychology. He continued his experimental
work at University College London, leading to
one of his most interesting and original publi-
cations, On the Consciousness of the Universal
and the Individual (1912). In Louvain he had
studied, under Michotte, the differences
between perceiving objects as individuals and
perceiving them as types. In his later experi-
ments in London he turned to the study of con-
ception rather than perception. His results
demonstrated that even the most elementary
thinking involves concepts, that images are not
necessary for thought, and that the 'universal'
is phenomenologically present to conscious-
ness as a concept (which he defines as an
'imageless substantive content'). His experi-
ments also demonstrated the process of abstrac-
tion of concepts, and appeared to show that
concepts are (among other things) word
meanings. In this way he amassed a body of
empirical evidence in support of core elements
in the Thomistic theory of knowledge.
Aveling's Thomism was a constant presence
in all of his work, not least in the historical
knowledge and understanding that he brought
to bear upon contemporary problems. It can be
seen also in his most substantial book on
Psychology, Personality and Will (1931),
although it is a Thomism much expanded with
the help of ideas taken from contemporary
science. He suggested that all existing
mind-body theories are undermined by an
outmoded conception of matter, but that if we
conceive of matter as energy or energies, and set
to one side the Cartesian notion of extension,
we can think of the conscious self as the prin-
ciple that systematizes and unifies all of the
energies that constitute our bodies. This
enabled him to argue that there is such a real
thing as the self, and that the self is endowed

with free will. The intrinsic principle of per-
sonality', he wrote, 'is simply intelligent will'
(Personality and Will, p. 242), thus concluding
a persuasively updated version of Aristotle's
and Aquinas's conception of the person.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The God of Philosophy (1906).
On the Consciousness of the Universal and
the Individual (1912).
Personality and Will (1931).
Other Relevant Works
The Immortality of the Soul (1905).
Science and Faith (1906).
Hugh Bredin
AYER, Alfred Jules (1910-89)
AJ. Ayer was born in London on 29 October
1910 and died there on 27 June 1989. He was
educated as a scholarship student in classics at
Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford, gradu-
ating in Greats in 1932. He was a lecturer
(1932-35) and research student (1935-40) at
Christ Church, Oxford. From 1940 to 1945 he
served in Military Intelligence with the Welsh
Guards, rising to the rank of captain. After the
war he was fellow and Dean of Wadham
College, Oxford (1945-6), and then Grote
Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic
at the University of London (1946-59), where he
did much to create a strong postgraduate pro-
gramme. Ayer returned to Oxford as Wykeham
Professor of Logic (1959-78), but took leave
for such distinguished visiting posts as William
James Lecturer at Harvard (1970), John Dewey
Lecturer at Columbia (1971) and Gifford
Lecturer at Aberdeen (1972-3). He was knighted
in 1970.
Over his lifetime, Ayer was a prolific author
of books and notable essays, primarily in epis-
41
AYER
temology and philosophy of mind, and, to a
lesser extent, philosophical logic and meta-
physics. His work was translated into many
languages, and many of his essays were repub-
lished in collections of his own essays, as well
as in numerous other anthologies, a sign of
their philosophical insight, influence, literary
merit and accessibility. Nonetheless, his best-
known work remained his first book.
At Oxford he attended lectures by H.H.
PRICE and was tutored by Gilbert RYLE, falling
under the intellectual influence of RUSSELL and
WITTGENSTEIN. At Ryle's urging, he took leave
to attend the Vienna Circle from 1932 to 1933
to learn about logical positivism. In Vienna,
he also met the young American philosopher,
W.V. Quine. On returning to England he was
urged to publish what he had learned and
produced Language, Truth, and Logic (1936),
a short, lively book that became one of the
most widely read philosophical works in the
twentieth century. It synthesized the views of
the positivists, Schlick, Neurath and Carnap,
with some arguments of his own. The result
may not have been entirely original, but it was
never boring and managed to say something
provocative about most of the major topics in
philosophy.
At the core of his position was the verifica-
tion criterion of meaningfulness, according to
which empirical observations must be relevant
to the determination of the truth or falsity of
any statement that was factually significant.
The only other literally significant truths were
those that were analytically and necessarily
true. Natural science consisted of factually sig-
nificant statements. Logic and mathematics,
Ayer argued, consisted of analytically true state-
ments. These, Ayer variously claimed, were
tautologies that were true by virtue of the rules
or conventions of language, that we could not
deny without contradicting ourselves, that
expressed our determination to use words in
certain ways rather than any facts about the
world, and that were knowable a priori by
reflecting on the meanings of the terms used in
making them. Later, critics pointed out that
AYER
these various characterizations of necessary
truth were hardly equivalent, and Quine argued
that the distinctions between sentences that
depended on them were not very hard and fast.
To the extent that philosophers confined
themselves to the analysis of literally signifi-
cant statements or to showing their logical rela-
tions or criticizing attempts to do so, the state-
ments they made were literally significant and
the legitimate task of philosophy. To the extent
that philosophers purported to make experi-
ence-transcendent claims about reality, their
claims were metaphysical pseudo-statements
without literal significance. Traditional meta-
physicians had been misled by the superficial
grammatical similarity of their claims, for
example 'there are universals', to factual claims,
for example 'there are geese', into thinking that
metaphysical claims also were of factual sig-
nificance. Ayer argued that many of the tradi-
tional disputes of philosophy, for example
realism vs idealism, monadology vs monism,
turned out to be, to the extent that they could
not be reconfigured as disputes about the
analysis of statements in use or shown to be
empirical issues, simply pseudo-problems. Most
theological statements were similarly dismissed.
Indeed, for Ayer, the positions of the atheist, the
agnostic and the theist alike were without literal
significance. However, questions about the
existence and nature of material objects, the self
and other minds were reconstrued as ones
about the translation of sentences about them
into sentences about the contents of sense expe-
rience. Throughout the rest of his career, Ayer
struggled with issues about how to understand
such sentences in empirical terms, often switch-
ing his views. Ethical and aesthetic statements,
on the other hand, could not be translated into
statements about our actual and possible expe-
rience, but were simply the expression of our
attitudes to classes of actions and objects. This
was a view he never really abandoned.
Following Frank RAMSEY, Ayer argued that
'true' did not pick out a real property of state-
ments. He concluded that the philosophical
problem of the nature of truth, for example
42
correspondence or coherence, was also a
pseudo-problem, and that the only real
question was under what conditions statements
were verified. A priori verifiable statements
could be certain, but empirically verifiable ones
could be at best probable. The latter divided
into two categories: observation reports record-
ing sense experience, and empirical hypotheses
that allowed us to anticipate and predict sense
experience. The former were not certain
because even the most basic empirical concepts
like red were not purely ostensive or demon-
strative but classified experiences as belonging
to a set of resembling experiences and so went
beyond what was immediately given in experi-
ence. Empirical hypotheses, on the other hand,
were always subject to further test and thus
also could never be exhaustively confirmed.
The problem of induction, construed as the
problem of finding a non-circular reason for
thinking inductive inferences had mostly true
conclusions, was dismissed as a pseudo-
problem. However, in a novel twist, the ratio-
nality of induction was trivially guaranteed
since 'rationality' by definition was simply a
matter of employing a self-consistent accredited
procedure in the formation of all one's beliefs.
Ayer also argued that empirical hypotheses
were not conclusively falsifiable since individ-
ual hypotheses had observational implications
only in conjunction with a host of background
assumptions that might be abandoned instead
when a prediction failed. Ayer recognized the
holistic implication: what is tested by experi-
ence is strictly a system of hypotheses.
However, unlike Quine, he failed to recognize
the full force of this point until much later:
only systems of hypotheses have empirical sig-
nificance, and thus there is no legitimate philo-
sophical project of analysing types of individ-
ual statements about material objects, the self,
other minds, the past, theoretical entities in
science, etc. to find their empirical content.
Indeed, it caused problems for the verifiability
criterion of meaningfulness itself. As critics
pointed out, on the one hand, individual empir-
ical hypotheses were not empirically testable all

by themselves, but, on the other hand, meta-
physical or theological propositions might be
part of systems of hypotheses that were as a
whole empirically significant. Ayer struggled
to find a defensible form of the verifiability cri-
terion of meaningfulness. In addition, critics
wondered whether the verifiability criterion
itself was analytic or empirically verifiable.
Ayer's response that it was a stipulative defin-
ition of 'meaningful' seemed to allow his oppo-
nents simply to reject the stipulation.
Ayer's second book, The Foundations of
Empirical Knowledge (1940), focused more
narrowly on epistemology. In opposition to
Price and others, Ayer argued that the idea that
in sense perception we were not immediately
presented with material objects but rather
sense-data was not some fact about perception
that we discovered on reflection, or a conse-
quence of the argument from illusion. Instead
it was a way of talking about perception that
was useful to adopt to characterize the relation
between empirical theory and empirical
evidence, between uncertain empirical hypothe-
ses the content of which goes beyond the
evidence for them and observation reports the
content of which does not go beyond our
evidence for them. Allowing for error with
respect to sense-datum reports would thus defeat
their purpose. Likewise, the privacy of sense
experience was regarded as a linguistic truth
rather than a discovery about sense experience.
Ayer thus abandoned his earlier fallibilistic
holism for a more traditional foundationalism,
albeit for somewhat non-traditional reasons.
However, he maintained his overall phenome-
nalistic analysis of material object statements as
referring to nothing over and above possibilities
of sense-data, and provided a detailed phenom-
enological analysis of the experiential basis of
our conception of material things as existing
independently of our experience. Sense-data
theory in various guises later fell into disrepute
in Britain, thanks largely to Wittgenstein's
Philosophical Investigations (1953) and J.L.
AUSTIN'S Sense and Sensibilia(1962). Ayer
patiently replied to each respectively in 'Can
43
AYER
There Be a Private Language' and 'Has Austin
Refuted the Sense-Datum Theory?', both
reprinted in Metaphysics and Common Sense
(1969)
Ayer's third book, The Problem of
Knowledge (1956), which he thought his best,
shed much of the trappings of positivism and
was very influential in subsequent epistemo-
logical thinking in Britain and America. Ayer
outlined the now standard tripartite analysis of
prepositional knowledge as a matter of being
sure of something that was true and that one
had the right to be sure of. However, he now
argued that one could make genuine, non-
verbal, mistakes even in claims about the char-
acter of one's own immediate experience. Yet,
that did not impugn one's right to be sure of the
truth of these claims without further evidence
or reasons for their truth. Moreover, although
there could not be a non-circular justification of
inductive inference, our reliance on it was not
irrational since there cannot - at least on pain
of begging the question - be a higher standard
of rationality that it failed to meet. Other
standard epistemological problems, such as the
external world, other minds, scientific entities
or the past, could be represented, Ayer argued,
as having four steps. First, our knowledge of
these is not direct. Second, there is no justifying
deductive inference for them from premises we
had the right to be sure of. Third, there is no
inductive inference for them, and fourth, as a
sceptical conclusion, our belief in them could
not be justified at all. Intuitionists or naive
realists deny the first, reductionists the second,
and the scientific approach the third. What
Ayer called the method of descriptive analysis
denied the underlying assumption that infer-
ential justification had to be either inductive or
deductive. On this approach, the task of epis-
temology was simply to articulate the relation-
ship between theory and evidence in practice,
not to justify it by appeal to further standards
the defence of which could only be as question-
begging as their denial. That might, in some
cases, depending on the outcome of the descrip-
tive analysis, lead to the claim that a kind of
AYER
knowledge was direct, or reducible to another,
or inductively derivable, but need not.
Ayer himself embraced descriptive analysis,
thinking that its response to scepticism made it
the heir of the other responses. He rejected the
reductivism that had previously led him to
embrace phenomenalism about the external
world, behaviourism about other minds, and
the construal of statements about the past as
about present and future verifying observa-
tions. Ayer argued that in particular cases
memory beliefs were justified without infer-
ence from other knowledge, but corrigibly and
fallibly so. However, he argued that our beliefs
about other minds were in particular cases jus-
tified to some degree by inductive or analogical
reasoning, although reflection on particular
cases and the limitations of our evidence
revealed that our degree of rightful confidence
was often less than we might uncritically think
it to be. Statements about physical objects, on
the other hand, were a theoretical interpretation
of our sense experiences that had no meaning
apart from their relation to sense experience but
were irreducible to statements about the sense
experiences. It is characteristic of what is meant
by 'there is a table before me' that statements
about apparent table experiences or sense-data
constitute corrigible and fallible evidence for it.
The new focus on the careful description of
the criteria of knowledge in various domains
that characterizes much recent epistemology is
partly responsible for its flourishing state.
Ayer returned to a broader consideration of
the nature of philosophy and its many issues in
The Central Questions of Philosophy (1973),
based on his Gifford Lectures and drawing on
a wide variety of essays and lectures. Rejecting
the verification criterion of meaningfulness,
Ayer now argued that metaphysical theories
were literally significant only if they had some
explanatory value, helping at least indirectly
to account for observable facts. This he granted
was a stipulation, but vindicated pragmatically
because otherwise it would be a mystery why
anyone would care whether the theory was
true. Ayer was sympathetic to the common-
44
sensism he saw as underlying the work of
Moore, Wittgenstein and Ryle, but thought the
sort of conceptual analysis they engaged in
could only be a starting-point for philosophy
since common usage is not fixed but changes as
our ways of interpreting experience gradually
change. The need for radical reform of our
existing conceptual practices thus cannot be
ruled out. With respect to our perceptual
knowledge of material objects, Ayer defended
a version of the 'scientific approach' according
to which material objects were posited as part
of a theory justified by its ability to explain
contingent features of our experience. Belief in
other minds was likewise part of an explana-
tory theory, and the degree to which we were
right to hold it less weak than it might be, had
its basis been purely analogical. Ayer dealt sim-
ilarly with our belief in the reality of the past.
The very general beliefs about our relationship
to the world and others that our explanatory
theories presuppose are justified by the explana-
tory success of these theories. However, the
appeal to explanatory coherence underlying
the 'scientific approach' was not irrational just
because it failed the sceptic's standards.
Ayer granted that we could ask why we
should assume explanatory success so far gave
us a reason for thinking that a theory would
continue to work. That was to raise Hume's
problem of induction. Ayer granted Hume that
events in the world were logically distinct.
Although many of the ways we describe events
are not atomistic, for example 'soluble' or
'sibling', Ayer thought there was nonetheless a
regimented theory of the basic facts of the
world which was atomistic and which he called
the 'primary system', as opposed to our full
explanatory theory of the world which he
called the 'secondary system'. (Both systems, he
thought, could be literally true.) He also
granted Hume that there was no real relation
of natural necessity holding between events.
Natural necessity was simply what is excluded
by natural law. Natural laws were simply true
generalizations we were willing to project over
unknown or imaginary cases. Ayer argued that

there were epistemic probabilities or statements
of credibility that were irreducible to logical
probabilities or frequencies. In justifying our
acceptance of generalizations, we ultimately
assume that acceptance of a generalization in
the face of favourable evidence of such and
such strength is provisionally justified, just as
we assume that confident judgements of per-
ception and memory are prima facie justified.
The further assurance the Humean sceptic
demands is unavailable but also unnecessary.
Finally, as various paradoxes of induction
showed, there was latitude in which hypothe-
ses we projected from the evidence and those
which we saw as more likely to be right
reflected, as always, the theories we already
accepted.
However, Ayer refused to abandon the idea
that there were truths that were logically nec-
essary and analytic. He granted Quine that
logical and mathematical truths confront the
empirical facts as part of our overall belief
system, but argued that, though empirical facts
could show some of them to be unserviceable,
for example in quantum mechanics or relativ-
ity theory, empirical facts could not invalidate
them. Ayer was willing to allow that there were
distinctive religious or mystical experiences,
but thought their best explanation physiologi-
cal or psychological. However, even if such
explanations turned out to be insufficient, but
required the postulation of a distinctive objec-
tive cause, we should only have reason for
thinking it a novel kind of object or feature in
the world rather than a transcendent one like
God. Nor did he think there any empirical
reason for thinking that the world or life as a
whole had any meaning or purpose. Ayer
remained an empiricist throughout the changes
in his views over his life.
Later in his career, he wrote several works on
the history of philosophy. He was more con-
cerned with critically engaging authors in issues
close to his own heart so as to advance our
appreciation of the issues and the philosophi-
cal merits and demerits of their views than with
placing authors in historical context. The most
45
AYER
substantial of such works was The Origins of
Pragmatism (1968) and Russell and Moore:
The Analytical Heritage (1972). Although he
wrote little on ethics or political philosophy,
Ayer was a public philosopher. He made
frequent appearances on the BBC. He chaired
the Society for Homosexual Law Reform,
helping to change public opinion to decrimi-
nalize homosexual activity between consent-
ing adults. In the 1960s, he also served on a
Commission on Public Education in the British
Isles that led, among other things, to the elim-
ination of corporal punishment, and was
knighted for his services. Finally, late in life,
Ayer published his autobiography in two
popular volumes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Language, Truth, and Logic (1936; 2nd rev.
edn with Introduction, 1946).
The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge
(1940).
Philosophical Essays (1954).
The Problem of Knowledge (1956).
The Concept of a Person and Other Essays
(1963).
Metaphysics and Common Sense (1969).
The Origins of Pragmatism: Studies in the
Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and
William James (London and San Francisco,
1968).
Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage
(London and Cambridge, Mass., 1971).
Probability and Evidence (London and New
York, 1972).
The Central Questions of Philosophy (1973).
Freedom and Morality and Other Essays
(1984).
Other Relevant Works
(Ed.), Logical Positivism (Glencoe, 1959).
Russell (1972).
Part of my Life (1977).
Hume (Oxford, 1980).
Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1981).
More of my Life (1985).
Wittgenstein (1985).
AYER
Voltaire (1986).
Thomas Paine (1988).
Further Reading
Austin, J.L, Sense and Sensibilia, ed GJ
Warnock (Oxford, 1962).
Foster, John, Ayer, Arguments of the
Philosophers Series (1985).
Griffiths, A. Phillips (ed.), A.J. Ayer:
Memorial Essays, (Cambridge, 1991).
Hahn, Lewis (ed.), The Philosophy of A.].
Ayer (La Salle, 1992).
Hanfling, Oswald, A.J. Ayer: Analyzing what
we Mean (1997).
Hempel, Carl, 'Empiricist Criteria of
Cognitive Significance', Aspects of
Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in
the Philosophy of Science (New York,
1965), pp. 101-19.
Macdonald, Graham (ed.), Perception and
Identity: Essays Presented to A.J. Ayer
with his Replies to them (1979).
Macdonald, Graham and Crispin Wright
(eds), Fact, Science, and Morality, Essays
on A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic
(Oxford, 1986).
Magee, Bryan, Modern British Philosophy
(1971).
Price, H.H., 'Critical Notice of The
Foundations of Empirical Knowledge',
Mind, vol. 50 (1941), pp. 280-93.
, 'Professor Ayer on the Problem of
Knowledge', Mind, vol. 67 (1958), pp.
433-64.
Quinton, Anthony, 'Alfred Jules Ayer
(1910-1989)', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 94 (1996), pp. 255-82.
Rogers, Ben, A.J. Ayer: A Life (1999).
Wisdom, John, 'Note on the New Edition of
Professor Ayer's Language, Truth, and
Logic, Mind, vol. 57 (1948), pp. 403-19.
Bruce Hunter
46
AYERS, Michael Richard (1935-)
Michael Richard Ayers was born in the
Wandsworth district of London on 27 June
1935. He was educated at Battersea Grammar
School and St John's College, Cambridge,
where he took his BA in 1958 and was
awarded a PhD in 1962 for a thesis on deter-
minism he subsequently published as his first
book. He was a fellow of St John's College
from 1962 to 1965, when he became a tutor
and fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. He
was appointed to a university lectureship in
1965, to a readership in 1994 and was a pro-
fessor from 1996 till his retirement in 2002.
After his retirement he became an emeritus
fellow of Wadham. Ayers held visiting appoint-
ments at a number of universities outside
Britain, including Berkeley, Oregon, Iowa and
the Australian National University. He was
made a fellow of the British Academy in 2001.
While Ayers's list of publications is impres-
sive, he is perhaps best known for two major
works: The Refutation of Determinism: An
Essay in Philosophical Logic (1968) and Locke
(1991). In the former Ayers offers a 'refutation
of the arguments that give rise to the free will
dilemma' (The Refutation of Determinism,
p. 1). The main source of the dilemma, claims
Ayers, is confusion over the meaning and use of
the concept of possibility. Once that concept
has been properly analysed and understood,
then 'determinism will shed its plausibility'
(ibid., p. vii). The form of determinism that
Ayers has in mind is what he calls 'metaphysi-
cal determinism' (also called 'necessitarianism'
or 'actualism'). He defines it as 'the metaphys-
ical theory that everything is necessarily as it is
and there are no genuinely open possibilities
beyond what actually happens' (ibid.). The
thing that gives metaphysical determinism its
air of plausibility is what Ayers calls the 'Basic
Argument', which denies freedom of the will by
denying the reality of 'genuine possibility'.
According to Ayers, the Basic Argument is fal-
lacious because it 'confuses different kinds of
possibility' and 'misunderstands' the ones that

it recognizes (ibid., p. 11). Ayers attacks the
Basic Argument by distinguishing between
three distinct kinds of non-logical possibility:
(1) 'epistemic' or 'relative' possibility; (2)
'natural' or 'ontological' possibility; and (3)
'possibility for choice'.
Epistemic or relative possibility refers to the
range of things that exist within one's epis-
temic or conceptual framework. The existence
and character of such possibility is entirely
relative to available evidence. Natural or onto-
logical possibility on the other hand is 'absolute'
rather than relative. It covers those things or
events that might exist or happen given the
actual or real character of the world. According
to Ayers, the difference between epistemic and
natural possibility 'corresponds to the differ-
ence between certainty and necessity ...
Certainty is relative to the available evidence,
necessity is not. Neither implies the other' (ibid.,
p. 53). These two kinds or types of possibility
are 'logically independent'.
Possibility for choice stands as the third log-
ically distinct kind of possibility. It refers to
the powers for action possessed by people,
powers which are importantly distinct from
the covering powers of things. According to
Ayers, 'the power of a person to do an action
is metaphysically or semantically different, in
important ways, from the potentialities of a
thing' (ibid., p. 102). The potentialities of a
thing are a 'capacity', while the potentialities of
a person are an 'opportunity'. The determinist
wrongly conflates the opportunities available to
a person with the capacities present in a thing.
This gives rise to the still orthodox view that 'all
power is conditional' upon the presence or
absence of some natural capacity (ibid., p. 119).
According to Ayers, however, '[i]t is a gross
misunderstanding of the relationship between
capacity and will to equate it with the distinc-
tion between physical and mental properties'
(ibid., p. 161). Ayers is highly critical of Hume,
MOORE, KEYNES, RYLE and WITTGENSTEIN, all
of whom he claims defend some variation on
the orthodox position. The key difference
between natural possibility and possibility for
47
AYERS
choice is the logically distinct element of 'trying'
or 'trial'. Natural possibilities are tested by
introducing some additional condition prior to
a desired result to see if that result will become
actual. Possibilities for choice on the other hand
(as exemplified in trying) need not appeal to
such antecedent conditions. Trying is not a
separate activity that comes prior to an action;
it is simply something done. Further, one may
try and still not produce the thing intended. But
this does not mean that the intended possibil-
ity for action is not genuine, for '[t]here is
always the logical possibility that what seems
impossible is only very difficult' and will be
attained through continued trying or practice
(ibid., p. 147). According to Ayers, these dif-
ferences demand that natural possibility and
possibility for choice be treated as distinct kinds
or categories of possibility: 'If all that is neces-
sary for water to boil is present in nature, then
water will boil. But although all that is neces-
sary for me to boil water is present in my
kitchen, I need not boil water. This illustration
of free will is a demonstration, not of indeter-
minism in my kitchen, but of two kinds of
"necessary condition"' (ibid., p. 162).
In Locke, Ayers presents a detailed com-
mentary on Locke's epistemology and meta-
physics that also stands as an important con-
tribution to contemporary philosophy. Ayers's
interpretation of Locke is controversial, if not
radically new. Of particular interest is his pre-
sentation of Locke as an 'imagist' for whom the
only thing mind can think about 'is a sensation
or image' (Locke, vol. 1, p. 45). Locke's
'abstract ideas' do not refer to mental objects
formed through a process of 'mental separa-
tion' from particular objects (as is commonly
supposed). Instead, abstract ideas are 'images'
of particular things formed by a 'partial con-
sideration' of those things 'for the purpose of
general thought'(along the lines of positions
held by Berkeley and Reid) (ibid., p. 251). Even
ideas of reflection such as jealousy are to be
read in this way, for reflection is itself a kind of
'internal sense' that is 'assumed to be as much
a sense as sight', and hence falls under the
AYERS
imagist model (ibid., p. 49). Because thought
can be explained solely by reference to imagi-
nation, there is no need for a separate faculty
of pure intellect such as one might find in
Aristotle or Descartes.
One of the lessons contemporary philoso-
phy can take from Locke, claims Ayers, is his
view that 'consciousness and intrinsic or primary
intentionality go hand in hand' (ibid., p. 193).
The view that consciousness possesses 'intrinsic
intentional content' goes against the mainstream
views of mind, all of which are grounded in an
exaggerated 'respect for science and a similar
respect for language' (ibid., pp. 193-4). Ayers
defends the view that there must be something
prior to language (and science) that serves as the
condition for its possibility. For the mere ability
to use language does not itself explain the inten-
tionality of mental states. The virtue of Locke's
position lies in its being a 'theory about con-
sciousness', a view that would help restore the
very subjectivity that the orthodox theories
seem so determined to ignore or exclude (ibid.,
p. 302).
Another of Ayers's more controversial claims
is found in the metaphysical resurrection of the
more traditional idea of substance. According
to Ayers, Locke's idea of substance stands as a
legitimate, realist alternative to the more 'con-
ceptualist' theories of identity that dominate
the contemporary scene. Substance, for Ayers,
is not to be taken as a 'naked substratum under-
lying all properties', but rather the cause,
unknowable in practice but knowable in prin-
ciple, of the observable properties of material
and immaterial things. Substance is not the
image of something, but lies instead 'at the
limits of abstraction', functioning as a 'place
maker for the unknown' (ibid., p. 49).
Substance is not opposed to qualities or attrib-
utes, but only to 'accidents'. Thus, contrary to
Aristotle, substances have 'independent exis-
tence', are 'real unities', are 'material', 'endure',
'are active', and 'fall into true natural kinds'
(ibid., vol. 2, p. 112). Resurrecting this
'Lockean' idea of substance would, claims
Ayers, help overcome many of the difficulties
48
inherent within conceptualism and help restore
the importance of ontology as an essential
ingredient in 'the actual structure of thought
and its relation to reality' (ibid., p. 128).
The importance of Ayers's work in defend-
ing the history of philosophy, both as an end in
itself and as a relevant contribution to con-
temporary philosophy, is beyond debate. Ayers
has played a major role in changing how we
perceive and approach the history of philoso-
phy. His long list of publications, particularly
his recent work Locke as well as The
Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century
Philosophy (1998), are a testament to this
claim. The Refutation of Determinism still
stands as a highly important and influential
contribution to the free will debate, adding
richly to our understanding both of determin-
ism and of possibility in general.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Counterfactuals and Subjunctive
Conditionals', Mind, vol. 74 (July 1965),
pp. 347-64.
'Austin on "Could" and "Could Have"',
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 16 (April
1966), pp. 113-20.
The Refutation of Determinism: An Essay in
Philosophical Logic (1968).
'Could and Could Have: A Reply',
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 18 (April
1968), pp. 144-50.
'Substance, Reality, and the Great, Dead
Philosophers', American Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 7 (January 1970), pp.
38-49.
'Some Thoughts', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 73 (1972-3), pp.
69-86.
'The Nature of Things', Philosophy, vol. 49
(October 1974), pp. 401-13.
'Reason and Psycholinguistics', in Renford
Bambrough (ed.), Wisdom: Twelve Essays
(Oxford, 1974), pp. 107-24.
'Individuals Without Sortals', Canadian
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 4 (1974), pp
113-48.

The Ideas of Power and Substance in Locke's
Philosophy', Philosophical Quarterly, vol.
25 (January 1975), pp. 1-27.
(with Jonathan Ree and Adam Westoby),
Philosophy and its Past (Atlantic
Highlands, New Jersey, 1978).
'Locke's Translations from Nicole's "Essais":
The Real First Edition', Locke Newsletter,
vol. 11 (Autumn 1980), pp. 101-103.
'Locke Versus Aristotle on Natural Kinds',
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 78 (May
1981), pp. 247-72.
'Mechanism, Superaddition, and the Proof of
God's Existence in Locke's Essay',
Philosophical Review, vol. 90 (April
1981), pp. 210-51.
'Berkeley's Immaterialism and Kant's
Transcendental Idealism', in Godfrey
Vesey (ed.), Idealism Past and Present
(Cambridge, 1982), pp. 51-69.
'Berkeley and Hume: A Question of
Influence', in Richard Rorty et al. (eds),
Philosophy in History (New York, 1984),
pp. 303-28.
'Are Locke's "Ideas" Images, Intentional
Objects, or Natural Signs?', Locke
Newsletter, vol. 17 (1986), pp. 3-36.
'Berkeley and the Meaning of Existence',
History of European Ideas, vol. 7 (1986)
pp. 567-73.
'Divine Ideas and Berkeley's Proofs of God's
Existence', in Ernest Sosa (ed.), Essays on
the Philosophy of George Berkeley
(Dordrecht, 1987), pp. 115-28.
Locke, 2 vols (1991).
'Substance: Prolegomena to a Realist Theory
of Identity', Journal of Philosophy (Fall
1991), pp. 69-90.
'The Foundations of Knowledge and the
Logic of Substance', in G.A.J. Rogers (ed.),
Locke's Philosophy (New York, 1994).
'The Cambridge Companion to Locke
(Edited by Vere C. Chappell): A Review',
Locke Newsletter, vol. 28 (1997), pp.
157-88.
'Is "Physical Object" a Sortal Concept? A
Reply to Xu, Mind and Language, vol. 12,
49
AYERS
nos 3-4 (September-December 1997), pp.
393-405.
(Ed. with Daniel Garber et al.), The
Cambridge History of Seventeenth-
Century Philosophy: Two Volumes (New
York, 1998).
(with Daniel Garber), 'Ideas and Objective
Being', in The Cambridge History of
Seventeenth-Century Philosophy: Two
Volumes, vol. 2, pp. 1062-107.
(with Alan Gabbey), 'New Doctrines of
Motion', in The Cambridge History of
Seventeenth-Century Philosophy: Two
Volumes.
(with Daniel Garber), Theories of
Knowledge and Belief, in The Cambridge
History of Seventeenth-Century
Philosophy: Two Volumes, vol. 2, pp.
1003-61.
'Can There Be a New Empiricism?', in Mark
D. Gedney (ed.), The Proceedings of the
Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy,
Volume 7: Modern Philosophy (Bowling
Green, 2000).
'What is Realism?', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 75 (2001),
pp. 91-110.
Other Relevant Works
(Intro, and notes), George Berkeley,
Philosophical Works; Including the Works
on Vision (197r5).
Griffin, Nicholas, 'Ayers on Relative
Identity', Canadian journal of Philosophy,
vol. 6 (1976), pp. 579-94.
McLaughlin, R.N., 'M. R. Ayers on the
Conditional', Mind, vol. 77 (April 1968),
pp. 290-92.
Walmsley, Jonathan, 'Locke on Abstraction:
A Response to M. R. Ayers', British
Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol.
7, no. 1 (March 1999), pp. 123-34.
Wilson, Margaret D., 'Superadded
Properties: A Reply to M. R. Ayers',
Philosophical Review, vol. 91 (April
1982), pp. 247-52.
AYERS

Further Reading Telfer, Elizabeth, Review of The Refutation

Chappell, Vere, 'Locke's Theory of Ideas', in of Determinism, Phil Books, vol. 10, no. 1
Vere Chappell (ed.), The Cambridge (January 1969), pp. 1-3.
Companion to Locke (New York, 1994). Williston, Byron, 'Self-Deception and the
Jolley, N., Review of Locke, Phil Books, vol. Ethics of Belief: Locke's Critique of
33, no. 4 (October 1992), pp. 205-208. Enthusiasm', Philo, vol. 5, no. 2
Langton, Rae, 'Locke's Relations and God's (Spring-Summer 2002), pp. 62-83.
Good Pleasure', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 100 (1999-2000), Philip Rose
pp. 75-91.
Rogers, G.A.J. (ed.), Locke's Philosophy:
Content and Context, (New York, 1996).
Stanford, P. Kyle, 'Reference and Natural
Kind Terms: The Real Essence of Locke's
View', Pacific Philosophical Quarterly,
vol. 79, no. 1 (March 1998), pp. 78-97.

50
 B
BAILLIE, James Black (1872-1940)
James Black Baillie was born in the county of
Angus on 24 October 1872 and died in
Weybridge on 9 June 1940. He attended school
in Haddington, East Lothian, studied at the
University of Edinburgh and, graduating MA,
won the Ferguson and Shaw fellowships in phi-
losophy. He studied further at Trinity College,
Cambridge, winning the MA, and in Halle,
Strasbourg and Paris before taking up a post as
lecturer in the then University College, Dundee,
as assistant to D.G. Ritchie, until 1902. He
was then appointed Professor of Moral
Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. He
remained there, with a two-year break on war
service in the Admiralty, till in 1924 he took up
the post of Vice-Chancellor of the University of
Leeds, following the failure of his 1919 appli-
cation for the Edinburgh Chair of Metaphysics
(in succession to his teacher PRINGLE-PATTTSON,
who supported him for the post) and his 1924
application for the Moral Philosophy Chair.
His success as a wartime administrator had led
to an impressive number of public appoint-
ments, and the award of an OBE in 1918. He
took up the Leeds post at a time of compre-
hensive reconstruction in that university. He
was knighted in 1931. After retiring from Leeds
in 1938 he continued as before to function as
chairman on major public boards and com-
missions, till his unexpected death.
Later known almost entirely for his transla-
tion of Hegel's Die Phenomenologie des Geistes
(1910), Baillie also published two hefty books
51
of Hegelian orientation and, amid a number of
papers, the series of essays begun during World
War I and collected in Studies in Human
Nature (1924). Introducing the startlingly banal
notes selected after his death from very exten-
sive private journals, his former Aberdeen assis-
tants in their Introduction resist the normally
admirable Rudolf Metz's pigeonholing of
Baillie as a sometime absolute idealist disillu-
sioned into another viewpoint by the horrors of
the war. It was, say these editors, rather a daily
acquaintance with the wide variety of
humankind and its activities that shifted
Baillie's thinking in the direction of the later
essays, and at a time when the strictly philo-
sophical concerns manifest in his earlier publi-
cations had begun to wane.
The title given the 1921 book led Metz to
think of Hume. Metz's suggestion that the
essays mark a recourse to some Reidian sort of
Common Sense may however represent a
generous reluctance to regard the complica-
tions of Baillie's unusual version of individual-
ism as confused rather than merely not worked
out yet. The book is a series of unusually
extended essays in a sort of popular moralizing.
Baillie had plainly shifted his attention from the
One to the Many, but his notion that all valid
expressions of the human spirit fully carried
through have some reconciliation in a totality
seems hardly more than aesthetic; or anywhere
beyond the vague mystical feelings with which
he identifies the beginnings of Hegel's philoso-
phy. Monistic individualism is a less philo-
sophically sound commonplace than Baillie's
BAILLIE
other late conclusion that there are other things
in life than philosophy. Numbering philoso-
phy as one among several valid expressions of
the human spirit, but not one for everyone,
Baillie pretty well denies Studies the designation
philosophy. In a passage in the journals Hegel's
dialectic of the Absolute is reaffirmed as the last
and first word in thought, but this is undated.
In his Contemporary British Philosophy article
Baillie implies that his preoccupation with the
dialectic had not proved amenable to address-
ing wider or more specific practical concerns.
This criticism had been ventured by others. A
series of essays on political themes never mate-
rialized, and Baillie's later, wordy encomium to
the works of his teacher and sometime sponsor
A.S. Pringle-Pattison is platitudinous to the
point of anti-intellectualism.
The abiding worth of his translation of
Hegel's Phenomenology is generally agreed; it
seems also to have helped Jean Hyppolite's
French translation. Dissatisfaction is most
commonly an effect of Baillie's success in retain-
ing the religious aspect of Hegel's expression.
Going to some lengths to avoid sacrificing the
religious Hegel, Baillie's prose alienates some
readers. This is not to countenance the mere
repeated rumour that the translation somehow
betrays Hegel. Simply, not everyone is com-
fortable reading prose which can slip into: 'It
has been in that experience melted in its inmost
soul, has trembled throughout its every fibre,
and all that was fixed and steadfast has quaked
within it' (Phenomenology, 1931, p. 237). A
disabling distaste for that sort of thing, or a
range of concerns which need no reference to
finer detail of religious feeling, may take readers
with special interests to A.V. Miller's later
translation of the same work as The
Phenomenology of Spirit. The different ren-
derings of the title reflect the problem the late
Duncan Forbes for one recognized by retaining
the German 'Geist' as untranslatable. Such an
option might have been unthinkable in Baillie's
day. The choice presumably also reflected
aspects of the original term in need of emphasis
c. 1910 on 'mind' rather than an only differ-
52
ently adequate alternative. In the body of the
text Baillie does not simply substitute 'mind' for
'Geist'. Where the latter term recurs he seeks an
English word appropriate in the context of the
sentence or argument. The late Walter
Kaufmann would at least grant that Baillie's
introductory matter and text did not miss
Hegel's passion.
Baillie's two early books are both founded on
postgraduate dissertations, the earlier his
Cambridge thesis, the later the lectures deliv-
ered under the Shaw Fellowship at Edinburgh.
Their merits are derivative of his preoccupation
with the Phenomenology, the Origins being
concerned not so centrally with the texts
known respectively as the Shorter and the
Longer Logic as with the 'logic' of Hegel, as
propaedeutic to study of the Phenomenology.
Baillie is especially clear, at some cost in relative
belittlement, on what differentiates Hegel's phi-
losophy from those of Kant, Fichte and
Schelling. In its dominant but not exclusive ref-
erence to the broader or longer view, the book's
relative neglect might be remedied by the
version now online.
Published under the stipulations of the Shaw
foundation, An Outline of the Idealistic
Construction of Experience was characterized
by R.F.A. HOERNLE, in a detailed critique to
which Baillie responded hotly, as representing
a 'back to Hegel' viewpoint. Its obvious con-
temporary address was to a latter-day 'back to
Kant' movement within the almost unprece-
dented development of philosophy in Britain
which had occurred since the 1870s; and to that
development in general, especially as repre-
sented by the influence of R.H. Lotze, which
Baillie deplored as he saw it in BOSANQUET and
BRADLEY. The book's worth might always have
been as an exceptionally involved sort of
exegesis of Hegel's texts; Hoernle does observe
that Baillie's fidelity to the Hegelian text was
such as to obscure for him the fact that he was
preferring its sanctity to the priority of trying to
meet genuine philosophical problems, which
thinkers who from his point of view might be
called 'revisionists' were commendably address-

ing. Baillie also published a lengthy review
article (1902) impugning J.M.E. McTAGGART's
lack of fidelity to the pure creed of Hegel's
Phenomenology.
Among Baillie's other publications notice
might be paid to his workmanlike, dutiful
exegesis of the by no means Hegelian or easily
construed Gifford Lectures of S.S. Laurie,
whose philosophy classes, given within the
Edinburgh Department of Education, Baillie,
like his teachers Pringle-Pattison and SETH, had
attended.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Origins and Significance of Hegel's
Logic (1901), http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/
~econ/ugcm/3113/hegel/101 l.pdf, accessed
December 2004.
Review of J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the
Hegelian Cosmology', Hibbert Journal, vol
1, (1902/1903), pp. 373-85.
(Trans.), G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology
of Mind (Oxford, 1910; rev. edn, 1931).
An Outline of the Idealistic Construction of
Experience (1906).
'Professor Laurie's Natural Realism', Mind,
vol. 17 (1908), pp. 475-492; vol. 18
(1909), pp. 184-207.
Studies in Human Nature (1921).
The Individual and his World', in
Contemporary British Philosoph, 1st ser.,
ed.J.H. Muirhead (1924).
Reflections on Life and Religion, ed. Sir
Walter Moberley and Oliver de Selincourt
(1952).
Robert R. Calder
BAILLIE, John (1886-1960)
John Baillie was born in Gairloch on 26
March 1886 and died in Edinburgh on 29
September 1960. He was educated at
53
BAILLIE
Edinburgh, Jena and Heidelberg universities.
He and his brother Donald were among the
most distinguished Scots theologians of the
modern era. Though John Baillie later recalle.
'a rigorously Calvinistic upbringing', there
were liberal strands in Free Church culture
and a respect for learning which drove the
brothers through brilliant academic careers
in the University of Edinburgh, where John
was Professor of Divinity (1934-56). He was
Joint President of the World Council of
Churches from 1954.
Baillie had moved to Auburn Theological
Seminary in New York State in 1919. The
Roots of Religion in the Human Soul appeared
in 1926, and The Interpretation of Religion in
1929. These books reflect wide cultural expe-
rience from the manse in Gairloch to American
culture - its poetry and politics, the polarization
of church politics in the fundamentalist debate,
and participation in conferences on the social
gospel in the early 1920s.
John went on to Emmanuel College, Toronto
in 1927, then in 1930 to America and Union
Theological Seminary in New York. Union
provided a forum for theology from which,
along with Henry Sloane Coffin, Reinhold
Niebuhr and Pitney Van Dusen, he was to have
a major impact on Western theology for the
next two decades. Though John returned to
Edinburgh in 1934, the four exerted huge influ-
ence on the new World Council of Churches.
The theme of the presence of God to faith
was central to the next three books, And the
Life Everlasting (1933), Our Knowledge of
God (1939) and Invitation to Pilgrimage
(1942), while the emphasis on spirituality was
manifested in A Diary of Private Prayer. The
next step was the report of the Baillie
Commission on God's Will For Church and
Nation, which combined critique of the Nazis
with a programme for social reconstruction
after the war, a programme echoed in the
Beveridge Report. The report recognized the
difficulty in applying Christian principles in
society, and took the route of 'middle axioms',
which should 'exhibit the relevance of the
BAILLIE
ruling principles to the particular field of action
in which guidance is needed', for example
'Economic power must be made objectively
responsible to the community as a whole'.
John Baillie's Gifford Lectures, The Sense of
the Presence of God, display the characteristic
combination of an appeal to experience with an
exploration of rational grounds for belief in
God. Knowledge seems to imply certitude but
often does not go beyond probabilities. Moral
convictions are central to human life. 'How do
we "reason things out?"' Procedures for veri-
fication and falsification are discussed. 'A faith
that is consistent with everything possible is
not a faith in anything actual' (Sense of the
Presence of God, p. 71). The ultimate refuta-
tion of doubts is theological and incarnational.
Love of God is always related to love of
neighbour, and beyond this to a new humanity.
This leads to 'meaning and reference'. It is
important not to confuse dogmas with the
primary perceptions of faith. There is aware-
ness of God in ' the pagan religions', but the
Way of Christ is decisive.
Clarity in linguistic analysis is not enough.
Neither is Barthian exclusivism. Faith is trust.
Propositions are necessary but not sufficient.
We have to do with 'a God whose living and
active presence among us can be perceived by
faith in a large variety of human contexts and
situations'. Baillie's work points to a theology
which remains resolutely liberal and resolutely
evangelical.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Our Knowledge of God (Oxford, 1939).
Invitation to Pilgrimage (Oxford, 1942).
The Sense of the Presence of God (Oxford,
1962).
Further Reading
Fergusson, D. (ed.), Christ, Church and
Society (Edinburgh, 1993).
Hood, Adam, Baillie, Oman and
Macmurray. Experience and Religious
Belief(Aldershot, 2003).
Newlands, G.M. and Peter Lang, John and
54
Donald Baillie-Transatlantic Theology
(Bern and New York, 2002).
G. M. Newlands
BALFOUR, Arthur James (1848-1930)
Arthur James Balfour was born on 25 July 1848
at Whittingehame, the house of his father, James
Maitland Balfour, in Haddingtonshire, and died
on 19 March 1930 at Fishers Hill, the home of
his brother Gerald, in Surrey. His mother was
Lady Blanche Gascoyne Cecil, daughter of the
Second Marquis of Salisbury and sister of Lord
Robert Cecil, afterwards Third Marquis.
Educated at Eton and Trinity College,
Cambridge, Balfour entered Parliament in 1874
as a Conservative member for Hentford. Under
his uncle, Salisbury, in the 1880s, he served as
President of the Local Government Board
(1885), Secretary for Scotland (1886) and Chief
Secretary for Ireland (1887-91). Balfour served
as First Lord of the Treasury and Leader of the
House of Commons for ten months from
October 1891, and again from 1895 to 1902
when, on Salisbury's retirement, he became
Prime Minister. Defeated in 1905, he led the
opposition in Parliament until his own retirement
in 1911. Drawn back into public life by World
War I, Balfour served as First Lord of the
Admiralty in the Asquith Coalition, shifted to
Foreign Secretary under Lloyd George, and was
retained as Lord President of the Council after
the end of the war, a position he returned to in
the Baldwin Government of 1924 to 1929.
Among the lengthy list of honours and tributes
earned, Balfour held the KG and the OM, served
as Chancellor of Cambridge and Edinburgh
Universities, Lord Rector of St Andrews and
Glasgow, President of the British Association in
1904, was a fellow of both the Royal Society and
the British Academy, and was both a Gifford and
Romanes lecturer.

Balfour was unique among modern prime
ministers in that he was a speculative thinker,
but despite his extensive writings on philoso-
phy, theology and science, the image of an
intellectual dilettante persists, making it diffi-
cult to estimate his significance in British intel-
lectual history. In this respect, Balfour might be
compared with his close friend, Richard
Burdon HALDANE. Both men combined the
study of philosophy and religion with active
participation in public affairs. Both men were
dilettanti in the proper sense of the word. It
may be argued that Haldane's systematic
philosophical principles governed his activi-
ties as a statesman, and that his religious life
found its sustenance in his idealist philosophy.
Balfour, on the other hand, propounded no
particular philosophic system. He would sub-
scribe to no philosophy which put religion out
of court, but his philosophy was not his
religion. One consistent theme pervaded all
his philosophic writings: the importance of
addressing not only the rational causes of
belief, but also what he called 'non-rational
causes'. This theme is central in A Defence of
Philosophic Doubt (1879), The Foundations
of'Belief(189'5), and in his Gifford Lectures on
Theism and Humanism delivered at Glasgow
in 1914.
The 'philosophic doubt' Balfour defended
was not based on any metaphysical doctrine
about the mind's incapacity to know things as
they are in themselves; rather he meant to scru-
tinize the claims of philosophical creeds to
provide final answers, in particular the philo-
sophical naturalism prevalent in late-Victorian
Britain. Balfour argued that the theory of
knowledge underlying the scepticism of science
in regard to religion should produce a similar
scepticism as regards science itself. He insisted
that all men, including philosophers and sci-
entists, are 'believers', and that all constructive
thought rests on a foundation of faith.
Presupposing what we commonly term scien-
tific knowledge is a body of beliefs that can
neither be proved nor ignored. We are obliged,
concluded Balfour, to assume a Tower' tran-
55
BALFOUR
scending the physical universe. What makes
naturalism especially untenable is that the
higher human values cannot be maintained in
a naturalistic setting. One of Balfour's
strongest criticisms of naturalism, as
expounded in his 1909 Romanes Lecture at
Oxford entitled 'Criticism and Beauty', was
that it could give no adequate account of the
facts of aesthetic experience.
A typically negative review of Foundations
was that of George Gabriel Stokes, who
thought the title was a misnomer; it should
have been called the 'Non-Foundations of
Belief, for the whole argument seem to show
that the ultimate truths of science and the
supreme beliefs of ethics and theology are in
the literal sense of the term unfounded. It does
not mean that these beliefs are not to be
accepted; rather they are to be accepted
without rational grounds. Asking where, then,
are the foundations of belief, Stokes causti-
cally suggested that Balfour must know, but
has kept it a secret to himself. For his part,
Stokes looked forward 'to a view of the world
in which the causation of belief shall be seen to
be implicitly rational' and 'So far as Mr
Balfour's book is opposed to such a result, we
can only regard it as retrograde in its tendency,
and sophistical in its conclusions' (Stokes, p.
39). In one of his last publications, Thomas
Huxley paid little mind to the book's general
argument; he simply could not countenance
Balfour's linking together of agnosticism, pos-
itivism and empiricism with a vaguely defined
'naturalism'. Nevertheless, it was precisely this
aspect of Balfour's theistic apologetic
(Foundations carried the subtitle 'Notes
Introductory to the Study of Theology') that
appealed to a wide spectrum of religious and
philosophical thinkers, both lay and clerical, in
the years before the war. Some of the most
cordial reviews came unexpectedly from
Roman Catholic writers. The Revd George
Tyrrell, SJ viewed the book as a much needed
correction of scientific naturalism and
wondered along with Balfour why it was that
'in the so-called conflict between science and
BALFOUR
religion, it is usually assumed that ... science
[is] in the judgment seat, religion at the bar'.
Tyrrell correctly noted that Balfour was not
asking that we cast our lot with religion rather
than science, 'but in preference to Naturalism,
which would make scientific methods all-suf-
ficing and exclusive' (Tyrrell, p. 17). Another
prominent Roman Catholic, Wilfrid Ward,
also reviewed the book favourably, seeing in it
more than an echo of Newman's scepticism.
Ward initiated a correspondence with Balfour
that led to the creation in 1896 of the Synthetic
Society, a kind of successor to the old
Metaphysical Society. The aim of the Synthetic
was to be 'constructive' in a way the
Metaphysical had not been. Its membership
was to be restricted to those who desired mini-
mally to find 'a working philosophy of religious
belief. While Ward was the chief organizer,
Balfour used his considerable influence and
prestige to recruit an extraordinary initial mem-
bership. It included Charles Gore and Edward
Talbot, both future Anglican bishops; James
Martineau, a Unitarian and British philosophy's
elder statesman; Richard Burdon Haldane;
Cambridge philosophers Henry Sidgwick and
James WARD; Oxford scholars Clement C. J.
WEBB and Hastings RASHDALL; Sir Oliver
LODGE, physicist, psychical researcher, and first
Principal of the University of Birmingham; Lord
Rayleigh, a Nobel Laureate in physics; Sir Alfred
Lyall, the Orientalist; Baron Friedrich von
H0GEL, perhaps the most brilliant English
Roman Catholic lay thinker; and the Revd
George Tyrrell, Jesuit priest and theologian.
The Synthetic dinner meetings were held
monthly during the winter/spring months from
1986 to 1910. Balfour delivered the first paper,
entitled 'Heads of Argument', essentially a
restatement of the principal thesis of
Foundations, but in the form of an agenda of
questions and problems to be addressed by the
membership. Presenters in subsequent years
followed his lead: Webb's 'The Ontological
Argument and Modern Agnosticism'; Haldane's
'The Meaning of Authority in Religion';
Sidgwick's 'On the Nature of the Evidence for
56
Theism'; and Lodge's 'On the Possibility of a
Logical Proof of Religious Doctrine'. Balfour
served as Chairman of the society for three years
of its fifteen-year existence, attended more than
half of the meetings, and provided several
papers and commentaries. During some of his
busiest years of politics, he was known to leave
the House of Commons in the midst of evening
debates to join his Synthetic colleagues at the
nearby Westminster Palace Hotel, then return to
the House later in the evening. Balfour's most
memorable contribution before the Synthetic
may have been a short untitled paper on
'Prayer', delivered in May 1900, in which he
spoke of the difficulty that many find in har-
monizing the instinct to appeal to a 'loving
Ruler of the Universe' with their general view of
the laws by which the universe is governed, and
concluded that all a priori assumptions against
the efficacy of prayer must be swept away.
A second persistent theme in Balfour's work
was the so-called conflict of science and
religion. In the first set of his Gifford Lectures,
published as Theism and Humanism, he
asserted positively a philosophy of theism,
making it clear that it was 'the God according
to religion, and not the God according to
metaphysics' to whom he referred: 'I mean a
God whom men can love, a God to whom
men can pray, who takes sides, who has
purposes and preferences, whose attributes ...
leave unimpaired the possibility of a personal
relation between Himself and those whom He
has created' (p. 21). Divine guidance must be
postulated, he argued, if we are to maintain
human values such as knowledge, love, and
beauty: 'Humanism without loses more than
half its value' (p. 248). Following these
lectures, Balfour wrote to his former Synthetic
Society colleague, von Hiigel, that 'if I could
convince my readers that the existence of God
was as certain as the existence of Matter, I
should be quite unmoved by the objection that,
after all, the existence of Matter was itself
uncertain'. It was for no political motivation
that Joseph NEEDHAM invited Balfour to write
an introduction to the famous collection of

essays entitled Science, Religion and Reality
(1925).
No one ought to claim that Balfour's part in
the history of British philosophical and reli-
gious thought is more than minor, yet he
rendered important enough service that his
works remain a part of the literature that must
be consulted if one is to grasp the depth and
complexity of the late-Victorian and
Edwardian search for a satisfactory synthesis
between intellect and faith.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1879).
The Foundations of Belief (1895; 8th rev.
edn, 1902).
Theism and Humanism [Gifford Lectures
for 1914] (1915).
Theism and Thought [Gifford Lectures for
1922-3] (1925).
Other Relevant Works
Essays and Addresses (1893).
(Comp.) Papers Presented before the
Synthetic Society, 1896-1908 privately
printed (1909).
Arthur James Balfour as Philosopher and
Thinker, ed. Wilfrid Short (1912).
Essays Speculative and Political (1920).
Opinions and Argument (1927).
Retrospect: An Unfinished Autobiography,
ed. Blanche E.G. Dugdale (1930).
Further Reading
Dugdale, Blanche E.G., Arthur James
Balfour, First Earl of Balfour, 2 vols
(1936).
Mackay, Ruddock F., Balfour: Intellectual
Statesman (New York, 1985).
Root, John D., The Philosophical and
Religious Thought of Arthur James
Balfour', Journal of British Studies, vol
12 (Spring 1980), pp. 121-41.
Stokes, George, The Foundations of Belief,
Blackwoods Magazine, vol. 158 (July
1895), pp. 32-9.
Turner, Frank Miller, Between Science and
57
BAMBROUGH
Religion: The Reaction to Scientific
Naturalism in Late Victorian England
(New York and London, 1974).
Tyrrell, George, 'Mr Balfour and the
Foundations of Belief, IF, The Month,
vol. 84 (May 1895), pp. 16-32.
Webb, Clement C.J., 'Arthur James
Balfour', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 16 (1930), pp. 410-18.
Young, Kenneth, Arthur James Balfour
(1963).
John David Root
BAMBROUGH, John Renford (1926-99)
Renford Bambrough was born in Sunderland
on 29 April 1926 and died in Cambridge on 17
January 1999. He gained firsts in classics in th.
year 1947-8 at St John's College, and became
a fellow there in 1950, and two years later a
college tutor for eleven years. In 1957 he
became an assistant lecturer in classics, then a
lecturer, and a lecturer in philosophy in 1966;
he was then Dean and President of his college.
From 1962 to 1965 he was Stanton Lecturer i.
the Philosophy of Religion. Married with four
children, he became a visiting professor of phi-
losophy at a number of American universities
after 1962, including Cornell, Indiana,
California and Virginia, and also taught in
Australia.
From a northern dissenting family and the
son of a colliery electrician, Bambrough did his
national service as a Bevin boy in a coalmine
from 1944 to 1945. In 1950 his fellowship thesi
was on 'Proof and Persuasion in Plato'; ten years
later he made his name with the oft-reprinted
'Universals and Family Resemblances', and in
1963 with a Mentor paperback, The Philosophy
of Aristotle, a selection widely read. Six years
later Reason, Truth and God was a trenchant
attack on a facile scepticism in theology from
BAMBROUGH
one who always held that religion was mean-
ingless without transcendence. His article 'A
Proof of the Objectivity of Morals' confirmed
his standing as a polemical philosopher, while
a collection of essays on his admired
Cambridge colleague John WISDOM declared
his deepest allegiance among living philoso-
phers. A Hull lecture 'Conflict and the Scope of
Reason' developed into Moral Scepticism and
Moral Knowledge (1979), though a more
ambitious Principia Metaphysica remained
unrealized at his death. From 1972 until 1994
he edited Philosophy.
Often opposed to the fashions of his age, his
remorseless refutations made enemies as well as
friends, while his style, always succinct,
advanced in asperity with the passing years.
Supporting in succession all three political
parties, he never even as a conservative lost his
radical edge, and he was a past master at con-
ceiving startling reasons for affirming familiar
positions in morality and the arts. Believing
that literature no less than philosophy has a
vital cognitive function, he scorned the easy
victories of relativists in debate and any confu-
sion between knowledge and account giving. A
prelinguistic infant, he would say, knows a
great deal. He was equally brisk with facile
appeals to conditioning in dismissing the truth-
claims of literature or moral philosophy.
His reading in poetry and fiction was excep-
tional, and exceptionally employed, and he
could advise a pupil to give up philosophy for
a time to read the great Russian novelists.
Greatly impressed by Rebecca West's remark
that, with the brothers William and Henry
James, it was Henry the novelist who was the
greater philosopher, he was struck above all by
his use in fiction of 'epistemic verbs' such as
knowing, understanding, perceiving and seeing,
as Strether, in The Ambassadors, moved as an
American in Paris towards realizing by slow
stages the full significance of a friend's love
affair. In seminars on critical theory he was
much taken by a remark by Lionel Trilling: 'I
do not know what thought is if Dante and
Shakespeare did not do it.' His admiration for
58
the later writings of WITTGENSTEIN, whom as a
young man he had heard in heated debate with
POPPER and RUSSELL in the Moral Sciences Club
in Cambridge, was an abiding influence on a
mind forever at odds with those who deny
moral truth and yet strive to look knowing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Universals and Family Resemblances',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol
61 (1960-61), pp. 207-22.
'A Proof of the Objectivity of Morals',
American Journal of Jurisprudence, vol. 14
(1969), pp. 37-53.
Reason, Truth and God (1969).
'Objectivity and Objects', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 72 (1971-2), pp
65-81.
Conflict and the Scope of Reason (Hull,
1974)
'Essay on Man', in R.S. Peters (ed.), Nature
and Conduct, Royal Institute of Philosophy
Lectures, vol. 8 (1975), pp. 1-13.
Moral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge
(1979).
Thought, Word and Deed', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 54
(1980), pp. 105-17.
'Discipline and Discipleship', in Ilham
Dilman (ed.), Philosophy and Life: Essays
on John Wisdom (The Hague, 1984), pp.
201-17.
'Articulation and Justification', The Monist,
vol. 71 (July 1988), pp. 311-19.
'Ethics and the Limits of Consistency',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vo
90 (1989-90), pp. 1-15. Reply by Bernard
Williams, 'Reply to the President', ibid.,
pp. 167-170.
Other Relevant Works
(Ed.), The Philosophy of Aristotle: A New
Selection (New York, 1963).
(Ed.), Plato, Popper and Politics: Some
Contributions to a Modern Controversy
(Cambridge, 1967).
'Renford Bambrough Discusses the Idea that

to Reason is to Generalise', Listener, 11
January 1973.
(Ed.), Wisdom: Twelve Essays (Oxford,
1974).
(Ed.), New Essays on Plato and Aristotle
(1979).
George Watson
BARKER, Ernest (1874-1960)
Ernest Barker was born in Woodley, Cheshire on
23 September 1874 and died in Cambridge on 17
February 1960. Born of humble parents, he won
a scholarship to the Manchester Grammar
School. From there he won scholarships to Balliol
College, Oxford, where he took first class
honours in classical moderations (1895), literae
humaniores (1897) and modern history (1898).
He became a lecturer and tutor in modern history
at Oxford from 1898 until 1920. At the same
time he pursued his interests in classical Greek
political thought, publishing his The Political
Thought of Plato and Aristotle in 1906 and
Greek Political Theory: Plato and his
Predecessors twelve years later. He was
appointed Principal of King's College London
in 1920 and (the first) Professor of Political
Science at Cambridge in 1928. He retired from
the post in 1939.
Barker was essentially a polymath scholar,
whose philosophical beliefs were expressed in
studies which ranged from ancient, Christian,
Byzantine and Victorian thought to the modern
political systems of continental Europe. The
enduring focus of his work was the state and its
relationship to the institutions of civil society,
religious and secular. His philosophical ideas
were shaped in the first instance by the idealism
of T.H. Green and Bernard BOSANQUET, whose
influence was felt keenly at the Oxford of his
youth. He took from Green the conception of the
state as an idea, the idea, that is, of the common
59
BARKER
good of society; it was not a mere mechanism for
the harmonization of competing interests as the
utilitarians maintained. However, like Green,
too, Barker emphasized that the idea of the state
stopped well short of existing states. From
Bosanquet he took the notion of groups and
associations as 'organising ideas'. In the years
before World War I, Barker invoked Bosanquet's
interpretation of groups against defences of their
'reality' by pluralist writers such as J.N. Figgis
('The Discredited State', p. 113). Nor could he
accept the implications of pluralism that the
state was simply one association among others;
for Barker, the state provided a legal framework
of rights and duties without which groups would
flounder (ibid., pp. 178-9). But he was not
unsympathetic to the claims of pluralism, and
was a devoted admirer of the legal scholar, F.W.
Maitland, whose work suggested that, as cor-
porate entities which survived the death of their
individual members, groups (and the state) were
central to English history; this was in spite of the
successive efforts of jurists and political thinkers
to deny their status as such. The relationship of
the state to corporate communities, not least
nations and churches (especially the Anglican
Church), became a major interest of Barker's as
a result of his dual idealist and pluralist, as well
as Burkean, heritage.
Barker was an eclectic thinker who strove,
not always successfully, to reconcile opposing
philosophical and political doctrines. Always,
however, he worked within a liberal framework
of ideas in which the individual remained sacro-
sanct. The acknowledged 'master' of his thought
was Aristotle, and it was through Aristotle that
he sought to rein in the excesses of both idealism
and pluralism, as well as address the deficiencies
of democracy and dictatorship in the twentieth
century. Like R.G. COLLJNGWOOD and Benedetto
Croce, he believed that philosophy and history
were mutually reinforcing disciplines; he also
sustained the legacy of R.B. HALDANE in insist-
ing upon the necessity of philosophical vision to
the conduct of politics. His work lapsed into
obscurity after his death but began to attract
attention again with the revival of interest in
BARKER
pluralist political theory and nationalism in the
1990s. His studies of Greek political thought
remain central to the teaching of the subject.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle
(1906).
Political Thought in England from Herbert
Spencer to the Present Day (1915).
Greek Political Theory: Plato and his
Predecessors (1918).
National Character: And the Factors in its
formation (1927).
Church, State and Study (1930).
Age and Youth: Memories of Three
Universities and Father of the Man (1953).
Other Relevant Works
The Discredited State: Thoughts on Politics
before the War', Political Quarterly', vol. 2
(February 1915), pp. 101-21.
(Trans.), Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the
Theory of Society, 1500-1800, 2 vols
(Cambridge, 1934).
The Citizen's Choice (Cambridge, 1938).
(Trans, with notes), The Politics of Aristotle
(Oxford, 1947).
Principles of Social and Political Theory
(Oxford, 1951).
Further Reading,
Grimley, Matthew, Citizenship, Community
and the Church of England: Liberal
Anglican Theories of the State between the
Wars (Oxford, 2004).
Runciman, David, Pluralism and the
Personality of the State (Cambridge,
1997).
Kearney, H., The Importance of Being
British', Political Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 1
(2000), pp. 15-25.
Stapleton, Julia, Englishness and the Study of
Politics: The Social and Political Thought
of Ernest Barker (Cambridge, 1994).
Julia Stapleton
60
BARNES, Jonathan (1942-)
Jonathan Barnes was born in Much Wenlock
on 26 December 1942. He attended City of
London School, and then read literae human-
iores (classics and philosophy) at Balliol
College, Oxford (1961-5). His undergraduate
career was distinguished: a college scholarship,
firsts in both parts of his degree, a University
Prize and scholarships. On graduating, he
remained at first a student at Balliol, but
quickly moved into teaching, with lectureships
in Chicago (1966-7) and at Exeter College,
Oxford (1967- 8). Meanwhile, in 1965, he
had married Jennifer (Postgate), a modern
linguist from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and
they have two daughters.
Barnes's subsequent academic career has
included five main stages. From 1968 to 1978
he was a tutorial fellow in philosophy at Oriel
College, Oxford; from 1978 to 1989 he was a
tutorial fellow in philosophy back at Balliol;
from 1989 to 1994, still remaining at Balliol, he
held an Oxford personal chair in ancient phi-
losophy; from 1994 to 2002 he was Professor
of Ancient Philosophy at the University of
Geneva; finally, from 2002 to date he has been
Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the
University of Paris-Sorbonne. He has also
during his career held a wide variety of visiting
posts in North America, Europe and most
recently Oxford, where he was the John Locke
Lecturer for 2004. He became an FBA in 1987
Barnes's first book, The Ontological
Argument (1972), was on the philosophy of
religion, and concerned the notorious issue of
whether God's real existence can be proved
from truths about the concept of God. Barnes
rejects some common objections to this project,
but finally concludes that it fails because the
term 'God' has simply not been given a clear
sense by the argument's proponents - nor, he
suspects, could it be. The book finely chal-
lenges over-simple treatments of the ontologi-
cal argument, but (as Barnes openly admits) his
own final position is not conclusively argued
either. He published no more on this subject,

and The Ontological Argument remained
something of an isolated adventure; he moved
on to establish his name in ancient philosophy.
The single philosopher for whom Barnes
expresses the greatest admiration is Aristotle.
'He bestrode antiquity like a colossus. No man
before him had contributed so much to
learning. No man afterwards could hope to
rival his achievements.' This comes from
Barnes's 'Past Masters' book Aristotle (1982,
p. 1), a little masterpiece of effective popular-
ization. Prior to this Barnes published his
Posterior Analytics (1975), a translation of
Aristotle's text with Introduction and com-
mentary, in the Clarendon Aristotle series. This
should be read in the second, revised edition
(1993), with its much improved translation
and other corrections. The commentary is sub-
stantial and heavyweight, forceful, packed with
information and rigorously analytic. Barnes
sees Aristotle's Posterior Analytics as 'one of the
most brilliant, original, and influential works in
the history of philosophy', which 'determined
the course of philosophy of science ... for two
millennia' (1993, p. xiv), and Barnes's own
work was in the van of the movement to spread
this appreciation.
Of all Barnes's books, the one for which he
may well become best known is his latest on
Aristotle to date, The Cambridge Companion
to Aristotle (1995), of which he is the editor.
Reviewers have hailed this as 'an impressive
addition' to Aristotelian literature (Jeffrey Carr,
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 47,1997, p. 261),
and 'a true friend' to Aristotle and to his readers
(Catherine Osborne, Classical Review, vol. 49,
1999, p. 115). More than a third of the book
- the Introduction, and the chapters 'Life and
Work', 'Metaphysics' and 'Rhetoric and
Poetics' - are by Barnes himself; others have
contributed chapters on 'Logic', 'Philosophy
of Science', 'Science', 'Psychology', 'Ethics', and
'Polities'. The book is rounded off by a mag-
nificent classified bibliography by Barnes,
Schofield and SORABJI, and a variety of indexes.
The Companion focuses on Aristotle as a
philosopher and specifically from the view-
61
BARNES
point of analytic philosophy (p. x); all the
chapters except 'Life and Work' are critical
examinations, pitched at the level of 'philo-
sophical readers who are new to Aristotle', and
aiming to be 'introductory' but not 'easy'. This
book will surely serve as the basic introduction
for serious students of Aristotle - and as an
important point of reference for more than just
beginners - for many years to come.
Barnes's interests extend both before and
after Aristotle. Physically, his biggest book to
date is The Presocratic Philosophers (1979;
rev. edn, 1982). Its focus is firmly philosophi-
cal: 'to analyse some of the arguments of some
of the early Greek thinkers; and ... to celebrate
the characteristic rationality of Greek thought'
(1982, p. xv). Its range is huge, and it is a rich,
vigorous, sprightly, illuminating, stimulating,
often provocative book - a refreshing foil to
more historically focused treatments of the pre-
Socratics. In addition to this book, Barnes has
also published a very useful sourcebook for
pre-Socratic philosophy, the Penguin Early
Greek Philosophy (1987; rev. edn, 2001),
which contains new translations of all known
fragments together with an instructive sample
of the contexts within which later writers cited
and thus preserved them.
Barnes's post-Aristotelian work spans the six
centuries to c. 300 AD. One major topic of his
interest has been ancient scepticism, particularly
so-called Pyrrhonian scepticism - named after
Pyrrho, a contemporary of Aristotle, but most
fully laid out by Sextus Empiricus in the second
century AD. Barnes has co-authored two books
on Pyrrhonian scepticism with Julia Annas:
The Modes of Scepticism (1985), a sourcebook
with extensive discussion, and later a full trans-
lation of Sextus's Outlines of Scepticism (1994;
rev. edn by Barnes, 2000). Additionally, as sole
author, he has published a very interesting,
acute and lively study of some key aspects of
Pyrrhonism in The Toils of Scepticism (1990).
Barnes's latest two books both concern the
Roman period. Logic and the Imperial Stoa
(1997) - 'offered as a contribution to the
ancient history of logic' (p. ix) - investigates
BARNES
logic's standing within Stoicism during the first
two centuries AD. Barnes argues that logic
remained a vital and popular part of Stoic phi-
losophy through this period. The book draws
on Epictetus's Discourses 1.7, and usefully
includes a translation. It is an impressive
exercise in making a potentially off-putting
subject accessible and interesting. Finally,
Barnes's latest publication to date is an edition
of Porphyry's Introduction (2003), in the new
series of later ancient philosophy texts initi-
ated by Barnes and A.A. Long. This work from
the third century AD was 'for a thousand years
and more ... every student's first text in phi-
losophy' (p. ix). Barnes presents a new English
translation, an engaging Introduction and a
voluminous commentary - a rich mixture of
philosophical analysis and supporting schol-
arly material; it is difficult, at times formidably
so, but fascinating in the glimpses it offers of the
living world of learning that persisted for cen-
turies from the classical Greek period onwards.
Barnes's editorial labours deserve special
mention. His Revised Oxford Translation of
Aristotle was a major enterprise, and a major
benefit to scholars and students. The original,
by then out-of-print translation was substan-
tially improved, and miracles of compression
reduced its twelve volumes to two.
Additionally, Barnes has co-edited many books
with other scholars, including The Cambridge
History of Hellenistic Philosophy and
numerous collections of articles: four volumes
on Aristotle, three each on the Hellenistic and
Roman periods, and more. Most of these books
include a substantial contribution by Barnes
himself. He has also written many other articles
(far too many to list here) and given many
lectures in various European languages.
It is too soon to sum up Barnes's importance
for philosophy in any final way; he is still
working. But the accounts given above of his
books, and the bibliography below (even
though selective) yield some indication of the
nature and range of his contribution to date. He
has played an influential part in recent initia-
tives expanding the study of ancient philosophy
62
into the post-classical period. He has enhanced
appreciation of the pre-Socratic philosophers.
He has also particularly furthered understand-
ing of Aristotle. And his fresh and vigorous
approach to ancient texts, his breadth of schol-
arship, and his cheering wit and style leaven
everything he touches.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Ontological Argument (1972).
(Trans, with comm.), Aristotle: Posterior
Analytics (Oxford, 1975; rev. edn, 1993
The Presocratic Philosophers, 2 vols (1979;
rev. edn, 1 vol., 1982).
Aristotle (Oxford, 1982); rev. edn, Aristotl
A Very Short Introduction (2000).
Early Greek Philosophy (Harmondsworth,
1987; rev. edn, 2001).
The Toils of Scepticism (Cambridge, 1990).
(Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Aristotle (Cambridge, 1995).
Logic and the Imperial Stoa (Leiden, 1997).
(Trans, with comm.), Porphyry: Introduction
(Oxford, 2003).
Other Relevant Works
(Trans.), Giinther Patzig, Aristotle's Theory
of the Syllogism (Dordrecht, 1968).
(Ed. with M. Schofield and R. Sorabji),
Articles on Aristotle (4 vols, 1975-9).
(Introd. and biblio.), Aristotle, The
Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K.
Thomson (Harmondsworth, 1976).
(Ed. with M. Schofield and M. Burnyeat),
Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies in
Hellenistic Philosophy (Oxford, 1980).
(Ed. with J. Brunschwig, M. Burnyeat and M.
Schofield), Science and Speculation: Studies
in Hellenistic Theory and Practice
(Cambridge, 1982).
'Terms and Sentences: Theophrastus on
Hypothetical Syllogisms', Proceedings of
the British Academy, vol. 69 (1983), pp.
279-326.
(Ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle: The
Revised Oxford Translation (2 vols,
Princeton, 1984).

(with J. Annas), The Modes of Scepticism:
Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations
(Cambridge, 1985).
'Ciceron et la Guerre Juste', Bulletin de la
Societe franc, aise de Philosophie (1986),
pp. 37-80.
(Ed. with M. Mignucci), Matter and
Metaphysics: Fourth Symposium
Hellenisticium (Naples, 1988).
'Epicurean Signs', Oxford Studies in Ancient
Philosophy, suppl. (1988), pp. 91-134.
(Ed. with M. Griffin), Philosophia Togata:
Essays on Philosophy and Roman Society
(Oxford, 1989); 2nd edn, Philosophia
Togata I (1997).
'Logical Form and Logical Matter', in A.
Alberti (ed.), Logica, Mente e Persona
(Florence, 1990), pp. 7-119.
'Galen on Logic and Therapy', in F. Kudlien
and R. Durling (eds), Galen's Method of
Healing (Leiden, 1991), pp. 50-102.
(Trans, and ed. with S. Bobzien, K. Flannery
and K. lerodiakonou), Alexander of
Aphrodisias: On Aristotle, Prior Analytics
1.1-7(1991).
(Trans, and ed. with J. Annas), Sextus
Empiricus: Outlines of Scepticism
(Cambridge, 1994; rev. edn by J. Barnes,
2000).
(Ed. with M. Griffin), Philosophia Togata II
(Oxford, 1997).
(Postface), Gottlob Frege, Ideographic, trans.
C. Besson (Paris, 1999).
(Ed. with K. Algra, J. Mansfield and M.
Schofield), The Cambridge History of
Hellenistic Philosophy (Cambridge, 1999).
(Ed. with J. Jouanna), Galien et la
Philosophie: Huit Exposes suivis de
Discussions (Geneva, 2003).
Jane M. Day
63
BARNES
BARNES, Winston Herbert Frederick
(1909-90)
W.H.F. Barnes was born in Ashton, Lancashire
on 30 May 1909 and died in Cleveland on 15
September 1990. He was educated at
Manchester Grammar School and Corpus
Christi College, Oxford, where he was influ-
enced by H.H. PRICE and W.F.R. FlARDiE. He
was awarded a first in both 'Mods' and 'Greats',
graduating BA in 1932, when he was awarded
the John Locke Scholarship. He was appointed
Senior Demy at Magdalen College, Oxford in
1933 but moved to the University of Liverpool,
where he was appointed assistant lecturer (1936)
and then lecturer (1939) in philosophy. During
World War II he served in the RAF Volunteer
Reserve before being appointed Temporary
Principal in the Ministry of Supply (1942-5). He
was Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Durham from 1945 to 1959 and Professor of
Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh
from 1959 to 1963. He was Vice-Chancellor of
the University of Liverpool from 1963 to 1969.
He gave the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in the
academic years 1968 to 1970. (His topic was
'Knowledge and Faith' but his lectures, contrary
to custom, were not published.) His final
appointment was as Sir Samuel Hall Professor of
Philosophy at Manchester University (1970-3)
though, in his retirement, he helped to establish
the University College of Buckingham, of which
he was an honorary fellow (1979-83), as well as
being an emeritus professor of both Liverpool
and Manchester.
Barnes is most noted as a critic of the ana-
lytical philosophy of his day. His inaugural
lecture at Durham on 'Is Philosophy Possible?'
was expanded into The Philosophical
Predicament (1950), in which he sought to
offer some defence of speculative philosophy
against what he saw as a negative misconcep-
tion of the subject. The 'predicament' was
partly that of the new philosophers, especially
the logical positivists, since they 'employ the
modes of reasoning and forms of statement
which they condemn as nonsensical' but it was
BARNES
also that of contemporary philosophy 'when it
faces the danger of forfeiting its true inheritance'
(Philosophical Predicament, p. 8). In the early
part of the book Barnes's main quarry was G.E.
MOORE, and later the logical and therapeutic
positivists. One of his main points was that
analysis always changes what is analysed, that it
is what he called 'interpretation'.
The Philosophical Predicament received some
hostile reviews from analytical philosophers, for
instance from Anthony QuiNTON. But the reason
the book is now largely forgotten is probably
because few would want any more to defend the
narrow view of philosophy it attacked. Barnes is
remembered for some of his articles, especially
two that were anthologized: his attack on the
'myth' of sense-data, and his defence of Berkeley
from the claim of Reginald Jackson that Berkeley
had seriously misunderstood Locke.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Did Berkeley Misunderstand Locke?', Mind,
vol. 49 (1940), pp. 52ff; repr. in C.B.
Martin and D.M Armstrong (eds), Locke
and Berkeley: A Collection of Critical
Essays (1968), pp. 78-85.
'The Myth of Sense-Data', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 45 (1944-5), pp
89-118; repr. in RJ. Swartz (ed.),
Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing (New
York, 1965), pp. 138-67.
'Ethics without Propositions', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 2.
(1948), pp. 1-30.
The Philosophical Predicament (1950).
Other Relevant Works
'Action', Mind, vol. 50 (1941), pp. 243-57
Language, Mind and Morals (Edinburgh,
1961).
Further Reading
Quinton, A., Review of The Philosophical
Predicament, Mind, vol. 62 (1953), pp
107-10.
Stuart Brown
64
BARRETT, Denis Cyril (1925-2003)
Cyril Barrett was born in Dublin on 9 May
1925 and died on 30 December 2003. A Jesuit
priest, he was educated initially at Ampleforth
College in Yorkshire and Clongowes Wood
College, County Kildare, Ireland. His tertiary
education was undertaken at University College
Dublin (BA), University of London (PhD), S
Stanislaus College, Tullamore (Licence in
Philosophy) and Milltown Park, Dublin (STL).
He was a lecturer in philosophy at St Stanislaus
College from 1959 to 1961, but the main part
of his academic career as a philosopher was
spent at the University of Warwick; he began as
a part-time lecturer in 1965 and became reader
in 1971. In 1992, upon retirement from
Warwick, he joined the Jesuit community at
Campion Hall, Oxford, where he became tutor
in philosophy. His main philosophical work
was on WITTGENSTEIN'S thought, with sub-
stantial contributions to aesthetics, ethics and
the philosophy of religion. He was also
extremely active as an art historian and critic.
Barrett's interest in Wittgenstein's approach
to philosophy is evidenced in his editing of
Wittgenstein's students' notes into perhaps his
most cited work, the volume Lectures and
Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and
Religious Belief (1966), and in his own book
Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief
(1991). In the latter, Barrett, whilst noting that
he is attempting a work of commentary and
criticism rather than putting forward his own
ideas, notes that 'whilst differing from
Wittgenstein on certain important points, I
accept his basic approach to both ethics and
religious belief (Wittgenstein, p. viii). In the
book, Barrett defines his programme as follows:
to show that (a) what Wittgenstein had to say
on ethics and religious belief was for him of
the utmost importance, if not of sole impor-
tance; (b) his views on these subjects did not
radically alter throughout his life, appear-
ances to the contrary notwithstanding; and
(c) what Wittgenstein said about ethics was

intimately interwoven with what he said
about religious beliefs.
(Wittgenstein, p. xiv)
In arguing for (a) and (b) of the above, Barrett
has to deal with a commonly held view of
Wittgenstein's career which would make a
sharp distinction between Wittgenstein's views
at the time of the Tractatus logico-philosophi-
cus and those of the period of the Philosophical
Investigations. According to this view, in the
former work, Wittgenstein dismisses statements
of ethics and religion as simply nonsense,
because they do not represent anything in the
world. This dismissal is a result of his under-
standing of meaningful language as presenting
a picture of states of affairs in the world: if
there is no state of affairs in the world to be
pictured, then language cannot represent it.
(This is the so-called 'picture theory' of
language.) The commonly held view goes on to
note that, by the time of the Philosophical
Investigations, Wittgenstein's view of language
has changed and he has rejected the picture
theory in favour of a view that has language ful-
filling a variety of roles (or as Wittgenstein puts
it, 'language-games') rather than performing
the sole task of picturing states of affairs. This
allows the possibility of a meaningful use of
language in ethics and religion.
Barrett has a relatively simple task in arguing
for (a) - that ethics and religion were of impor-
tance to Wittgenstein throughout his career.
Such a concern is amply supported by bio-
graphical and textual evidence. On the other
hand, it remains to show how such a concern
can be reconciled to the system of the Tractatus
whilst remaining consistent with the views of
language put forward in the Philosophical
Investigations. Barrett does this by noting that
for both the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and
of the Investigations, the essence of ethics and
religion lie 'in praxis, in the way of living, in the
believer's attitude to life. This is why words
do not matter here' (Wittgenstein, p. 188). This
is consistent with the Tractatus because it does
not pretend that religious and ethical language
65
BARRETT
stands in a simple pictorial relationship with
any state of affairs within the world, but in an
attitude to the world as a whole:
One is either happy or unhappy, in agree-
ment with the world or fruitlessly at variance
with it; either defiant of it, detached from it,
spurning its comforts and spiritually unaf-
fected by its miseries or pursuing its comforts
fruitlessly, hopelessly attempting to bend it to
one's will in order to avert its miseries,
immersed in temporality or living in the
detachment of the eternal present.
(Wittgenstein, p. 58)
Whilst such a view does entail that religious and
ethical language is 'unsinnig' (nonsensical), that
cannot here be understood as being simply
equivalent to our normal understanding of that
word: it becomes a technical term indicating
correctly that religious and ethical language
does not stand in a pictorial relationship to
states of affairs but performs another task of
helping us 'to see the world aright' (ibid., p. 20).
It remains for Barrett to explain how this
view of the Tractatus can be carried forward to
the position of the Investigations. Here, the
problem is less that religious and ethical
language might in some straightforward way be
dismissable as nonsense, but rather that, given
the wider view of the functions of language
given in the latter work, there might no longer
appear any difficulties at all. Just as there are
different language-games for mathematics, phi-
losophy, flirting and poetry - all with their
own conventions, all to be judged by their own
internal standards rather than by the standards
of the picture theory of language - so, it might
be said, there are the language-games of religion
and ethics, with their own rules which must not
be confused with or judged by the rules of, say,
simple factual observation or science. Against
such an analysis, Barrett wants to deny that, 'as
a language-game or set of language-games,
expressions of value become any more sayable
in later Wittgensteinian thought than they were
earlier. They become more animated, that is all'
BARRETT
(Wittgenstein, p. 122). Barrett argues that
Wittgenstein does not abandon the picture
theory in the Investigations, but rather that he
adds to it: 'It is no longer the sole account of
language' (ibid.). As far as the language-games
of ethics and religion are concerned, Wittgenstein
has not altered the basic characterizations of the
Tractatus, although he has more to say about
them. Being a language-game (or language-
games) does not make ethics and religion less
'nonsensical': 'by being a "language-game" a
form of expression does not eo ipso become
expressible. It may be a language-game of the
inexpressible. The game may be to show rather
than to say, just as it was in the Tractatus period
...'(Wittgenstein, p. 233).
Barrett has more to say in this work on the
detail of Wittgenstein's analysis of religion and
ethics in both the Tractatus and the
Investigations. His achievement is less in the
originality of any of the individual points he
brings forward, but rather in bringing them
together to provide a coherent and highly plau-
sible overview of Wittgenstein's thought in this
area throughout his career. Although he
touches on the correctness of Wittgenstein's
position as an account of religion and ethics, the
work is not primarily an evaluation of his
views. The incompleteness of the study is noted
by Barrett himself: 'Unlike a proper cook, I
have been a preparer of a meal, putting
thoughts together and letting them cook them-
selves or not, as the notion takes them'
(Wittgenstein, p. 251). However, that some-
thing like Wittgenstein's position is held by
Barrett himself is confirmed by a number of his
papers dealing directly with the philosophy of
religion. For example, in his paper 'Faith and
Rationality' (1989), having reviewed the pur-
ported rational arguments for the existence
(and non-existence) of God, he concludes: 'But
one must emphasize the monstrousness of reli-
gious belief and its non-rationality in order to
bring out its true nature. On the other hand one
must emphasize the fact that it is not irrational,
much less that its virtue lies in its irrationality'
('Faith and Rationality', p. 143).
66
As noted earlier, as well as his strictly philo-
sophical work, Barrett wrote extensively as an
art critic and art historian. Key interests here
were in the fields of Op Art (e.g., Op Art, 1970)
and Irish art (see Other Relevant Works in bib-
liography below). In the latter field, Barrett was
one of a number of scholars who worked to
create an awareness of the contribution of the
visual arts to the development of Irish identity.
In view of this extensive critical activity and
Barrett's philosophical interest in Wittgenstein,
the paper 'Wittgenstein, Leavis and Literature'
(1988) is noteworthy as a bridge between the
two spheres. Indeed, Barrett's comment on
Wittgenstein in this paper might well stand as a
comment on his own work: 'As with much of
Wittgenstein's thought, it is not difficult to find
someone who had similar ideas before him.
What is special about him, however, is what
ideas he selects and rejects, and his reasons for
selecting and rejecting them' ('Wittgenstein,
Leavis and Literature', p. 391). Written as a
response to the remarks on Wittgenstein by the
prominent Cambridge English critic, F.R. Leavis
(in Rush Rhees, ed., Recollections of
Wittgenstein, 1984), the paper contains an assess-
ment of Wittgenstein, both as a literary critic and
as a prose writer. As Barrett went on to note in
Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief, an
abiding emphasis in Wittgenstein's work is how
language may convey something that is, in some
sense, unsayable (see above). On Wittgenstein's
prose style as a writer of philosophy, Barrett
notes that, despite stylistic differences between the
Tractatus and the Investigations, the overall effect
of the two works is 'not dissimilar' ('Wittgenstein,
Leavis and Literature', p. 397). Both contain an
exposition of his thought in bursts rather than in
continuous argument. Whilst the Tractatus is
highly architectonic and the Investigations more
free-ranging, both are cryptic and, as Barrett
delicately puts it, make 'demands on the reader'
(ibid.). Barrett relates these stylistic difficulties to
Wittgenstein's position that: 'a philosophical
idea should dawn on the reader and not be
shoved under his nose' (ibid.). This underlying
view is related to other aspects of Wittgenstein's

understanding of literature that Barrett identi-
fies: for example, 'that literary expression
should be spontaneous' (ibid., p. 394). This in
turn is connected to the claim that 'the word
and the expression and the idea are almost one
and the same' (ibid., p. 395). As Barrett notes
such stylistic issues raise important points for
the writing of philosophy: 'If, as seems obvious
to me, Wittgenstein was a literary genius ...
should other philosophers attempt to imitate
him? On the other hand, if his way of present-
ing philosophical ideas is an indictment of the
conventional method ... how can (or could) the
conventional methods be "improved"?' (ibid.,
p. 399).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and
Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology
and Religious Belief (Oxford, 1966).
Op Art (1970).
'Wittgenstein, Leavis and Literature', New
Literary History, vol. 19 (Winter 1988), pp.
385-401.
'Faith and Rationality', Philosophy, suppl. 24
(1989), pp. 135-43.
Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief
(Oxford, 1991).
Other Relevant Works
The Scandal of Modern Art', Studies, vol. 51
(Spring 1962), pp. 117-34.
'Concepts and Concept Formation',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
63 (1962-3), pp. 127-44.
'The Aesthetics of St Thomas Re-Examined',
Philosophical Studies Ireland, vol. 12
(1963), pp. 107-24.
'Art as "Covert Metaphysics"', Philosophical
Studies Ireland, vol. 13 (1964), pp. 141-53.
'Description and Evaluation', Philosophical
Studies Ireland, vol. 14 (1965), pp. 139-50.
(Ed.), Collected Papers on Aesthetics (Oxford,
1965).
'Medieval Art Criticism', British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 5 (January 1965), pp.
25-36.
67
BARRETT
(with Harry Blocker), 'Symposium:
Wittgenstein and Problems of Objectivity in
Aesthetics', British Journal of Aesthetics,
vol. 7 (April 1967), pp. 158-74.
An Introduction to Optical Art (1971).
'Art and Polities', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 46 (1972)
pp. 125-38.
'Is the Artist Really Necessary?', Dialectics and
Humanism, vol. 3 (Spring 1976), pp.
81-92.
'Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic Judgements', in
The Judgement of Art: A Symposium
(Aberystwyth, 1978).
'Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of
Perception', Philosophy, suppl. 21 (1987),
pp. 123-39.
'The Concept of Leisure: Idea and Ideal', in
Tom Winnifrith and Cyril Barrett (eds), The
Philosophy of Leisure (New York, 1989).
'The Language of Ecstasy and the Ecstasy of
Language', in Martin Warner (ed.), The
Bible as Rhetoric (New York, 1990).
'The Logic of Mysticism', Philosophy, suppl.
31 (1992), pp. 61-9.
'Believing in Order to Understand',
Philosophy, suppl. 41 (1996), pp. 223-33.
Further Reading
Anon., The Times, 15 January 2004.
Leavis, F.R., 'Memories of Wittgenstein', in
Rush Rhees (ed.), Recollections of
Wittgenstein (Oxford, 1984).
Mathews, William, 'Cyril Barrett', The Tablet,
24 January 2004, p. 32.
Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations,
trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford, 1953).
, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, trans.
D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (1963;
original German edn, 1921).
Stephen Watt
BASSON
BASSON, Anthony Henry (1916-2004)
Anthony Henry Basson was born in
Northwood Hills, Middlesex on 12 September
1916 and died in Bath on 19 January 2004. He
entered University College London (UCL) as .
mature age student in 1950-51, studying phi-
losophy under AJ. AYER, and graduating in
June 1953 with BA honours in philosophy. In
that same year he and D.J. O'CONNOr pub-
lished Introduction to Symbolic Logic. One of
the earliest British textbooks on modern logic,
it went through three editions. In October
Basson was appointed assistant lecturer in the
Department of Philosophy at UCL, and
resigned in 1968 as senior lecturer before takin
up the Chair of Philosophy at St David's
College, Lampeter in 1969. St David's College
later became the Lampeter branch of the
University of Wales. In 1962 Basson changed
his name by deed poll to Anthony Pike
Cavendish and from then on published under
that name. However, most of his publications
appeared before he changed his name.
Basson was encouraged by Ayer to write an
introductory account of the philosophy of
David Hume. Published in 1958, Basson's book
became a successful text for several genera-
tions of students. It discussed not only familiar
topics - imagination, understanding, percep-
tion, morals, material objects - but, less famil-
iarly, the relation of Hume's thought to that of
the ancient Greek sceptics. The notes to the
chapter display Basson's interest in the history
of philosophy at a time when enthusiasm for
the procedures and problems of the new
analytic philosophy was making historical
studies increasingly unpopular with both
students and teachers.
The Basson-O'Connor book on symbolic
logic is modelled on American texts of the
period, and deals with such standard topics as
the calculus of propositions, the predicate
calculus and the axiomatic method, before
briefly discussing more advanced developments
of which decision procedures and satisfiability
are two. It is a notably compact book, and
68
closes with an account of the relation of tradi-
tional syllogistic logic to modern logic. Between
the mid 1940s and the early 1960s Basson also
published almost a dozen papers on, first, the
interrelationships among logic, language and
philosophy, and, second, the traditional
problems of substance, truth, the immortality
of the soul and the existence of material objects.
On the existence of material objects, Basson
concludes that we can know that they exist
because 'doubt of material facts rests on cer-
tainty of some others', and 'doubt of the suffi-
ciency of evidence likewise rests on certainty of
the sufficiency of other evidence'. Hence
Basson's paper gives various arguments for
believing that 'Doubt is in fact derivative, and
certainty ultimate' ('Existence of Material
Objects', p. 317). On the immortality of the
soul, Basson makes Socrates say that any soul
that exactly resembled the soul of Plato would
be Plato's soul. In order, then, for us to 'speak
truly' of its destruction, it must be impossible
for us 'to conceive of the existence of anything
exactly resembling it'. Therefore, Plato's soul
can never truly be said to be destroyed
('Immortality of the Soul', p. 33). It must be
immortal. This unconvincing conclusion
remains both for Socrates' companion, Crito,
and the reader, to consider critically.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(with D.J. O'Connor), Introduction to
Symbolic Logic (1953).
David Hume (195S).
Other Relevant Works
The Existence of Material Objects', Mind,
vol. 55 (October, 1946), pp. 308-18.
'The Problem of Substance', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 49 (1948-9)
pp. 65-72.
'The Immortality of the Soul', Mind, vol. 59
(January 1950), pp. 23-34.
'Unsolvable Problems', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 57 (1956-7), pp
269-80.

Further Reading
Wood, O.P., Review of Introduction to
Symbolic Logic, Mind, vol. 55 (1956), pp.
107-10.
Woozley, A.D., Review of David Hume,
Mind, vol. 58 (1959), pp. 570-71
Robert Brown
BATESON, William (1861-1926)
William Bateson was born in Whitby on 8
August 1861 and died in Merton, Surrey on 8
February 1926. His father was the Master of St
John's College, Cambridge. Bateson was sent to
Rugby, but he achieved little at school, and it
was only on going up to his father's college in
1879 that he found scope for his love of natural
history. He gained a first in both parts of the
Cambridge Natural Sciences Tripos, winning a
college scholarship in 1882. He became one o
Francis Balfour's students, and studied the
pattern of evolution through studies of mor-
phology and comparative embryology. From
1883 to 1885 Bateson studied the worm-like
Balanoglossus, at W.K. Brooks's marine
biology station in Hampton, Virginia. As he
attempted to explain the origin of segmenta-
tion, Bateson became convinced that this must
have evolved through a discontinuous process.
Bateson turned from his work on inverte-
brate morphology to investigate the nature of
individual development and the sources of vari-
ation. In the resulting Materials for the Study of
Variation (1894) he argued that variation was
fundamentally discontinuous, and that as a
result, evolution must also be so. He also
claimed that patterns of evolution were deter-
mined less by environmental factors than by
morphological constraints. This led to fierce
controversies with gradualist neo-Darwmians
such as W.F.R. Weldon and Karl PEARSON.
In 1900 Bateson rediscovered the mid-nine-
69
BATESON
teenth-century experiments of Gregor Mendel,
whose model of inheritance seemed to support
Bateson's emphasis on discontinuous variation.
Bateson translated and championed Mendel's
work, and in 1906 coined the term 'genetics'.
The rise of this new science helped Bateson's
career: in 1908 he accepted a newly created
Chair of Biology at Cambridge University, only
to resign it less than two years later to become
the Director of the John Innes Horticultural
Institution, which became a major research
centre under his direction. Bateson's own
research, however, became less influential after
1910 because he refused to accept the connec-
tion between Mendelian factors and chromo-
somes, and so became isolated from the chro-
mosome theorists who transformed genetics.
In the last years of his life Bateson gave many
popular lectures and addresses in Britain and
North America. He became a fellow of the
Royal Society in 1894 and was awarded its
medal in 1920.
While primarily an assiduous experimenter,
Bateson's field necessarily involved him in con-
troversies of wider philosophical concern. While
he recognized that eugenics might have a role to
play in the improvement of the human race, he
thought the state of knowledge about human
genetics far too uncertain to support most of
the repressive reforming schemes popular among
eugenists. He also became inadvertently involved
in the early stages of the debate between evolu-
tion and creationism in North America. In a
1922 address to the American Association for
the Advancement of Science in Toronto, Bateson
explored the difficulties of determining just how
the origin of species had come to pass, given the
state of genetic knowledge at the time. His
account of these difficulties was so convincing
that despite his claim that evolution must have
happened, his speech was taken up by journal-
ists and creationists as evidence that evolution
could not be true.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Materials for the Study of Variation (1894).
Mendel's Principles of Heredity: A Defence
BATESON
(1902).
Mendel's Principles of Heredity (1909).
Problems of Genetics (1913).
Other Relevant Works
William Bateson3 FRS, Naturalist: His Essays
and Addresses together with a Short
Account of his Life, ed. Beatrice Bateson
(1928).
Scientific Papers of William Bateson, ed. R.
C.Punnett,2vols(1928).
Further Reading
'William Bateson', Dictionary of Scientific
Biography.
Richard K. England
BAX, Ernest Belfort (1854-1926)
Ernest Belfort Bax was born in Leamington on
23 July 1854 and died on 26 November 1926.
He briefly attended a school in Hampstead,
but was mostly educated by private tutors,
before going to the Stuttgart Conservatorium
to study music. Although he soon gave up the
idea of being a composer, becoming, instead,
an assistant reporter in Berlin for the Standard,
he developed a lifelong interest in philosophy
while in Germany. His philosophical guide
was Edward von Hartmann, with whom he
had lengthy discussions about idealist meta-
physics. Earlier Bax had been inspired by the
Paris Commune, taking from it the lesson, 'the
highest and indeed only true religion for
human beings was that which had for its object
devotion to the future social life of Humanity'
(Reminiscences, p. 29). Back in London, Bax
mixed with French exiles and socialists who
appear to have introduced him to the work of
Karl Marx. In 1881 he wrote one of the first
sympathetic pieces on Marx to appear in
English for Modern Thought. Thereafter his
70
philosophy sought to bridge idealism, posi-
tivism and Marxism. It was a mix very differ-
ent from the evangelical liberalism of his
family.
Bax married twice, first to Emily, with
whom he had seven children, and then, after
Emily's death in 1893, to Maria. His father
had become wealthy from a wholesale and
retail business in the mackintosh trade. Thus,
although Bax was called to the bar in 1892,
after which he practised law, he did so only
intermittently being financially secure. Indeed,
he devoted himself to philosophy and politics.
In the early 1880s he joined the Democratic
Federation, and, before long, he had become a
member of its executive committee. The
Democratic Federation began as a collection of
radicals, but as the more moderate members
left, so it moved towards an avowedly social-
ist position, eventually, in 1884, changing its
name to Social Democratic Federation (SDF).
At the end of 1884 Bax and almost half of the
members split away to form the Socialist
League, partly in protest at the authoritarian
style of its leader, H.M. Hyndman, and partly
because of their doubts about engaging in elec-
toral politics. By 1889, anarchists and impos-
sibilists had effective control of the League, so
Bax, who did not oppose Parliamentary action
as such, resigned from it and rejoined the SDF.
Although Bax played an active part in the early
socialist movement, he was not good at public
speaking or agitation, and his philosophy typ-
ically remained too abstract and difficult to
have much impact on the movement.
According to Bax, Kant's metaphysics con-
tained two possible paths of development. The
later history of German idealism consisted of
the working out of these two paths. On the one
hand, Hegel stressed the 'think' of Kant's unity
of apperception and so fell prey to the intel-
lectualist fallacy of reducing reality to reason.
Yet Hegel's dialectic rightly captured the
dynamic nature of the world: it was a revolu-
tionary concept that showed all fixed distinc-
tions to be merely temporal. Moreover,
whereas the Kantian categorical imperative

invoked a transcendental, quasi-religious
source of morality, the dialectic showed that
morality depended on the needs of society,
although Hegel himself had unfortunately
reined in the radical implications of this idea
by identifying the state, rather than society, as
the embodiment of our needs. On the other
hand, Bax continued, Schopenhauer stresses
the T of Kant's unity of apperception. Thus he
rightly overturns Hegel's panlogism by an
appeal to the 'will': he derives thought from
a deeper and non-conscious reality.
Schopenhauer also believed that all wanting
implies suffering, so he adopted a pessimism
in which the best hope is for the will to rec-
ognize its own futility. Here Bax suggested
that Schopenhauer's 'will' could not be the
root principle of reality since, according to
Schopenhauer's own ethical theory, it negated
itself and negation implies the destruction of
the original substance - 'the Will as thing-in-
itself would seem to be not merely a basal
element, but itself a concrete' ('Introduction'
to Selected Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer, p.
xlv). Although von Hartmann had attempted
to overcome this problem by replacing the
concept of the will with that of the uncon-
scious, his efforts had run aground on his rejec-
tion of Hegel's dialectic in favour of
Schopenhauer's pessimism.
Bax's philosophy thus attempted to develop
the Kantian unity of apperception in a way
that avoided Hegel's panlogism by adopting
an alogical principle such as the 'will' or
'unconscious' but in a way that nonetheless
retained Hegel's dialectic with what he took to
be its radical implications. He began by defend-
ing a primary unity between the universal
object or consciousness-in-general and the uni-
versal subject or the universal-I. Then he sug-
gested that all experience involves the negation
of this basic unity: it divides reality into subject
or Ego and object or feltness so that the subject
takes the object to be independent of itself.
Thought then appears as the third term of a
primary synthesis in that it reaffirms the unity
of all against experience: although our imme-
71
BAX
diate intuition is that the individual is absolute,
philosophy or thought shows the particular-I to
be part of a universal-I at one with a universal
object. Bax thereby makes both the primary
unity and the primary negation prior to
thought. In being prior to thought, they are, he
explains, alogical; that is to say, they constitute
a reality that thought, our logical categories,
cannot properly capture. For Bax, 'we find,
throughout the whole range of Reality, that
activity of the Subject, which we call Thought,
universalizing, defining and reducing to its
special forms or categories the a-logical element
of feeling' (The Problem of Reality, p. 155).
In Bax's analysis of reality, we thus find both
a development of von Hartmann's idea of a
fundamental reality beyond thought, and a
metaphysical basis for the Marxist dialectic.
The dialectic described the way thought
operated on experience; it was a truth about
consciousness-in-general and so reality itself.
History is the logical movement of the dialec-
tic manifested in the progress of consciousness-
in-general. For Bax, the end of this progress was
socialism, so socialism was inevitable in the
strong sense of being a logical necessity
deducible from the nature of reality itself.
However, Bax continued, to say this is to treat
history only logically from the perspective of
thought, when behind the logical there lurks the
alogical. The existence of the alogical implies
that socialism in inevitable only in a timeless
sense. 'The Category must be realized; the
logical course of human development must
obtain; but the individual working in his own
element, so to say, the form of all quantitative
Particularity - Time, to wit - can indefinitely
delay or accelerate its realisation' (The Problem
of Reality, p. 161). The realization of socialism
here depends on an ideological struggle within
suitable economic contexts.
Socialism, for Bax, was the resolution of the
primary negation between subject and object,
between the particular-I and the universal-I.
The socialist ethic is thus one in which indi-
viduals recognize they are not atomistic units
but rather part of a larger social whole. Bax
BAX
then drew on the republican positivism of the
Commune to give content to this social ethic.
The revolutionary trinity of liberty, equality
and fraternity describes the proper relationship
of the particular-I to the universal-I. Equally,
Bax saw liberty in terms of realizing that one's
true interests are one with those of the com-
munity, and this seems to imply that it actually
incorporates equality and fraternity. To realize
such liberty, Bax suggested, requires property,
but whereas capitalism provides liberty for the
few through private property, socialism will
provide liberty by establishing collective own-
ership. Bax defined his ethic in contrast to
Christianity and bourgeois individualism at
least as much as capitalism. He believed that
Christianity concentrated on subjective virtues
concerned with personal piety, not on objective
virtues concerned with a social consciousness.
The false ethic of Christianity creates hypocrisy,
as people are more concerned to appear to be
good people than to do good deeds.
Within the British socialist movement, Bax
spoke out vehemently against feminism in a
way that made him controversial. Similarly,
within the international movement, although
he contributed to the development of a theory
of imperialism, his idealism ran contrary to
the orthodox historical materialism of the
Socialist International: he challenged this
orthodoxy in a debate with Karl Kautsky, its
leading exponent, in Neue Zeit. Mind you,
Bax argued even more vehemently against the
revisionism of Eduard Bernstien, whom he
wanted to expel from the International.
Despite Bax's cosmopolitan philosophy and
his involvement in the Socialist International,
the outbreak of World War I saw him side
with his national government. After the war,
Bax briefly opposed the Bolshevik Revolution
as an attempt to bypass the inevitable process
of history, but by the summer of 1918 he had
come to welcome it with only minor reserva-
tions. Although his idealist philosophy had no
place within the Soviet Union, he has had some
influence on the development of idealist, and
especially Kantian, readings of Marx. Victor
72
Adler, one of the leading Austro-Marxists, for
example, translated a number of Bax's essays
into German while imprisoned for involve-
ment in the train strike of 1889.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Handbook of the History of Philosophy
(1886).
The Religion of Socialism (1886).
The Ethics of Socialism (1889).
The Problem of Reality: Being Outline
Suggestions for a Philosophical
Reconstruction (1892).
The Social Side of the Reformation in
Germany, 3 vols (1894-1903).
The Roots of Reality: Being Suggestions for
a Philosophical Reconstruction (1907).
Problems of Men, Mind, and Morals (1912).
Reminiscences of a Mid and Late Victorian
(1918).
The Real, the Rational, and the Alogical:
Being Suggestions for a Philosophical
Reconstruction (1920).
Other Relevant Works
Jean-Paul Marat (18SQ).
'Karl Marx', Modern Thought, vol. 3 (1881),
pp. 349-54.
'Hartmann's "Religious Consciousness of
Humanity"', Modern Thought, vol. 4
(1882), pp. 177-81.
Introduction to Kant's Prolegomena and
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science (ISS3).
(with Charles Bradlaugh), Will Socialism
Benefit the English People? (1887).
Introduction to Selected Essays of Arthur
Schopenhauer (1891).
Outlooks from the New Standpoint (1891).
The Story of the French Revolution (1891).
(with William Morris), Socialism: Its Growth
and Outcome (IS94).
A Short History of the Paris Commune
(1895).
Introduction to Boethius's Consolation of
Philosophy (1897).
Outspoken Essays on Social Subjects (1897).

Jean-Paul Marat: The People's Friend
(1900).
(with Harry Quelch), A New Catechism of
Socialism (1900).
(with J.H. Levy), Socialism and
Individualism (1904).
Essays in Socialism: New and Old (1906).
The Legal Subjection of Men (1908).
The Fraud of Feminism (1913).
German Culture: Past and Present (1915).
The Analysis of Reality', in J.H. Muirhead
(ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy
(1924).
Further Reading
Arch, Robert, Ernest Belfort Bax: Thinker
and Pioneer (1927).
Bevir, Mark, 'Ernest Belfort Bax: Marxist,
Idealist, and Positivist', Journal of the
History of Ideas, vol. 54 (1993), pp.
119-35.
Cowley, John, The Victorian Encounter with
Marx: A Study of Ernest Belfort Bax
(1991).
Crick, Martin, The History of the Social
Democratic Federation (Keele, 1994).
Hunt, Karen, Equivocal Feminists: The
Social Democratic Federation and the
Woman Question 1884-1911
(Cambridge, 1996).
Pierson, Stanley, 'Ernest Belfort Bax
18 54-1926: The Encounter of Marxism
and Late Victorian Culture', Journal of
British Studies, vol. 12 (1972).
Robertson, A., 'Belfort Bax Centenary',
Monthly Record (October 1954).
Mark Bevir
BELL, Arthur Clive Heward (1881-1964)
Clive Bell was born in East Shefford, Berkshire
on 16 September 1881 and died in London on
73
BELL
17 September 1964. A portrait of him by Roger
Fry, painted around 1924, hangs in London's
National Portrait Gallery. Bell studied at Trinity
College, Cambridge, where, through member-
ship of the elitist group, the Apostles, he came
into contact with such students as Lytton
Strachey and Leonard Woolf, who were later to
form the nucleus of the 'Bloomsbury Group',
dedicated to living out the words of G.E.
MOORE in Principia ethica that 'the pleasures of
human intercourse and the enjoyment of beau-
tiful objects ... form the rational ultimate end
of social progress' (Moore, pp. 188-9). In 1907
he married another founding member of the
group, Virginia Woolf's younger sister, Vanessa
Stephen. She was later to become a pioneering
abstract painter as well as the lover both of
Bell's colleague Roger FRY and, later, the
painter Duncan Grant. Bell nonetheless
remained on intimate terms with all three, in
keeping with the group's liberated attitude to
life. Vanessa had two sons by Bell: Quentin,
who became a writer, and Julian, who became
a Marxist poet and was killed in 1937 fighting
for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.
Bell himself had been a conscientious objector
in World War I, which he attacked in a
pamphlet, written in 1915, Peace at Once. In
1910 and 1912 Bell along with Fry organized
ground-breaking art exhibitions at London's
Grafton Galleries, devoted to post-impression-
ist painting - a term coined by them that stuck.
These exhibitions played a major part in awak-
ening British audiences to twentieth-century
modern art movements as exemplified, above
all, by the paintings of Cezanne, Matisse and
early cubism, whose formalist emphasis on
powerful structures of line, colour and shape
contrasted markedly both with the anecdotal
focus of Pre-Raphaelite art and the impres-
sionist emphasis on atmosphere that were still
in fashion at the time, and for which Bell had
little but contempt. However, unlike those such
as the futurist painter Wyndham Lewis, who
defended modern art in terms of its opposition
to the culture that preceded it, Bell and Fry
were unanimous that what really mattered was
BELL
to see such art in terms of its continuity with the
past. Cezanne, for example, is linked as much
with the geometric abstractions of early
Byzantine mosaics and Sumerian sculpture as
with his contemporaries.
In 1914 Bell set out this essentialist doctrine
in his celebrated and succinctly titled work,
Art. A heady mixture of criticism, history and
philosophy, Art is written in an ex cathedra
style whose authoritativeness owes much to
the intuitionism of G.E. Moore. Moore had
argued that just as no reason can be given for
the fact that we see red other than that we just
see it, so too in the ethical realm do we possess
a similar 'moral sense' which enables us to 'see'
the moral features of a situation just as directly,
although in practice not all people have this
ability equally. Bell, under Moore's influence,
aimed to produce a similar account for aes-
thetic perception, echoing Moore's natural/non-
natural distinction in ethics with a comparable
one between an artwork's non-aesthetic
subject-matter, for example, the mountain
painted by Cezanne, and its aesthetic structure
- in this case, Cezanne's solid geometric chunks
of orange, green and purple that shape up for
the sensitive art lover into what Bell calls 'sig-
nificant form'. This is 'the quality common to
Santa Sophia and the windows of Chartres,
Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese
carpets, Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and the
masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca
and Cezanne' (Art, 1987, p. 8).
An essentialist through and through, Bell
regards significant form not just as the defining
quality of art, but as its holy grail. Insofar as
'significant' implies human intention (and Bell
is none too clear about this), the natural world
is excluded as an object of aesthetic contem-
plation which departs dramatically from the
Kantian tradition. Such a conception of art
necessarily downgrades all works that elevate
subject-matter over form, as do works like
Friths's genre paintings such as Paddington
Station or seventeenth-century Dutch tavern
scenes which all tend to the aesthetically trivial.
Just as misconceived for Bell are those works
74
that sacrifice form to atmosphere, such as the
landscapes of Turner, who is dismissed as 'an
after dinner poet' (Art, 1987, pp. 173-4).
Ironically, Bell's aesthetic puritanism leads him
to a degree of iconoclasm reminiscent of that
other great savager of the canon, Tolstoy in
What is Art?, albeit that Tolstoy is driven by a
moral puritanism that is the polar opposite of
Bell's aestheticism. In a provocative remark
calculated to give anyone of Tolstoy's persua-
sion apoplexy, he argues that 'To appreciate a
work of art, we need bring with us nothing
from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs,
no familiarity with its emotions' (Art, 1987,
p. 25). It is not that such concerns are unim-
portant but that for Bell they are simply not the
concern of art, which should ideally be focused
on our delight in the visible structures of colour,
line and shape alone. Sixty years earlier, in The
Beautiful in Music, the Austrian aesthetician
Edward Hanslick had argued the same for
music, that 'sound and motion' (Hanslick,
p. 48) alone concern the real music lover, and
that all representative and expressive elements
constitute a distraction.
Bell grounds the authenticity of significant
form squarely in the first-person arousal of
what he calls 'aesthetic emotion'. This would
seem to make his account, in some ways, an
idiosyncratic version of the expression theory of
art, associated with Croce and COLLINGWOOD
- idiosyncratic in that it focuses on one emotion
alone: 'The starting point for all systems of aes-
thetics must be the personal experience of a
peculiar emotion' (Art, 1987, p. 6). However,
insofar as significant form and aesthetic
emotion are here defined in terms of each other,
this definition has often been accused of circu-
larity. It can be argued, nonetheless, that Bell
does break out of any vicious circle by provid-
ing further information on aesthetic emotion.
Negatively, it is described as being unlike any
other emotion, bringing complete detachment
from our utilitarian and cognitive concerns, in
a way reminiscent of Kant and Schopenhauer.
Positively, he describes it as ecstatic, referring to
'the austere and thrilling raptures of those who

have climbed the cold, white peaks of art' (ibid.,
p. 33). Furthermore, for all its otherworldliness,
it still depends on 'a sense of form and colour
and a knowledge of three-dimensional space'
(ibid., p. 27), which, after all, constitute the
most basic fabric of our everyday perceptions.
Although, as we have seen, significant form
appears most clearly in the abstractions of
twentieth-century artists such as Cezanne and
the cubists, in Oriental textiles, African carving
and the like, Bell argues that it may also be
found in representational art which subordi-
nates subject-matter to aesthetic concerns, as in
the works of Poussin and Claude. Strictly
speaking, of course, it has to be said that 'sig-
nificant form' is a real misnomer here, insofar
as in its purest manifestations it appears to be
no more than sensuous, perceptual configura-
tions signifying nothing at all. Perhaps to avoid
this consequence Bell tentatively offers a
further, somewhat overblown 'metaphysical
hypothesis' that significant form may make us
aware of 'the God in everything ... of the all
pervading rhythm' (ibid., p. 69) - thereby rein-
troducing extra-perceptual significance, despite
having earlier ruled it out.
More problematic however, is Bell's unfor-
tunate conflation of art with aesthetic interest.
Since Kant's third Critique, aesthetic experi-
ence per se has been primarily identified with
our delight in the perceptual richness of the
world in general, of which art is only a subclass.
Furthermore, art itself is clearly a much wider
class than that of the aesthetic, being a product
of human intention that is typically concerned
not just with aesthetic exploration but with
that very 'knowledge of life's affairs and
emotions' which Bell so contemptuously dis-
misses. Even many of Cezanne's most aesthet-
ically intriguing pictures, such as The Card
Players, are equally full of human interest.
Thus, Bell's attempt to squeeze all art into the
confines of the aesthetic looks as misguided as
Tolstoy's attempt to deny art status to any
works that failed to meet his narrow moral
criteria. Both theories fly in the face of the
complex nature of art. Furthermore, as many
75
BELL
have argued, there is no way that form and
subject-matter can be finally separated in
artworks insofar as the two modify each other
- as when the 'broken glass' cubist aesthetic of
Picasso's Guernica dramatically alters our per-
ception of war, or when the whole aesthetic
structure of Breughel's Fall of Icarus alters as
we come to realize the significance of the small
splash of water in a corner of the painting.
Another problem with Art is that while, in
theory, the realist drive of Bell's intuitionist
approach should have led him to place most
weight on the perceptual properties of the
artwork itself, in practice, the weight tends to
be more on the subjectivist side. Thus, on the
one hand, aesthetic qualities are held to have
the same kind of irresistible visibility as the
colours and shapes of everyday perception,
which would, of course, minimize the possibil-
ity of divergence. On the other hand, they are
also seen in relational terms as dependent for
their existence on a special aesthetic sensibility
capable of the refined aesthetic emotion needed
to intuit them. Such a powerful subjective
element inevitably brings with it a degree of
arbitrariness insofar as intuitionists can in
practice undermine anyone's judgement simply
by asserting that they lack the requisite sensi-
tivity. This tendency may be seen in Maynard
KEYNES'S memoir of the Bloomsbury Group in
action, in which he wryly records 'the effec-
tiveness of Moore's gasps of incredulity and
head shaking, of Strachey's grim silences and of
Lowes Dickinson's shrugs' (quoted in
Mclntyre, p. 17).
Nonetheless, even if Art conspicuously fails
as a general account of its subject, it still paints
a vivid picture of how the arrival of twentieth-
century modern art compelled a reappraisal of
the nature of art itself. In fact, if one takes
away the simplistic essentialism, Bell's many
insightful views on the continuity between new
and old are very much in line with recent
writings on the definition of art by such writers
as Arthur Danto and Jerrold Levinson. Bell
also provides a counterbalance to the anti-aes-
theticism of twentieth-century avant-garde art,
BELL
as exemplified by Duchamp. Finally, perhaps
Bell's greatest contribution to our thinking
about art is the importance that he places, both
in theory and in practice, on the educability of
taste, through what he aptly calls the critic's
'loving talk about art'. In his later writing, as
R.K. ELLIOTT has pointed out (in 'Bell's
Aesthetic Theory and Critical Practice'), there
is evidence that Bell eventually came to regard
all means as legitimate to bringing about the
right state of mind for the perception of aes-
thetic form, including talk about the non-aes-
thetic features of the work, comparisons with
other works, provision of biographical, histor-
ical and technical information, and so on. In
many ways, this anticipates Frank SlBLEY's
seminal paper, Aesthetic Concepts (1978). At
the same time, however, Bell never seems quite
to have shaken off the effortless air of superi-
ority inherited from the Bloomsbury Group
and in his later work, Civilisation:An Essay
(1928), there is more than a hint that taste in
reality is inherited rather than acquired. As
Virginia Woolf once said of him, 'civilisation,
for Clive, was a lunch party at No 50 Gordon
Square (His Bloomsbury house)' (quoted in
Dictionary of National Bibliography 1961-70,
1981, p. 90).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Art (1914; Oxford, 1987).
Since Cezanne (1922).
Landmarks in Nineteenth-Century Painting
(1927).
Proust (1928).
Civilization: An Essay (1928).
An Account of French Painting (1931).
Enjoying Pictures (1934).
Old Friends (1956).
Other Relevant Works
Bywater, W., Clive Bell's Eye (Detroit, 1975).
Dickie, G.T., 'Clive Bell and the Method of
Principia Ethica', British Journal of
Aesthetics (April 1965), pp. 139-43.
Elliott, R.K., 'Bell's Aesthetic Theory and
Critical Practice', in British Journal of
76
Aesthetics, (April 1965), pp. 111-22.
Maclntyre, A., After Virtue (1981).
Meager, R. 'Clive Bell and Aesthetic
Emotion', British Journal of Aesthetics
(April 1965), pp. 123-31.
Moore, G.E., Principia ethica (Cambridge,
1959).
Nick McAdoo
BENN, Stanley Isaac (1920-86)
Stanley Benn was born in West Ham and died
on 25 July 1986. He was educated at the West
Ham secondary school and at the London
School of Economics. Unusually, for one whose
later work was focused on central questions of
moral and political philosophy, his early
training was in political science and he was
lecturer in government at Southampton
University until he emigrated to Australia in
1962. Stanley Benn was senior fellow in phi-
losophy at the Research School of Social
Sciences at the Australian National University
from 1962 until 1972, and professorial fellow
from 1973 until his retirement in 1985.
By the time of his move to Australia, Benn
was already known as a lucid authority on
political philosophy, thanks to the publication,
in 1959 of Social Principles and the Democratic
State, which he co-authored with R.S. PETERS.
In this work, they stated their aim as 'the pro-
duction of a comprehensive textbook on social
philosophy which takes account of recent devel-
opments in philosophy without being too
remote from the institutions of the Modern
Welfare state'. Benn and Peters argued, in a
fashion that would have cheered many of their
nineteenth-century forebears, that 'most of the
principles we find attractive in politics reflect a
utilitarian disposition'. Nonetheless, the volume
is named by Philip Pettit as one of three that
ended the long silence in political philosophy

that had lasted since the end of the nineteenth
century (the others were Brian Barry's Political
Argument and H.L.A. HART'S The Concept of
Law). Certainly, the book played an impor-
tant role in stimulating serious philosophical
work on political theory.
Over the next few years, Benn's approach to
political philosophy became more Kantian. In
this respect it contrasted with JJ.C. SMART'S
more utilitarian and non-cognitivist approach
when they were colleagues at the Australian
National University in the early 1980s. This
Kantianism was most evident in Benn's last
work, published posthumously, A Theory of
Freedom (1988), an immensely wide-ranging
study.
With long-term collaborator Gerald Gauss
he edited Public and Private in Social Life
(1983), a work which emerged from a 1979
conference at the Australian National
University and which included a rich combi-
nation of both theoretical, and sociological and
anthropological material in a still rare mix.
Benn's middle work showed a strong interest in
questions of rationality and the methodology of
the social sciences, whilst in his later work he
turned more to questions associated with moral
philosophy per se. Benn avoided the tendency
of some Kantians to isolate the moral agent
from her surroundings. This explained his par-
ticular take on the perennial issue in liberal
theory: the extent to which basic individualism
can be combined with a recognition of the
social nature of humans, and the importance of
one's social environment in the formation of
personality. Benn was among those who insist
that the liberal commitment to persons as
choosers is in no way inconsistent with appre-
ciating the importance of our social inheritance.
The liberal individual, he insists, does not:
conjure his nomos out of thin air, adopting
it by a kind of random fancy, kicking aside
the nomoi of his culture, its traditions, as so
much clutter. One's reasons for engaging in
an activity as worthwhile ... must already be
built into one's conception of the world,
77
BENN
which one must have received initially from
those about one.
(A Theory of Freedom, pp. 220-21)
In this way, Benn maintained a delicate balance
between Kantian abstraction and the commu-
nitarian interest in the embeddedness of polit-
ical identities. These concerns, together with
his engagement in issues of methodology, led
him to develop an expressive theory of voting,
in contrast to the rational choice problematic
outlined by Downs and Olson.
According to Miriam Benn and Gerald
Gauss, 'A Theory of Freedom is not merely
Staneley Benn's last philosophic work, it is the
summation of those beliefs by which he lived'
(p. vii). Benn does not favour a traditional
account of freedom as the absence of obstacles
to doing what one desires to do. Rather,
infringing someone's freedom is a matter of
restricting the range of his possible choices, not
simply the choices he desires to make. Desires,
on Benn's account, are unnecessary for the
explanation of rational action, since epistemic
action commitments come directly from beliefs,
and rationality is largely a matter of acting in
accordance with such commitments. This char-
acteristically Kantian position is open to criti-
cism, that it downplays the importance of the
value of freedom in favour of specifying it cor-
rectly. A Theory of Freedom, however, was
welcomed as 'a major contribution that will be
a part of the standard literature on freedom for
many years' by a reviewer for the Journal of
Politics.
Benn's paper on 'Egalitarianism and Equal
Consideration of Interests', while cited by Peter
Singer as presenting a version of speciesism,
was one of the early attempts to consider the
widening of moral concern beyond human
beings, a widening that has been a feature of
applied ethics in the later part of the twentieth
century.
Benn was an important supporter of the
Society for Applied Philosophy, and gave the
first conference address entitled 'Deterrence or
Appeasement: Or, on Trying to be Rational
BENN
about Nuclear War' in 1980. In it he argued
that there is no inconsistency in both support-
ing resistance to evil, even at risk of total
destruction, and in refusing to form or condone
a conditional intention to do equivalent but
pointless evil in order to make a threat credible.
Benn's journeys from political science to phi-
losophy, from utilitarianism to a form of
Kantianism, and from the UK to Australia left
their mark on a distinctive, unique and valuable
contribution to the discipline.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(with R.S. Peters), Social Principles and the
Democratic State (1959).
(Ed. with G.W. Mortimore), Rationality and
the Social Sciences: Contributions to the
Philosophy and Methodology of the Social
Sciences (1976).
A Theory of freedom (1988).
Other Relevant Works
'An Approach to the Problems of
Punishment', Philosophy, vol. 33 (1958),
pp. 325-41.
'"Interests" in Polities', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 60 (1959-60), pp.
123-40.
'Freedom and Persuasion', Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 45 (1967), pp.
259-75.
'Persons and Values: Reasons in Conflict and
Moral Disagreement', Ethics, vol. 95
(1967), pp. 20-37.
'Wickedness', Ethics, vol. 95 (1967), pp.
795-810.
(with W.L. Weinstein), 'Being Free to Act,
and Being a Free Man', Mind, vol. 80
(1971), pp. 194-211.
'Practical Rationality and Commitment',
American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 23
(1973), pp. 255-66.
(with W.L. Weinstein), 'Freedom as the Non-
Restriction of Options: A Rejoinder',
Mind, vol. 83 (1974), pp. 435-8.
'Rationality and the Social Sciences: A Reply
to John Kekes', Philosophy of the Social
78
Sciences, vol. 9 (1975), pp. 175-80.
'Freedom, Autonomy and the Concept of a
Person', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 76 (1975-6), pp. 109-31.
'Privacy and Respect for Persons: A Reply',
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 58
(1980), pp. 54-61.
'Deterrence or Appeasement: Or, on Trying
to be Rational About Nuclear War',
journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 1
(1982), pp. 5-20.
Jon Pike
BENNETT, Jonathan Francis (1930-)
Jonathan Bennett was born in Greymouth,
New Zealand on 17 February 1930. His father,
Francis Oswald Bennett, was a physician and
published author of fiction and history; his
mother, Pearl Allan Bennett, was a homemaker
active in local educational politics. Bennett grew
up attending local state schools, before heading
to Canterbury University College, where he
studied philosophy with Arthur N. PRIOR.
Bennett wrote a thesis entitled 'The Paradoxes
of Strict Implication' for his MA in 1953, which
was the basis for his first published papers. His
studies then took him to the University of
Oxford for two years, and in 1955 he earned
the BPhil. After one year teaching philosophy
at Haverford College in the United States, he
returned to England in 1956 to take the post of
lecturer in moral science at the University of
Cambridge. In 1968 Bennett moved to Simon
Fraser University as Professor of Philosophy,
and then two years later he went to the
University of British Columbia. In 1979 he
came to Syracuse University as Professor of
Philosophy, where he would spend the rest of
his academic career. He was President of the
Eastern Division of the American Philosophical
Association in 1987/8. In 1985 he became a

fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, and in 1991 a corresponding fellow of
the British Academy. He was awarded the
LittD from the University of Cambridge in
1991 and was the John Locke Lecturer at
Oxford in 1992. Bennett retired in 1997, and
lives on Bowen Island near Vancouver.
Bennett has written extensively in philoso-
phy, publishing ten books and more than a
hundred articles over a wide range of topics.
The majority of his work falls into five areas:
early modern philosophy, philosophy of mind
and language, theory of events, ethics and
action theory, and theory of conditionals. He is
an eclectic thinker - eclectic in his subjects, in
the resources he brings to his studies and in his
methods - and has been widely noted for his
creativity. Still, Bennett's philosophy carries
with it not only an instantly recognizable voice
and style but also a set of systematic intellectual
emphases. He is acclaimed as much for his
techniques as for his specific views. Most
notable in this regard has been his work in
history of philosophy.
With the 1966 publication of Kant's
Analytic, Bennett helped to launch a wave of
research that would bring early modern phi-
losophy back to active interest among philoso-
phers. Its approach to the subject, one Bennett
described in part as 'fighting Kant tooth and
nail' in order to learn from him (Kant's
Analytic, p. viii), would also prove influential.
The essay is marked by its focus on Kant's
arguments and its often critical assessment, and
by Bennett's efforts to engage Kant as philoso-
pher with something to contribute to the under-
standing of ongoing philosophical discussions.
To this end,' Bennett notes, 'I have freely crit-
icized, clarified, interpolated and revised.'
Kant's Analytic spoke directly to the issues in
Kant's philosophy and devoted little space to
questions of historical or intellectual context.
For Bennett, history of philosophy would be
philosophy with a special technique, not history
with a special subject matter.
This 'philosophical' or 'collegial' approach to
the history of philosophy sparked controversy.
79
BENNETT
It struck many as an exciting form of inquiry,
one casting new light on philosophy and its
history and instituting a high standard of active
philosophical reflection on the part of the com-
mentator. Others sharply disapproved. Critics
characterized Bennett's work as historically
insensitive or anachronistic. The philosophical
pay-off, it was suggested, was coming at the
expense of sound scholarship. Bennett's answer
was to write three more books in early modern
philosophy in the same mode: Locke, Berkeley,
Hume (1971), Kant's Dialectic (1974) and A
Study of Spinoza's Ethics (1984). This did not
placate the critics, but it did confirm Bennett's
place as a pre-eminent scholar in the study of
early modern philosophy. Yet for all his influ-
ence in establishing a rigorous, philosophy-
minded approach to the subject, the postmod-
ern turn from history of philosophy to histori-
ography of philosophy - the rise of the study of
the commentator - did not itself hold much
interest for Bennett. Characteristically, his
sights were trained on the philosophy in the
texts before him, and for the most part he did
not wade into the increasingly baroque and
partisan disputes over methodology that had
become an academic preoccupation. Only in his
fifth and final book in history of philosophy,
the two-volume Learning from Six
Philosophers (2001), did Bennett address the
question of method in detail and offer defence
of his own approach. But by then the issue was
largely resolved at the level of scholarly
practice. Methodological pluralism has proved
to be the order of the day, and the collegial
approach has become an important and
entrenched tradition. Bennett's work in this
area continues with the provision of freely
accessible online versions of the early modern
classics, revised with the aim of removing styl-
istic impediments to understanding the texts
while leaving the philosophical content intact.
Bennett's philosophical writings - historical
and otherwise - belong to the analytic tradition
and display the imprint of the 'linguistic turn'
in philosophy with its signature emphasis on
language. He describes his work as conceptual
BENNETT
analysis, that is as the articulation of a body of
'analytic truths' about, for example, the concept
of meaning, or causation, or moral account-
ability. Yet his own view of conceptual analysis
incorporates a kind of rationalist outlook that
separates him sharply from the mid-twentieth-
century Oxford analysts. Bennett sees in the
human mind deep structures of concepts and
meaning that order our thought about the
world, and he views them as being expressed
in our linguistic practices and in the syntax
and grammar of language. Linguistic data do
therefore offer a passage to the subject matter
of philosophy and so merit close attention.
But they serve only as a stepping-stone to the
principal goal of his philosophical work: to
bring the underlying conceptual structures to
light where they can be examined in relation
to modern canons of argument, inquiry and
explanation.
In his 1988 study Events and their Names,
following the lead of work by Zeno Vendler,
Bennett approaches the theory of events with a
distinction between two types of sentence nom-
inalizations. A sentence such as 'Tenzing
climbed Everest' allows a perfect nominal form,
Tenzing's climbing of Everest', as well as an
imperfect form, Tenzing's climbing Everest'.
Both constructions operate as names and each
refers to a part of the history of mountaineer-
ing. But the distinction here tracks a deeper
conceptual division and the two names actually
refer to entities of distinct ontological types:
the imperfect nominal names a fact, the perfect
form names an event. Nor, Bennett argues, are
the two conceptual frameworks equivalent.
Facts and events require distinct semantical
treatments, and moreover for important theo-
retical roles - such as the construction of causal
explanations - the concept of a fact is superior
to that of an event. Bennett contends that a
failure to draw the distinction properly has
given rise in philosophy to an incorrect seman-
tics for event language and to a mistaken pro-
motion of the category of events for theoretical
work. The event concept does manage to pick
out a feature of reality: events belong to the
80
broader ontological category of 'tropes' or par-
ticular instantiations of properties at a place
and a time, like the fall of a sparrow or the
paleness of Socrates' face. But the fact concept,
in virtue of its fineness of grain, is more precise,
more informative and better suited to the
purposes of causal explanation. Of our two
ways of thinking of the world and its causal
superstructure, the one involving the event
concept is, in the end, dispensable.
The balance, and perhaps tension, between
descriptive and revisionary analyses of human
understanding in Bennett's philosophy, as well
as his focus on conceptual foundations, also
appears prominently in his writings on ethics
and action theory. Initially his research in this
quarter concentrated on the question of what
role the consequences of an act should have in
determining the moral status of that act. Yet his
strategy soon became to ask after the very
concept of an act and whether an act could
provide a locus for moral evaluation indepen-
dently of consequences. In his 1981 Tanner
Lectures he articulated an influential line of
argument on the subject, one later refined and
deepened in The Act Itself'(1995).
Consider the distinction between killing
someone and letting someone die. It is often
thought that there is a morally significant dis-
crimination to be made: killing is worse than
letting someone die, despite the fact that death
will be the outcome in both cases. An important
moral weight apparently attaches to the act
itself, independently of its consequences. But
what is the ground of the distinction between
the act of killing and that of letting die that will
support this difference in moral status?
Bennett's subtle inquiry into action theory finds
no basis in the act itself for drawing this
common-sense moral distinction. Killing and
letting die are instances of a more general
contrast between making things happen and
allowing things to happen, and underlying that
contrast there is indeed a sharp action-theo-
retic distinction. But, Bennett argues, it is one
devoid of moral significance. Contrary to our
common-sense view, the distinction between

making and allowing cannot carry any moral
weight. Killing is morally no worse than letting
die; alternatively, letting die is just as immoral
as killing - and likewise for all kinds of harms
that one commits or fails to prevent. Bennett's
analysis naturally yields a form of consequen-
tialism in ethics and so raises familiar chal-
lenges to common sense, and faces familiar
problems about the prospects of an extraordi-
narily demanding morality. It is not the conse-
quentialist conclusion that centrally matters,
however, but rather the line of inquiry that
produced it. For any effective reply will have to
come at the level of foundations, where the
work consists in patiently, clearly and method-
ically asking after the most basic concepts
around which we frame our understanding of
moral and immoral behaviour.
There is also a strong empiricist streak tem-
pering Bennett's work that expresses itself in his
concern to state empirical conditions under
which we would be justified in applying the
concepts under study. Bennett routinely seeks
to couch his inquiries in terms that can refer
back to experience, keeping the reflective
analysis on a tether. This dates to his earliest
writings and is most evident in his work on the
nature of language and mind, especially
Rationality (1964) and Linguistic Behaviour
(1976). The first book addresses the mental
states of animals, defining 'rationality' to be
whatever it is that separates humans, in men-
talistic kind, from other terrestrial animals.
Bennett poses his question by asking what
would have to be added to the language-like
behaviour of honeybees for it to be appropri-
ate to ascribe beliefs (and other 'contentful'
states) to them. He suggests that belief should
be understood in relation to wants, needs and
behaviour, and that the correct constraint on
belief ascription is not that the animal be able
to express a belief in language but only that it
have the ability to manifest the belief in its
behaviour. Arguing that beliefs about the past
and general beliefs cannot be so manifested by
non-linguistic animals, Bennett concludes that
rational creatures are distinguished by the
81
BENNETT
ability to escape cognitively from the present
into the past and from the particular into the
general.
Linguistic Behaviour revisits the whole
subject of language, belief and meaning, and
features a Gricean analysis of linguistic meaning
in terms of intention. Again Bennett develops
his case by taking sub-linguistic systems of com-
munication - this time the bees are replaced by
imaginary 'anthropoid mammals' - and grad-
ually adding complexity to the behaviours of
the individuals until the evidence for the attri-
bution of intentions, beliefs and so on is in
place. He also gives clear voice to the empiricist
scruple: 'statements about minds are based
upon facts about behaviour, and I shall never
introduce any mentalistic concept without first
displaying its behavioural credentials, saying
what sorts of physical behaviour would entitle
us to apply it' (Linguistic Behaviour., p. 3). The
project starts with an analysis of the concept of
goal-oriented behaviour that sets the notion of
teleology on firm ground, then builds up an
account of intentional behaviour, and finally
advances to meaningful behaviour, thus
keeping the behavioural frame intact at every
stage of the analysis of language and meaning.
Bennett has also worked on the theory of
conditionals. His earliest publications address
the concept of 'entailment' or 'strict implica-
tion' - where a statement p strictly implies a
statement q just in case it is impossible that p
be true and q false - and belong to philosophy
of logic. His later writings focus on conditional
constructions in natural language that express
weaker, more complex forms of connections
between statements. A central question
concerns taxonomy. Consider three examples.
(1) 'If Booth didn't shoot Lincoln, someone
did.' (2) 'If Booth doesn't shoot Lincoln,
someone will.' (3) 'If Booth hadn't shot Lincoln,
someone would have.' Indicative conditionals
like (1) are widely thought to differ in their
semantics and functional roles from subjunctive
or count erf actual conditionals like (3).
Indicative conditionals (it is thought) are sub-
jective, express links among an agent's system
BENNETT
of beliefs, and do not have truth-values,
whereas subjunctive conditionals are objective,
report principled relations among possibilities
and have truth-values. Whether to classify
common future-directed conditionals like (2)
with the indicatives or with the subjunctives is
unclear. Tradition locates (2) with (3), but there
are dissenters. Bennett began as a traditionalist,
briefly departed by arguing that most (2)-type
conditionals belong with the indicatives like
(1), and then recanted, offering an exacting
and novel defence of the traditional account.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rationality (1964).
Kant's Analytic (Cambridge, 1966).
Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes
(Oxford, 1971).
Kant's Dialectic (Cambridge, 1974).
Linguistic Behaviour (Cambridge, 1976).
A Study of Spinoza's Ethics (Indianapolis,
1984).
Events and their Names (Indianapolis, 1988).
The Act Itself (Oxford, 1995).
Learning from Six Philosophers (Oxford,
2001).
A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals
(Oxford, 2003).
Other Relevant Works
'Meaning and Implication', Mind, vol. 63
(1954), pp. 451-63,
'Analytic-Synthetic', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 59 (1958-9), pp.
163-88.
'A Myth about Logical Necessity', Analysis,
vol. 21 (1960), pp. 59-63.
'Substance, Reality and Primary Qualities',
American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 2
(1965), pp. 1-17.
'"Whatever the Consequences'", Analysis,
vol. 26 (1965), pp. 83-102.
The Age and Size of the World', Synthese,
vol. 23 (1971), pp. 127-46.
'Shooting, Killing, Dying', Canadian Journal
of Philosophy, vol. 2 (1973), pp. 315-23.
The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn',
82
Philosophy, vol. 49 (1974), pp. 123-34.
'Philosophy and Mr Stoppard', Philosophy,
vol. 50 (1975), pp. 5-18.
'Morality and Consequences', in S.
McMurrin (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on
Human Values, vol. 2 (Salt Lake City,
Utah, 1981), pp. 49-116.
'Counterfactuals and Temporal Direction',
Philosophical Review, vol. 93 (1984), pp.
57-91.
Thoughtful Brutes', Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Association, vol.
62 (September 1988), pp. 197-210.
'Farewell to the Phlogiston Theory of
Conditionals', Mind, vol. 97 (1988), pp.
509-27.
Truth and Stability in Descartes's
Meditations', Canadian Journal of
Philosophy, suppl. vol. 16 (1990), pp.
75-108.
'Negation and Abstention: Two Theories of
Allowing', Ethics, vol. 104 (1993), pp.
75-96.
'Descartes's Theory of Modality',
Philosophical Review, vol. 103 (1994), pp.
639-67.
'Classifying Conditionals: The Traditional
Way is Right', Mind, vol. 104 (1995), pp.
331-54.
'Conditionals and Explanations', in A. Byrne,
R. Stalnaker and R. Wedgwood (eds), Pact
and Value: Essays on Ethics and
Metaphysics for Judith Jarvis Thomson
(Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 1-28.
further Reading
Oxford Comp Phil, Pres Addr of APA v9
Buchanan, Cathy L., Jonathan Bennett on
Language and Belief, PhD dissertation,
University of Chicago (Chicago, 1983).
Cover, J.A. and Mark Kulstad (eds), Central
Themes in Early Modern Philosophy:
Essays Presented to Jonathan Bennett
(Indianapolis, 1990).
Scheffler, Samuel, 'Deontology and the
Agent: A Reply to Jonathan Bennett',
Ethics, vol. 100 (1989), pp. 67-76.

Thomson, Judith J., 'Bennett's "The Act
Itself", Nous, vol. 30 (1996), pp. 545-57.
Wood, Allen W., 'Kant's Dialectic', Canadian
journal of Philosophy, vol. 5 (1975), pp.
595-614.
Samuel S. Levey
BENSON, John Heys (1929-)
John Heys Benson was born in Ashton on
Mersey on 13 October 1929. He was educated
at Sandbach School (1939-48) and took his BA
honours in philosophy from the University of
Manchester in 1953. After posts as a tutor at
the Workers' Educational Association and the
University of Durham, he was appointed
lecturer (1963-7) and senior lecturer in phi-
losophy (1967-71) at the University of York. In
1971 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy
at the University of Lancaster, where he taught
until 1993, becoming an emeritus professor
thereafter.
Benson is best known for his work in moral
philosophy. Although his writings cover a range
of topics, including virtue ethics, moral char-
acter and moral motivation, there is a dominant
thread concerned with understanding the
nature of the self and its moral identity.
Benson's principal mentors have been Alasdair
MACINTYRE, J.L. MACKIE and Eric Oilman, and
Aristotle has been a main influence on his
thought. In an early, influential paper, 'Emotion
and Expression' (1967), Benson argues that
the expression of emotion involves a more com-
prehensive range of activities than explicit utter-
ances which make use of emotion terms.
Benson's inaugural lecture, The Search for the
Self (1975), precipitates ideas in his important
article, 'Who is the Autonomous Man?' (1983),
in which he develops a distinctive view of
autonomy by drawing a distinction between
intellectual and moral autonomy, and arguing
83
BENSON
for a more complex understanding of
autonomy and its value as a feature of moral
character. His work on the self and Aristotle is
brought together in a detailed piece on friend-
ship, 'Making Friends: Aristotle's Doctrine of
the Friend as Another Self (1990).
Benson's contributions in practical ethics,
developed in two articles on the relationship
between humans and animals in moral thought,
have been taken forward in his book
Environmental Ethics (2000), which includes
critical discussions of fundamental questions
in this area and a carefully chosen set of
readings. In aesthetics, another more recent
interest, he played a key role in a major project
to collect together and co-edit Frank Sibley's
papers. This interest has continued in Benson's
work on the aesthetics of nature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Characterisation of Actions and the
Virtuous Agent', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 63 (1962-3), pp.
251-66.
The Concept of Community', in L. Bright
and S. Clements (eds), The Committed
Church (1966).
'Emotion and Expression', Philosophical
Review, vol. 76 (1967), pp. 335-57.
(symposium with Neil Cooper), 'Oughts and
Wants', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 42 (1968), pp. 156-72.
'Further Thoughts on Oughts and Wants', in
Geoffrey Mortimore (ed.), Weakness of
Will (London and Basingstoke, 1971), pp.
226-32.
The Search for the Self [inaugural lecture],
Publications by Members of Staff 1974
(Lancaster, 1975), pp. 1-20.
'Hog in Sloth, Fox in Stealth: Man and Beast
in Moral Thinking', in R.S. Peters (ed.),
Nature and Conduct, Royal Institute of
Philosophy Lectures, vol. 8 (1975), pp.
265-80.
(symposium with N.J.H. Dent), 'Varieties of
Desire', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 50 (1976), pp. 177-92.
BENSON
'Duty and the Beast', Philosophy, vol. 53
(1978), pp. 529-49.
'Who is the Autonomous Man?', Philosophy,
vol. 58 (1983), pp. 5-17.
'Making Friends: Aristotle's Doctrine of the
Friend as Another Self, in Andros Loizou
and Harry Lesser (eds), Polls and Politics:
Essays in Greek Moral and Political
Philosophy (Aldershot, 1990), pp. 50-68.
Environmental Ethics: An Introduction with
Readings (2000).
(Ed. with Betty Redfern and Jeremy Roxbee
Cox), Frank Sibley, Approach to
Aesthetics: Collected Papers on
Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford, 2001).
'Sibley after Sibley', in Emily Brady and
Jerrold Levinson (eds), Aesthetic Concepts:
Essays After Sibley (Oxford, 2001), pp.
213-28.
Emily Brady
BERENSON, Frances Maria (1929-)
Frances Berenson was born on 12 July 1929.
She studied at the Guildhall School of Music
from 1948 to 1953, and was then appointed as
a teacher and Music Association staff conduc-
tor with the Inner London Education
Authority, posts which she held until 1970.
From 1966 to 1975 she studied philosophy at
Birkbeck College in the University of London,
where she was awarded her BA and PhD. In
1970 she took up an appointment as the Head
of the Philosophy Department at Stockwell
College, a constituent of the University of
London Institute of Education, where she
remained until 1981. In that year she was
appointed to a post as part-time tutor in phi-
losophy at Birkbeck, and also worked as a
tutor for the Open University. She has lectured
extensively abroad, and in 1990 became an
honorary member of the University of Navarra
84
in Spain, and received the Distinguished
Professor Medal from the University of
Helsinki, Finland.
In her work Understanding Persons:
Personal and Impersonal Relationships (1981)
Berenson examines the issues of what consti-
tutes personal relationships, and what makes it
possible to understand both other people and
ourselves. She maintains that all understanding
is situational, and that understanding a person
involves two things: understanding the concept
'person', and understanding what it is for
someone to be the particular person he is.
Whilst we have to have some 'background',
factual knowledge about a person, such knowl-
edge is objective. We cannot relate to a person
purely objectively, because to do so would not
constitute understanding the concept of a
person. Instead, there has to be a subjective
side to our understanding. We have to have
experience of personal relationships in order to
understand what such relationships are like,
and we have to be in a personal relationship
with an individual in order to understand him.
Berenson then develops this thesis in her later
publications. Understanding other persons is
not a purely intellectual matter, because we
have to have emotions in order to understand
the emotions of others. Emotions are active in
that they are a crucial feature of human agency.
To understand another person is not merely to
understand what they feel, but how they feel:
hence there is a qualitative difference, and how
someone feels is not necessarily expressible in
words.
Berenson says that literature can teach us
about the human condition, and can also chal-
lenge our own personal prejudices. Our imag-
ination allows us to 'enter' the characters in lit-
erature, and hence to consider things from their
point of view, not our own. Our involvement
with the characters and situations in literature
does not eliminate our critical faculties, but
instead can yield self-knowledge.
Music has the power to convey emotions, but
in order for its listeners to understand and to
respond to it, it has to be structured and disci-

plined. In understanding a piece of music, the
listener draws upon his own experiences and
background, and in this respect the relationship
with the music is personal.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Freedom', in I. Lloyd (ed.), Philosophy and
the Teacher (1976).
Understanding Persons: Personal and
Impersonal Relationships (1981).
'Understanding Art and Understanding
Persons', in S.C. Brown (ed.), Objectivity
and Cultural Divergence (1984).
'Emotions and Understanding Persons', in R.
Burnett, P. McGhee and D. Clarke (eds),
Accounting for Relationships (1987).
'Interpreting the Emotional Content of
Music', in Michael Krausz (ed.),
Interpretation of Music: Philosophical
Essays (1991).
'What is this Thing Called "Love"?',
Philosophy, vol. 66 (1991), pp. 65-79.
'Emotions and Rationality', International
Journal of Moral and Social Studies, vol. 6,
no. 1 (1991).
Kathryn L. Plant
BERLIN, Isaiah (1909-97)
Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, Latvia on 6
June 1909 and died in Oxford on 5 November
1997. His father, a successful Jewish timber
merchant, moved the family to Britain follow-
ing the Russian Revolution of 1917, which the
young Berlin witnessed. Berlin was educated at
St Paul's School, London and Corpus Christi
College, Oxford, where he read Greats and
PPE. He was appointed a lecturer at New
College, Oxford in 1932, and shortly after-
wards was elected a prize fellow of All Souls.
During and immediately after World War II he
served in the British Information Services, New
85
BERLIN
York, the British Embassy, Washington, DC,
and, briefly, the British Embassy in Moscow,
before returning to Oxford. He was appointed
Chichele Professor of Social and Political
Theory there in 1957, and knighted the same
year; he resigned his professorship in 1967, a
year after becoming the founding President of
Wolfson College, Oxford, a position which he
held until 1975. He was awarded the Order of
Merit in 1971, and served as President of the
British Academy from 1974 to 1978.
Berlin published only one full-length book,
an intellectual biography of Karl Marx, which
has remained in print since its publication in
1939. His academic reputation rested heavily,
at first, on several essays or lectures, initially
published in pamphlet form: The Hedgehog
and the Fox (1953, on Tolstoy's philosophy of
history), Historical Inevitability (1954) and
Two Concepts of Liberty (1958), Berlin's inau-
gural lecture at Oxford, which remains one of
the most read and discussed works of political
theory of the twentieth century. He also pub-
lished numerous essays, on the philosophy of
history, political theory, epistemology, ethics,
Russian intellectual history and literature, and
the history of ideas in Europe from the
Renaissance to the twentieth century. These
essays have, since 1978, been collected, edited
and published by Berlin's unstinting editor,
Henry Hardy.
Berlin began his career as a professional
philosopher at Oxford in the 1930s. His col-
leagues included J.L. AUSTIN, whom he partic-
ularly admired, A.J. AVER and his close and
life-long friend Stuart HAMPSHIRE. It was at
Berlin's suggestion, and in his rooms at All
Souls, that these and other young philosophers
met and engaged in a regular series of philo-
sophical discussions, based on the analysis of
linguistic usage, and focusing on logical and
epistemological questions. These discussions
laid the foundations for what became known as
'Oxford philosophy', and played an important
role in the development of Anglo-American
analytic philosophy generally. After the war
Berlin was instrumental in developing bonds
BERLIN
between Oxford and American universities,
thus further spreading Oxford philosophy, and
also in recruiting other thinkers - such as his
friend H.L.A. HART - to the ranks of Oxford's
philosophers. However, by the time he returned
to Oxford, Berlin had determined to give up
philosophy as it was understood by his peers.
Although he wrote several significant articles in
analytic philosophy (republished in Concepts
and Categories, 1978), he regarded himself as
a second-rate philosopher; he also found his
colleagues' approach increasingly arid. He had
from early on been interested in the history of
ideas, in literature, in the philosophy of history,
and in moral and political questions. During his
war service he realized that he found these
topics more engrossing than 'pure' philosophy
as practised at Oxford; and from 1946 he
turned increasingly to the history of ideas, and
to political and ethical theory.
The works of Berlin's middle years (roughly
1949-62) are concerned largely with the phi-
losophy of history and the social sciences; the
nature and limits of human understanding; the
relationship between basic ethical ideas and
politics, and particularly with those ideas about
ethics, psychology and metaphysics that
underlie liberalism on the one hand, and total-
itarian ideologies on the other; and with
charting the development of all of these ideas
from the French Revolution to his own day.
Thereafter, Berlin's works focused primarily
on the history of ideas, often using an exami-
nation of those he regarded as significant intel-
lectual forebears to elaborate his ideas on the
topics that he had explored earlier. Finally, late
in his life (from roughly 1980 onwards) Berlin
sought to consolidate his work as a whole, and
in particular to clarify his doctrine of pluralism.
As a historian of ideas, Berlin's importance
lay primarily in drawing attention to a range of
Western European and Russian thinkers who
were previously seldom studied in Britain, such
as Vico, Herder, Hamann, Fichte, de Maistre,
Saint Simon, Moses Hess, Sorel, Belinsky,
Herzen and Bakunin; and in exploring
neglected dimensions of the works of
86
Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Mill, Tolstoy and
Turgenev. He also explored the philosophical
significance of cultural and political move-
ments, such as romanticism and socialism.
True to his own warnings against oversim-
plification and the dangers of systematic
theories, Berlin's thought was unsystematic,
sometimes ambiguous and often ambivalent.
He wrote essays rather than treatises; his
approach was wide-ranging, sweeping, some-
times impressionistic. His most concrete and
detailed writing was devoted to expounding
the views of other thinkers, with whom he
achieved such a level of identification that it is
often difficult to tell to what extent he was
trying faithfully to convey their distinctive
visions, and to what extent he was expressing
his own beliefs. Nevertheless, Berlin's widely
diverse works were held together by a set of
recurrent concerns, and a view of human
thought and action that, while unsystematic,
was nevertheless unified.
Berlin was an empiricist in denying that there
was any source of knowledge other than expe-
rience, and a sceptic in denying that there was
any such thing as absolutely certain knowl-
edge; indeed he summed up the message of his
work as 'distrust of all claims to the possession
of incorrigible knowledge ... in any sphere of
human behaviour' (Russian Thinkers, p. viii).
As he wrote,
the total texture [of experience] is what we
begin and end with. There is no Archimedan
point outside it whence we can survey the
whole and pronounce upon it... the sense of
the general texture of experience ... is itself
not open to inductive or deductive reasoning:
for both these methods rest upon it.
(Concepts and Categories, pp. 114-15)
Berlin was also deeply influenced by Kantian
philosophy, and emphasized throughout his
works the importance of basic and often sub-
conscious concepts, models and constellations
of beliefs about the world in shaping people's
views of reality. He insisted that it was impos-

sible to view reality without the aid of any con-
ceptual assumptions because reality was too
complex, varied and dynamic to be fully under-
stood by the human mind. But he also insisted
that it was possible to become more aware of
these assumptions, and more critical and lucid
in the selection, application and modification of
our theories about reality in light of our expe-
rience of the world. The goal of philosophy
was to remind human beings of the limits of
their knowledge, to make their thinking more
self-aware and critical, and so 'to assist men to
understand themselves and thus operate in the
open, and not wildly, in the dark' (Concepts
and Categories, p. 11).
The main theses that Berlin's early works
advance are, first, that not all meaningful state-
ments need be either about direct sensory expe-
rience or purely formal; and, second, that not
all statements about the world are translatable
into a single kind of statement - that is, there
is no single model for all true statements.
Berlin's belief that there is no single model for
understanding experience, and that the misap-
plication of dogmatically held theories to phe-
nomena that they do not properly fit is the
source of mistakes in theory, and errors and
crimes in practice, would remain central to his
later work.
One of the confusions with which Berlin was
most concerned was the tendency of both
philosophers and social scientists to apply the
standards and techniques of the natural sciences
to the human sciences. Berlin insisted that the
human sciences were fundamentally different,
and demanded a different approach, in terms
both of what they study, and of what they seek
to discover. The natural sciences are concerned
with discovering general laws that can explain
a wide range of phenomena: they search for
similarity and regularity. While some of the
human sciences (such as economics and most
schools of psychology) have similar aims,
others (history foremost among them) seek, on
the contrary, to identify and explain what is
unique in phenomena rather than what they
have in common. Such studies look to differ-
87
BERLIN
ences rather than similarities, particularities
rather than generalities.
The other difference between the human and
natural sciences, according to Berlin, is that of
the relationship of the inquirer to what is being
studied, and, related to this, the different sorts
of knowledge at which they aim. Natural sci-
entists study phenomena external to human
beings: they aim at knowledge from the outside,
and can acquire no other kind. The human
sciences consist of the study of human beings by
human beings; they necessarily involve, and
should aim at, knowledge from the inside. We
experience our own existence and actions, and
the events around us, as purposive, thinking,
feeling beings; and the actions and intentions of
other human beings will only make sense to us
if we understand them in the same way. Also,
we naturally and properly identify with other
human beings in a way that we cannot with
natural phenomena. It would be nonsensical, or
a sign of confusion and error, to speak of
understanding the law of gravity as it under-
stands itself, or studying geological change
'from the inside', in terms of that phenome-
non's own beliefs and intentions. But we can
achieve such knowledge of other human beings;
and unless we do so (Berlin insisted), we cannot
understand them.
Furthermore, the natural sciences, being con-
cerned with external knowledge, demand
objectivity, dispassion and critical scepticism
towards accepted ideas, and trust in the validity
of the methods they employ. The human
sciences, on the contrary, require acceptance of
human assumptions about experience and
reality, and a non-dogmatic flexibility in the
application of methods of study. Furthermore,
'internal' understanding requires the faculty of
empathy - the capacity for entering into human
outlooks different from one's own, under-
standing the beliefs and experiences of others as
they did themselves, and so understanding why
they act as they do.
Finally, because of our similarities to others,
we identify with them and their actions, as we
do not with natural phenomenon. Just as we
BERLIN
cannot reasonably identify with the sun or the
force of gravity or the law of inertia, we cannot
regard the effects of these phenomena in moral
terms; whereas moral evaluation necessarily
enters into, and should enter into, our consid-
eration of the actions of other human beings.
The assertion that our moral evaluations rest
on a view of people as choice-making agents
was central to Berlin's critique of determinism.
He did not claim that determinism was false;
indeed, he acknowledged that the human
capacity for freely willed choice was probably
far more limited than had once been believed.
But he insisted that the terms in which we think
and speak about human experience presup-
pose at least a limited capacity for choice. If
human beings are compelled to act as they do
by forces beyond their control, the notions of
responsibility and culpability, of deserved praise
and blame, become incoherent. If we truly and
thoroughly accept the doctrine of determin-
ism, we must dramatically alter the way we
think and speak about, and treat, one another.
Berlin argued that the doctrine of 'historical
inevitability' rested on the assumption that
history is ruled by larger forces endowed with
the agency, and even the intentions, that are
usually attributed to individuals; and on the
need to believe that history has a purpose or
direction which can be understood and pre-
dicted. Berlin regarded these assumptions and
aspirations as deluded. He also charged that
belief in historical inevitability was morally
dubious, providing an 'alibi' for both fatalistic
acceptance and passivity, and for the inhumane
and pitiless use of force and the crushing of
minorities, dissenters and deviants. This focus
on the doctrine of historical inevitability, and
opposition to its consequences, was clearly
shaped by Berlin's response to communism,
and to totalitarian regimes and movements
more generally.
Berlin's most widely read work is probably
Two Concepts of Liberty, which distinguishes
between two different conceptions of (political)
liberty, which Berlin depicts as distinct, and
potentially conflicting. The first, negative
88
liberty, is conceived as the absence of external,
humanly imposed obstacles blocking or con-
stricting human action. Negative liberty is
freedom from, the absence of constraint, the
opposite of imprisonment or constriction.
Berlin's account of positive liberty is more com-
plicated, and has inspired confusion and mis-
interpretation. This is partly because at the
heart of this account are two logically distinct
definitions of liberty. One is liberty as oppor-
tunity, or the ability to achieve desired results
- that is, freedom to as opposed to negative
liberty's freedom from. The other is liberty as
self-rule or self-determination, the opposite of
dependence on, or control by, others.
Many readers have been confused, too,
about Berlin's attitude towards positive and
negative liberty. Berlin defended the negative
concept of liberty, and criticized the use of a
version of positive liberty by communists,
nationalists and others to justify oppression.
But he did not attack or dismiss the claims of
positive liberty, which he regarded as a genuine
value, though one distinct from, and not nec-
essarily compatible with, negative liberty.
Rather, he argued that the nature of the positive
concept of liberty had made it prone to per-
version over time, culminating in the defence of
political violence and oppression in the name of
liberation.
The grounds for this perversion were
twofold, following from the two aspects of
positive liberty. First, the identification of
liberty with the accomplishment of certain goals
gave rise to the claim that, if inherently desir-
able goals are achieved, this must be equivalent
to the achievement of liberty, even if such
achievement involves coercion. Second, Berlin
argued that the meaning of all conceptions of
liberty depends on the vision or definition of the
human self that is at liberty, especially when
liberty is defined as self-mastery or self-rule.
So long as the self was defined in terms of the
self-perceptions and conscious thoughts and
sentiments of individual human beings, all was
fairly well. But, Berlin recounted, in the early
nineteenth century theorists of positive liberty

replaced this empirical and individualistic con-
ception of the self with metaphysical and col-
lectivist theories of the 'true' self. Such doc-
trines defined self-mastery not as the ability of
individuals to make decisions for themselves
and live according to their own lights, but as the
realization and achievement of what the indi-
vidual's 'true' self desired - that is, what the
individual would desire if she realized what
was best for her, what her true nature and
purpose were.
Berlin associated the doctrine of the 'true' self
with monism. This he defined as the belief that
for all genuine questions there must be one,
and only one, true answer; that there must be
a correct path that will lead any clear thinker
to this answer; and that all genuine answers are
compatible with one another, and together
form a coherent and harmonious system.
Against this, Berlin advocated pluralism.
Berlin came to emphasize pluralism as a doctrine
about the nature of human values, often calling
his position 'value pluralism', even though plu-
ralism, like monism, can involve wide-ranging
claims about human knowledge and reality in
general. Value pluralism holds that genuine
human values are many; that they are intrinsi-
cally valuable and demanding rather than means
to some larger end or part of a larger system;
that they are not necessarily compatible with
one another, but may, and often do, conflict;
and that there is no single measure, no para-
mount goal or universally applicable rule of
conduct, that can be applied in deliberating
between values (so that, for instance, both util-
itarian and deontological ethics, as well as the
absolutism of Plato and the teleology of
Aristotle, are misguided). Conflicts of values
must be addressed on a case-by-case basis, using
practical reason, which is itself uncertain and
fallible. Sometimes compromises or trade-offs
between values are possible; in other cases one
value will, in the context in question, clearly take
priority. But often conflicting values must simply
be chosen between, and there is no such thing
as a single right answer; such cases involve real
and often tragic moral sacrifice and loss.
89
BERLIN
Berlin connected the ethical theories of
monism and pluralism to political positions.
Monism, he charged, holds that there is one
right way to live; moral knowledge is as possible
as factual or logical knowledge. As a result,
moral 'experts' - those who have discovered
the correct way to live, the true answers to
human problems - are justified in dictating the
choices of others, imposing their own vision of
the truth and the good, and crushing those who
disagree as being morally misguided. Monism
easily generates a dangerously ruthless political
utopianism: 'the search for perfection', Berlin
wrote, 'seem[s] to me a recipe for bloodshed'
(The Crooked Timber of Humanity, p. 18).
Berlin argued that pluralism, on the other
hand, promotes the recognition of the value of
individual liberty, and thus supports a
moderate and humane liberal politics. Berlin's
pluralism holds that choice is a central and
essential element in human life: it is in making
choices that human beings define themselves as
individuals. Furthermore, since in many cases,
there being no single right answer, there is no
good reason for forcing people to make choices
about their own lives, rather than allowing
them to decide for themselves. At the same
time, while Berlin's pluralism led him to place
special value on liberty as both intrinsically
good, and a necessary condition for the pursuit
of the full range of human values, it also led
him to recognize the need to balance liberty
with respect for other values, such as justice and
equality. Thus, despite his strong opposition to
bureaucratic control and 'social engineering',
Berlin's liberalism is less dogmatically opposed
to all forms of government intervention, or all
limitations placed on individual liberty on
behalf of other values, than that of some con-
temporaneous liberal and libertarian thinkers.
Berlin's pluralism, humanism and scepticism
also informed his views on the ethics of politi-
cal action. There is no final solution or ultimate
goal, everything is imperfect and involves com-
promise, and our knowledge both of good or
right and of the consequences of our actions is
uncertain: The one thing that we may be sure
BERLIN
of is the reality of the sacrifice, the dying and
the dead'. There is therefore no valid justifica-
tion for sacrificing living human beings to
abstract ideals, for causing present pain in the
hope of future felicity: 'holocausts for the sake
of distant goals ... [are] a cruel mockery of all
that men hold dear' (ibid., p. 16).
Berlin's contributions to philosophy are of
two different sorts. One consists of the doc-
trines and interpretations that he advanced.
These remain provocative, attractive and
fruitful, but have also often proven problem-
atic. Berlin's rearticulation of liberalism,
analysis of the idea of liberty, and exposition of
value pluralism are major contributions to
political and ethical theory which continue to
attract readers and commentary; but they are
unsystematic, and beset by ambiguities and
omissions, while his interpretations of the
history of ideas, particularly his accounts of
the Enlightenment and its critics, are disputed
by many scholars, even as they are praised by
others.
The other source of Berlin's significance lies
in the approach or style of his work, and the
conception of philosophy that this reflects.
Berlin's work fuses, often through sheer force
of personality and intensity of intellectual
engagement, a number of usually divergent
intellectual activities and traditions. At different
points - and sometimes at the same moment -
Berlin wrote as an analytically minded British
philosopher, seeking to clarify thinking about
ordinary human experience; a deeply learned
and adventurous savant engrossed in the
history of ideas; and a forceful and conscien-
tious but undogmatic proponent of a prag-
matic, humane politics of moderation. Perhaps
most importantly, he was acutely perceptive
and sensitive about human moral experience,
drawing on the morally impassioned tradition
of the Russian intelligentsia, but combining it
with the caution and discernment of a Jewish
emigre, and the ironic detachment characteris-
tic of his adopted country. The intellectual
career that united all of these elements was
bound together by Berlin's conviction of the
90
importance of philosophical concepts to the
most pervasive and pressing problems of
human life, and particularly those involving
ethics. Philosophy was for him, ultimately, an
inquiry into what we are, how we came to be
so, and what we might, and should seek to, be
and do. This dimension of Berlin's conception
of philosophy set him apart from most other
British philosophers of his time.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (1939;
4th edn Oxford, 1978).
Four Essays on Liberty (1969); inc. in Henry
Handy (ed.), Liberty (Oxford etc., 2002).
Vico and Herdet (1976); inc. in Henry
Handy (ed.), Three Critics of the
Enlightenment (2000).
Concepts and Categories, ed. Henry Hardy
(1978).
Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and
Aileen Kelly (1978).
Against the Current, ed. Henry Hardy
(1979).
The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed.
Henry Hardy (1990).
Other Relevant Works
The Age of Enlightenment (Boston, 1956).
Personal Impressions, ed. Henry Hardy, 2nd
edn (1998)
The Magus of the North, ed. Henry Hardy
(1993); inc. in Henry Handy (ed.), Three
Critics of the Enlightenment (2000).
The Sense of Reality, ed. Henry Hardy
(1996).
The Proper Study of Mankind, ed. Henry
Hardy and Roger Hausheer (1997).
The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy
(1999).
The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy
(2000).
freedom and its Betrayal, ed. Henry Hardy
(2002).
Flourishing: Letters, 1928-1946, ed. Henry
Hardy (2004); published in the USA as
Letters 1928-46 (New York, 2004).

The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library,
http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk, accessed
October 2004.
Further Reading
Crowder, George, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and
Pluralism (Cambridge, 2004).
Galipeau, Claude, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism
(Oxford, 1994).
Gray, John, Isaiah Berlin (1995).
Ignatieff, Michael, Isaiah Berlin: A Life
(1998).
Lilla, Mark, Ronald Dworkin and Robert B.
Silvers, The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (New
York, 2001).
Lukes, Steven, Liberals and Cannibals
(2003).
Mali, Joseph and Robert Wokler (eds), Isaiah
Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment
(Philadelphia, 2004).
Margalit, Avishai and Edna Ullmann
Margalit (eds), Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration
(1991).
Ryan, Alan (ed.), The Idea of Freedom:
Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin (Oxford,
1979).
Joshua L. .Cherniss
BERNAL, John Desmond (1901-71)
John Desmond Bernal was born in County
Tipperary, Ireland on 10 May 1901 and died in
London on 15 September 1971. His father
Samuel Bernal was an Irish Catholic and his
mother Elizabeth Miller was American, but the
family was originally of Sephardic Jewish
descent. He was educated at a Jesuit prepara-
tory school (where he became an Irish patriot
and enthusiastically pious), then Bedford
School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge,
where he discovered both Marxism and X-ray
crystallography. After research under Sir W.H.
91
BERNAL
Bragg at the Royal Institute, London, he took
charge of the new Crystallographic Laboratory
in Cambridge in 1927. He was later responsi-
ble for the introduction of crystallography to
the United States. From 1937, when he was
elected FRS, he spent his entire academic life as
Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College,
London. Apart from pioneering work in X-ray
crystallography as a tool in the study of
biology, his wide range of interests included
proteins, viruses, the physics of composites and
social studies of science.
BernaPs philosophy was hugely influenced by
the Russian contributions to the Second
International Conference on the History of
Science and Technology held in London in July
1931, especially Bukharin's comments that
Soviet scientists and workers had united in the
building of the new socialist culture, thereby
producing not only a new economic system
but a new science. Bernal's greater involvement
in socialist politics largely dates from then.
Although he gave up being a card-carrying
member of the Communist Party in 1933 to
further his academic career, there was never
any shift in his scientific and political activities.
At one time he was involved with over sixty
committees devoted to his ideological pursuits.
He remained to the end of his life a dedicated
Marxist, espousing dialectical materialist ideas
in his scientific interests. He thought the capi-
talist system a hindrance to the development of
science. In his book The Social Function of
Science (1939) he discussed the liberating effect
of the socialist revolution in the Soviet Union,
and argued that science could only reach its full
potential under socialism. Much of the postwar
Labour Party science policy could be attrib-
uted to Bernal's influence and in the 1964
British general election, the Labour Party leader
and future Prime Minister, Harold Wilson,
mandated to bring a 'white-hot' technological
revolution to Britain.
Bernal's book became a classical text in the
new discipline that he founded, the 'science of
science'. He conceived that science was the
basis of philosophy. The scientific analysis of
BERNAL
society and that of nature were continuous and
could not be separated, and Marxist philoso-
phy was purely an extension of the scientific
method, giving it greater scope and significance.
He wrote:
The relevance of Marxism to science is that
it removes it from its imagined position of
complete detachment and shows it as a part,
but a critically important part, of economy
and social development ... The task which
the scientists have undertaken - the under-
standing and control of nature and of man
himself - is merely the conscious expression
of the task of human society ... In its endeav-
our, science is communism.
(The Social Function of Science, p. 416).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Dialectical Materialism and Modern
Science', Science and Society, vol. 2
(Winter 1937).
The Social Function of Science (1939).
Marx and Science (1952).
Science and Industry in the Twentieth
Century (1953).
Science and History (1954).
Further Reading
Sheehan, Helena, Marxism and the
Philosophy of Science: A Critical History
(New York, 1985).
Swann, Brenda and Francis Aprahamian
(eds), / D Bernal: A Life in Science and
Politics, (1999).
Werskey, G., The Visible College (1988).
Alan Cohen
BIRD, Graham H. (1930-)
Graham Bird was born in 1930 and was
educated at the City of London School. After
92
serving his two years in the RAF, Bird attended
Magdalen College, Oxford. There he earned a
BA in PPE and was a fellow (by examination)
from 1954 to 1957. From 1957 to 1962 Bird
was a lecturer in logic at Aberdeen University.
From 1962 to 1967 he held a senior lectureship
at St Andrews. In 1967 he was appointed
Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Stirling, where he remained until 1980, when he
took the post of Sir Samuel Hall Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He
held that chair until his retirement in 1996,
serving also as head of the department at
Manchester from 1980 to 1992 and for two
years as Dean of the Faculty of Arts. Bird
founded the UK Kant Society in 1994 and has
been the co-editor of its journal, Kantian Review,
since its inception in 1997. Since retiring, Bird
has held honorary posts with the University of
Liverpool and the University of Wales.
In 1962 Bird published Kant's Theory of
Knowledge, in which he set out to clarify a
central argument from the First Critique. His
interpretation was intended to overcome a tra-
ditional reading of Kant's theory, represented
most notably by H.A. PRICHARD'S Kant's
Theory of Knowledge (1909). Most impor-
tantly, Bird argued that the traditional inter-
pretation wrongly ascribed to Kant a commit-
ment to the existence of things-in-themselves
(noumena) as the causes of the appearances
presented to our senses. The traditional view is
supposed to raise for Kant the difficulty of
exactly how we are to know about these
noumena when Kant himself repeatedly insists
in the Critique that our knowledge is limited to
appearances. Bird proposed to overcome the
problem by showing that Kant in fact rejects
such transcendental dualism, maintaining
instead a wholly epistemological use of
'noumena' as referring to the 'object' of claims
that extend beyond the reach of our senses.
Hence Bird argued that the traditional views are
wrong to ascribe to Kant either a phenome-
nalist or a noumenalist theory of perception.
Bird's revolutionary interpretation was
instrumental in challenging the hegemony of

the traditional view. Henry Allison claimed
that 'the overall direction of my interpretation
owes much to his work'. According to Allison,
Bird 'deserves credit for being the first English-
language Kant commentator of this generation
seriously to challenge the standard picture'
(Allinson, p. 333 n. 9). Indeed, Bird's corrective
has proved so compelling that any contempo-
rary theory of mind and knowledge seriously
concerned with Kant and his influence has been
forced to address its challenge.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kant's Theory of Knowledge: An Outline of
One Central Argument in the Critique of
Pure Reason (New York, 1962).
Philosophical Tasks: An Introduction to
Some Aims and Methods in Recent
Philosophy (1972).
William James (New York and London,
1987).
Other Relevant Works
The Necessity of Kant', Mind, vol. 68 (July
1959), pp. 389-92.
'Analytic and Synthetic', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 11 (July 1961), pp.
227-37.
'Recent Interpretations of Kant's
Transcendental Deduction', in G. Funke
and J. Kopper (eds), Akten des 4.
International Kant-Kongress, pt 1
(Berlin, 1974), pp. 1-15.
'Kant's Transcendental Idealism', in G. Vesey
(ed.), Idealism Past and Present
(Cambridge, 1982), pp. 71-92.
'Tradition and Revolution in Kant', in H.
Robinson (ed.), Proceedings of the 8th
International Kant Congress, vol. 1, sect.
3S (Milwaukee, 1996), pp. 1119-36.
'McDowell's Kant: "Mind and World"',
Philosophy, vol. 71 (April 1996), pp.
219-43.
Further Reading
Allison, Henry E., Kant's Transcendental
Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense
93
BLACK
(New Haven arid London, 1983).
Prichard, H.A., Kant's Theory of Knowledge
(Oxford, 1909)
Erin E. Flynn
BLACK, Max (1909-88)
Max Black was born on 24 February 1909 in
Baku, which was then in Russia and is now the
capital of Azerbaijan, and died in Ithaca, New
York on 27 August 1988. His father, Lionel
Black, was a businessman. Because the Blacks
were Jewish and suffered from the anti-
Semitism prevalent in Russia at the time, the
family left Baku shortly after Max's birth. After
a brief stay in Paris, they emigrated to England
in 1912. Black received his entire education in
England, and grew up thoroughly assimilating
English culture instead of the Jewish-Russian
culture into which he was born. As a child,
Black exhibited great talent in both mathe-
matics and music. He was a gifted violinist and
pianist, at one point contemplating a career in
music. He decided instead upon a career in
mathematics, and entered Queen's College,
Cambridge. There, under the influence of
Bertrand RUSSELL and Frank RAMSEY, and to an
even greater degree, G.E. MOORE and Ludwig
WITTGENSTEIN, his interests turned increasingly
towards philosophy of mathematics first, and
then towards philosophy generally. He com-
pleted the BA degree in 1930 and was awarded
a year-long fellowship to attend the University
of Gottingen, where he studied with Hermann
Weyl, Paul Bernays and David Hilbert. Black
returned to complete the PhD at the University
of London in 1939, writing a dissertation on
Theories of Logical Positivism'.
While pursuing his doctoral studies, Black
taught at the Royal Grammar School in
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and then, from 1936
to 1940, at the Teacher Training Institute of
BLACK
Education at London University. In 1940 he
moved to the United States to accept a philos-
ophy position at the University of Illinois. He
became a United States citizen in 1948. In 1946
he became a Professor of Philosophy at Cornell
University, and in 1954 became the Susan Linn
Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell, a
position he held until his retirement in 1977. In
his retirement, Black continued to serve as
Director of the Cornell Program in Science,
Technology and Society until 1978, and he was
a participant in that programme until his death.
Black held visiting appointments at Oxford
and Cambridge, as well as in Australia, India,
Israel, Japan, Scandinavia and continental
Europe. He also held visiting fellowships at the
Princeton and Stanford Institutes of Advanced
Study and the National Humanities Center.
He served as President of the Eastern Division
of the American Philosophical Association in
1958/9, and as President of the International
Institute of Philosophy from 1981 to 1984,
being only the second American to hold the
latter position. He was also a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
As a philosopher, Black was not committed to
a particular system of philosophy. He under-
stood the primary purpose of philosophy as con-
ceptual clarification or, as he characterized his
own work by the end of his career, 'the articu-
lation of concepts'. In his efforts at clarifying
wide ranges of philosophical problems, Black
was less concerned with precise formalism than
with sensitivity to common language and
common sense. This sensitivity was an inheri-
tance from his Cambridge exposure to C.D.
BROAD, F.P. Ramsey and G. E. Moore, although
the greatest single influence on Black was
Wittgenstein. While his philosophical interests
ranged widely, mathematics and language
provided the central foci around which his work
developed.
During his early study at Gottingen, Black
wrote his first book, The Nature of
Mathematics (1933). It was a critical exposition
of Bertrand RUSSELL and Alfred North
WHTTEHEAD'S Prindpia mathematica with sup-
94
plementary accounts of intuitionist and for-
malist approaches to mathematics. His expo-
sition of L.E.J. Brouwer's intuitionism was par-
ticularly clear and insightful. Also before the
completion of his doctorate, Black wrote
'Vagueness: An Exercise in Logical Analysis'
(1937). In that paper Black explored the nature
of vagueness and, perhaps more importantly,
the significance the notion of vagueness might
have for logic. It was the first attempt to give a
precise analysis of what Black called 'vague
sets', or what are now called 'fuzzy sets'.
While Black's list of book publications is
long, most of his books are collections of essays,
his favoured medium of writing. Black wrote of
himself that he had 'always been interested,
like a poet, in minute particulars'. This interest
in minute particulars manifested itself in the
treatment of an exceptionally broad range of
philosophical issues, including such topics as
the nature of rules, the warrant for induction,
reasoning with vague or loose concepts,
metaphor and the shortcomings of the picture
theory of language. As Black looked back on his
own work only a few years before his death, he
divided his writings into three groups: exposi-
tory, critical and constructive. Black classified
his magisterial Companion to Wittgenstein's
Tractatus (1964), as well as a number of later
essays in which he pursued themes drawn from
his work with Wittgenstein, as at the same time
both expository and critical. Black also included
his important and pioneering logic text, Critical
Thinking (1946), among his expository
writings, as well as The Labyrinth of Language
(1968).
Black's critical writings, in addition to the
critical elements in his various writings relating to
Wittgenstein's work, included the essays, largely
on method, in Language and Philosophy (1949).
They also included essays on Rudolf Carnap's
views on semantics, J.L. AUSTIN'S understanding
of performative uses of language, Paul GRICE'S
work on conversational meaning, and Nelson
Goodman's work on symbol systems. Moving
away from issues in the philosophy of language,
Black also wrote critically of B.F. Skinner.

Black characterized his constructive work as
focusing most importantly on four sets of
issues: vagueness, models and metaphors,
induction and probability, and rationality. His
work on vagueness, as already noted, started
with his pioneering essay of 1937. His interest
in metaphor, starting with his 1955 paper by
that title, extended the importance of Black's
work into the area of aesthetics. The basis of
probabilistic and inductive reasoning was a
long-standing concern in Black's work, starting
with his 1947 paper, 'Professor Broad on the
Limit Theorems of Probability', and his 1949
'The Justification of Induction', and continuing
through a number of later papers and
exchanges defending a common-sense under-
standing of induction according to which the
very request for a justification of induction is
fundamentally misguided. Black's exploration
of the notion of rationality was a particularly
dominant theme towards the end of his career.
In that area of his work he explored traditional
problems of rationality such as the prisoner's
dilemma, the core question of 'Why Should I Be
Rational?' and the usefulness of formal decision
theory in modelling our rationality. His very
last published papers were a critique of
Bayesian decision theory, arguing that intelli-
gent human choices are based more on a prac-
tical and informal art than on the application
of some kind of formal calculus of probability,
and an exploration of 'Ambiguities of
Rationality'.
Black's work in the articulation of concepts
also carried him deeply into questions of philo-
sophical method and into traditional questions
of metaphysics. In the 1940s he wrote several
articles on the paradox of analysis and the
problem of how analysis of terms can be infor-
mative. The influence of Wittgenstein led Black
to reject the notion that terms possess meanings
that are constituents of the world waiting to be
discovered, clarified and categorized by philoso-
phers. Rather, Black recognized that under-
standing the functioning of human language
also involved, to use a title of a 1949 article,
'Speaking With the Vulgar'. His high regard for
95
BLACK
ordinary language accordingly led Black, like
many philosophers who worked in the tradition
of Wittgenstein, to pay less attention to
meanings and more to rules. Black devoted a
good deal of attention to the analysis of rules,
how they are formulated in various kinds of
statements, and how they are expressed in
various forms of practice.
Black's method was to start with the deliv-
erances of ordinary language. In particular,
Black favoured starting out by identifying
certain paradigm cases of the application of
the concepts to be articulated. He believed that
through the examination of the range of these
paradigm cases the philosopher can move, by
an essentially inductive process, to a set of
cautious generalizations that will lead to an
integrative articulation of the concept. Careful
examination of paradigm cases, in Black's view,
enables the philosopher to identify the rules
and criteria that govern the use of the concepts,
and to show their place within various systems
of semantically and pragmatically related
concepts. Black's understanding of method
clearly involved a marriage of the ordinary
language analysis of his English philosophical
education and the pragmatism of his adopted
America.
Black devoted considerable attention,
starting with his 1951 'Achilles and the
Tortoise', to temporal paradoxes. Black's con-
tributions in this area contributed to a lively
debate with Richard Taylor and Adolf
Griinbaum in particular. In 1952 Black wrote
an article, 'The Identity of Indiscernibles', that
has been widely reprinted in metaphysics texts
and that elicited substantial journal response
from other philosophers. Black raised his inge-
nious 'twin globe' counter-example to the tra-
ditional principle that distinct entities can only
be distinct by virtue of some qualitative differ-
ence.
Beyond Black's interest in and important
contributions to traditional technical problems
of philosophy, Black also manifested a career-
long concern for what one might call the more
human face of philosophy. As early as 1944
BLACK
Black wrote a paper, 'Education as Art and
Discipline'. This interest in education and in
ethics continued throughout Black's career.
In the final decade of his life, for example, he
wrote a contribution, 'Humanistic Education
and the Physician's Art', for an anthology on
Changing Values in Medicine, and authored
The Mount Carmel Declaration', a statement
issued by a symposium on ethics and tech-
nology.
Black's project of 'the articulation of
concepts' centred around a concept of method
that was rooted in common sense, ordinary
language and a clearly pragmatic understand-
ing of reasonableness that went beyond any
kind of formalizable rationality. He rejected
any attempt by others to identify him with any
particular philosophical 'school', characterizing
himself as 'logician, "detached empiricist"
(J. Passmore), and active skeptic (in the spirit of
Goethe's tdtige Sepsis)'. He was concerned with
particular problems rather than the construc-
tion of some overarching conception of reality.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say
that Black thought that whatever there is of an
overarching reality is at bottom nothing more
than a collection of particular minutiae. Black
was careful to avoid jargon and technical ter-
minology. While he maintained throughout his
career his deep and profound love of the math-
ematical, we might well leave with the impres-
sion that he thought that reality was more like
a poem than like a mathematical system.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Nature of Mathematics: A Critical Study
(1933; 2000).
'Vagueness: An Exercise in Logical Analysis',
Philosophy of Science, vol. 4 (1937), pp.
427-55.
Critical Thinking (New York, 1946).
Language and Philosophy: Studies in Method
(Ithaca, New York, 1949).
'The Identity of Indiscernibles', Mind, vol. 61
(1952), pp. 153-64.
The Problems of Analysis: Philosophical
Essays (Ithaca, New York, 1954).
96
Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language
and Philosophy (Ithaca, New York, 1962).
A Companion to Wittgenstein's Tractatus
(Ithaca, New York, 1964).
The Labyrinth of Language (New York,
1968).
The Margins of Precision: Essays in Logic
and Language (Ithaca, New York, 1970).
(with E.H. Gombrich and Julian Hochberg),
Art, Perception, and Reality (Baltimore,
Maryland, 1972).
Caveats and Critiques: Philosophical Essays
in Language and Logic (Ithaca, New York,
1975).
The Prevalence of Humbug and Other Essays
(Ithaca, New York, 1983).
Perplexities: Rational Choice, the Prisoner's
Dilemma, Metaphor, Poetic Ambiguity,
and Other Puzzles (Ithaca, New York,
1990).
Other Relevant Works
Max Black's papers are at Cornell University,
'Conventionalism in Geometry and the
Interpretation of Necessary Statements',
Philosophy of Science, vol. 9 (1942), pp.
335-49.
'Some Objections to Ogden and Richards'
Theory of Interpretation', Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 39 (1942), pp. 281-9.
'Education as Art and Discipline', Ethics, vol.
54 (1944), pp. 290-94.
'The "Paradox of Analysis'", Mind, vol. 53
(1944), pp. 263-7.
'The Limits of a Behavioristic Semiotic',
Philosophical Review, vol. 56 (1947), pp.
258-72.
'Linguistic Method in Philosophy',
Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, vol. 8 (1948), pp. 635-50.
The Semantic Definition of Truth', Analysis,
vol. 8 (1948), pp. 49-63.
'Carnap's Semantics', Philosophical Review,
vol. 58 (1949), pp. 257-64.
'Achilles and the Tortoise', Analysis, vol. 11
(1951), pp. 91-101.
'Why Cannot an Effect Precede Its Cause?',

Analysis, vol. 16 (1956), pp. 49-57.
'Necessary Statements and Rules',
Philosophical Review, vol. 67 (1958), pp.
313-41.
'Can Induction Be Vindicated?',
Philosophical Studies, vol. 10 (1959), pp.
5-16.
The "Direction" of Time', Analysis, vol. 19
(1959), pp. 54-63.
'Reasoning with Loose Concepts', Dialogue,
vol. 2 (1963), pp. 1-12.
(Ed.), Philosophy in America (Ithaca, New
York, 1965).
The Elusiveness of Sets', Review of
Metaphysics, vol. 24 (1971), pp. 614-36.
'Humanistic Education and the Physician's
Art', in Eric J. Cassell (ed.), Changing
Values in Medicine (New York, 1979), pp.
181-95.
'Why Should I Be Rational?', Dialectica, vol.
36 (1982), pp. 147-68.
The Radical Ambiguity of a Poem', Synthese,
vol. 59 (1984), pp. 89-108.
The Articulation of Concepts', in Andre
Mercier and Maja Svilar (eds),
Philosophers on their Own Work (Bern,
1985), vol. 12, pp. 9-41.
'Making Intelligent Choices, How Useful is
Decision Theory?', Dialectica, vol. 39
(1985), pp. 19-34.
Further Reading
Bohan, James C., 'On Black's "Loose"
Concepts', Dialogue, vol. 10 (1971), pp.
332-6.
Calistro, Ralph F., 'On Discovering Rules:
Max Black's Methods', De Philosophia,
vol. 1(1980), pp. 17-23.
Cross, Charles B., 'Max Black on the Identity
of Indiscernibles', Philosophical Quarterly,
vol. 45 (1995), pp. 350-60.
Ferraiolo, William, 'Black's "Twin Globe"
Counterexample', Southwest Philosophy
Review, vol. 13 (1997), pp. 59-66.
Carver, Newton, 'Max Black', in The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York,
1967), vol. 1, pp. 318-19.
97
BLACKBURN
Grunbaum, Adolf, 'Messrs Black and Taylor
on Temporal Paradoxes', Analysis, vol. 12
(1952), pp. 144-8.
Johnson, Bredo C., 'Black and the Inductive
Justification of Induction', Analysis, vol.
32 (1972), pp. 110-12.
Marcus, Ruth B., 'Max Black (1909-1988)',
Dialectica, vol. 44 (1990), pp. 5-8.
Martinich, A.P., 'Meaning and Intention:
Black Versus Grice', Dialectica, vol. 44
(1990), pp. 79-98.
Salmon, Wesley C., 'Should We Attempt to
Justify Induction?', Philosophical Studies,
vol. 8 (1957), pp. 33-48.
Sanford, David H., The Inductive Support of
Inductive Rules: Themes from Max Black',
Dialectica, vol. 44 (1990), pp. 23-41.
Scherzinger, Martin, 'Max Black's
"Interaction View" of Metaphor',
Conference, vol. 6 (1995), pp. 89-97.
Taylor, Richard, 'Mr. Black on Temporal
Paradoxes', Analysis, vol. 12 (1951), pp.
38-43.
Warner, Martin, 'Black's Metaphors', British
Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 13 (1973), pp.
367-72.
David E. Schrader
BLACKBURN, Simon (1944-)
Simon Blackburn was born in the Cotswolds
village of Chipping Sodbury on 12 July 1944.
He was educated at Clifton College in Bristol
(1957-61) and Trinity College, Cambridge
(1962-5), where Casimir LEWY taught him,
and where he took pts 1 and 2 of the
Cambridge Moral Sciences Tripos. He worked
again with Lewy on his PhD (also from
Cambridge, received 1970), but also with
Richard BRAITHWAITE. After a research fellow-
ship at Churchill College Cambridge,
Blackburn was appointed a fellow and lecturer
BLACKBURN
in philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford in
1969, where he remained until 1990. In that
year he was appointed Edna J. Koury
Distinguished Professor at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He returned to
the UK in 2001, where he is Professor of
Philosophy at Cambridge University. He was
editor of the journal Mind from 1985 until
1990. He holds an honorary LL D from the
University of Sunderland and in 2002 he was
made a fellow of the British Academy.
Blackburn has made important contributions
to many debates within contemporary analytic
philosophy, such as RUSSELL'S theory of descrip-
tions, indirect speech or WITTGENSTEIN'S rule-
following considerations. However, it is more
telling to categorize him as part of an older
tradition of British empiricism. His work is
clearly under the influence of David Hume.
This is evident in Blackburn's naturalist
outlook, in his areas of research and perhaps
even in his style of writing. Like Hume,
Blackburn is interested in our justification for
beliefs that cannot be directly supported by
sense-experience, such as beliefs about possi-
bility and necessity, about causes, inductively
supported beliefs and beliefs about what one
ought to do. But Blackburn's horizons are wide
- he also draws on the ideas of, for example,
Butler, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger.
In his first book, Reason and Prediction
(1973), Blackburn attempted to solve the
problem of inductive scepticism by invoking
some basic a priori principles - a Humean
problem, but on this occasion not a Humean
solution. Later, Blackburn developed his
famous 'projectivism' and 'quasi-realism'.
These two doctrines constitute a general
approach to dealing with a number of empiri-
cally suspect areas of human thought: morality,
causality, necessity and counterfactuals.
Projectivism is the Humean idea that in these
areas we project our attitudes and feelings onto
the world, misleadingly making it seem as if our
judgements represented features the world has
independently of us. Our judgements appear to
represent the world as containing moral values,
98
logical necessity, etc., but in fact it does not.
One might conclude that human thought is
therefore erroneous in these areas (as J.L.
MACKIE did). However, Blackburn's quasi-
realism is the doctrine that even though we
think and talk as if values, possibilities, etc. are
there and as if moral and modal statements
could be true or false, we are nevertheless not
committing any error in doing so. It is the aim
of quasi-realism to legitimize our practice by
explaining how we come to make the judge-
ments in question without recourse to meta-
physically and epistemologically dubious prop-
erties.
Among philosophers Blackburn is best
known for his projectivism and quasi-realism in
meta-ethics, the area of application in which the
double doctrine has had by far the most impact,
and to which Blackburn himself seems to have
devoted most attention. The remainder of this
entry is therefore focused mostly on
Blackburn's meta-ethical views.
Blackburn argues that moral qualities (such
as moral goodness) do not exist independently
of human observers. Rather, moral thinkers
project these features onto the world. Moral
judgements are more like desires or sentiments
than like beliefs. Moral judgements are atti-
tudes towards the world rather than represen-
tations of it. They must be, because if moral
judgements were like beliefs and represented the
world, then they could not have the motiva-
tional force they evidently have. For, as Hume
teaches, beliefs on their own do not motivate
one to act. Another argument for projectivism
in meta-ethics is Blackburn's well-known
modal argument (or argument from moral
supervenience): if we regard moral judgements
as desire-like, motivating states of mind, then it
becomes possible to explain why moral prop-
erties depend on non-moral properties - why
the moral supervenes on the non-moral. For
any motivating mental state should guide our
actions as in dependence of the state of our
environment. A moral realist, Blackburn
claims, has difficulty in explaining moral super-
venience.

Blackburn combines this Humean projec-
tivism with an 'expressivist' view of moral
language, similar to that of AJ. AYER. Given
that moral judgements are desire-like states,
'attitudes', rather than beliefs, moral statements
are there to express these states. Moral state-
ments do not therefore admit of truth or false-
hood in any robust sense.
This expressivist doctrine (that moral state-
ments are not truth-apt and express sentiments)
is subject to a lively debate in which Blackburn
takes centre stage. Earlier forms of expres-
sivism, such as Ayer's, Stevenson's and HARE'S,
had been criticized by GEACH as follows:
suppose with the expressivist that it is the
semantic function of 'gambling is bad' to
express a certain negative sentiment, namely
disapproval, towards gambling. Now consider
another sentence within which the first is
embedded as antecedent: 'if gambling is bad,
then so is betting on dogs'. Clearly, the second
sentence does not express the negative senti-
ment. So the phrase 'gambling is bad' occurring
in it clearly does not have the function of
expressing disapproval of gambling when it is
embedded, or so Geach argues. But the two
occurrences of the phrase 'gambling is bad'
cannot differ in meaning, because if they did,
then the undeniably valid modus ponens infer-
ence that can be drawn from the two state-
ments would turn out to be invalid through
equivocation. Thus the initial supposition that
the semantic function of 'gambling is bad' is
expression of a sentiment of disapproval
towards gambling is untenable.
Blackburn is famous for an innovative
response to this argument (see chapter 6 of
Spreading the Word). The nub of Geach's
objection is that orthodox semantic theories
presuppose that every sentence has a truth-apt
content, for this feature of contents is usually
exploited when it comes to explaining the com-
positionality of a language, i.e. the way in
which the meanings of complex expressions
depend on the meanings of component parts.
Blackburn sketches an alternative semantic
strategy that does not rely on the truth-aptness
99
BLACKBURN
of sentences. His idea is that moral attitudes can
be complex, and that the complexity of moral
language systematically reflects complexity at
the level of the moral attitudes expressed by it.
Thus, the sentence 'If gambling is bad, then so
is betting on dogs' expresses a complex attitude
of which the attitudes expressed by its
antecedent and consequent are component
parts (the complex higher order attitude of
approval of a disposition to disapprove morally
of betting on dogs when one disapproves
morally of gambling). The resulting 'Boo-
Hooray-semantics' meets the challenge posed
by Geach.
The adequacy of Blackburn's response to
Geach's embedding challenge has been disputed
by, among others, Bob Hale and Crispin
WRIGHT. One objection is that it fails to
account for 'mixed' embeddings, where moral
sentences are compounded with non-moral
ones (Hale). Another objection is that
Blackburn's semantics represents the logical
must of valid inferences involving moral
premises as a mere moral requirement (Wright).
This dispute about the semantics of moral
language is ongoing (see Essays in Quasi-
Realism, 1994).
As mentioned, a related feature of
Blackburn's meta-ethical view is a doctrine he
calls 'quasi-realism'. Our practices of talking
and thinking about moral matters seem to belie
projectivism: we talk as if moral sentences
expressed moral beliefs, which are capable of
being true or false. Sentences expressing moral
judgements are grammatically just like other
declarative sentences; moral predicates, such
as 'bad', just like non-moral ones. In short, we
speak and think as if moral judgements had
truth-conditions and were objective. Quasi-
realism is the claim that even though moral
statements are originally and essentially expres-
sive, and even though moral judgements are at
bottom desire-like attitudes and not truth-apt,
there is nevertheless no error involved in this
practice (compare J.L. Mackie's error theory).
We can, according to Blackburn, 'earn the
right' to speak in this way by explaining the for-
BLACKBURN
mation of moral judgements merely in terms of
our subjective responses to the world and
without recourse to any genuine moral prop-
erties that these judgements purport to detect.
There is nothing wrong with our ways of
treating moral judgements as if they were beliefs
about something objective as long as we do
not infer from this that there really are moral
values independently of our subjective
responses.
It may appear (and has been argued by
MCDOWELL) that Blackburn's quasi-realism
undermines his projectivism in that it legit-
imizes precisely what projectivism rejects,
namely the assimilation of moral thought and
talk to thought and talk about objective reality.
However, Blackburn retains a distinction
between quasi-beliefs representing quasi-facts
and genuine beliefs representing genuine facts,
where genuine beliefs, unlike quasi-beliefs,
cannot be explained merely by recourse to sub-
jective responses. Such a distinction allows a
formulation of projectivism compatible with
quasi-realism. However, the emerging picture is
not, as it may initially have appeared, a meta-
physical view which delineates the kinds of
facts there are, but ultimately a psychological
comparison between the precise natures and
roles of certain mental states (moral judge-
ments) as opposed to others (factual beliefs).
Indeed, Blackburn's ambitious recent work,
Ruling Passions (1998), pursues precisely this:
a characterization of the place of ethical delib-
eration in practical thought more generally.
According to this - again Humean - moral
psychology, what sets moral thoughts apart
from other practical considerations is their
indispensable coordinating social function.
Unlike other sentiments, moral thoughts are
subject to the legitimate sanctions of others.
Together with the feelings of guilt and shame,
moral thought allows individuals to exert
control on others and to be controlled by
others. In Blackburn's view, while moral
thought does not answer to objective values, it
is nevertheless not arbitrary and subject to eval-
uation. Moral thinkers can and should reflect
100
on their own moral principles and practices in
the light of their consequences, and revise if
necessary. Thus Blackburn opposes the preju-
dice that a projectivist, non-cognitivist outlook
prevents one from taking moral deliberation
seriously.
In recent years Blackburn has increasingly
assumed the role of a public figure. He has
published three very successful books aimed at
the general public rather than professional
philosophers. These books clearly go beyond
merely setting out his previously published
views for a non-philosophical audience. Think
(1998) is a general introduction to philosophy
through some key themes and key figures. But
it is also a defence of, and plea for, philosophy
as a form of 'conceptual engineering'. Being
Good (2001), an introduction to ethics, con-
tinues the optimistic approach to ethics outlined
in Ruling Passions: even though ethics is under
threat from the decline of religion and the real-
ization that moral values are to a large extent
determined by historical accident, there is nev-
ertheless room for some universal values and
for distinguishing between more or less func-
tional ethical systems. Blackburn's latest opus,
Lust (2004), written for a series of lectures on
the seven deadly sins, argues that lust should be
classed not as a vice or sin, but as a virtue.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reason and Prediction (Cambridge, 1973).
Spreading the Word (Oxford, 1984).
Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford, 1994).
Ruling Passions (Oxford, 1998).
Think (Oxford, 1998).
Being Good (Oxford, 2001).
Lust (Oxford, 2004).
Further Reading
Book Symposium on Ruling Passions,
Philosophical Books, vol. 42 (2001),
pp. 1-32.
Book Symposium on Ruling Passions,
Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, vol. 65 (2002), pp. 144-9.
Hale, Bob, The Compleat Projectivist',

Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 36 (1986),
pp. 65-84.
Law, Iain, 'Improvement and Truth in Quasi-
Realism', Cogito, vol. 10 (1996), pp.
189-93.
McDowell, John, 'Projection and Truth in
Ethics' [Lindley Lecture, University of
Kansas, 1987], repr. in McDowell, Mind,
Value and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.,
1998), pp. 151-66.
Miller, Alex, An Introduction to
Contemporary Metaethics (Cambridge,
2003), chap. 4.
Wright, Crispin, 'Realism, Anti-Realism,
Irrealism, Quasi-Realism', Midwest Studies
in Philosophy, vol. 12 (1989), pp. 25-49.
Max Kolbel
BLACKHAM, Harold John (1903-)
Harold John Blackham was born on 31 March
1903. He did not follow a conventional
academic career, but worked as a farmer and as
a teacher before becoming one of the leading
members of the Ethical Union, which in the
1960s became the British Humanist
Association, with Blackham as its first Director.
Before World War II he was one of the
founders of the Journal for Moral Education,
and an organizer of a conference in London in
1938 for the World Union of Freethinkers.
After the war he helped to found the
International Humanist and Ethical Union, of
which Julian HUXLEY was the first President. He
has lectured widely, and officiated at humanist
funerals until he was in his nineties. He cele-
brated his one-hundredth birthday in 2003,
and for many years has been living in the Wye
Valley on the Welsh border.
Blackham belongs to the rationalist humanist
tradition, and has written many books and
articles to provide a philosophical justification
101
BLACKHAM
for humanist beliefs. He traced humanist ratio-
nalism from the pre-Socratics and Epicureans,
through the French philosophes, to Bentham,
Mill and the present day. He identified
Darwinism as the greatest challenge to reli-
gious belief, and maintained that, after Darwin,
the onus has lain with the religious believer to
attempt to provide rational justification for his
beliefs. Blackham thinks that the removal of its
historical religious basis leaves ethics to develop
independently, and he has been an advocate
both of teaching ethics in schools, and of
putting one's ethical principles into practice in
one's own moral behaviour.
Blackham's most famous philosophical work
is Six Existentialists (1951), which has been a
standard university text ever since it was pub-
lished. When this work was written, many of
the standard primary existentialist texts still
awaited translation into English, and
Blackham, together with a number of other
distinguished thinkers, was responsible for stim-
ulating British interest in existentialism. As
stated in the Preface to Six Existentialists,
Blackham hoped to provide a clear introduc-
tion to existentialism, which would remove
some of the accretions of misunderstanding
which surrounded the movement. The thought
of each of the six, namely Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel and
Sartre, is on Blackham's exposition highly indi-
vidual and distinctive, but their similarities are
sufficient to form them into a single philo-
sophical movement. Interestingly, Blackham
includes religious as well as secular existential-
ists in his exposition and interpretation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Living as a Humanist: Essays (1950).
Six Existentialists (1951).
The Human Tradition (1953).
Religion in a Modern Society (1966).
Humanism (1968).
'A Metaphysic of Man', Religious Humanism
(Autumn 1969), pp. 166-8.
'What is Agnosticism?', Free Inquiry, vol. 1
(Summer 1981), pp. 31-3.
BLACKHAM
'Moral Education and its Near Relatives',
Journal of Moral Education, vol. 12 (May
1983), pp. 116-24.
Kathryn L. Plant
BLANCO WHITE, Amber (nee Pember
Reeves: 1887-1981)
Amber Pember Reeves was born in
Christchurch, New Zealand on 1 July 1887
and died in London on 26 December 1981.
Her father, William Pember Reeves
(1857-1932), was appointed Agent-General
for New Zealand in England in 1896, and in
1909, Director of the London School of
Economics. Her mother, Maud Pember Reeves
(1865-1953), was active in the campaign for
women's suffrage in New Zealand, and - after
the family moved to England - became a
member of the Fabian Society and the author
of a study of working-class domestic econom-
ics.
Blanco White was educated at Kensington
High School, then took a double first in the
Moral Sciences Tripos at Newnham College,
Cambridge in 1908, where she became a
founder member of the University Fabian
Society. She began an affair with H.G. WELLS
in 1908. Her parents were outraged and in
spring 1909 the lovers fled to France. Amber
returned to England in 1909 to marry a Fabian
barrister, Rivers Blanco White (d. 1966); her
child by Wells was born on 31 December of
that year. The publication of Wells's Ann
Veronica (1909) - in which the heroine,
modelled on Amber, elopes with a married sci-
entist - provoked such hostile reviews that an
estrangement between Wells and the Blanco
Whites ensued until the late 1920s.
Blanco White turned to novel writing. The
last of her four novels, Give and Take (1923),
was based on her experience as a civil servant
102
during World War I, when she served in the
Ministry of Munitions. Her civil service career
ended in 1922, and she became a writer and
public speaker, in 1928 taking a post at Morley
College, where she lectured in psychology and
ethics. In 1932 she collaborated with Wells to
produce The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of
Mankind, to which she contributed statistical
material. In 1934 she published The
Nationalisation of Banking, which was
followed by The New Propaganda (1939). This
considered the psychological reasons for the
success of modern governments of the extreme
left and right: although her socialism made her
uncritical of the communist states of Russia
and China, she accurately diagnosed the likely
impact of war on the fascist regimes of Hitler
and Mussolini. In 1941 she published Worry in
Women, another work of popular psychology,
influenced by the theories of Freud, Ernest
Jones and Melanie Klein, in which she argued
that women's emancipation had brought new
levels of responsibility as well as opportunity,
and that current domestic and education
systems - which continued to differentiate
between girls and boys, and to repress and
devalue the former - left many women with an
'inferiority complex'.
Her next work, Ethics for Unbelievers
(1949), aimed to establish 'a scientific system of
morals' (p. 1), independent of religious belief.
Her contribution to ethics was unoriginal:
strongly influenced by social contract and
natural law theories, she stressed the central
role of rationality in the definition of a
communal ethical system which would protect
and nurture the development of individuals
healthy in both body and mind and free to
pursue their own personal ideals. She empha-
sized that such systems must be adequate to
protect the community, but also workable
through being acceptable to, and not unduly
demanding of, the majority of citizens. She
argued that the advent of the social sciences -
in particular, Freudian psychology - would aid
the development of ethical codes which avoided
dangerous over-repression of basic human

instincts. Ethics for Unbelievers was sympa-
thetically reviewed in the Universities Quarterly
for May 1949 by Bertrand RUSSELL, who found
it 'an extremely useful and timely book', but it
appears to have had no impact on contempo-
rary ethical theorists or theory.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The New Propaganda (1939).
Worry in Women (1941).
Ethics for Unbelievers (1949).
Other Relevant Works
Give and Take (1923).
The Nationalisation of Banking (1934).
Further Reading
Fry, R., Maud and Amber (Christchurch,
New Zealand, 1992).
West, A., H.G. Wells: Aspects of a Life
(1984).
Rosemary Mitchell
BOSANQUET, Bernard (1848-1923)
Bernard Bosanquet was born at Rock Hall,
near Alnwick, Northumberland on 14 July
1848 and died in London on 8 February 1923.
He was the youngest of five sons of the Revd
Robert William Bosanquet and Caroline
MacDowall. Bernard's eldest brother, Charles,
was one of the founders of the Charity
Organization Society and its first Secretary;
another brother, Day, was an admiral in the
Royal Navy and served as Governor of South
Australia (1909-14).
Bosanquet studied at Harrow (1862-7) and
at Balliol College, Oxford (1867-70), where he
was introduced to the idealist 'German philos-
ophy' of Kant and Hegel by T.H. Green.
Bosanquet obtained first class honours in clas-
sical moderations (1868) and literae human-
103
BOSANQUET
lores (1870) and, upon graduation, was elected
to a fellowship at University College, Oxford,
over F.H. BRADLEY. In 1881, after receiving a
small inheritance, Bosanquet gave up teaching,
and moved to London. There, he became active
in adult education and social work principally
with the Charity Organization Society (COS)
and the London Ethical Society. This period
was also one of intense philosophical activity.
Bosanquet joined the newly established
Aristotelian Society in 1886, and served as its
Vice-President in 1888 and its President from
1894 to 1898. During this time he met and
married (in 1895) Helen Dendy, an activist in
social work and social reform and, later, a
leading member of the Royal Commission on
the Poor Laws (1905-1909).
In 1903 Bosanquet returned to professorial
life, as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the
University of St Andrews in Scotland, but his
health was starting to fail and, in 1908, he
retired to Oxshott, Surrey. He remained
involved in the COS and in philosophy, and
was elected Gifford Lecturer for 1911 and
1912. For his services to philosophy, Bosanquet
was made a fellow of the British Academy in
1907, and was awarded honorary doctorates
from the universities of Glasgow, Birmingham,
Durham and St Andrews. Bosanquet main-
tained an active philosophical profile until just
before his death. His papers, with those of his
wife, are held in the library of the University of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Bosanquet's philosophical writing began rel-
atively late. His years as fellow at University
College were occupied primarily in teaching,
and his sole published work during this time
was a translation of G.F. Schomann's Athenian
Constitutional History (1878). It was only after
leaving Oxford that he was able to dedicate
himself to writing.
Bosanquet's first major philosophical publica-
tions were in logic. In 1883 he published 'Logic as
the Science of Knowledge', in Essays in
Philosophical Criticism, a collection edited by
Andrew Seth PRINGLE-PATTISON and R.B.
HALDANE. This was soon followed by more exten-
BOSANQUET
sive work in the area - an edition and translation
of two volumes of the work of the German
philosopher, Hermann Lotze (1884), his own
Knowledge and Reality (1885) and, three years
after that, Logic, or the Morphology of
Knowledge, in two volumes (1888). The principal
elements of this latter work were recast in a short,
but influential, book prepared for adult education
courses, The Essentials of Logic (1895).
Bosanquet's work on logic has affinities with
both Hegel and Greek classical thought. A
response to F.H. Bradley's Principles of Logic
(1883), Knowledge and Reality has sometimes
been referred to as the longest book review in
philosophical history. Here, Bosanquet
reproaches Bradley for attaching himself to
certain 'reactionary' views in contemporary
German thought, and for allegedly failing to
appreciate fully the contribution of Hegel. The
second edition of Bradley's Principles (1922)
acknowledges the author's debt to Bosanquet's
critique.
In his Logic, Bosanquet - following what he
takes to be the view of Plato and Aristotle -
holds that logic is the science of knowledge and
not (more generally) of thought. Logic is a study
of the 'morphology' or forms of knowledge, and
is concerned with describing the evolution of
species of judgement and inference and with
determining their interrelationships. According
to Bosanquet, because judgements are expressed
in sentences, the sentence (and not words) is 'the
real unit of language'.
Bosanquet argues that metaphysics cannot be
distinguished from logic, the science of knowl-
edge, any more than one can separate a result
from the process which produces it. Still,
although reality 'is in our thought, it is not
merely considered as our thought' (Elements of
Logic, 1895, p. 11). Despite the connection
between logic and knowledge, however,
Bosanquet denied that he was offering an epis-
temological view - in the sense that it implied a
theory of cognition in which truth and reality are
external to one another.
Bosanquet proposes a coherence theory of
truth. Consistent with this, Bosanquet argued
104
that truth and validity cannot be separated, since
an inference (where validity applies) is a judge-
ment whose ground or reason is explicitly set
forth, and a judgement is really a conclusion. In
contrast with the formal logic of J.S. Mill, then,
Bosanquet favoured a dialectical logic, where
'experience forces thought along certain lines
from partial to more complete notions'.
By the late 1880s Bosanquet's philosophical
interests had shifted and broadened. While he
retained an interest in logic throughout his life,
Bosanquet began to write on aesthetics and
social philosophy. His first foray into aesthetics
appeared in 1886 - a translation and lengthy
introduction to The Introduction to Hegel's
Philosophy of Fine Art. This was followed by
several articles on artwork and aesthetic experi-
ence, and led up to A History of Aesthetic
(1892), the first such study in the English
language.
Bosanquet placed a greater emphasis on art
and aesthetics than any other major thinker in
the early British idealist tradition. He does not
conceive of art in a narrow sense; he saw (fol-
lowing John Ruskin and William Morris) the
work of artisans as also reflecting the 'mystery'
that is often associated with art. For Bosanquet,
'art' is important because it is revelatory of the
'spiritual' world. Thus, his History was not
aimed at defining principles, but articulating an
account of aesthetic consciousness and the devel-
opment of aesthetic theory. Although there are
similarities with Hegel's Lectures on Fine Art,
Bosanquet's approach is also influenced by
Aristotle.
The most developed statement of Bosanquet's
aesthetics is his Three Lectures on Aesthetic
(1915). Here, Bosanquet is concerned with
analysing the 'aesthetic attitude' which, he says,
is an activity not of the mincl alone, but of the
whole person - 'body-and-mind'. Art itself is an
expression of spirit - and Bosanquet's account is
close to, but avoids some of the pitfalls of, the
later 'expression theory' associated with
Benedetto Croce and R.G. COLLINGWOOD.
Bosanquet's aesthetic theory reflects a
number of principles found in his logic. For

example, in art, as in logic, no element is
'isolated'; starting from any particular, we are
led to the 'system' - which he calls, in meta-
physics, the 'Absolute'. Thus, art allows access
to the Absolute through 'feeling' or aesthetic
consciousness. Other topics discussed by
Bosanquet are the forms of aesthetic satisfac-
tion and the different 'kinds' of beauty.
Bosanquet suggests that nothing is genuinely
ugly in art. Thus he speaks of 'difficult' beauty
- cases where, because of some feature in the
object or of some failure in the individual
observer (e.g., of education, imagination or
effort), one fails to appreciate the beauty of the
object.
Bosanquet's work in social and political phi-
losophy parallels his activity in charity work
and adult education. Like his tutor Green,
Bosanquet believed that philosophers should
address practical issues. He joined the COS in
1887 and, beginning in 1888, we find a number
of articles on social reform and socialism, many
of which were published in the Charity
Organisation Review.
In his Essays and Addresses (1889) - a
volume containing articles both on social
reform and of a technical philosophical char-
acter - Bosanquet includes an essay, 'The
Kingdom of God on Earth', wherein he begins
to outline a moral philosophy based on Green
and Bradley's notion of one's 'station and its
duties'. But Bosanquet's concerns were not just
theoretical. He challenged the proposals for
social reform of Salvation Army General
William Booth in a lengthy pamphlet, 'In
Darkest England' On the Wrong Track (1891).
In a later collection, The Civilization of
Christendom (1893), Bosanquet criticizes the
individualist account of liberty of J.S. Mill and
advances an 'ideal of modern life' which he
calls 'Christian Hellenism'. Bosanquet's interest
in social reform and political theory also led to
his edited translations of the German philoso-
pher/economist Albert Schaffle's works The
Quintessence of Socialism (1889) and The
Impossibility of Social Democracy (1892), and,
particularly, to a collection of essays to which
105
BOSANQUET
he contributed five of seventeen chapters,
Aspects of the Social Problem (1895). In this
latter work, Bosanquet's objective was to bring
together 'theory' and practice in the area of
social reform. He emphasized the development
of character, which, he held, largely determined
the influence of the environment. This has
important implications for the relation of the
individual to the community, but also for the
role and specific responsibilities of the state.
Another of Bosanquet's principal activities,
during the 1890s, was his involvement in adult
education, and many of his publications - such
as The Essentials of Logic (1895), A
Companion to Plato's Republic for English
Readers (1895) and Psychology of the Moral
Self (1897) - are products of this work.
Bosanquet enjoyed a good reputation as a
teacher and was a popular lecturer, although he
was demanding of his students and, it was said,
he 'had not naturally the born expositor's gift'
(Helen Bosanquet, p. 49).
One of Bosanquet's series of adult educa-
tion lectures became the basis of The
Philosophical Theory of the State (1899). Here,
Bosanquet's aim was to address problems in
contemporary empiricist political thought - in
particular, the problem of political obligation.
Bosanquet developed Rousseau's conception
of the general will to explain the nature and jus-
tification of the state, its positive role in human
freedom, and its limits. This same notion of the
general or 'real' will enabled Bosanquet to
provide an account of human rights that was
based on identifying one's 'station' or function
in society and the duties that follow, and to
explain the nature of punishment (which he
saw as combining deterrence, rehabilitation
and retribution).
Bosanquet maintained that, to provide a
coherent account of the nature of state action,
one must abandon some of the 'individualist'
assumptions of liberalism, and he argued at
length against the analysis of liberty and of law
found in Bentham, Spencer and Mill.
Bosanquet saw in Hegel's Philosophy of Right
a plausible account of the modern state as an
BOSANQUET
'organism' or whole united around a shared
understanding of the good. Less frequently
noted, but just as important for Bosanquet's
political thought, is the work of Kant.
Bosanquet's emphasis on the moral develop-
ment of the human individual and on limiting
the state from directly promoting morality
clearly reflects both his own reading of Kant
and the Kantian influences on T.H. Green. The
function of the state, then, was fundamentally
'the hindrance of hindrances'.
Within nations, Bosanquet held that the state
itself is absolute, because social life requires a
consistent coordination of individuals and insti-
tutions. Nevertheless, he also acknowledged
that there was a movement in human con-
sciousness towards a notion of 'humanity'
which could give rise to international institu-
tions and law, and he favoured the establish-
ment of a 'League of nations'.
Bosanquet's political thought had a central
place in the British idealist tradition; the classi-
cal criticism of this movement, Leonard
HOBHOUSE's The Metaphysical Theory of the
State (1918), is principally a critique of The
Philosophical Theory of the State. Hobhouse
took Bosanquet's view to be virtually identical
with, and at best only an extrapolation of,
Hegel, and argued that Bosanquet adopts the
putatively Hegelian view of the state as ideal,
non-empirical and ahistorical, and leads to a
mere defence of the status quo. While
Hobhouse's criticisms of Bosanquet were
neither original nor unique, they were system-
atically and thoroughly presented.
In the second and third editions of The
Philosophical Theory of the State (1910; 1919),
and in later work, such as Social and
International Ideals (1917), Bosanquet
attempted to address several of these criticisms.
While Bosanquet would not have denied the
influence of Hegel, his political thought is better
seen (as many of his contemporaries recog-
nized) as growing out of classical Greek
thought. This influence is particularly evident in
his earlier Companion to Plato's Republic, and
his several essays on Plato, where he locates
106
such notions as 'my station and its duties' in
Plato's concept of ergon (function). Bosanquet
also discusses the conditions for effective inter-
national political organizations and the impor-
tance of addressing matters relating to charity
and casework. Despite Hobhouse's criticisms,
recent studies have emphasized the progressive
character of Bosanquet's views. He held that
there should be no a priori limitation on the
state to promote social well-being, he was in
favour of worker ownership, and his 'theory as
a whole' has been said by some to be consistent
with socialism. Indeed, Bosanquet was an active
Liberal and, in the 1910s supported the Labour
Party.
Another series of adult education lectures,
more clearly intended as a textbook, was pub-
lished as the Psychology of the Moral Self
(1897). Here Bosanquet discusses a number of
influential views in psychology, especially those
of James WARD and William James. Opposed
to the crude associationist and the 'push and
pull' psychology of empiricists (such as Hume,
Mill and Bain), Bosanquet argues that one
cannot separate the individual from 'everything
that goes to make up its world'. He also
presents an account of consciousness that
underlies his theory of the 'general will'.
During his tenure as Professor of Moral
Philosophy at St Andrews, Bosanquet published
little. It was only after his retirement that he
could complete the second edition of his Logic
(1911) and finish his long-promised 'work on
Metaphysic'. His Gifford Lectures (1911-12
and 1912-13), The Principle of Individuality
and Value and The Value and Destiny of the
Individual, are a thorough and systematic
account of his metaphysics. His position has
been called 'absolute idealism', to be distin-
guished from the 'personal idealism' of
Hastings RASHDALL, W.R. SORLEY and others,
whose work emphasized the fundamental dis-
tinctiveness and independence of human beings.
For Bosanquet, the ultimate principle of reality
and of value was 'the Absolute'.
In the Gifford Lectures, Bosanquet focused
on individuality - a principle underlying much

of his philosophical thought and rooted in his
earliest studies in logic. In the first series of
lectures, Bosanquet's object is to show 'how the
reality and value of all things in the universe
depend[s] on the degree of their embodiment of
the principle of individuality' (The Value and
Destiny of the Individual, p. xix). He argues
that we see, in nature and thought, a 'nisus
towards a whole' - a move from incoherence
and an effort to self-completeness. It is by seeing
a thing in its relation to this whole that it
acquires not only greater meaning, but 'uni-
versality'. Bosanquet describes this 'whole' as a
'living world', 'positive individuality', 'the
concrete universal' or 'the Absolute'.
The view that Bosanquet sketches here is
'teleological', though in a special sense. The
remainder of this first series elaborates this
account of reality, by showing how the
'Absolute' or 'individuality' is a principle of
value, and by examining the nature of finite
selves. The 'nisus towards a whole' which char-
acterizes the universe is seen in the finite self:
when 'what we are' conflicts with our sense of
what we should be and, then, is harmonized
with the 'higher self, 'the self is at its best and
fullest'. This is also seen when one speaks of a
great experience pulling us outside of or beyond
ourselves. This process or method of meeting
and removing contradiction, characteristic of
the growth of any thing, is what Bosanquet
calls the argument a contingentia mundi.
Bosanquet explicitly rejects panpsychism -
the view that nature has consciousness.
Nevertheless, he allows that the 'detail' of the
universe is brought into mind and, through it,
to the Absolute. The finite mind serves, then, as
a copula between nature and the Absolute. But
Bosanquet's arguments against panpsychism
are inconclusive, and it would seem that his
resistance to this conclusion was influenced
already by his recognition of the value of the
finite individual.
In the second series of Gifford Lectures, The
Value and Destiny of the Individual, Bosanquet
continues the account of The Principle of
Individuality and Value by showing how the
107
BOSANQUET
individual 'works out its destiny and achieves
its worth, by and through its membership in the
universe' (The Value and Destiny of the
Individual, p. xix). Beginning with a general
analysis of the finite mind, Bosanquet argues
against dualism and the 'exclusiveness' of indi-
vidual personality. Although there is a prima
facie obvious distinction among human beings,
at root there is a basic unity. What is important
in selves is not their separateness or distinction
from one another, but their 'content'.
Bosanquet argues that if we can speak of a
purpose to the universe, it is 'the moulding of
souls'. There is a natural and a social selection
in nature, but there is also 'self creation'. In his
discussion of 'the hazards and hardships of
finite selfhood', Bosanquet notes that individ-
uals find themselves in a moral world of claims
and counter-claims - of pleasures and pains,
and of good and evil. But good and evil, he
insists, are not opposites. Evil is necessary for
the development of corresponding moral good,
and the existence of both evil and good are
evidence of the movement of the finite spirit
towards perfection. The soul, then, is driven to
what Bosanquet calls religious consciousness.
Here, the finite self recognizes its own true
nature, which involves self-surrender and an
unselfish devotion to interests beyond itself.
The destiny of the finite self, then, is that it
recognizes itself as an element of the Absolute.
But Bosanquet adds that this 'goal' is not a
telos after which there is a stasis or rest.
Although a mature statement of his philo-
sophical views, the Gifford Lectures brought to
the fore several issues to which Bosanquet
returned over the next decade. One issue was
the relation of this theory to 'philosophical
realism'. In The Distinction between Mind and
its Objects (1913), Bosanquet addresses the
authors of The New Realism - R.B. Perry, W.P.
Montague and E.B. Holt - arguing that, while
they aim at providing a comprehensive view of
reality, they restrict the place of mind and cut
it off from physical reality. Bosanquet adds
that the introduction of the realism of Samuel
ALEXANDER (with whom Bosanquet saw some
BOSANQUET
affinity) requires reconfiguring the
'idealism/materialism' debate.
A second issue arising out of the Gifford
Lectures concerned the nature of the finite (i.e.
human) individual. In an important exchange
with Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, G.F. STOUT
and R.B. Haldane on 'Do Individuals Possess a
Substantive or Adjectival Mode of Being?'
Bosanquet speaks of 'selves' as 'provisional
subjects' and describes the 'reality' of finite
individuals as 'adjectival' and not 'substantive'.
Yet Bosanquet also asserts that individuals
characterize the world 'as permanent qualifi-
cations'. Bosanquet's objective, then, is not to
reject the existence or reality of the self, but to
emphasize its 'co-existent' identity as much as
its 'continuous identity'. Again, we find that the
nature and value of the individual self cannot,
then, be determined independently of its
relation to other selves and to what it can
become.
Some ethical implications of ideas sketched
in his Gifford Lectures are found in Some
Suggestions in Ethics (1918; 2nd edn, 1919).
These essays are important because they reveal
several differences in emphasis, if not in
doctrine, from views found in Bradley. This
volume provides a general account of the
nature of ethical value, and addresses a number
of issues that bear on Bosanquet's philosophy
of law - particularly on punishment. Bosanquet
rejects the charge that ethical absolutism leads
to moral indifference or suggests that evil is
not real and that all will come out for the best,
independently of human work. Moreover, here
again, Bosanquet emphasizes a morality of 'my
station and its duties' - that what one ought to
do is determined by the roles or functions one
has in social life.
But while the main root of individual morals
is social function - one's station and its duties
- the conception of the good that is its base is
related to 'what a human being wants' and is.
Again, underlying many of Bosanquet's
concrete recommendations in social policy is his
insistence that individuals have to 'create them-
selves'. Still, this cannot be achieved by each
108
person alone. While the state has an essential
role in this, Bosanquet reminds us of the impor-
tance of voluntary (i.e. non-state) organiza-
tions. (This 'mutual nourishing' of part and
whole is in keeping with Bosanquet's views on
logic, where there is a mutual dependence and
implication of each proposition on all others.)
The ethic that Bosanquet presents is a teleo-
logical, but not a consequentialist, one. While
he does not say so explicitly, It seems that what
is 'moral' is what the Aristotelian 'practically
wise person' (phronimos) would do - i.e. there
is no 'moral code' from which one can derive
one's moral obligations. One is simply 'to
respond adequately to the situation'.
A further issue arising from the Gifford
Lectures concerns the relation between meta-
physics and religion. The most extensive
description of Bosanquet's views on religion
are found in What Religion Is (1920), although
he had written on the topic from almost the
beginning of his philosophical career.
Bosanquet's account is typical of the humanis-
tic demythologizing associated with many
thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies, such as David Strauss, Ferdinand Baur
and, later, Rudolf Bultmann. Like Edward
Caird, Bosanquet speaks of religion as having
'evolved' from 'subjective' to 'objective' forms
towards what he calls 'Absolute religion'. Just
as 'evolution' is an inherent operation in the
process of knowledge and thought, it is true of
religious belief as well.
According to Bosanquet, religious dogma is
distinct from faith; theology and dogma are
the product of an intellectualization (usually
by an authority) of a simple religious experi-
ence. Moreover, he understands religion or
'faith' in a broad sense, as 'that set of objects,
habits, and convictions, whatever it might
prove to be, which [one] would rather die for
than abandon, or at least would feel himself
excommunicated from humanity if he did
abandon' (Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 33).
Thus, Bosanquet suggests that particular reli-
gious beliefs are often 'disguised' metaphysical
or ethical propositions.

Yet Bosanquet denied that religion could be
'reduced' to morality, and while he advised
believers to scrutinize their religious beliefs - he
challenged such notions as the personality of
God and the existence of an afterlife - he held
that faith itself was to be treated with respect.
While much more critical of religion than
Bradley, Bosanquet denied that his view was an
agnostic one, and (in 1889-90) even led a class
of working people in reading the New
Testament.
Finally, following the Gifford Lectures, and
continuing until the end of his life, Bosanquet
returned to logic. Now, however, his work was
challenged by a 'new' logic - that of Frege, as
developed by RUSSELL and WHTTEHEAD. But this
new logic was, to Bosanquet's mind, no more
successful than the old, for it continued to
separate judgement and inference, and empha-
sized 'linear implication' over his 'systematic'.
In Implication and Linear Inference (1920)
Bosanquet developed some logical issues raised
in the Gifford Lectures and in the second
edition of his Logic (1911), and related this to
the work of a number of contemporary
authors, including Husserl. Although there was
little substantively new in this work, it incited
a wide critical response. As he had argued
earlier, logical principles are not part of some
abstract real but are 'the expression of the
movement and life of the mind' (Creighton, p.
52). Inference is not deductive (e.g., from
general principles) or inductive (e.g., from
'instances') but 'systematic' - 'it proceeds from
within a whole or a system already appre-
hended as such' (ibid., p. 53). Linear inference
or syllogistic is only a limited form of inference
and, he points out, it presents the world as a
non-developing system. Our knowledge does
not exist as a set of isolated formal proposi-
tions, but is found in 'whole concrete systems
or aspects of our experience, such as art, or
religion, or philosophy' (ibid., pp. 53-4).
Moreover, like some contemporary philoso-
phers, Bosanquet acknowledges that there is
no neutral or external test by which we can
determine truth.
109
BOSANQUET
Bosanquet's last book published during his
lifetime was The Meeting of Extremes in
Contemporary Philosophy (1921). This title
reveals a characteristic present throughout
Bosanquet's philosophy - the desire to show
relationships among different schools of
thought, rather than dwell on differences. Here,
Bosanquet returns to a question raised in The
Distinction between Mind and its Objects -
specifically, the relation between realism and
idealism (here, that of Benedetto Croce and
Giovanni Gentile).
Bosanquet argues that the terms 'idealism'
and 'realism' are not antithetical and that these
'schools' converge on such matters as the reality
of time, progress and ethics. As each seeks a
complete view, it is led to positions character-
istic of its 'opponent'. Bosanquet insists that
with a more reasonable understanding of
progress, and a correct understanding of the
nature of 'individuality' and of the 'unity' of
reality, these oppositions can be overcome.
A number of important texts appeared soon
after Bosanquet's death. His widow, Helen,
took the three completed chapters of
Bosanquet's last manuscript, and published it as
Three Chapters on the Nature of Mind (1923).
Here Bosanquet directly addresses Russell's
account in the Analysis of Mind as being not so
much wrong as 'too narrow', and he again
insists that circumstances and history have to be
taken into account if we wish to understand
persons. In 1927 J.H. MUIRHEAD and
Bosanquet's nephew, the archaeologist R.C.
Bosanquet, prepared a collection of some of
Bosanquet's major published essays, Science
and Philosophy and Other Essays by the Late
Bernard Bosanquet. Finally, in 1935, Muirhead
edited a volume of Bosanquet's letters, Bernard
Bosanquet and his Friends, that - together with
Helen Bosanquet's earlier biography of her
husband, Bernard Bosanquet: A Short Account
of his Life (1924) - provides essential back-
ground for understanding the development of
his philosophical views.
At the time of his death, Bosanquet was
arguably 'the most popular and the most influ-
BOSANQUET
ential of the English idealists' (Randall, p. 114),
and in his obituary in The Times he was said to
have been 'the central figure of British philos-
ophy for an entire generation' (Muirhead, p.
19). He not only had written or edited some
twenty books and over 200 articles and
reviews, but was one of the leading public intel-
lectuals. Bosanquet was one of the earliest
figures in the Anglo-American world to appre-
ciate the work of Edmund Husserl, Emile
Durkheim, Benedetto Croce and Giovanni
Gentile. Moreover, he had been party and
made significant contributions to many of the
major philosophical debates of his time, and
even with the shift, at the beginning of the
century, from idealism to logical empiricism,
Bosanquet continued to be actively engaged in
debate. It is important to remember, for
example, that Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN com-
plained to G.E. MOORE in 1914 that much of
Wittgenstein's own (unsuccessful) Cambridge
BA dissertation was 'cribbed' from Bosanquet's
logic. It is now generally recognized that the
claim that idealists, such as Bosanquet, were a
'sharp break' in nineteenth-century British phi-
losophy is highly exaggerated, and that
Bosanquet was far from a marginal figure in the
development of twentieth-century empiricist
and phenomenological philosophies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Collected Works of Bernard Bosanquet,
ed. with Introductions by William Sweet
(Bristol, 1999), 20 vols. In addition to the
books referred to in this article, the
Collected Works contain two new volumes
of selected essays.
Bernard Bosanquet: Essays in Philosophy
and Social Policy - 1883-1922, ed. with
Introductions, notes and annotations by
William Sweet, 3 vols (Bristol, 2003).
Other Relevant Works
Bosanquet, Helen, Bernard Bosanquet. A
Short Account of his Life (1924).
Bradley, James, 'Hegel in Britain: A Brief
History of British Commentary and
110
Attitudes', The Heythrop Journal, vol. 20
(1979), pp. 1-24,163-82.
Collini, Stefan, 'Hobhouse, Bosanquet and
the State: Philosophical Idealism and
Political Argument in England:
1880-1918', Past and Present, vol. 72
(1976), pp. 86-111.
Creighton, J.E., Review of Implication and
Linear Interference, The Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 18, no. 2, 20 January
1921, pp. 52-4.
Gaus, Gerald, 'Green, Bosanquet and the
Philosophy of Coherence', in C.L. Ten
(ed.), Routledge History of Philosophy,
vol. 7: The Nineteenth Century (1994), pp.
408-33.
Hobhouse, L.T., The Metaphysical Theory of
the State (191S).
Houang, Francois, De rhumanisme a I'abso-
lutisme: revolution de la pensee religieuse
du neo-hegelien anglais Bernard Bosanquet
(Paris, 1954).
McBriar, A.M., An Edwardian Mixed
Doubles: The Bosanquets versus the
Webbs; a Study in British Social Policy
(Oxford, 1987).
Milne, A.J.M., The Social Philosophy of
English Idealism (1962).
Muirhead, J.H. (ed.), Bernard Bosanquet and
his Friends: Letters Illustrating the Sources
and Development of his Philosophical
Opinions (1935).
Nicholson, Peter P., The Political Philosophy
of the British Idealists: Selected Studies
(Cambridge, 1990).
Pfannenstill, Bertil, Bernard Bosanquet's
Philosophy of the State (Lund, 1936).
Randall, J.H., Jr, 'Idealistic Social Philosophy
and Bernard Bosanquet', in The Career of
Philosophy (New York, 1977), vol. 3, pp.
97-130.
Sweet, William, 'F.H. Bradley and Bernard
Bosanquet', in James Bradley (ed.),
Philosophy after F.H. Bradley (Bristol,
1996), pp. 31-56.
— Idealism and Rights (Lanham, Maryland,
1997).

— (ed.), British Idealism and Aesthetics
[thematic issue of Bradley Studies, vol. 7,
no. 2] (2001).
— (ed.), Bernard Bosanquet and the Legacy
of British Idealism (Toronto, 2005).
Vincent, Andrew and David Boucher, British
Idealism and Political Theory (Edinburgh,
2000).
Vincent, Andrew and Raymond Plant,
Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship: The
Life and Thought of the British Idealists
(Oxford, 1984).
William Sweet
BOWMAN, Archibald Allan (1883-1936)
Archibald Allan Bowman was born in the
Congregational Union manse in Beith,
Ayrshire, on 4 April 1883 and died at his home
in the Professors' Square of Glasgow University
on 7 June 1936. He attended Spier's School in
Beith, and Glasgow University, from which he
graduated with second class honours in classics
and first class honours in philosophy in 1905.
A Ferguson Scholarship enabled him to spend
the first of a series of summer vacations
studying in Germany (1905-12). In 1906 he
was appointed assistant and lecturer in the
Department of Logic and Metaphysics, and
philosophy lecturer to the then women's college
at Glasgow University. Appointed in 1912 to
the Stuart Chair in Logic at Princeton, in 1915
he secured academic leave to join the military.
From April 1918 until the duration he was in
prisoner-of-war camps. On release he served
some further time in Germany; he returned to
Princeton only in 1920. Bowman returned to
Glasgow in 1926 as Professor of Logic. In 1927
he transferred to the Chair of Moral
Philosophy. Alarmingly active in public and
political life after his return to Glasgow, he
succumbed to the chest complaint on account
111
BOWMAN
of which his final class lectures had to be read
by a substitute at the end of the 1935-6
academic session.
The notes for Bowman's large ordinary class
lectures, extensively rewritten more than once,
were seriously considered for publication after
his death, but only some extracts appear in the
completion of A Sacramental Universe (1941).
Many students of the generation he taught were
deeply interested in philosophical questions but
very unlikely to be able to develop such
concerns in life after university, and the exam-
inable basics were presented within a large-
scale systematic presentation. He 'taught an
honours course to his ordinary class'. Students
who proceeded under the degree arrangements
at the time into technology, or the sciences,
were as likely as colleagues who entered public
or pastoral service to continue to cite him.
The early papers listed in Bowman's full bib-
liography clarify the error of claiming him a late
or perhaps revisionist adherent of Edward
Caird's idealist school. In his writing on 'the
stupendous set of ruins that is the critical phi-
losophy' his citations demonstrate closeness to
such continental contemporaries and sometime
teachers as Georg Simmel, Aloys Riehl
(Vanuxem Lecturer and honorand of Princeton
in 1913), Paul Natorp and Emil Boutroux.
Nietzsche and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are
important references. Of a generation influ-
enced by John BURNET, he was a sufficiently
independent active classicist to raise points of
detail in a number of his citations from Burnet.
Unusual in his generation in having written
about Thomas Reid, he is more unusual in
having written of Reid in relation to the
Upanishads, although Indian thought is dis-
cussed in some depth in the earlier, more
massive of Bowman's two posthumous books.
As Bowman himself later noted with retro-
spective amazement, his resolve in 1914 to
enlist and fight, despite the recent birth of a first
child, was representative of many of his gener-
ation and culture, regardless of allegiance or
otherwise to absolute idealism. On the front
line in April 1918, he surrendered to a German
BOWMAN
fellow alumnus of Heidelberg. During his
ordeal following a failed attempt to escape
from a prisoner-of-war camp Bowman under-
went what he described to his friend and later
editor J.W. SCOTT as 'experience of spirit'. In
Scott's report this sounds like one of the
'Mystical Experiences of the Prison Camps'
discussed by Mihajlo Mihajlov. To Bowman
the experience was in effect a scientific discov-
ery crucial to the inspiration of the work which
went into his in the event unfinished, posthu-
mously published big books. On these a very
considerable but very localized reputation was
founded.
Studies in the Philosophy of Religion(l93S)
was only ever a provisional title for a work
finally of some eight hundred pages composed
during the 1920s and set aside to allow work
on the 1934 Charles Eliot Vanuxem Lectures at
Princeton, the basis of Bowman's other big
book. The topic of Studies might be termed
'mind or consciousness' quite as much as
'spirit', if the latter term can be allowed to
include both the former. With VON H0GEL,
Bowman treated of 'religion' as tradition
(without reduction of the former term to a nar-
rowing conception of the latter). He would not
venture a preliminary definition of religion,
other than by way of extensive description of
various religions as processes. Following pre-
liminaries on method which include a severe
critique of RUSSELL'S logic in its pretence to
exhaustiveness, and a critique of what he called
(no 'the') Enlightenment, Bowman argued an
anthropological account of the historical devel-
opments of minds. He engaged in extended
debate with Durkheim's Elementary Forms of
the Religious Life and with Tylor's account of
'animism', in the latter case to secure the term
for his own use.
Tylor and Frazer are notorious for having
projected the viewpoint of the scientific
observer on early or primitive man. Bowman,
however, though convinced that very early
human beings had much the same psycho-
physical equipment as their twentieth-century
descendants, argued that scientific observation
112
was a very late discovery: a result of the long
experience of many, including witness to the
emergence of contradictions within tradition -
or between traditions which circumstances
hitherto had permitted to coexist without
awareness of mutual conflict. Religion was
another such discovery, as were science or the
sciences, morality, secularity. Each attained to
its own autonomy, and there is no lack of
evidence that within the development of each,
and certainly within that of religion, there are
tendencies towards one-sided ness, and towards
an increasing impersonality.
What Bowman termed Enlightenment might
be regarded as such a development of one-
sidedness and impersonality. 'Enlightenment'
comes into force from time to time throughout
history (as it did for instance during what is
now called 'The Enlightenment') with an over-
simplified view of things. It: lacks a sense of
what Bowman calls 'Significant Contrasts',
attempting to enshrine a self-sufficient secular-
ism as rational, superior to and able to dispose
of moral and other traditions. Bowman dis-
cusses conflicts between traditions in various
contexts, Significant Contrasts and 'the self-
criticism of religion', instructively within the
Old Testament. His discussion of the Book of
Job refers to the coming into being of one
entirely new orientation towards life. Scholarly
reference to revisions of the text of Job, made
long after any Urtext had been set down, allows
Bowman to consider the development of that
new orientation, interpreting identifiable accre-
tions within the transmission of the narrative,
as evidence of subsequent readings and retro-
spects on it within Judaic tradition.
Religion, in becoming exclusive as it becomes
impersonal, does not merely exclude such other
discoveries as secularity and morality. Religion,
having come into being with the ordering or
organization of performances, Bowman
demonstrates with reference to 'Eastern reli-
gions', can become antithetical to what he calls
'the desire for life'. This 'desire for life' is char-
acteristic of animism, and is the spring of all the
'discoveries' he discusses. If the reader disagrees

with Bowman's preference of the desire for life
over the exclusivist religious alternative, there
is a summary of his case in the light-hearted
address read out to students at the end of the
1935-6 lecture course which he was too ill to
deliver in person.
The published text of A Sacramental
Universe was compiled by J.W. Scott, adding to
the completed first half of the planned book the
platform summaries from which Bowman had
delivered the lectures at Princeton, connecting
scattered passages Bowman had worked up in
notebooks. The book was rounded off with
the Platonic myth which was the book's
intended conclusion, and with what can fairly
be called the climax of Bowman's large series of
class lectures. Scott's editorial achievement was
considerable.
There is some overlap between the later
chapters of Studies and the book Scott edited,
the later book having begun with a focus on
anthropology, moving towards issues in the
philosophy of science. A Sacramental Universe
begins with address to the newer philosophical
work which took its start from recent devel-
opments within the sciences, and not least post-
Einsteinian physics.
In Studies Bowman moves in the direction of
Plato, shifting from consideration of 'substance'
to the notion of system, a mathesis universalis.
He does not mention Husserl, but there are
plain parallels between the phenomenologist's
discussion of the contents of pure consciousness
and Bowman's insistent standpoint of con-
sciousness. Bowman's orientation is however
emphatically the (transcendental) realism of an
avowed opponent of phenomenalism. In a
parallel with Berkeley which Bowman does not
leave obscure, God has provided not merely a
divine visual language, he has generated every-
thing, from the conscious and living to the
lifeless and unconscious.
Bowman takes on WHITEHEAD'S notion of
'eternal objects' as what is/are stable in the flux
of events. Does not this notion merely replace an
old mind-body dualism with implications of
untenable doctrines of representative perception?
113
BOWMAN
A great deal of attention is paid in both of
Bowman's books, first, to an account of the
nature of mind, consciousness, spirit; then, to
an account of consciousness in the creatures in
whom it might be discerned; and to the states
or conditions of human consciousness as
between fading and even a liminal state
(external sensitivity in the sleeper) beyond the
bracketed consciousness of specialized scien-
tific observation. For spirit, esse est percipere.
Bowman takes issue with Santayana's notion
of consciousness as an operative state of the
organism, one which comes into being as a rec-
tifying function when normal animal processes
are inadequate to any situation. Consciousness
can at times be in abeyance or partial suspen-
sion or restriction, but it is not episodic.
Bowman, for all that Ernst Cassirer praised his
'revival of dualism', was not, he himself
insisted, a dualist. Dualism is a point of view,
whereas, like the in other respects very differ-
ent John Anderson, he insists that minds - or
for Bowman, spirits - are existences of a certain
character, describable, not entities hypothe-
sized within a dualist doctrine.
The extensive discussion of physics in A
Sacramental Universe effects full recognition
of the work of Einstein, Schrodinger and others,
but not in supplanting standpoints of mind,
consciousness and perception. Like Bronislaw
Malinowski, whose then untranslated Polish
work he could not know but of whose oppo-
nents Mach and Avenarius he was not ignorant
(he certainly knew his friend Norman KEMP
SMITH'S critique of Avenarius), Bowman drew
on his mathematical training for the notion of
function.
Bowman, unlike Malinowski, remained a
philosopher, and his notion of function was
more complex than that in Malinowski's func-
tionalist anthropology. Function as a relation-
ship between processes is a concept developed
extensively in Bowman's second book. He is
concerned rather with mathesis than with
mathematics, and with the notion of reality, of
the universe - granted the unity of physical
theory - as a system of functional relationships.
BOWMAN
The one-ness of things consists in participation
in reciprocal functional relationships. Whatever
this might say about mathematical physics - and
Bowman has his say against a notion of reality
as founded on a projection of competing calcu-
lated probabilities - it is not a way of leaving
mind or spirit out of things. Mind is a function
of brain no more and no less than brain is a
function of mind: m and b alike are f(mb).
Bowman's 'transcendental realism', a realism
never without concern as to how knowledge
comes to be, is opposed to what he calls the the-
oretician's 'pragmatism of negations', the abuse
of Occam and the phenomenalist fallacy of mis-
taking the observer's standpoint for awareness
itself. A pragmatism of negations is always at the
mercy of letting the soundly refuted in again by
the back door, whether a dualism refuted earlier
in the case, or, in EDDINGTON'S physical theory,
reference to pretty well the operation of such
powers as are recognized in pre-religious ani-
mistic ideas.
A Sacramental Universe proceeds to a classi-
fication of values thorough enough to include
discussion of mere matters of taste (choice of
wallpaper) to higher aesthetic values (Beethoven,
say), and ethical and religious value. These
belong to the larger classification, the spiritual.
It stands differentiated from the physical, and
nature.
Certainly deeply read in idealist philosophy, in
respect of the spiritual, Bowman makes impor-
tant brief reference to Fichte's project of refuting
doctrines of a predestinarian or fatalist charac-
ter. The spiritual is for one thing to be considered
as the spirited, not the passive, while also encom-
passing the higher values of reverence and
religion. The physical is precisely the physicist's
exact field of study. It is a value, it is valuable,
and where for a strict exclusive phenomenalist
theory there is nothing behind phenomena, there
are no values in the physical. It is there, but it has
had to be looked for. It is there neither for nor
to anyone who is not looking for it.
Nature is on the other hand the system of
things functionally related which has no being
without the awareness of a spirit. It is as it
114
were the realm of perceptual and other trans-
actions in which human beings are engaged. In
the physical there are no human beings, insofar
as no human values obtain. Translating
Bowman into a later idiom, his distinction
between nature and the physical is one whose
transgression results in not merely a mixed dis-
course but confusion.
Bowman does at the end of A Sacramental
Universe speak the language of speculative
metaphysics, of Samuel ALEXANDER, a personal
friend and philosopher Bowman regarded
highly. It is a language of attempted integration,
of functional system, such as that with which
Bowman rounded off his large and intensively
argued works into a Christian theistic vision.
The entire universe is an emanation of God in
what are - in sheerly physical terms - vibra-
tions, ranging in their respective consciousness
of him from the absolutely unconscious to the
reverent. Bowman does make clear, however,
that this is strictly an extrapolation or transition
beyond what he might have hoped to demon-
strate philosophically.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Difference as Ultimate and Dimensional',
Mind, vol. 19, no. 76 (1910), pp. 492-522.
The Absurdity of Christianity (1931); repr. in
Charles W. Hendel (ed. and intro.), The
Absurdity of Christianity and Other Essays
(New York, 1958).
'Spirit-Time', Proceedings of the Aristotelean
Society, vol. 33 (1933), pp. 296-332.
Studies in the Philosophy of Religion (1938).
A Sacramental Universe (Princeton, 1941).
'Essays and Addresses', unpublished type-
script edition of Bowman's uncollected
publications, with memorials, in Glasgow
University Archives.
Other Relevant Works
Sonnets from a Prison Camp (1919).
Further Reading
Bowman, Ian, The Philosophy of A.A.
Bowman', Edinburgh Review, vol. 82

(1989), pp. 103-20. With a selection of
'Remarks on Education' from A.A.
Bowman, pp. 100-102, and repr. of his
bibliography.
Scott, J.W., 'Archibald Alan Bowman',
Hibbert Journal, vol. 35 (1936-7), pp.
77-83.
Robert R. Calder
BOYCE GIBSON, Alexander, see Gibson
BOYCE GIBSON, William Ralph, see
Gibson
BRADLEY, Francis Herbert (1846-1924)
Francis Herbert Bradley was born in Clapham
on 30 January 1846 and died after a brief bout
with blood poisoning on 28 September 1924.
He was buried in Oxford's Holywell Cemetery.
His father, the Revd Charles Bradley, was a
well-known evangelical minister in the Church
of England. His mother, Emma Linton Bradley,
came from an old Yorkshire family, and was a
member of Charles Bradley's 'Clapham Sect'.
Her husband's second wife, they had eight
children. (Charles Bradley had thirteen children
from his first marriage.) F.H. - or 'Herbert' -
was the fourth child born to Charles and
Emma Bradley.
Revd Bradley held numerous posts during
his career. But when he retired from his
115
BRADLEY
position at St James in 1852, he moved the
family to Cheltenham, and it was in the
summer of 1856 that F.H. Bradley entered
Cheltenham College. Bradley would spend five
years there, not leaving until the autumn of
1861. Upon his departure Bradley immediately
entered Marlborough College, where his half-
brother, George Granville Bradley (later
Master of University College, Oxford and
Dean of Westminster Abbey) was Headmaster.
Bradley led an active life at Marlborough; in
addition to his studies he was a member of the
rifle corps and football team. However, it was
also at Marlborough that he contracted
typhoid fever followed by pneumonia. So ill did
Bradley become in the summer of 1863 that he
was forced to return home. And it was not
until the autumn of 1865 that he was able to
enter University College, Oxford.
At Oxford, Bradley's studies were largely
directed towards the classics. However, we
know too that he read a number of contem-
porary writers, including J.S. Mill, Alexander
Bain, Henry Mansel and Sir William Hamilton.
But the year Bradley was admitted to
University College, a new intellectual
movement was under way. T.H. Green,
Edward Caird and Benjamin Jowett were by
this time quite active. (William Wallace would
join them in 1866.) And all were encouraging
- through the close study of Kant and Hegel -
a break with the established traditions of atom-
istic empiricism and common sense realism.
Bradley took a first in classical moderations
in 1867. However, two years later he received
only a second in literae humaniores. This unex-
pected result caused him difficulty in obtaining
a fellowship. But Bradley persevered; and in
December of 1870 he was elected to a life fel-
lowship at Merton College (terminable only
upon marriage or death). Some months after
receiving this fellowship, Bradley became seri-
ously ill, and was left with a kidney condition
(pyleitis) that would plague him for many
years. Bradley remained a fellow of Merton
College to the end of his life. And, although in
later years he would spend less time in Oxford,
BRADLEY
he always maintained his college rooms and
took an interest in Merton's affairs.
Bradley's philosophy may be best summa-
rized by considering the leading ideas of his
most important publications. And the first of
these - a pamphlet called The Presuppositions
of Critical History - appeared in 1874. This
work has as its principal aim (1) the refutation
of what Bradley calls the 'theory of simple
reproduction'; and (2) the analysis of the
reasoned or 'critical' attitude in history.
The reproduction theory - a working idea of
both common sense and traditional empiricism
- states that the historian's 'facts' first present
themselves to a completely passive observer.
But this Bradley rejects. While he concedes the
existence of uninterpreted sensation, such sen-
sation cannot, he claims, be consciously appre-
hended by us. If sensation has become con-
scious, it is because it exists within the intellec-
tual atmosphere of judgement. And all of the
historian's 'facts' - since they involve sensuous
presentations that are now past - are not just
judgements; they are also inferences ('conclu-
sions', Bradley often calls them). But if histor-
ical facts are inferences, we must ask 'By what
criterion may we ascertain their validity?'
Bradley's answer is that the historian himself
provides the criterion because it his larger
system of belief (comprising within it lesser,
relatively disparate, systems) that constitutes
the better part of the 'reality' against which
any historical inference is evaluated. Thus when
the historian is confronted by new data
(sensuous experience and the testimony of
others) these data must somehow accommo-
date themselves to his belief system. And how
exactly the historian will proceed is determined
by the standard of maximal coherency within
his larger experience.
But, we are told, it is 'only when history
becomes explicitly aware of its presuppositions
that it first becomes truly critical, and protects
itself (so far as is possible) from the caprices of
fiction' (The Presuppositions of Critical
History, p. 15). But what is the nature of these
presuppositions? And how can they be justi-
116
fied? Bradley makes it clear that critical histo-
rians must recognize that their inferences are
justified only on the assumption of the 'essen-
tial uniformity' of nature and the course of
events. And, further, this assumption is itself
justified because its denial would result in a
self-contradiction. Put differently, if historians
are to proceed critically, they must not only
seek an inferential reconstruction of the past
that maximally integrates their experience with
perceptual data and the testimony of others,
they must also recognize that this activity is
governed by principles (presuppositions) that -
since they are the condition of any historical
reconstruction - cannot be challenged.
Although the Presuppositions of Critical
History finds Bradley developing these views in
a highly condensed fashion, the work is note-
worthy for its anticipation of themes that
would appear in later works.
Appearing in 1876, Ethical Studies was
Bradley's first book. It consists of eight 'essays'
(with appended notes); and the first of these
examines the 'Vulgar Conception of Morality'.
Here Bradley argues that we have no choice but
to assume with common sense that moral
accountability is real. What v/e need, however,
is not just to acknowledge the truth of this
view; we must also provide it with a reasoned
foundation.
Bradley next considers the question 'Why
Should I be Moral?' And we are told that in
asking this question the moral viewpoint has
already been abandoned. To question the end
of morality is, Bradley claims, to embrace a
self-contradiction; and this is because the
pursuit of any end assumes that there is a good
to be realized. From this Bradley goes on to
argue that we may take as the end of moral
experience (and experience generally) 'self-real-
ization'. And it is against this idea that he
proceeds to evaluate some common concep-
tions of moral worth.
The first of these to be considered is the util-
itarian's idea of 'Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake'.
And his claim here is that the utilitarian's
doctrine does not supply us with a genuine

standard of goodness. The end that utilitarian-
ism admonishes us to pursue - the greatest
pleasure - is nothing more than a series of 'per-
ishing particulars'; and such a series cannot, he
claims, be viewed as an actual sum or total.
What is required instead is that we view our life
as a 'concrete whole' which each of our acts
either contributes to or detracts from. And it is
only such a concrete whole that can provide us
with a genuine conception of the moral end.
Following his discussion of utilitarianism,
Bradley considers the quasi-Kantian notion of
'Duty for Duty's Sake'. This view tells us that
the good may be realized only by acting on the
abstract principle of duty. But duty, Bradley
insists, cannot function in the abstract. If we are
to will something, what we will must be
concrete and definite. And the theory of duty
for duty's sake, telling us only to do the 'right
thing', leaves us without a usable conception of
what the right thing might be.
In the widely anthologized sixth chapter of
Ethical Studies - 'My Station and its Duties' -
Bradley develops a position greatly influenced
by Hegel's doctrine of Sittlichkeit. And the
claim that Bradley makes in this essay is that
morality is social throughout. Morality, we
learn, is social because the individual moral
agent is social, i.e. his or her identity is largely
determined by his or her relations to others
and his or her roles in life. And if one is to be
moral, one must first perform one's duty as
prescribed by these roles. This is not to say
that Bradley endorses a merely relativistic ethic
in which existing social norms exhaust the
content of morality. However, he makes it clear
that in the search for one's concrete duty one
must first look to the demands that one's
station in life makes.
Bradley greatly qualifies the conception of
moral experience found in 'My Station and its
Duties' with his discussion of 'Ideal Morality'.
There we learn that an individual must be
finally judged - not by the explicit standard of
the day - but by the fuller criterion this
standard implies. This higher criterion, while
always presupposed by 'my station', is only
117
BRADLEY
vaguely recognized by it. And as an individual
begins to appropriate this higher standard, he
or she may begin to realize that the socially
recognized conception of duty may - because of
its limited understanding of the agent's relation
to the whole - be woefully inadequate.
After acknowledging the intrinsic defect of
'my station' Bradley considers various senses in
which a 'self may seek its realization. The good
or realized self, Bradley tells us, 'is the self
which identifies with, and takes pleasure in,
the morally good'. And the morally good, we
are told, is just the notion of the ideal self as it
exists in 'social reality, the social ideal, and the
non-social ideal' (Ethical Studies, 1927, p. 279).
Hence, while the moral self begins with socially
defined roles and obligations, it must undergo
continuous self-criticism and reformulation in
order to overcome the inconsistencies that
plague it in its lower, merely social, form.
However, Bradley does not believe that the
inconsistencies within the moral self can ever be
fully overcome. And in his 'Concluding
Remarks' he develops the view that moral expe-
rience is inherently 'self-contradictory'. What
morality postulates as its end is - within the
sphere of morality per se - unrealizable. And
we are told that the only way we may get
beyond this difficulty is by embracing the 'reli-
gious' attitude. Religion, Bradley tells us, sees
as already accomplished what morality seeks to
achieve. And only on the belief that the true end
of moral experience already exists (in some
sphere), may we move beyond the limitations
of the merely moral point of view.
Bradley's Principles of Logic (1883) was pub-
lished some seven years after his book on moral
philosophy. Taking as its focus 'judgment' and
'inference', the work is noted for its polemical
condemnation of opposing views. Book 1 of his
Logic - 'Judgment'- begins by telling us that the
judgement (or 'assertion') - in being the most
primitive unit of cognitive experience - is logic's
primary concern. And Bradley goes on to define
judgement as 'the act which refers an ideal
content... to a reality beyond the act' (1922, p.
10). What he emphasizes throughout his dis-
BRADLEY
cussion, however, is the judgement's capacity,
as an 'ideal' or 'thinking' extension of what is
sensuously given, to be 'true or false'. And the
larger function of judgement, we are told, is to
reconstruct in thought and perception what at
the level of mere sense is partial, disconnected
and incomplete.
Taking the disappearing contents of sense as
its starting point, then, judgement makes its
first business the ideal development of a
'world'. And after it has built up this world,
judgement is engaged in its maintenance and
modification. We may also note that, for
Bradley, the truth or falsity of any judgement is
proportional to the coherency and compre-
hensiveness it exhibits. Some judgements -
those that possess a low 'degree' of truth - are
only peripherally related to this world; and
their denial would effect little change in it.
However, when other judgements are denied -
those containing greater truth - the element of
conflict is much greater. And those judgements
possessing the highest degree of truth are so
inextricably bound up with the structure of
our experienced world that their denial cannot
be entertained short of denying that world's
very foundations.
After providing a general account of judge-
ment, Bradley makes what many readers have
found to be puzzling claims. We are told that
(1) every judgement is ultimately hypothetical
(or 'conditional') and may be seen as having an
'if-then' form; and yet (2) every judgement -
even the wildly counterfactual judgement - is,
at the same time, categorical (in the sense of
being 'about reality').
We may understand Bradley's first claim by
considering his views on universal affirmative
assertions. These, he argues, must be differen-
tiated from merely collective judgements. 'All
men are mortal' actually asserts 'if man, then
mortal'. And its focus is, as Bradley says, the
'marriage of universals'. Surprisingly, though,
Bradley argues that our ordinary categorical
assertions - what he calls 'individual judgments'
- should also be understood as low-level uni-
versal affirmatives. Consider 'This bough is
118
broken.' While this assertion intends to desig-
nate a unique object, it fails to realize this end.
There is only so much of the entity designated
by 'this bough' included within the judgement
itself; and similarly, we have a limited under-
standing of the term 'broken'. This being the
case, such judgements must be seen as consist-
ing of abstract concepts ('bough' and 'broken')
standing in conjunctive relation to one another.
And hence we find that here too the judgement
expresses a relation - albeit a defective one -
between universals.
The principal difference between the univer-
sal affirmative and the individual judgement,
however, is that the latter's conditions are, to
a great extent, external to the assertion. While
a high-level universal affirmative expresses a
necessary bond between its contents (e.g., 'man'
and 'mortal'), the relation between those in the
merely individual judgement ('bough' and
'broken') is contingent and effected by condi-
tions that are largely unknown.
Bradley's claim that all judgement is cate-
gorical is a bit more problematic; and this is
because there seem to be many asserted
contents that are fictional in nature and that
cannot be found in given perception (our prin-
cipal point of contact with reality). Although
Bradley had not fully worked out this view in
the first edition of his Principles of Logic, he
eventually came to argue that all asserted
contents hold a precise place within the larger
presupposed reality - a reality that extends far
beyond what we ordinarily characterize by the
term 'existence'. Put differently, the contents in
fictional and counterfactual assertion all
occupy, Bradley believes, a 'world'. And, in the
end, the various worlds which these contents
occupy are continuous and aspects of the one
reality. But, he argues, if all such contents are
part of the one reality, we must be willing to
attribute some sort of 'existence' to each and
every one (although, obviously, not the same
sort of physical existence that characterizes
spatio-temporal objects and events).
The second book of The Principles of Logic
- Inference' - is an elaboration of the theory of

judgement developed in Book 1. And in his
discussion Bradley lays down two conditions
for inference. A genuine inference must (1)
bring into the awareness of the judging subject
something that is new; and yet (2) what is new
must be continuous with, and a development
of, that from which it starts. Stated otherwise,
inference proper exists so far as an assertion
brings to light a new (for us) aspect of the larger
reality that is its ground and condition. And we
may say that, so far as a judgement fails to
exhibit this ground, it fails as an inference.
Bradley also tells us that every inference pos-
sesses a 'degree of validity'. And the validity
that any inference possesses is simply the degree
to which it is seen as necessitated by the larger
intellectual/perceptual system within which it
falls.
In addition to its highly original account of
judgement and inference, Bradley's Principles of
Logic provides a sustained criticism of other
theories popular at the time. Most significantly,
we find Bradley attacking 'associationism',
'inference via particulars', the traditional syl-
logism and logical formalism.
First published in 1893, Bradley's
Appearance and Reality seeks a theoretical jus-
tification of the metaphysical theses presup-
posed in earlier works (particularly the
Principles of Logic). However, we should
understand that, for Bradley, metaphysics does
not have a particular subject matter or specific
content. As we are told, metaphysics is 'an
attempt to know reality as against mere appear-
ance', and is 'the effort to comprehend the
universe, not simply piecemeal or by fragments,
but somehow as a whole' (Appearance and
Reality, 1897, p. 1).
The discussion of Appearance and Reality is,
like the Log/c, divided into two books. The
first book ('Appearance') makes an assault on
the intelligibility of many categories of common
sense, science and philosophy. And among
those Bradley examines are 'primary and sec-
ondary qualities', 'substance and accident',
'causation' and 'relation and quality'. These
modes of apprehension (and more) are found
119
BRADLEY
by him to be defective. And the conclusion of
Book 1 is simply that our phenomenal experi-
ence - since forced to see things in a partial and
incomplete manner - is 'self-contradictory'.
Bradley's argument in Book 2 ('Reality') may
be described as 'transcendental' throughout.
There he claims that it is a condition of any
experienceable world that it have certain char-
acteristics; and most important amongst these
is its being non-contradictory. Another of
reality's features that may be certainly estab-
lished is its pervasive unity. And it is Bradley's
belief that we may arrive at this second char-
acteristic through an analysis of the first,
because to experience something as contradic-
tory just is, he believes, to apprehend it as
belonging to some whole in a discontinuous
(and thus inadequate) fashion. But we may
better grasp Bradley's position by considering
in greater detail his understanding of contra-
diction.
First, we must realize that all contradictories
are, on Bradley's view, actually contraries; and
this is because what is 'not-P' must have a
positive character. But since it must be some-
thing positive that conflicts with P, the source
of this conflict is to be found in the inability of
'P' and 'not-P' to occupy, as he puts it, 'the
same point'. And when Bradley says that these
contrary predicates cannot occupy the same
point, he is claiming that - although there exists
in reality a ground of union between them - this
ground is absent from our awareness.
For example, we may understand 'My
painting is both beautiful (P) and not-beautiful
(not-P)' as more accurately put by 'My painting
is both beautiful and ugly.' However, if I
expand the ground between the predicates
'beautiful' and 'ugly', I may find that their
initial opposition has been largely overcome. By
asserting 'My painting is beautiful by daylight,
but ugly by artificial light' I have managed to
accommodate to one another predicates that, if
not thus qualified, would clash. Contrary pred-
icates become within this expanded awareness,
then, differents whose opposition has been
more or less resolved. However, I emphasize
BRADLEY
here 'more or less' because, on Bradley's
account, no matter how far we go in trans-
forming contraries into differents, there will
always be a point at which our reconciled terms
stand in the relation of 'mere conjunction'.
That is, even our most strenuous efforts to find
the complete ground by which differents are
united must, at some point, fail.
We may on this basis also understand
Bradley's doctrine of 'degrees of reality'. This is
the idea that all appearances contain at least
some reality. And our phenomenal experience
may be said to be in possession of reality just so
far as it has managed to apprehend various
appearances (potentially contradictory predi-
cates) in a non-contradictory fashion. We may
summarize, then, by saying that all appear-
ances are for Bradley characterized by their
partiality, incompleteness and externality to
one another. That which is more real is more
inclusive and complete; and the most real
'thing' of all - what Bradley sees as the only true
'individual' - is reality-as-a-whole or the
Absolute.
There are many other characteristics of
reality discussed by Bradley in his metaphysical
treatise. And, while they are too numerous to
discuss here, some mention should be made of
his understanding of the criterion of truth and
reality. The ability to evaluate the relative truth
(and reality) of any assertion must, Bradley
argues, reside within an experience that - while
it includes thought and perception - goes well
beyond them. And it is one of the distinguish-
ing features of Bradley's idealism that it sees a
kind of supra-intellectual feeling as providing us
with our fullest sense of reality and the standard
according to which any judgement must be
measured.
Throughout his career, Bradley wrote essays
in which he elaborated and refined his views.
And in 1914 a collection of what he believed to
be some of the more important of these
appeared under the title Essays on Truth and
Reality. The papers in this collection (most
were written between 1899 and 1911) have a
more or less common theme: the nature of
120
truth. And throughout the book we find
Bradley developing the ideas of 'degrees of
truth', 'truth as coherence' and 'the compre-
hensiveness of truth'. But Bradley does not
confine himself to these topics in his Essays on
Truth and Reality. 'Pragmatism', 'immortal-
ity' and 'floating ideas' are but some of the
many other subjects discussed.
Although Bradley was writing more or less
continuously up until his death, his most impor-
tant later work was surely the second edition of
The Principles of Logic (1922). This edition -
consisting of the original text, twelve new
Terminal Essays' and additional chapter notes
- clarifies many ambiguities surrounding his
earlier discussion. During the final year of his
life Bradley was also revising his Ethical Studies.
And, although the revisions were never
finished, the better part of what had been
written appears in the (posthumous) second
edition of 1927. Most of Bradley's other papers
(including his unfinished essay on 'Relations')
were gathered together and published as
Collected Essays in 1935.
Bradley's achievements as a philosopher have
been differently viewed. During his lifetime he
was seen by many as having made a compelling
case for absolute idealism; yet others saw his
philosophy as signalling the end of that
doctrine. But there can be no doubt of his influ-
ence. By his fifth decade, Bradley was the most
read philosopher in the English-speaking world.
And over the course of his career there were
numerous honours conferred upon him (includ-
ing in 1924 the Order of Merit.) Although
Bradley always disclaimed any permanent value
for his work, many of his colleagues saw things
differently. J.H. MUIRHEAD once called him the
individual 'to whom British philosophy owed
the impulse that gave it new life in our time'
(Muirhead, Dedication). And this sentiment
was one that few during Bradley's own day
disputed.
While his dialectical abilities have always
been admired, for much of the past century
Bradley has been ignored. There has appeared
the occasional monograph. But most philoso-

phers have viewed his work as arcane and irrel-
evant to contemporary concerns. However, this
attitude has been changing. While there remains
disagreement about Bradley's relation to both
the early analysts and more recent trends, his
role as a seminal thinker in English-speaking
philosophy is once more widely recognized.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Presuppositions of Critical History
(Oxford, 1874).
Ethical Studies (1876; 2nd edn, Oxford,
1927).
The Principles of Logic (1883; 2nd edn,
Oxford, 1922).
Appearance and Reality (1893; 2nd edn,
Oxford, 1897).
Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford, 1914).
Aphorisms (Oxford, 1930).
Collected Essays (Oxford, 1935).
Collected Works, ed. C. Keene and W.J.
Mander, 12 vols (Bristol, 1999).
Other Relevant Works
Bosanquet, Bernard, Knowledge and Reality
(1885).
, Implication and Linear Inference
(1921).
Further Reading
Ferreira, Phillip, Bradley and the Structure of
Knowledge (Albany, 1999).
Ingardia, Richard, Bradley: A Research
Bibliography (Bowling Green, 1992).
Mander, W.J., An Introduction to Bradley's
Metaphysics (Oxford, 1994).
Muirhead, J.H. (ed.), Contemporary British
Philosophy, 2nd ser. (1925).
Wollheim, Richard, F.H. Bradley (1959; 2nd
edn, 1969).
Phillip Ferreira
121
BRAITHWAITE
BRAITHWAITE, Richard Bevan (1900-90)
R.B. Braithwaite was born in Banbury on 15
January 1900, into a Quaker family, and died
in Cambridge on 21 April 1990. World War I
forced a major moral dilemma upon the young
Braithwaite: should he declare himself pacifist?
He did and lived; a school friend did not - and
died. Braithwaite was left worrying about his
real motives. Indeed a strand throughout his
work would be the relation between intention,
belief and action; and, years on, he would
return to practical moral decision making, but
as the academic topic Theory of Games as a
Tool for the Moral Philosopher for his inau-
gural lecture as Cambridge's Knightbridge
Professor of Moral Philosophy. Mathematics
and the physical sciences were his subjects
when, in 1919, he entered King's College,
Cambridge. It was there that John Maynard
KEYNES spotted him as a student with flair;
and, after considerable success in his studies,
Braithwaite turned to the moral sciences.
Stimulated by (though eventually rejecting)
Keynes's probability work, and developing a
close friendship with Frank RAMSEY - both
becoming fellows at King's - Braithwaite ini-
tially focused on philosophy of science. He
moved up the Cambridge lectureships, the cul-
mination being his 1953 professorial election,
fellowship of the British Academy and publi-
cation of his major work, Scientific
Explanation (1953). Earlier, in 1931,
Braithwaite had edited Ramsey's papers after
the latter's premature death. Although
Braithwaite had some influence on Ramsey -
their thinking certainly intertwines - Ramsey
was rightly regarded by Braithwaite and others
as the more original of the two; and, as
Braithwaite escaped WITTGENSTEIN'S spell, he
increasingly saw and promoted the importance
of Ramsey's work.
Although Braithwaite sat at the feet of
MOORE and Wittgenstein, his own work was in
the Cambridge tradition that heeded scientific
and mathematical developments. Braithwaite
himself became a figure of some influence in
BRAITHWAITE
understanding scientific explanation, laws and
probability from an empiricist standpoint; and
from such a standpoint he tackled the nature of
belief, including moral and religious belief.
Indeed, his life intermeshed with his academic
work, for, although no conventional Christian
believer, he was baptized in 1948, a baptism he
justified by his view that Christian belief
amounted to the intention to live agapeistically
(in a loving spirit), a position urged in his 1955
lecture, An Empiricist's View of the Nature of
Religious Belief. Later he was involved with the
Epiphany Philosophers, whose driving spirit
was Margaret MASTCRMAN, his second wife.
There, contemplation and openness to spiri-
tual possibilities were to the fore. Braithwaite
was thus sharing with those close to him,
sharing being a central feature of his agapeistic
commitment. Contemplative moments apart,
Braithwaite was an ebullient character, with
an outspoken enthusiasm for philosophy that
fired his lecturing and students; yet, although
some of his students - such as Ian Hacking,
Stephan KORNER and Hugh Mellor - owe
much to his teaching, interest in his work has
undeservedly much declined.
An empiricist has problems with gaps - both
epistemological and semantic. Gaps occur
between the evidence and what the evidence is
evidence for - be it evidence for the existence of
theoretical entities, for future regularities or
for what could have happened. Bertrand
RUSSELL sought, for example, to close the gap
relating to theoretical entities, believing such
entities to be logical constructions out of
observed events. Braithwaite, in the spirit of
Ramsey, rejects this. Scientific theories develop:
theoretical terms, such as 'electron', receive
novel uses in the face of new experiences.
Meaning is determined by the role of terms
and sentences within a system of sentences and,
for such theoretical terms, their meanings
possess an openness. Braithwaite tackles their
meanings by investigating the use of such terms
according to rules of symbolic manipulation
(the calculi); and, although he assumes a dis-
tinction between the empirical and analytic, he
122
rejects any idea that sentences rigidly belong to
one domain or that a calculus must have one
fixed interpretation.
Braithwaite treats scientific theories as hier-
archical deductive systems in which observable
consequences logically flow from conjoined
observation sentences and fundamental
hypotheses. He works on the correspondence
between these deductive systems and the calculi
used to express them. A calculus and its inter-
pretation fit like a zip, he says, in that they
need an end that attaches some formulae to
observations, other formulae then securing
meaning derivatively through mathematical
manipulations. This led him to the wry moral
for statesmen that proper scientific planning
requires pure mathematicians to be endowed
fifty years ahead of scientists. Although his
work seems far removed from scientific
practice, he was well aware that scientists often
cling to theories - there would be no greater
tragedy than the murder of a beautiful scientific
hypothesis by one discordant instance - but he
promoted the normative empiricist demand
that theories should respond to evidence.
Although sentences can change their position in
the hierarchy, lowest level generalizations gain
their meaning through those logically possible
observations that should lead to their rejec-
tion.
Scientific hypotheses, of course, are often
probabilistic, intrinsically with no possibility
of conclusive refutation; this raises a crucial
problem for any rejection rules and hence for
the meaning of the hypotheses. Braithwaite's
solution, deploying Neyman-Pearson theories
of testing, involves rules of provisional rejec-
tion, the rules grounded in observed frequen-
cies. Although Braithwaite is led to claim that
his is a frequency probability theory, for him
statistical hypotheses do not amount to ones
simply about observable frequencies; indeed,
reasonable belief in probabilistic laws need not
rely on those frequencies. As argued by Hugh
Mellor, Braithwaite sees probability as an
implicitly defined theoretical concept within a
hypothetico-deductive system, frequencies

being what the probability statements are tested
against, albeit with provisional outcomes.
Scientific explanations refer to laws of
nature. For Braithwaite - true to his Humean
credentials - these laws are objectively nothing
but constant conjunctions; yet what distin-
guishes them from cosmic coincidences? We
typically see natural laws as explanatory and,
at least at a common sense level, causal; accord-
ing to Braithwaite, this results solely from the
role of the universal generalizations in our
thinking, those generalizations identifying laws
when pointing beyond a generalizing of
observed instances. If the hypothesis that all
men are mortal (pretending that to be a scien-
tific hypothesis) is seen as supported solely by
men having died, then it identifies no natural
law; but if, also, it is deduced from the higher
level hypothesis that all creatures are mortal
(bats, cats and rats having died), then the hon-
orific title 'law of nature' is appropriate, indi-
cating that there are reasons for believing it
beyond directly related observations.
Paradoxically, the highest generalizations, if
they have no other support, are not expres-
sions of natural laws, even though they deliver
such honours to others. This should not
surprise: when generalizations solely result from
direct observations, they explain nothing at all.
To explain, they need to go further than stating
the evidence in need of explanation, either
through use of theoretical terms or through
pointing upwards to supporting hypotheses.
Natural laws, for example Newton's first
law of motion, can be thought to hold even
when no subjects exist to which they apply.
Even when nothing is F, 'Everything F is G'
might be law-like, not because vacuously true
(nothing is both F and not G), but because
were something to be F, it would be G. To
understand such subjunctive manoeuvres,
Braithwaite - empiricism to the fore - relies
again on the generalization's place within our
knowledge: assertion of the subjunctive condi-
tional involves asserting that nothing is both F
and not G and that nothing is F, but there is
more: that nothing is both F and not G is
123
BRAITHWAITE
asserted to be independently deducible from a
higher level hypothesis within an established
true scientific deductive system. Assertoric
abundance to one side, this proposal's heart is
that subjunctive conditionals parade certifi-
cates of origin: the universal generalizations
are hypothetico-deductively establishable, inde-
pendently of the negative existential claims.
Naturalness of natural laws is hence merely an
epistemological feature, a feature arising from
their expression's position in the corpus of
belief and temporal order of belief acquisition.
Resistance to this approach continues through
various necessitarian understandings of laws;
but necessitarians, of course, have some
explaining to do. Holding laws of nature as,
metaphysically, nothing but constant conjunc-
tions, is the most modest position, the one with
least trouble. There is, though, trouble enough
- inductive trouble - for what justifies belief
that past conjunctions will continue?
Pursuing inductive reasoning frequently pays
off, the pay-off being truth attained. Hence it is
reasonable to continue inductive pursuits in
contrast to soothsayers' consultations.
Braithwaite, developing Peirce, pursues induc-
tion's truth-producing virtue in justifying induc-
tion. Although this predictionist justification
of induction looks circular - the conclusion
that it is reasonable to infer inductively is used
in reaching the conclusion - that conclusion is
not a premise. Braithwaite hypothesizes an
inference machine working inductively: such a
machine could reach a position that corre-
sponded to a belief that that way of working is
effective. We, like the machine, can reach con-
clusions, ones that are reasonable to believe,
based on inductive procedures, so long as the
procedures are effective. Even if belief that the
procedures be effective is demanded, that still
differs from demanding a reasonable belief in
such effectiveness. To the objection that, in
order to get started, we need a reasonable belief
in that effectiveness, Braithwaite argues that
most deductive reasoning should then be dis-
missed for, to justify deductive practices, we
should frequently need appeals to memory
BRAITHWAITE
which are themselves inductively grounded.
In Braithwaite's sensible world we can
properly engage in inductive behaviour, rea-
sonably believe inductive conclusions and offer
justified scientific explanations. Explanations,
of course, can also be teleological, with behav-
iour explained by the end in view. Russell iden-
tified purposive behaviour as behaviour that
tends to cause certain results, and when the
results are achieved, the behaviour ceases; but,
as Braithwaite declares, Russell had forgotten
the bomb and the post-explosion temporary
quiescence. For Braithwaite, the events' chain,
linking the behaviour and the end sought, has
the distinctive feature of plasticity: that is, the
activity displays persistence towards the end
under a variety of conditions. What the bomb
did for Russell's theory arguably death does for
Braithwaite's: human activity displays persis-
tence towards that deadly end. As with scien-
tific hypotheses, teleological laws for
Braithwaite, whatever the details, are concep-
tual devices for organizing our empirical
knowledge with a view to prediction, revision
or rejection. Any such hypothesis might become
subsumed under more general hypotheses; and
the facts explained by the hypothesis might
become explicable by a different hypothesis in
another deductive system.
Braithwaite's stress on the use of terms and
sentences within a larger framework perme-
ates his work. Moral assertions are open neither
to falsification nor verification, be it empirical
or logical; yet they guide conduct. This suggests
an ethics without propositions. Moral sentences
are used to express intentions to act in certain
ways and to subscribe to certain policies. Moral
beliefs are those springs of action - intentions,
desires, needs, motives - involved in causing
our goal-directed activity. Seen thus, empirical
testing is available: we can observe what people
do and say. Of course, qualifications are
needed: a morality is a subscription to gener-
alized policies; our resolution is to act to the
best of our abilities, acknowledging possibilities
of character weaknesses. This approach,
though, makes for a much reduced gap between
124
moral belief and action.
Braithwaite held a similar empiricist position
on religious belief, a position frequently cited in
philosophy of religion anthologies and fre-
quently attacked by traditional believers.
Religious assertions, for Braithwaite, express
intentions to carry out a set of moral policies -
an allegiance to a whole way of life - together
with the entertainment, though not assertion, of
stories with empirical content. The stories illus-
trate the moral policies. They are presented as
neither true nor false, but are exemplary fairy
tales, strengthening resolve, working on believ-
ers as a matter of psychological fact. The inten-
tions to follow a certain way of life form the cri-
terion for meaningfulness of religious asser-
tions and also their sincerity.
Although moral and religious beliefs, at
heart, lack propositional content, they resemble
regular propositional beliefs in their behav-
iouristic content - they manifest the springs of
action in people's lives - whereas genuine
propositional beliefs are displayed by people
performing actions such that if the proposi-
tions believed are true, the actions will tend to
fulfil those springs. To be consciously believing
that p is to be both entertaining that p and
disposed to act as if p were true. Feelings can
provide a person's criterion for such a state, but
are not constitutive of that state, a view devel-
oped later by Wittgenstein. The stress on behav-
ioural dispositions, a view proposed in the late
nineteenth century by Alexander Bain and in
accord with Ramsey's analysis of differing
degrees of belief, led Braithwaite to be classified
as a straightforward behaviourist, even though
he explicitly doubts a behaviourist analysis of
entertaining that p.
Braithwaite's empiricism and his own values
place heavy weight on what people do; so it is
unsurprising that, in his work in moral philos-
ophy, he is much concerned with how philos-
ophy can help in practical living. His Theory of
Games lecture is one of the first applications to
a moral dilemma of the mathematician's
Theory of Games (a theory kindled, as he said,
around Princeton's poker tables). Braithwaite

considers Matthew and Luke, a jazz trumpeter
and a classical pianist, whose neighbourly
playings are mutually disturbing. The assump-
tion is that the individuals can each order their
preferences and the ratios between their pref-
erences's strengths. Braithwaite's mathematical
elan is here in the service of discovering what
constitutes fairness regarding the allocation of
evenings for trumpeting and tinkling. He sets
out with loose common sense notions of
fairness, prudence and sense and - through the
'sweet reasonableness of his parabolas' - hones
these notions, providing rational reconstruc-
tions in order to secure useful and fair practi-
cal outcomes.
Although Braithwaite is no eponym - and his
name, when bandied, is often banded with an
unfashionable crude empiricism and behav-
iourism - his work and his life displayed an
admirable and spirited commitment to philos-
ophy, yet one grounded in sweet and coopera-
tive - indeed, in cheery and buoyant - reason-
ableness.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Nature of Believing', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 33 (1932-3), pp.
129-46.
'Belief and Action', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 20 (1946),
pp. 1-19.
Scientific Explanation: A Study of the
Function of Theory, Probability and Law
in Science (Cambridge, 1953; repr. with a
few corrections, 1955).
An Empiricist's View of the Nature of
Religious Belief (Cambridge, 1955).
Theory of Games as a Tool for the Moral
Philosopher, An Inaugural Lecture
(Cambridge, 1955).
Other Relevant Works
'Moral Principles and Inductive Policies',
Proceedings of the British Academy, vol.
36 (1950), pp. 51-68.
'Why is it Reasonable to Base a Betting Rate
upon an Estimate of Chance?', in Y. Bar-
125
BRITTON
Hillel (ed.), Logic, Methodology, and
Philosophy of Science (Amsterdam, 1965),
pp. 263-73.
further Reading
Mellor, D.H., The Matter of Chance
(Cambridge, 1971).
— (ed.), Science, Belief and Behaviour,
Essays in Honour ofR.B. Braithwaite
(Cambridge, 1980).
Ramsey, P.P., The Foundations of
Mathematics and Other Logical Essays,
ed. R. B. Braithwaite (1931).
Peter Cave
BRITTON, Karl William (1909-83)
Karl Britton was born in Scarborough on 12
October 1909 and died in Northumberland on
23 July 1983. He was educated at Southend
High School, and from 1927 to 1932 at Clare
College, Cambridge, where he gained his MA.
His first academic appointment was as Choate
Fellow at Harvard University, a post which he
held from 1932 to 1934. From 1934 to 1937
he was lecturer in philosophy at University
College, Aberystwyth. He then lectured in phi-
losophy at University College, Swansea, a post
which, apart from the war years, he held until
1951. His war service was spent at the Regional
Commissioner's Office in Reading. From 1951
until his retirement in 1975 he was Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Newcastle-
upon-Tyne. He gave the Mill Centenary
Lecture at the University of Toronto in 1973
and was awarded an honorary DLitt from
Durham University in 1976.
At Cambridge, Britton was one of a number
of philosophy students that included Peter
GEACH, Elizabeth ANSCOMBE, John WISDOM,
Norman Malcolm and G.A. PAUL who met
and were taught by WITTGENSTEIN, and later
BRITTON
went on to teach philosophy themselves. Even
though many of Wittgenstein's students did
not adhere to traditional Wittgensteinianism,
they all remained throughout their careers pro-
foundly influenced by Wittgenstein and his way
of doing philosophy. In The Portrait of a
Philosopher' Britton recalls the impression
which Wittgenstein made on him after they
first met in 1931 in Cambridge at one of G.E.
MOORE'S discussion classes:
Wittgenstein's absolutely single-minded
devotion to the investigation of philosophi-
cal problems, his high seriousness and
absolute honesty - these came to be one of
the most important 'absolutes' in my life ...
it has always seemed to me very bizarre that
his philosophy should be taken by some as
trivialising, or not taking philosophy seri-
ously enough.
(Wittgenstein: The Man and his
Philosophy, p. 57)
Throughout his career, Britton was interested
in the philosophy of J.S. Mill, on whom he
published a work in 1953 which was long
regarded as a standard student text. Britton
here emphasizes Mill's contribution to induc-
tive and deductive logic and mathematics, a
subject which was of interest to him since his
talks with Wittgenstein on these topics during
his time as a student. Mill thought that the
nature of necessary truths lies in the inconceiv-
ability of their contradictions, and that such
inconceivability rests on inseparable associa-
tion, or constant conjunction without counter-
examples, in all our experience. Thus, for Mill,
deduction relies on induction. Deductive argu-
ments are concerned with whether a conclusion
follows from its premises, not with the truth or
falsity of the premises themselves, and such
arguments can never give us new knowledge.
Similarly, the conclusions of proofs in geometry
are necessary in that they follow from their
premises, but the axioms of geometry with
which the proofs begin are grounded in expe-
rience. Arithmetic and algebra, too, have expe-
126
riential bases. Algebra is simply more abstract
than arithmetic, and arithmetic is founded on
our observation of the amalgamation or
addition, or separation or subtraction, of
groups of objects. With regard to induction,
Mill believed that it relies on the fundamental
principle of the uniformity of nature, which in
turn is a factual proposition the evidence for
which relies on particular causal laws.
In his works on language., including his early
publication Communication: A Philosophical
Study of Language (1939), Britton examines the
uses of language. He maintains that sentences
can be used in any one of four ways: to convey
necessary truths; as informative, and therefore
factual, statements which are based on evidence
and indicate what our possible future experi-
ences will be like; as propositions which contain
the value-terms of ethics or aesthetics; and as sen-
tences which contain emotive terms, the main
exemplar of which is lyrical poetry. Sentences
expressive of our emotions are dynamic and are
made in the expectation that they will be met by
others' emotional acceptance. Propositions about
value convey information but are also persuasive
or emotive. Sentences which contain factual or
necessary truths require intellectual assent. Some
of the latter express the rules or customs of
language and its use. There are several criteria to
which any rule of language must conform: it
must be consistent with other rules, and the
coherent system of which it is an element must
make possible communication between its users.
Thus Britton develops the earlier work of
Wittgenstein on language, language-games and
communication.
In his publication entitled Philosophy and
the Meaning of Life (1969) Britton first
observes that many students come to the study
of philosophy because they hope to find an
answer to this fundamental issue. Britton then
makes the typically Wittgensteinian move of
asking what the question 'What is the meaning
of life?' itself means, what would constitute a
suitable answer to it, and what methods are to
be used to find such an answer. 'What is the
meaning of life?' can be transformed into many

more specific questions. What is the purpose of
life? Why is there anything rather than nothing?
Why does the universe exist in the way it does,
rather than in another way? How extensive
can our knowledge about the universe be? Why
do I exist? How should I live? Is the natural
universe a bearer of moral values? If life has a
meaning, does this meaning provide a guide
about how to live? Britton then examines
various proposed answers to these questions.
The religious answer to the question of why the
universe exists and whether there is a purpose
in life stems from authority or tradition. It
holds that the universe exists because God
created it, and that this earthly life is a prepa-
ration for the afterlife. Britton then observes
that our imaginations are not powerful enough
to give any precise details about what the after-
life could consist of. He then examines the
attempt by rationalists such as Spinoza and
Leibniz to support their contention that every-
thing about the universe and ourselves is in
principle knowable. In Leibniz's case, there is
the problem that the existence of human beings
is not necessary, as it could have been the case
that God did not bring us into existence, but an
explanation of our existence is necessary to
yield a complete explanation of the existence of
the world as a whole. Even if we knew what
exists and why, we would still have no guide on
how to live, so Britton turns to possible answers
to this issue. The meaning of our earthly lives
is variously given as our work, our children, our
service to others or our own moral self-devel-
opment, but none of these considerations is
entirely satisfactory. Many jobs are trivial and
unsatisfying; many people are childless; having
children and looking after them until they reach
adulthood does not take up the whole of life;
and we are not all in a position to serve others.
Britton finds moral self-development to be the
most satisfactory of the proposed answers, as
we must make choices and take responsibility
for them in order to be fully human, but it is too
general a consideration, not providing us with
any specific guide about the content of our
choices, or what we should do.
127
BRITTON
Britton was one of the leading figures in
British philosophy in the mid twentieth century
who maintained and developed the direction
and content of philosophy as initiated by
Wittgenstein.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Communication: A Philosophical Study of
Language (1939).
'Are Necessary Truths True by Convention?',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Societyr,
suppl. vol. 21 (1947), pp. 78-103.
The Nature of Arithmetic: A
Reconsideration of Mill's Views',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society', vol.
48 (1947-8), pp. 1-12.
Truth and Knowledge: Some Comments on
Russell', Analysis, vol. 8 (January 1948),
pp. 39-43.
John Stuart Mill (19'53).
'What Does a Moral Judgement Commit Me
To?', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 54 (1953-4), pp. 97-114.
The Paragon of Knowledge', Philosophy
(1954), pp. 216-30.
'Portrait of a Philosopher', The Listener, 10
June 1955; repr. in Wittgenstein: The Man
and his Philosophy, pp. 56-63.
'Feelings and their Expression', Philosophy,
vol. 32 (1957), pp. 97-111.
'Utilitarianism: The Appeal to a First
Principle', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 60 (1959-60), pp. 141-54.
'Philosophy and Poetry', Philosophy, vol. 36
(1961), pp. 74-6.
'On Knowing the Difference between Right
and Wrong', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 37 (1963),
pp. 1-10.
'Mill's Debating Speeches', Mill Newsletter,
no. 1 (Autumn 1965), pp. 2-6.
The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill',
Philosophy, vol. 41 (1966), pp. 174-9.
The Language of Controversy', Philosophy,
vol. 41 (1966), pp. 412-18.
Wittgenstein: The Man and his Philosophy,
ed.K.T.Fann(1967).
BRITTON
Philosophy and the Meaning of Life (1969).
'Concepts of Action and Concepts of
Approval', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 73 (1972-3), pp. 105-17.
'Symbolic Actions and Objects', Philosophy,
vol. 54 (1979), pp. 281-91.
'Wonders', in Ilham Dilman (ed.), Philosophy
and Life: Essays on John Wisdom (1984),
pp. 49-60.
Kathryn L. Plant
BROAD, Charlie Dunbar (1887-1971)
Charlie Dunbar Broad was born on 30
December 1887 in Harlesden, 'a most unat-
tractive suburb of London' (as he put it with, I
am sure, his usual scrupulous accuracy), and
died in Cambridge on 11 March 1971. He was
an only child but grew up in the active and
somewhat peculiar family society of his many
aunts and uncles. Because of the extensive auto-
biography which forms the opening of Schilpp's
volume, we know quite a bit about the external
circumstances of his life and a surprising
amount about his inner life. Perhaps the most
remarkable revelation is Broad's admission that
by around 1938 or so (at the not very advanced
age - for a philosopher - of around fifty) he 'no
longer believed in the importance of philoso-
phy' ('Autobiography', p. 61) and, even as
Knightbridge Professor at Cambridge, he was
an 'unbelieving Pope' (ibid., p. 65).
His route to this august professorship is one
of smooth and impressive if not spectacular
progression through school and professional
academia. He attended Dulwich College, begin-
ning at the age of thirteen. There he prevailed
upon his father for a brief transfer to the engi-
neering 'stream', the upshot of which was the
beginning of a very solid grounding in mathe-
matics and, more importantly, the recognition
by his mathematics teacher (a university level
128
mathematician in his own right) that here was
an outstanding candidate for an university
entrance scholarship. Broad swiftly moved into
the science stream with its deeper and more
theoretical approach to knowledge (although
on the mechanical side of things he retained an
interest in electric train sets into adulthood).
In 1905 Broad was awarded a major entrance
scholarship in the natural sciences to Trinity
College in Cambridge accompanied with a
personal letter of congratulations and welcome
from the Master. In 1908 he took the Tripos'
examination in natural sciences and passed first
class. However, he did not attempt the appar-
ently natural continuation to Pt II of the science
Tripos, switching instead to philosophy (then
called the 'moral sciences'). Although it is diffi-
cult to know how seriously to take Broad's
explanation of this, he says that there were two
main reasons. The first was that he realized that
he would never be a first-rate scientist and the
second was that there was a monetary award in
the moral sciences for which., he says, 'the com-
petition is generally very slight'. Broad already
had a precocious interest in philosophy, having
read, in the original German, some
Schopenhauer lent to him by a family friend,
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (in translation)
as well as Mill's Logic and, with little under-
standing by his own admission, RUSSELL'S
Principles of Mathematics.
In any event, Broad took to philosophy with
enthusiasm, won the monetary award, and was
quickly recognized as an exceptional student.
At that time, few places could boast a more
prominent faculty than Cambridge, which
included such luminaries as G.E. MOORE
(though Moore was away from Cambridge
during Broad's studies), W.E. JOHNSON, A.N.
WHITEHEAD (technically, in the Mathematics
Department), B. Russell and J. McTAGGART.
Broad became especially close to McTaggart
and later devoted great efforts to editing
McTaggart's posthumous second volume of
The Nature of Existence as well as writing a
massive two-volume Examination of
McTaggart's Philosophy.

In 1910 Broad achieved first class with
special distinction in the Moral Sciences Tripos
and decided to enter the fellowship competi-
tion, submitting a dissertation on the philoso-
phy of mechanics (a topic chosen in consulta-
tion with McTaggart and Russell). Broad was
one of four awarded a prize fellowship in 1911
and the dissertation became his first book.
Broad claims he was surprised to win and in the
meantime had been offered a position - assis-
tant to Professor G.F. STOUT - at the University
of St Andrews. He decided to take this up while
retaining the fellowship, since residency was
not required for the latter. He stayed in St
Andrew's until 1920, though not as Stout's
assistant, instead becoming an independent
lecturer at the University College of Dundee in
1914 (then a part of St Andrews). During
World War I Broad avoided any public display
of what he called his 'physical cowardice' by
assisting in chemical munitions research at the
university in addition to continuing his philos-
ophy lectures.
After a stint at Bristol University from 1920
to 1923, filling C. Lloyd MORGAN'S professor-
ship, Broad returned to Cambridge to stay,
taking up the rooms which Isaac Newton had
occupied while a fellow of Trinity College.
Broad was formally to take over McTaggart's
lectureship but with McTaggart remaining on
the scene. McTaggart's sudden death in early
1925 threw Broad into deep water, and he
struggled to keep up his lectures. This was
made more difficult by his habit of writing
them all out in full, suitable for reading. On the
other hand, this method had the advantage of
making the transition from lecture to publica-
tion relatively easy and indeed Broad published
prolificacy. In addition to the volume that
sprang from his fellowship dissertation, there
were many other books. These major works
punctuated a constant flow of articles, reviews
and short monographs. After his death, edited
collections of his lectures and articles continued
to appear, the latest being Ethics (1985).
Broad attained various positions at
Cambridge: lecturer in moral sciences
129
BROAD
(1926-31), Sidgwick Lecturer (1931-3) and
finally Knightbridge Professor of Moral
Philosophy (1933-53). Academic life within
college apparently suited Broad's personality
perfectly; he described his life as 'not unlike
that of monk in a monastery ... without the
duties of asceticism' ('Autobiography', p. 67).
In fact, he makes a point of his financial inde-
pendence, attained by his simple tastes and the
fact that 'there was never any risk of my
catching my foot in the man-trap of matri-
mony' (ibid., p. 52). He did not venture beyond
the British Isles until 1946, when he was fifty-
eight, but after his retirement in 1953 he took
up some long-standing invitations to visit
America, where he enjoyed being 'treated as a
great philosopher' (ibid., p. 66), and from 1946
onwards spent some of each year in Sweden. It
might seem an idyllic existence for an academic
philosopher, but, sadly, Broad claims to have
lost interest in philosophy as it was developing
long before his retirement. It is clear that
Broad's vision of philosophy was not compat-
ible with the 'linguistic turn' of British analytic
philosophy and especially the form of it prac-
tised by WITTGENSTEIN and his disciples, who
met weekly at the Moral Sciences Club 'in a
thick atmosphere of cigarette smoke while
Wittgenstein punctually went through his
hoops, and the faithful as punctually
"wondered with a foolish face of praise"' (ibid,
p. 61).
The problem was that Wittgenstein and the
rest thought that philosophy could not produce
and should not even be aimed at producing
any kind of factual knowledge. Broad wanted
philosophy to lead to definite results or, failing
that, to at least be in the business of seeking
results. In this respect, his own philosophical
work is somewhat paradoxical. Broad is not
read very much anymore and though the
neglect is unjust, it is understandable to the
extent that no original or distinctive philo-
sophical position can be ascribed to him. His
greatest strength was in the careful and
painstaking analysis of the range of possible
theses that could be advanced on some philo-
BROAD
sophical topic, the sober weighing of the argu-
ments for and against such theses, leading to a
provisional assessment of which might be
nearer the truth.
Broad's philosophical output was immense
and can only be inadequately outlined here.
His writings span almost every philosophical
topic save for political philosophy, and extend
beyond the usual philosophical fare into exten-
sive writings on psychical or parapsychological
phenomena. Broad's own meta-philosophy
divided philosophy (at least the worthwhile
varieties of it) into two branches which he
labelled speculative and critical. The paradox of
his work can be expressed in these terms. He
had the greatest respect for and interest in spec-
ulative philosophy, wherein a philosopher tries
to burrow under the surface of things and
propound some overarching account of how
everything 'hangs together'. Yet Broad never
undertook to produce a speculative philoso-
phy of his own, though he was happy to
explore those of other philosophers. He did
regard critical philosophy, in which ordinary
concepts and the propositions which they can
form are clarified, analysed and purified of
confusion, or sometimes even of inconsistency,
as an essential precursor to speculative philos-
ophy. He also believed that the project of
critical philosophy was ongoing and progres-
sive. The fruit of such progress is not only a
more subtle and complete understanding of the
target concepts, but a similarly deeper under-
standing of the philosophical problems they
engender. For example, Broad is willing to
claim that 'any competent philosopher
nowadays, whether he asserts or denies the
independent existence of matter, is asserting
or denying something far more subtle and far
better analyzed than anything which Berkeley
or Descartes would have understood by the
same form of words' ('Critical and Speculative
Philosophy', p. 80). I think most philosophers
would agree that there is a kind of genuine
progress of this kind in philosophy, and not a
few would say that this is the only progress of
which philosophy is capable. Broad later con-
130
fessed that 'I greatly overestimated the certainty
which could be hoped for in what I called
"Critical Philosophy"' ('Reply to My Critics',
p. 711).
Broad's own critical philosophy was
deepened and greatly strengthened by his exten-
sive knowledge of natural science and mathe-
matics. Although he was not what would
nowadays be called a naturalist (he explicitly
denied that he was a 'physicalist'), he did think
that philosophy had to be alive to what was
going on in physics, chemistry and biology.
The first half of Scientific Thought (1923) is a
masterful philosophical explication of classi-
cal physics, including the then brand-new and
recondite general theory of relativity. Much of
his work in the philosophies of mind and per-
ception was geared towards at least reconciling
his philosophical position with the empirical
finding of science even if his basic views did not
fit well with the burgeoning scientific picture of
the world.
Within the various fields of philosophy we
can discern certain viewpoints or theories to
which Broad adhered pretty consistently
throughout his life, though never with complete
conviction. One can deduce from his writings
the truth of his own statement: 'I find myself
now inclined to favour one kind of alternative
and now another, but never to come down
decisively in favour of any' ('Reply to My
Critics', p. 813).
Broad's writings on ethics are primarily
metaphysical in motivation. Questions about
the nature of the good intrigue him but the
idea that philosophy might have something to
say about the good life struck him as absurd.
Practical ethics is analogous to golf or tennis;
just as an understanding of the abstract princi-
ples of mechanics and aerodynamics is not of
much use in improving your game, a merely
intellectual appreciation of the foundation of
ethics will not make you a better person. He
concludes that 'the interest of ethics is thus
almost wholly theoretical' but is 'quite good fun
for those people who like that sort of thing'
(Five Types of Ethical Theory, p. 285). His

own theoretical posture is a kind of ethical
intuitionism in which the radically non-natural
moral features of things are known, in the first
instance, via our emotional responses. These
core ideas he maintained throughout his career
and they also serve to illustrate his non-natu-
ralistic tendencies. Broad averred that he was
strongly inclined towards a 'predicative' or cog-
nitivist analysis of ethical terms, which, he
thought, entailed that moral concepts were a
priori and that there were knowable synthetic
necessary truths linking moral features with
certain non-moral attributes ('Reply to My
Critics', pp. 813ff.). While he allowed that con-
temporary philosophical sensibilities were
strongly set against such notions, he himself
had no qualms about them.
Broad's longest sustained work was his
Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy. It is
hard to believe that he was particularly
attracted to McTaggart's notion that reality
consists of atemporal and immaterial spirits
whose sole activity is the loving perception of
each others' perceiving. On the other hand,
Broad owed a lot to McTaggart and had the
greatest respect for him and his philosophical
abilities. Perhaps most people would think that
editing the posthumous works of McTaggart
shows sufficient devotion. But Broad says that
he undertook the examination since it 'seemed
unlikely that anyone else would tackle the
project and it seemed sad that his life-work
should go by default' ('Autobiography', p. 60).
His two-volume work is still the best guide to
McTaggart's labyrinthine system but is,
nonetheless, severely and almost unremittingly
critical. One of the most trenchant criticisms is
the refutation of McTaggart's claim that time
is unreal, in particular the argument that
temporal 'passage' is incoherent (Examination,
bk 8, sect. B). McTaggart's fundamental error,
according to Broad, is to suppose that it is
always possible to replace tensed forms of
expression with untensed forms which assert a
temporal relation between events. If this were
possible, we ought to be able to replace a
statement such as 'it is raining' with something
131
BROAD
like 'the event of raining is present' where 'is
present' is a kind of temporal predicate and
the 'is' is strictly tenseless. After a time, when
we would normally say 'it was raining', the
replacement statement becomes 'the event of
raining is past'. Thus the raining event is both
present and past which appears contradictory
or will lead to a regress which McTaggart
regarded as vicious. Broad simply replies that
there is no justification for believing that the
replacement preserves the meaning of the
original statement. Of course, the failure of
McTaggart's argument does not imply that
temporal process or becoming is real. The
reality of process is an abiding feature of
Broad's views. In Scientific Thought (chap. 2)
he defended an interesting theory in which
reality is continuously being augmented as time
passes. The future does not exist but both
present and past do, and thus the extent of
existence grows as the present sweeps into the
future. Although Broad later characterized his
expression of this view as 'crude', he main-
tained 'that there is an irreducibly characteris-
tic feature of time, which I have called
"Absolute Becoming" ... [which] manifests
itself as the continual supersession of what was
the latest phase by a new phase' ('Reply to My
Critics', p. 766).
On the topic of perception, to which he
devoted a great deal of his writing, Broad early
endorsed a kind of sense-datum theory of per-
ception which he never gave up, although there
were many modifications. According to such a
theory, perceptual experiences involve a
complex relation between the perceiver, a 'sense
content' or 'sensum' and the perceived object
(if, as in the usual case, there is one). Thus
when I see a coin which is tilted towards me the
sensum is literally an elliptically shaped
coloured patch. This elliptical thing is some-
thing I am 'directly' aware of and whose prop-
erties - at least those that appear to me -1 can
be absolutely certain are exactly as they appear
to me. Various intuitive appeals and arguments
can be adduced in favour of such a theory. For
example, Broad argues that the coin is circular
BROAD
and always remains circular no matter how I
may view it, but the appearance of the coin
clearly changes with the angle the coin makes
to my line of sight. Broad finds it passing
strange that we could 'see the property of [ellip-
ticality] exhibited in a concrete instance, if in
fact nothing was present to our minds that pos-
sessed that property' (Scientific Thought., p.
241). An interesting feature of his view is that
sensa are neither physical nor mental, although
they are dependent upon the perceiving mind
and are only temporary existents, appearing
and disappearing with perceptual states.
On the matter of mind and its place in nature,
Broad struggled to integrate the increasingly
extensive and explanatorily powerful scientific
materialist view of the world with his firm belief
that mind could not be reduced to a physical
basis. In his view, mental events were radically
non-spatial, and certain mental episodes, such as
experiencing colours, sound and other qualities,
involved non-physical and mind-dependent
aspects of the world. Yet he was very well aware
of the long-standing and inexorably growing
evidence favouring the complete dependence of
mental features upon underlying physiological
processes. He was somewhat circumspect about
whether mind should be regarded as an inde-
pendent substance (partly because of doubts
about the clarity of the notion of substance itself),
but he did claim that the human person was an
amalgamation of a physical component (princi-
pally the brain) and a 'psychic-factor'. It seems
the main reason for endorsing what he called a
'Platonic-Cartesian' view was to allow for the
possibility of the post mortem survival, in some
sense, of persons. In this respect, Broad's interest
in parapsychological research is crucial, but
before considering that strand of his thought we
should look closer at his theory of mind, for it is
perhaps the most interesting of his doctrines and
provides a view which need not endorse any
substantial dualism and which - were it not for
the evidence from parapsychology - he largely
accepted.
Following the work of Lloyd Morgan and
others, Broad defended what he called
132
'emergent materialism'. This is a view that
involves two core postulates. First, a compos-
ite object can have properties which cannot be
reduced to the features of the object's con-
stituents and their mutual causal interrelation-
ships. Second, all emergent properties arise
from more or less complex configurations of
physical constituents. Emergentism is all the
rage nowadays in biology arid the new sciences
of complex systems, but Broad would not have
regarded typical modern examples of emer-
gence as anything more than instances of what
may be called epistemological emergence. He
was happy to admit that, as a practical matter,
most of nature's complexity could not be
deduced from the underlying physical con-
stituents and their basic interactions. This non-
theoretical impediment was swiftly swept aside
by saying 'let us replace Sir Ernest Rutherford
by a mathematical archangel, and pass on'
(Mind and its Place in Nature, p. 70).
Presumably, the archangel is not only highly
girted in mathematics and computation but has
access to the initial basic physical conditions of
the system in question. The point is that even
a fully informed archangel would not be able to
predict the appearance or effects of an emergent
property. Broad was of the opinion that this
kind of emergence was reasonably uncontro-
versial and that even basic chemistry provided
examples. This was quite widely believed up to
1925 and it is thus ironic that 1925 is both the
year The Mind and its Place in Nature was
published and the year that the 'new' quantum
mechanics was born, according to which it
seemed evident that all chemical features did in
fact reduce to the basic physical properties of
the interacting protons, neutrons and electrons
which made up any chemical substance. With
the loss of its principal uncontroversial
example, the doctrine fell on hard times, victim
of a reductionist groundswell in science and
philosophy, although there has recently been
some revival of interest in emergent material-
ism, and the term 'reductionism' is no longer
very fashionable in polite philosophical
company.

Emergent materialism has the virtue of per-
mitting mind to be a unique and irreducible
feature of human persons while fully respecting
the undeniably huge advances made in basic
science. It could recognize the complete depen-
dence of mental states upon the physical, for
which, even in Broad's time, there was abundant
sophisticated scientific evidence, without robbing
mind of its special place and efficacy in nature.
The 'psychic factor' of Broad's compound theory
of persons could thus be, fundamentally if not
solely, material. But there remained one kind of
evidence which he took completely seriously and
which threatened, or promised, to undercut
emergent materialism.
This was the evidence of parapsychology or
psychical research, discussion of which absorbed
a great deal of Broad's intellectual efforts
throughout his life. He had joined the Society for
Psychical Research (SPR) in 1920, became a
council member of the Society in 1930 and twice
served as its President (in 1935-6 and 1958-9).
Although well aware of the dangers of fraud
and wishful thinking in this area, Broad was
quite sure there was a residue of genuine results,
both from scientific research aimed specifically
at the paranormal and well-verified anecdotal
accounts of psychical phenomena. This may
strike us as bizarre, and with hindsight it may
seem that Broad was simply too credulous. For
example, Broad was highly impressed with the
card-guessing work of Samuel G. Soal, a college-
level mathematics teacher, which involved care-
fully designed experimental set-ups and sophis-
ticated statistical analysis of the resulting data.
Some of Seal's card guessers had produced
results that could not have been the result of
chance and Broad considered them good
evidence for telepathy at least. Despite certain
dark rumours, it was not until 1978 that it was
discovered, ironically by Elizabeth Marwick of
the SPR itself, that Soal had been cheating, sur-
reptitiously rearranging the results to improve
the statistics. Even more surprising is Broad's
willingness to accept the performance of
mediums as providing genuine evidence of con-
sciousness persisting beyond the death of the
133
BROAD
body. Broad professed not to care about or look
forward to such survival, and seemed to enjoy
most the idea that psychical research might show
that scientific orthodoxy 'may prove to be as
inadequate as it certainly is arrogant and ill-
informed' (Lectures on Psychical Research, p. x).
It may seem a mere waste that Broad would
devote so much time and effort to parapsychol-
ogy, but his analysis of the consequences upon
philosophy and science of the acceptance of
paranormal phenomena is as acute and pene-
trating as any of his other work. It was part of
critical philosophy, which would, when suffi-
cient facts were in and carefully sifted, provide
the basis for a more complete and acceptable
speculative philosophy of the metaphysical struc-
ture of the entire world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Perception, Physics and Reality: An Enquiry
into the Information that Physical Science
Can Supply about the Real (Cambridge,
1914; repr. New York, 1972).
Scientific Thought (1923; repr. 1952).
The Mind and its Place in Nature (1925; repr.
1962).
The Philosophy of Francis Bacon: An Address
Delivered at Cambridge on the Occasion of
the Bacon Tercentenary (Cambridge, 1926;
repr. New York, 1976).
Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930; repr.
1962).
Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy
(Cambridge, 1933,1938; repr. New York,
1976).
Ethics and the History of Philosophy (1952).
Religion, Philosophy and Psychical Research
(1953; repr. New York, 1969).
Lectures on Psychical Research: Incorporating
the Perrott Lectures Given in Cambridge
University in 1959 and 1960 (1962; repr.
1971).
Induction, Probability and Causation, ed. J.
Hintikka (Dordrecht, 1968).
Broad's Critical Essays in Moral Philosophy,
ed. D.Cheney (1971).
Leibniz: An Introduction, ed. C. Lewy
BROAD
(Cambridge, 1975).
Kant: An Introduction, ed. C. Lewy
(Cambridge, 1978).
Ethics, ed. C. Lewy (Dordrecht, 1985).
Other Relevant Works
'Critical and Speculative Philosophy', in J.
Muirhead (ed.), Contemporary British
Philosophy: Personal Statements, 1st ser.
(1924), pp. 77-100.
(Ed.), J.M.E. McTaggart, The Nature of
Existence, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1927).
'Autobiography', in P.A. Schilpp (ed.), The
Philosophy ofC. D. Broad (1953), pp.
3-68.
'Reply to My Critics', in Schilpp (1953), pp.
711-830.
Further Reading
Britton, K., 'Charlie Dunbar Broad,
1887-1971', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 64 (1978), pp. 289-310.
Gustavsson, K., Emergent Consciousness:
Themes in C. D. Broad's Philosophy of
Mind (Goteborg, 2002).
Lean, M., Sense-Perception and Matter: A
Critical Analysis ofC.D. Broad's Theory
of Perception (1953).
McLaughlin, B., 'The Rise and Fall of British
Emergentism', in A. Beckermann, H. Flohr
and J. Kim (eds), Emergence or Reduction
(Berlin, 1992), pp. 49-93.
Schilpp, P. A. (ed.), The Philosophy ofC. D.
Broad (New York, 1953).
William Seager
BRYANT, Sophie (nee Willock: 1850-1922)
Sophie Willock was born near Dublin, the third
of six children of the Revd W.A. Willock and
Sophie Morris. As well as being an early female
rower and cyclist, she was an enthusiastic
134
mountaineer who climbed the Matterhorn
twice. She met her death climbing Mont Blanc,
aged seventy-two, in 1922. As a child, Sophie
Willock was educated principally by her father,
a fellow of Trinity College Dublin. The family
moved to London in 1863. Three years later,
she won an Arnott Scholarship to Bedford
College, London, emerging in 1867 as the only
candidate in the first class of the Senior
Cambridge Local Examinations, which had
only recently become open to women. At the
age of nineteen, she married Dr W.H. Bryant,
a Plymouth physician, but was widowed within
a year. She was appointed to teach mathemat-
ics at the North London Collegiate School in
1875 by its founder, Frances Mary Buss.
Throughout her life, Bryant maintained a love
for all things Irish and was a prominent sup-
porter of home rule. She received an honorary
doctorate from Trinity College Dublin in 1904.
After the opening of London University
degrees to women in 1878, Bryant decided to
further her own studies. In 1881 she was
awarded a BSc, gaining a first in mental and
moral science and a second in mathematics.
Three years later she became the first woman in
England to gain a DSc, having studied logic and
moral philosophy. Bryant succeeded Buss as
Headmistress of the North London Collegiate
School in 1895 and remained there until her
retirement in 1918. Her interests and achieve-
ments were manifold. She was appointed in
1894 to the Bryce Commission on Secondary
Education, was influential in establishing the
London Day Training College in 1902 and
served as a member of the Consultative
Committee of the Board of Education
(1900-12). She held office as President of the
Association of Headmistresses (1903-1905),
became the first female Senate member of the
University of London (1900-1907) and was a
member of the London County Council
Education Committee (1908-14).
Without a base in a university, Bryant's
impact upon academic philosophy was neces-
sarily limited, but her talks to ethical societies
and articles were developed into books.

Educational Ends (1887), Short Studies in
Character (1894) and The Teaching of
Morality in the Family and the School (1897)
reflected Bryant's interests in the human char-
acter, self-development and moral education.
Teaching, she believed, should take account
both of religion and reason. The application of
religion to schooling was accompanied by
insufficient examples of social teaching, but
Bryant cautioned against secular education on
the grounds that it would create a moral
vacuum. She was influenced by Boole's work
on symbolic logic, arguing that mathematics
was the universal language of thought and that
general logic was essentially mathematics with
conceptions of quantity omitted.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Educational Ends or the Ideal of Personal
Development (1887).
Short Studies in Character (1894).
The Teaching of Morality in the Family and
the School (1897).
Moral and Religious Education (1920).
Other Relevant Works
'On the Nature and Functions of a Complete
Symbolic Language', Mind, vol. 13, no. 50
(1888), pp. 188-207.
'Self-Development and Self-Surrender',
International Journal of Ethics, vol. 3, no. 3
(1893), pp. 308-23.
'Antipathy and Sympathy', Mind, vol. 4
(1895), pp. 365-70.
'The Many-Sidedness of Moral Education',
International Journal of Ethics, vol. 22
(1912), pp. 383-99.
Further Reading
[Drummond, Isabella M.], Sophie Bryant,
D.Sc., Litt.D., 1850-1922, for private circu-
lation (1922).
Scrimgeour, Ruby M. (ed.), The North
London Collegiate School, 1850-1950
(1950).
David Crook
135
BUCHDAHL
BUCHDAHL, Gerd (1914-2001)
Gerd Buchdahl was born in Mainz on 12
August 1914 and died in Cambridge on 17
May 2001. Of liberal Jewish parents, he matric-
ulated at the Mainz Realgymnasium in 1933,
then trained in England as an engineer. In 1940
he was one of the two thousand 'dangerous'
aliens deported on HMT (Hired Military
Transport) Dunera. On board ship, he was one
of the authors of the constitution, inscribed on
a toilet roll, for self-government of the
internees. Kept under appalling conditions and
surviving a torpedo attack, they reached
Australia after fifty-seven days, there to be
placed in an internment camp until 1942. It was
under these harsh circumstances that he found
his vocation, first as a 'table captain' leading the
ship's philosophy discussions based on a copy
of JOAD'S Guide to Philosophy, then teaching
philosophy in the 'university' that he helped to
set up in the camp. On release he combined
employment as a civil engineer with the study
of philosophy at Melbourne University, grad-
uating with first class honours in 1946. In the
following year Buchdahl joined, and shortly
became Head of, the Department of General
Science, set up to introduce the sciences to arts
students. Over the next decade he developed his
department from a one-man one-room show
into a substantial Department of History and
Philosophy of Science. From 1954 to 1955 he
was an exchange lecturer in philosophy of
science at Oxford and visited Cambridge,
where teaching of the history and philosophy of
science had recently been introduced. In 1957
he was appointed lecturer in philosophy of
science at Cambridge, and from 1959 to 1974
he had primary responsibility for the develop-
ment of the history and philosophy of science,
first as Secretary of the Committee on History
and Philosophy of Science and then, with the
achievement of official departmental status in
1972, as the first Head of Department. In 1970,
in collaboration with Larry Laudan, he
founded Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science. Buchdahl retired in 1981, but long
BUCHDAHL
remained active as a lecturer, researcher and
promoter of Kantian studies.
BuchdahPs most substantial published work
was Metaphysics and the Philosophy of
Science. The Classical Origins, Descartes to
Kant (1969). Here Buchdahl challenged the
sharp distinction between rationalists and
empiricists, showing how the classic works of
the period variously recognized and embodied
the achievements of the natural sciences. In
contrast with histories of philosophy which
address the adequacies or inadequacies of past
philosophers' answers to supposedly perennial
questions, Buchdahl set out to demonstrate
how the canonical philosophers had engaged in
virtual dialogues with their predecessors, so
appropriating and transforming their problems
as to generate new philosophical agendas.
In Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science
and Kant and the Dynamics of Reason (1992)
Buchdahl offered detailed and innovative inter-
pretations of Kant's critical philosophy. He
opposed 'old-fashioned deductivist' accounts
in favour of exploration of the structure of the
Kantian system and of its 'mutualities', the rela-
tions of mutual dependence or balance between
what in our cognitive situation is given and
what is imposed or constituted by us. Thus
Buchdahl maintained that Kantian conditions
of possibility are tied to that for which they
provide grounds - experience in general, a
lawfully ordered nature, the principles of
Newtonian mechanics - by complex relations
of mutual presupposition rather than by simple
entailments. In Kant and the Dynamics of
Reason and others of his late works these mutu-
alities are expounded using a hermeneutic
scheme of reduction and realization inspired by
Husserl's Idea of Phenomenology (1907). For
example, in explicating the Kantian conditions
of possibility of experience in general, Buchdahl
explains how in the process of reduction all
assumptions about the perceiving subject and
the external world are suspended, as are all
categorizations and spatio-temporal locations.
Thus the everyday object of the sensory world
is transformed into Kant's transcendental
136
object, the completely indeterminate thought of
something in general. The contrary process of
realization corresponds to Kant's transcenden-
tal exposition of space and time and deduc-
tion of the categories. The transcendental object
is realized in its material aspect through the
modes of sensibility, space and time, and in its
formal aspect through the categories of the
understanding, substance, causality, interac-
tion, etc.
Both Buchdahl's hermeneutic approach and
specific aspects of his reading of Kant have
proved controversial - see, among others,
Westphal, Allison, and Jardine. For example, it
is widely supposed that for Kant the source of
the necessity of causal laws lies in the under-
standing, because the Second Analogy of
Experience entails the existence and necessity of
particular causal relations. On Buchdahl's
reading of the Second Analogy, Kant there
invokes the concept of a causal relation only
schematically in order to define the time-direct-
edness of the series of perceptions, just as in the
First Analogy the concept of substance provides
the schema for temporal duration and in the
Third Analogy the concept of reciprocity
provides the schema for temporal coexistence.
Accordingly, the principle of causality of the
Second Analogy may prompt reason's quest
for empirical laws, but it does not imply that
any such laws are to be found. The true source
of causal necessity is rather to be found in
reason, which projects onto our experience the
idea of a unified order of nature.
Buchdahl first sketched his own neo-Kantian
philosophy of science in a series of historical
studies: of the interactions of metaphysics,
mathematics, physics and observation in
Kepler's astronomy and optics; of the method-
ology of Mathias Schleiden; and of the delib-
erations and disputes of Newton and his suc-
cessors over the intelligibility of action-at-a-
distance. Fuller accounts were set out in his
unpublished book Science and Rational
Structures (1973) and in 'Neo-Transcendental
Approaches towards Scientific Theory
Appraisal' (1982) and 'Styles of Scientific

Thinking' (1993). Buchdahl's account of the
methods and structure of sciences is triadic. All
matters directly pertaining to the relation
between hypotheses and empirical data are
assigned to the constitutive (or inductive) com-
ponent. Everything having to do with criteria of
simplicity, coherence, symmetry, etc. is assigned
to a regulative (or systemic) component, along
with preferred explanation types - mechanistic,
teleological, genetic, etc. All issues of intelligi-
bility, convention and conceptual scheme are
allocated to an explicative (or metaphysical)
component. The empirical, rational and con-
ceptual methods of theory appraisal associated
with these basic components are not, Buchdahl
maintained, timelessly fixed but subject to crit-
icism and change. This triadic scheme was
proposed by Buchdahl both as a tool for inter-
preting past philosophies of science and as a
framework within which to address current
problems in the philosophy of science. In
Science and Rational Structures and later
writings Buchdahl counters radical scepticism
with an account of the truth of theories in terms
of their satisfaction of tests of the types pre-
scribed by his scheme; and he associates his
own notion of world constitution through the
methodical pursuit of science with Kant's
claims concerning the progressive construction
of an order of nature through the employment
of reason in accordance with regulative
maxims.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science.
The Classical Origins, Descartes to Kant
(Oxford, 1969; repr. Lanham, Maryland,
1988).
Science and Rational Structures [Tarner
Lectures, Cambridge, 1973], unpublished
ms., Whipple Library, Cambridge.
Kant and the Dynamics of Reason: Essays on
the Structure of Kant's Philosophy
(Oxford, 1992).
Other Relevant Works
The Image of Newton and Locke in the Age
137
BUCHDAHL
of Reason (1961).
The Kantian Dynamic of Reason with
Special Reference to the Place of Causality
in Kant's System', in L.W. Beck (ed.), Kant
Studies Today (La Salle, Illinois, 1969), pp.
341-74.
'Gravity and Intelligibility: Newton to Kant',
in R.E. Butts and J.W. Davis (eds), The
Methodological Heritage of Newton
(Toronto, 1970), pp. 74-102.
'History of Science and Criteria of Choice', in
R.H. Stuewer (ed.), Historical and
Philosophical Perspectives of Science
(Minneapolis, 1970), pp. 204-29, 239-45.
'Inductivist versus Deductivist Approaches in
the Philosophy of Science', The Monist,
vol. 55 (1971), pp. 343-67.
'Explanation and Gravity', in M. Teich and
R. Young (eds), Changing Perspectives in
the History of Science (1973), pp.
167-203.
The Conception of Lawlikeness in Kant's
Philosophy of Nature', in L.W. Beck (ed.),
Kant's Theory of Knowledge (Dordrecht,
1974), pp. 128-50.
Transcendental Reduction: A Concept for
the Interpretation of Kant's Critical
Method', Kant-Studien, vol. 65 (1974), pp.
28-44.
'Neo-Transcendental Approaches towards
Scientific Theory Appraisal', in D.H.
Mellor (ed.), Science, Belief and Behaviour
(Cambridge, 1980), pp. 1-22.
'Reduction-Realization: A Key to the
Structure of Kant's Thought', in J.N.
Mohanty and R. W. Shahan (eds), Essays
on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
(Norman, Oklahoma, 1982), pp. 39-98.
'Kant's "Special Metaphysics" and
Metaphysical foundations of Natural
Science^ in R.E. Butts (ed.), Kant's
Philosophy of Physical Sciences
(Dordrecht, 1986), pp. 127-62.
'Metaphysical and Internal Realism: The
Relations between Ontology and
Methodology in Kant's Philosophy of
Science', in R. Barcan Marcus et al. (eds),
BUCHDAHL
Proceedings of the Seventh International
Congress of Logic, Methodology and
Philosophy of Science (Salzburg, 1983)
(Amsterdam, 1986), pp. 623-41.
'Styles of Scientific Thinking', Science and
Education, vol. 2 (1993), pp. 149-67.
Modelli di spiegazione. Per una lettura
neotrascendentale delle teorie scientifiche,
ed. F. Bevilacqua and F. Giudici, trans. M.
Cardinetti (Pavia, 1995).
Further Reading
Allison, H.E., 'Causality and Causal Laws in
Kant', in P. Parrini (ed.), Kant and
Contemporary Epistemology (Dordrecht,
1994), pp. 291-307.
Jardine, N., 'Hermeneutic Strategies in Gerd
Buchdahl's Kantian Philosophy of Science',
Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science, vol. 34A (2003), pp. 183-208.
Westphal, K.R., 'Buchdahl's
"Phenomenological" View of Kant: A
Critique', Kant-Studien, vol. 89 (1998), pp.
335-52.
Whitelock, J., J.M. Rampelt and N. Jardine,
'Gerd Buchdahl's Writings in History and
Philosophy of Science: A Listing of
Publications, Unpublished Works, and
Annotated Books', Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science, vol. 34A (2003),
pp. 209-27.
Woolhouse, R.S., 'Gerd Buchdahl:
Biographical and Bibliographical', in R.S.
Woolhouse (ed.), Metaphysics and
Philosophy of Science in the 17th and 18th
Centuries: Essays in Honour of Gerd
Buchdahl (Dordrecht, 1988), pp. 1-7.
Nick Jardine
138
BULLOUGH, Edward (1880-1934)
Edward Bullough was born in Thon,
Switzerland on 28 March 1880 and died in
Bath on 17 September 1934. The child of a
Lancastrian father and a Swiss mother, he was
educated at Vitzhum Gymnasium, Dresden and
Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1902
from Trinity, where he read the Modern
Languages Tripos, and receiving his MA in
1906. In December 1912 he became Drosier
Fellow at Gonville and Caius College,
Cambridge. From 1916 to 1919 he was
employed at the Admiralty. For the year 1918
he was Chairman of the Council of the Modern
Languages Association and in 1920 was
appointed university lecturer in modern lan-
guages. He rapidly acquired fluency and exper-
tise in more languages, Russian, Spanish and
Chinese, as well as deepening his interests in
European culture, and in 1934 was elected to
the Chair of Italian at the University of
Cambridge. He was author of Cambridge
Readings in Italian Literature: Italian
Perspectives, an authoritative survey of nine-
teenth-century Italian culture, and he trans-
lated Essays in History by Pope Pius XL
Concurrently with his modern languages
teaching, Bullough made a close study of psy-
chological aesthetics, working for several years
in the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory to
test and develop his theories of perception and
the aesthetic attitude. He also attended classes
given by the Director of the Fullbourn Asylum
and learned the physiology of the nervous
system, both theoretical and practical, with Sir
Hugh Anderson. In 1907 he delivered the first
lectures in aesthetics to be given at the University
of Cambridge. The lectures generated wide-
spread interest at the time and have influenced
discussion in the philosophy of aesthetic experi-
ence ever since. From 1907 he delivered annually
a set of lectures on aesthetics and published
numerous papers on the subject. His psycho-
logical work widened to include an interest in
psychical research and he became a member of
the Society for Psychical Research.

In 1908 Bullough married Enrichetta Druse,
the daughter of a famous Italian actress,
Eleanora Druse. With Enrichetta he was
responsible for the building of an elegant Italian
villa in Cambridge which Enrichetta, after
Edward Bullough's premature death, gave to
the Dominican Order. Bullough was received
into the Roman Catholic Church in 1923.
When he died he was buried in the Dominican
habit and with the full rites of a member of the
Dominican Order.
Bullough is distinguished for his work in
modern languages and his broad and detailed
knowledge of European culture, but he is
probably more widely known for his writings
on aesthetics and especially for the theory of
aesthetic attitude that he first expounded in his
paper, '"Psychical Distance" as a Factor in Art
and an Aesthetic Principle', published in 1912.
In this paper he introduced the concept of 'psy-
chical distance' to refer to a state of mind in
which all practical concerns are 'distanced' and
which is the defining condition of aesthetic
consciousness, enabling us to distinguish merely
agreeable pleasures from aesthetically valuable
experiences. The 'distance' he describes is that
between the self and its affections and his prime
example is of our experience of a fog at sea. The
fog may be strange and frightening, but if we
become distanced from our sense of its dangers
it can become an intensely enjoyable phenom-
enon. When distancing occurs we suddenly
find ourselves capable of appreciating the
ethereal veil the fog spreads over everything, the
smooth creamy appearance of the water, the
changed quality of any sound, and the strange
mysteriousness of an atmosphere that seems
at once serene and menacing. He further main-
tains that when we attend a theatrical perfor-
mance we become similarly 'distanced' and he
argues that we do not restrain ourselves from
intervening to prevent a staged murder, say,
because we know the whole thing is fictitious,
but because our attitude has become a 'dis-
tanced' one. 'Distance' has disabled all practi-
cal concerns and facilitated a vivid perception
of what is depicted. It is what makes aesthetic
139
BULLOUGH
contemplation possible. It is implicit in
Bullough's account that a 'distanced' attitude
may either be cultivated or may occur sponta-
neously. He also maintains that a person's aes-
thetic relationship with a perceived object
remains a personal one, even though its prac-
tical connotations have been filtered out.
For Bullough, experiment and introspection
were the prime means of achieving under-
standing of aesthetic experience, but this was a
view that was criticized and sometimes vigor-
ously repudiated later in the twentieth century,
in particular by Susanne K. Langer, who main-
tained that psychological aesthetics evaded the
genuine problems of art, and who preferred
an approach that concentrated on the art object
rather than a person's experience of it. The
theory of psychical distance has also been force-
fully criticized by George Dickie in papers and
a book written between 1961 and 1971.
Dickie's broad claim is that the idea of a distinct
aesthetic attitude is a myth that is harmful to
aesthetic theory. He objected to Bullough's
introduction of special terms, to the overarch-
ing notion of 'distance', and to the way in
which, on Bullough's account, the notions of an
aesthetic object and aesthetic qualities lose out
to the idea of a psychological mechanism as the
determinant and measure of aesthetic experi-
ence. Dickie's own main contentions are that
everything cited by Bullough in his description
of 'distancing' can be accounted for by using
the concept of 'attention', and that aesthetic
attention is determined by objective features
of what is attended to. Such objections do not
invalidate Bullough's enquiries into the psy-
chological effects of the experience of art. He
did not believe that his theory answered every
question of aesthetics but that it cast light and
generated fruitful debate on a number of them.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Matter and Form', Modern Languages
Quarterly, vol. 7 (1904), pp. 10-15.
The Modern Conception of Aesthetics
[course of lectures delivered at the
University of Cambridge], privately printed
BULLOUGH
(1907).
'On the Apparent Heaviness of Colours', The
British Journal of Psychology, vol. 2
(1907), pp. 111-52
'"Psychical Distance" as a Factor in Art and
an Aesthetic Principle', British Journal of
Psychology, vol. 5 (1912), pp. 87-118.
The Relation of Aesthetics to Psychology',
The British Journal of Psychology, vol. 10
(1919), pp. 43-50.
'Mind and Medium in Art', The British
Journal of Psychology, vol. 11 (1920), pp.
26^6.
'Recent Work in Experimental Aesthetics',
British Journal of Psychology, vol. 12
(1921), pp. 76-99.
Aesthetics: Lectures and Essays, ed., with an
Introduction, Elizabeth M. Wilkinson
(Westport, Connecticut, 1977).
Other Relevant Works
The Philosophy ofSt Thomas Aquinas, trans.
from the French of E. Gilson (Cambridge,
1924).
The Relation of Literature and the Arts',
Modern Languages, vol. 14 (1933), pp.
101-12.
'Italian Perspectives' [inaugural lecture],
(Cambridge, 1934).
Further Reading
Bennett, E.K., 'Obituary: Professor Edward
Bullough', The Cambridge Review, vol.
56, no. 1364,19 October 1934, p. 25.
Evennett, H.O., 'Edward Bullough'
[obituary], Dublin Review, vol. 196, no.
392 (1935), pp. 134-47.
Oakeshott, Michael, 'A Memoir', The Caian
[the journal of Gonville and Caius College,
Cambridge], vol. 43, no. 1 (Michaelmas
Term 1934), pp. 1-9.
Diane Collinson
140
BURDON JONES, Rachel Mary, see Kydd
BURNET, John (1863-1928)
John Burnet was born in Edinburgh on 9
December 1863 and died in St Andrews on 26
May 1928. Educated at the Royal High School,
he studied Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and natural
philosophy at the University of Edinburgh
(1880-82), before winning the first open schol-
arship to Balliol College, Oxford. He went up
in 1883, following studies in France. As a
graduate, he came to St Andrews (1887-8) as
personal assistant to Lewis Campbell, Professor
of Greek. Briefly a schoolmaster, then fellow of
Merton College, then Campbell's substitute
(1891-2), he held the St Andrews Greek Chair
until 1926, despite an invitation to Harvard
(1909). He was elected fellow of the British
Academy.
Burnet's precociously brilliant edition of
Plato remedied a long-standing deficiency and
long remained the standard edition. In Burnet's
reasoned rather than sentimental reading, Plato
provides a faithful account of the historical
Socrates, his friend and mentor in establishing
the distinction between philosophy and, respec-
tively, sophism and viewpoints of physical
science. The valedictory Sather Lectures insist
on Plato's massive abiding contribution to
Western civilization. Early Greek Philosophy
(1892) was considerably important as demon-
strating the propaedeutic value of reading
Heraclitus, and Parmenides, for non-scientists
and philosophers in need of some general per-
spective on the new physical theory. Part of a
revival of Greek and Platonic studies contem-
porary with the heyday of absolute idealism,
Burnet's work was an influence in moves away
from the latter. He ought not: to be confused
with the excessively modernizing readings of
subsequent enthusiasts.

Believing philosophy indispensable within
the intellectual curriculum, Burnet criticized a
professionalization of philosophy independent
of attention to other studies. Philosophy
belonged within a critical complementarity
between respective disciplines. Tendencies
towards detached and uninformed abstract the-
orizing needed correctives. The study of Greek,
beside plainer literary and cultural advantages,
was a road into philosophical appreciation of
linguistic questions, and the forestalling of some
confusions. Burnet esteemed Renaissance
humanism, the revival of Greek rhetoric pre-
ceding scientific advance.
'On Ignorance', perhaps influenced by J.F.
Ferrier, is a rare essay into pure philosophy.
Ignorance is the capacity to learn, a definition
of the scope of possible knowledge. One can be
ignorant only of what is the case.
Burner's arguments were championed by his
pupil A.D. RITCHIE, especially in his later work.
Burnet's interpretation of Heraclitus was defini-
tive for John ANDERSON, whose 'Socrates as an
Educator' is a major restatement of principle.
Anderson's catchphrase 'the Greek directness'
can valuably be glossed from Burnet's account of
the meanings or character of Greek philosophi-
cal terms and concepts in Aristotle on Education
(1903). That little work's contrast between 'infor-
mation' and 'knowledge' - between having infor-
mation, and knowing - has some restatement
from John MACMURRAY.
George DAVE (1986) explores the systematic
philosophic thinking involved in Burnet's activi-
ties as educationist, beyond the 1913 lectures' pre-
scient discussion of Wilhelmine Prussian ideals.
Unpublished correspondence and memoranda,
and public records of extensive practical engage-
ment, committee work and chairmanship in
pressing debates about the Scottish Education
Department and university policy, more than
account for Burnet's oft-remarked falling-off
from a striking early scholarly productivity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Early Greek Philosophy (London and
Edinburgh, 1892; 2nd edn, 1908; 3rd edn,
141
BURNS
1920; 4th edn, 1930 [by W.L. Lorimer]).
(Ed. and comm.), The Ethics of Aristotle
(1900).
(Ed.), Platonis opera, 5 vols (Oxford,
1900-1908).
Aristotle on Education (Cambridge, 1903).
(Ed. and comm.), Plato's Phaedo (Oxford,
1911).
Greek Philosophy, Part 1: Thales to Plato
(1914).
Higher Education and the War, revised text
of lectures from 1913 (1917).
Platonism [Sather Classical Lectures vol. 5]
(Berkeley, California, 1928).
Essays and Addresses, with memoir by Lord
Charnwood(1929).
Further Reading
Davie, G.E., The Crisis of the Democratic
Intellect (Edinburgh, 1986).
Joyal, Mark, 'John Burnet', The Dictionary
of British Classicists, 1500-1960 (Bristol,
2004).
Lorimer, W.L. and A.E. Taylor, PBA, vol. 14
(1928), pp. 445-70; bibliography, pp.
467-70.
Robert R. Calder
BURNS, Cecil Delisle (1879-1942)
C. Delisle Burns was born on St Christopher-
Nevis in 1879 and died in Surrey on 22 January
1942. He was educated at Christ's College,
Cambridge and in Rome, though his highest
degree was a DLit awarded by London at a
later stage. He was, for a number of years, the
British editor of Ethics: An International
Journal of Social Philosophy. From 1908 to
1915 he was a university extension lecturer for
Oxford, Cambridge and London. He worked
in the Ministry of Reconstruction (1917-19).
From 1921 till 1924 he was Assistant Secretary
BURNS
of the Joint Research Department of the TUC
and the Labour Party. In 1925 he was
appointed lecturer in logic and philosophy at
Birkbeck College as well as lecturer in social
philosophy at the London School of
Economics. In 1927 he was appointed
Stevenson Lecturer in Citizenship at the
University of Glasgow in 1927. He retired in
1936 and spent his final years in Dorking.
Burns was a prolific writer on a wide variety
of topics with more than thirty books to his
credit, nearly all written for the general reader.
His books were often based on lectures he was
giving at the time. This was probably true of the
first one, The Growth of Modern Philosophy
(1909), a history of philosophy from the
Renaissance up to his own time. Two of his
later books - Democracy: Its Defects and
Advantages (1929) and The Challenge to
Democracy (1934) - were expressly linked to
his 'citizenship' lectures at Glasgow. Other
books express his standpoint on religion and
politics: OId Creeds and the New Faith (1911)
is a defence of a rational and non-sectarian
religion and The Principles of Revolution: A
Study in Ideals (1920) reflects his involvement
in the early Labour movement. He was inter-
ested, though not in a philosophically deep
way, in the foundations of international law,
which he took up in The Morality of Nations
(1915) and International Politics (1920).
Burns's contributions to academic philoso-
phy consist of a few papers to the Aristotelian
Society and his book, The Contact between
Minds: A Metaphysical Hypothesis (1923). His
orientation in philosophy, which emerges in
this book and in his pamphlet What to Read in
Philosophy (Leeds, 1930), is strongly realist.
Among the main influences on his thought in
epistemology and metaphysics were
ALEXANDER, WHITEHEAD and NUNN.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'William of Ockham on Universals',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society', vol.
14 (1913-14), pp. 97-9.
The Morality of Nations (1915).
142
International Politics (1920).
The Contact between Minds: A Metaphysical
Hypothesis (1923).
The Horizon of Experience: A Study of the
Modern Mind (1933).
Democracy (1935).
Other Relevant Works
The Nature of the State in View of its
External Relations', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 16 (1915-16), pp.
290-301.
The Contact of Minds', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 23 (1922-3), pp.
215-18.
The Activity of Mind', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 26 (1925-6), pp.
263-78.
Stuart Brown
BUTLER, Ronald Joseph (1929-2000)
Ronald Joseph Butler was born in New
Zealand on 24 September 1929 and died in
Benedon, Kent on 17 February 2000. He
attended school in Dunedin and obtained his
BA in 1951 and his MA in 1954 from the
University of Otago. He was a teaching fellow
in philosophy at Otago from 1954 to 1955
before being appointed as an instructor in the
United States at Cornell University (1955-6),
and then at Princeton University (1956-9). He
was assistant professor at Oberlin College,
Ohio during the following year and moved to
the University of Toronto as assistant professor
(1960-64) and associate professor (1964-7).
Visiting professor at the University of Waterloo
(1967-8), then professor there (1968-71),
Butler became Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Kent in 1971, retired in 1982,
but was re-engaged on a part-time contract
until 1989.

Butler edited three volumes of papers by con-
temporary philosophers: Analytical Philosophy,
first and second series (Oxford, 1962 and
1965); and Cartesian Studies (Oxford, 1972),
devoted to the work of Descartes. The papers
in all three volumes were well enough chosen
that they set high standards for some years in
work on 'hard-headed subjects'. Butler wrote
one book, The Mind of Santayana, his early
and highly critical study of Santayana's 'fun-
damental errors' which Butler thought deserved
to 'die with him'. However, Butler's usual pub-
lications were articles, and their topics were
diverse and often logically complex.
In 'Distinctiones Rationis ...' Butler argues
for the central role of the 'distinction of reason'
in Hume's science of human nature. This dis-
tinction is the human ability to learn through
experience - by experiment - to distinguish
between ideas which are actually different but
which in practice are inseparable. We do this
'by comparing contrasting comparisons' as, for
example, when we distinguish between an
object's figure and its colour, or between its
motion and shape, or between a face and its
expression ('Distinctiones Rationis', p. 165).
Thus we compare the same object or event
before and after our experience (or experiment)
with it. Unable to see the invisible and intangi-
ble distance between two objects, we discover
there is a visible and tangible distance by
putting a slip of paper between them. So dis-
tinctions of reason are abilities to 'form ideas
and make judgments' (ibid., p. 167). Butler
then discusses Hume's use of such distinctions
in describing the differences between, for
example, particular and abstract ideas, thinking
and feeling, the passions and understanding.
Butler's interest in classical Greek philosophy
is displayed in his paper 'Aristotle's Sea-Fight
and Three Valued Logic'. He examines 'some
ontological implications of the law of excluded
middle' because of modern 'claims that "many-
143
BUTLER
valued logics" invalidate that law' ('Aristotle's
Sea-Fight', p. 264). In particular, Butler is con-
cerned with the application of that law to
'propositions about future contingent events',
such as 'there will be a sea fight tomorrow'.
Modern critics of Aristotle's treatment of such
propositions do not understand his interpreta-
tion of the law of excluded middle. They also
ignore his view that 'some future events are
not predetermined' (ibid., p. 266). Modern
logic converts the tense of all propositions into
the tenseless present, and this overrides
Aristotle's metaphysical presuppositions,
including his important distinctions between
different kinds of necessity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Aristotle's Sea-Fight and Three-Valued
Logic', Philosophical Review, vol. 64
(April, 1955), pp. 264-74.
'Distinctiones Rationis ...', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 76 (1975-6),
pp. 165-76.
'Tand Sympathy', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 49 (1975),
pp. 1-20.
Other Relevant Works
The Mind ofSantayana (Chicago, 1955).
'Other Dates', Mind, vol. 68 (January 1959),
pp. 16-33.
'Substance Unlocked', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 74 (1973-4), pp.
131-60.
Further Reading
Aristotle, De Interpretatione.
Robert Brown
 c
CAIRD, (Alice) Mona (nee Alison:
1854-1932)
Mona Alison was born on the Isle of Wight on
24 May 1854 and died in London on 4 February
1932. It is possible that she spent part of her
childhood in Australia. Although she lacked
formal education, she studied the work of
English, French and German writers and philoso-
phers. In 1877 she married James Alexander
Caird (later Henryson-Caird), a Scottish
landowner who published a book on New
Zealand sheep farming. Their only child, Alister
James, was educated privately and at Magdalene
College, Cambridge. A member of the King's
Own Scottish Borderers, Alister was awarded
the Military Cross in World War I. His career
caused friction between himself and his mother,
a pacifist who allegedly supplied her son with
poison to be used if he were taken prisoner.
Caird became notorious in the 1880s for her
opinions on marriage, influenced strongly by
the writings of John Stuart Mill. Because society
kept women deliberately ignorant about the
true nature of marriage, she argued, women
submitted blindly to a subordinate position
which left them legally little better than slaves.
Marriage should instead be a free contract
between equal partners, dissoluble at will.
Caird's work in the twentieth century devel-
oped her belief in personal liberty; in particu-
lar, she denied that the individual should be
subordinated to the race. Directly attacking the
historical construction of womanhood, Caird
refused to accept biological determinism,
144
arguing that 'traditional' gender roles were in
fact man-made social constructs. Many femi-
nists of the late nineteenth century claimed that
emancipation would ideally allow women to
devote themselves to motherhood. In contrast,
Caird believed that any competent person could
raise a child, and that instead of being trained
only for marriage, women should be given all
opportunities for personal fulfilment.
Caird offered strong support to the suffrage
and anti-vivisection movements. In a 1908
letter to The Times, she rebutted Mrs Humphry
Ward's statements on behalf of the Women's
National Anti-Suffrage League, arguing that
only by direct representation could women
achieve true freedom and equality. In another
letter, she acknowledged the necessity of
militant tactics, although she did not participate
in such activities. In her anti-vivisection work,
Caird was one of many activists who connected
the treatment of animals with that of women.
Both groups suffered from the belief that
physical power justified the abuse and torture
of weaker creatures. Caird's objections to vivi-
section reject the argument that 'might makes
right' (a stance which strongly informs all of her
post World War I writing); she contends that
scientists who practise institutional cruelty
debase humanity by destroying social justice
and responsibility. Caird's exhortations against
the persecution of animals also made her sym-
pathetic to vegetarian movements.
Although most of Caird's twentieth-century
work was non-fiction, she published two novels,
both of which build on her dedication to

personal liberty. The Stones of Sacrifice (1915)
addresses the drawbacks of socialism, while The
Great Wave (1931), set in the years leading up
to World War I, illustrates the moral dilemmas
related to the creation of unlimited physical
power. In addition to publishing essays in peri-
odicals such as the Westminster Review and
journals devoted to specific causes, Caird turned
many of her essays and letters into pamphlets,
particularly those writings which rejected senti-
mental and patriotic arguments for war.
Combined with her frequent use of dialogue,
this indicates a clear intention of engaging with
her readers about complex issues, rather than
constructing theoretical intellectual exercises.
Caird's work has received renewed attention
since the 1960s, when the feminist movement
revived interest in many neglected nineteenth-
century writers. She is now regarded as a
prominent member of the heterogeneous group
known as New Women Writers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Daughters ofDanaus (1894; repr. with
an Afterword by Margaret Morganroth
Guillette, 1989).
The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays
on the Status and Destiny of Women
(1897).
The Stones of Sacrifice (1915).
The Great Wave (1931).
Other Relevant Works
'Is Vivisection Logically Justifiable?', The
Humane Review, vol. 1 (July 1900), pp.
139-50.
The Duel of the Sexes: A Comment',
Fortnightly Review, vol. 84 (July 1905),
pp. 109-22.
Letters to The Times, 11 and 18 August and
30 November 1908.
'After' (n.p., 1918).
'A State-Supported Cruelty' (Newton
Stewart, n.d.).
'Vivisection as a Test Question at Elections'
(n.p., n.d.).
145
CAMPBELL
Further Reading
Heilmann, Ann, 'Mona Caird (1854-1932):
Wild Woman, New Woman, and Early
Radical Feminist Critic of Marriage and
Motherhood', Women's Writing, vol. 5,
no. 1(1996), pp. 67-95.
Richardson, Angelique, '"People Talk a Lot
of Nonsense about Heredity": Mona Caird
and Anti-Eugenic Feminism', in Angelique
Richardson and Chris Willis (eds), The
New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-
de-Siecle Feminisms (Basingstoke and New
York, 2001), pp. 183-211.
Tracey S. Rosenberg
CAMPBELL, Charles Arthur (1897-1974)
Charles Arthur Campbell was born in Glasgow
on 13 January 1897 and died in Callander,
Perthshire on 17 March 1974. He was
educated at Glasgow Academy, Glasgow
University and Balliol College, Oxford, with his
studies at Oxford interrupted by service as an
army officer during World War I. He returned
to Glasgow in 1924 as assistant and (the fol-
lowing year) lecturer in moral philosophy.
Glasgow University awarded him the degree of
DLitt, based on his first book Scepticism and
Construction (1931). In 1932 he was appointed
Professor of Philosophy at the University
College of North Wales in Bangor, where he
remained until 1938, when he was appointed
Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at the
University of Glasgow. He gave two series of
Gifford Lectures at the University of St
Andrews (1953-4 and 1954-5), later published
in a revised form as the book On Selfhood and
Godhood (1957). He retired in 1961.
Campbell is best known today for his defence
of free will, having appeared as the champion
of free will in a number of widely circulated
anthologies prepared for students. Campbell
CAMPBELL
himself believed, however, that his most impor-
tant contribution was his development of the
metaphysics of F.H. BRADLEY, which he pre-
sented in his major books. Throughout his life he
remained a convinced objective idealist in the
face of the prevailing philosophical fashion. A
major part of the honours programme in phi-
losophy at Glasgow University during his tenure
involved the logic and metaphysics of Bradley.
Among the idealists it was with Bradley that
Campbell felt the greatest affinity. Campbell
follows Bradley in affirming that judgement is
the act which refers an ideal content to a reality
beyond the act. The problem of metaphysics is
to characterize the nature of this reality posited
in the fundamental act of the intellect.
Orthodox idealism contends that this reality
(aka 'the Absolute') is a fully comprehensive
and intelligible system of thought in which the
efforts of finite minds find their completion.
Bradley rejects this identification of the real
and the rational, and maintains that reality is a
harmonious system of experience, involving
other sides of our nature than mere thought.
Campbell agrees with Bradley that the real is
the supra-rational. His central point is that
'there is a fundamental difference in kind, such
as renders thought-products and Reality strictly
incommensurable ... we must have for Reality
differences united in a certain way, and we
actually have in thought-products differences
united in quite a different way' (Scepticism and
Construction, p. 20).
Campbell's contribution is a more abstract
and austere concept of the supra-rational reality
than we are offered by Bradley, since Campbell
sees no reason to follow Bradley in the claim
that the stuffing of reality can be characterized
as experience. This may be a healthy scepticism,
but the risk is that it turns the Absolute into an
unknowable Thing-in-Itself. Campbell is well
aware of the danger and his strategy is to avail
himself of techniques developed by theologians
such as Rudolf Otto for the representation of
the divine. Even if the supra-rational cannot be
captured through a literal description, it may be
possible to represent it symbolically.
146
However important such symbols may be in
the worship of the Deity, it is difficult to see
how they can be much use to the sober meta-
physician. Nevertheless, there may be some-
thing to be said for the negative point shared by
Bradley and Campbell that the judgements we
make can never completely satisfy the intellect.
It is interesting that Campbell uses this thesis
from absolute idealism to bolster his defence of
free will. Idealists generally were not sympa-
thetic to the freedom of the will. This idea was
condemned in the severest terms by both Sir
Henry JONES, who taught Campbell at Glasgow
University, and Bradley himself, who called it
a 'lingering chimera'. Campbell, however, used
the idealist notion of what satisfies the intellect
to defuse a central criticism of the theory of free
will that the supposedly free decisions of the
agent are unintelligible. His cunning move is to
argue that the causal 'explanations' of the deter-
minist are in the last resort equally unintelligi-
ble. If one 'explains' a causal connection by
identifying a missing link, one must still explain
how the link connects with the elements on
either side. And if the 'explanation' involves
bringing a sequence under a general law, even
the most general laws such as the law of gravity
involve an uneliminable element of facticity
introduced through the gravitational constant,
for whose specific size there is no explanation.
Bradley and Campbell agreed that our judge-
ments could never satisfy the intellect, since
apart from what Bradley called 'a miserable
tautology' the ground of the connection and
distinction of their components will necessarily
remain outside thought. To soften this conclu-
sion, Bradley introduced the doctrine of the
degrees of truth and reality, according to which,
although no judgements are completely true,
some are more true than others. Campbell,
however, introduces an important modifica-
tion through his notion of 'final phenomenal
truths' which are intellectually incorrigible.
Although no judgements are intellectually sat-
isfactory, there are some which are intellectu-
ally incorrigible. These final phenomenal truths
are for the most part truths about our imme-

diate experience, which lack the intellectual
supplementation which introduces the possi-
bility of error. Among these incorrigible phe-
nomenal truths appear the records of our free
decisions among genuine alternatives, whereas
any attempt to provide a causal explanation of
such decisions belongs to the lower category of
the corrigible! Thus Campbell is again using his
version of idealism to bolster his defence of
free will. One may wonder, indeed, how
Campbell can assert dogmatically that the belief
in free will is incorrigible, given the efforts
made throughout the ages by important
philosophers to correct it; but it is possible to
represent these discussions as a debate about
whether the belief in the freedom of the will is
incorrigible or not. Campbell could argue that
because of its immediacy the belief in free will
must be incorrigible, although there are people
who do not realize this.
Campbell remained a staunch champion of
the objective idealism which dominated British
philosophy in the latter half of the nineteenth
century in a philosophical climate which
became increasingly hostile. Thus the supra-
rationalism which he developed to challenge
orthodox idealism received little attention.
Surviving idealists had other things to worry
about, whereas non-idealists had little interest
in criticisms developed in an idiom which they
rejected.
At the present time, indeed, his views might
be useful in the developing debate between the
realists and the anti-realists, since his core
position presents the essence of the idealist
insights while cutting away the baggage
involved in the orthodox idealist conception
of the Absolute. Of special interest in this con-
nection is his contribution 'The Mind's
Involvement in "Objects'" to Theories of the
Mind (1962), where he is the standard-bearer
for idealism. (This item is later reproduced in In
Defence of Free W/7/, pp. 218-42.) Following
Bradley, Campbell agrees that the basic cogni-
tive act of judgement refers an ideal content to
a reality beyond the act. This means that on the
one hand an independently existing world is a
147
CAMPBELL
postulate of cognition, whereas on the other
hand the objects of our knowledge are charac-
terized and discriminated through a content
which is inescapably ideal. Without an inde-
pendent reality, the distinction between true
and false judgement could have no meaning.
Judgement necessarily claims and aims at truth
and 'the claim to truth inherent in judging is
interpreted by idealists as simply the claim that
the complex of related ideas (the "ideal
content") which we affirm in our judgement
does conform to, or correctly characterize, the
nature of the independent objective reality'
(ibid., pp. 237-8).
Campbell is prepared to go along with what
he considers the standard view of objective
idealism that an indeterminate reality is the
ultimate subject of every judgement, so that'S
is P' becomes 'Reality is such that S is P'. This
view does indeed allow a role for a reality
beyond thought which underpins the true/false
distinction, but Campbell takes a further step in
the direction of realism. This move depends
on the assumption that the presupposed inde-
pendent reality has special parts on which a
mind from time to time can focus its attention.
These special parts are the objects which are the
immediate subjects of ordinary judgements,
such as 'This tree is a poplar'. Objects such as
'this tree' are both ideal and real. They are
ideal insofar as they have been introduced
through an ideal characterization which has
its foundation in the activity of the mind. They
are real insofar as they are conceived as partic-
ular parts of the presupposed independent
reality which we seek to know. This may be a
way to satisfy the insights of both realism and
anti-realism.
Campbell's views are also more in line with
current thinking in his account of perception.
He attacks the sense datum theory dominant in
his day and argues for the now widely accepted
view that even the most basic sensory cognition
is propositional in nature (involves judgement).
It is interesting that to involve the assumptions
built into the concept of sense datum he makes
an early use (1967) of the now fashionable
CAMPBELL
term 'quale' ('qualia') (In Defence of Free Will,
p. 223).
Campbell was also determined in his oppo-
sition to the linguistic turn taken by philosophy
in mid century. His profound belief that this
was a turn for the worse emerges most clearly
in his sustained attack on Gilbert KYLE'S
account of intellectual acts in The Concept of
Mind (In Defence of Free Will, pp. 243-73).
Against Ryle, Campbell argues that what a
speaker means by the words used depends on
acts of thought which take place in a private
stream of consciousness. This is a careful,
serious argument in which Campbell counters
in detail Kyle's various objections to the tradi-
tional view which posits a different status for
the mental and the physical. Campbell is not, of
course, a Cartesian dualist. As an objective
idealist, how could he be? But this does not
require him to adopt Kyle's concept of mind,
which he considers thoroughly misguided,
albeit a brilliant tour de force.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Scepticism and Construction (1931).
On Selfhood and Godhood (London and
New York, 1957).
In Defence of Free Will (London and New
York, 1967).
Further Reading
Maclachlan, Lome T.H.Bradley and
C.A.Campbell', in Philosophy after F.H.
Bradley (Bristol, 1996), pp. 73-90.
D.L.C. Maclachlan
CAMPBELL, Norman Robert (1880-1949)
Norman Robert Campbell was born in
Colgrain, Dumbarton on 7 March 1880 and
died in Nottingham on 18 May 1949. He was
the third son of William Middleton Campbell
148
and Edith Agneta Bevan. After being educated
at Eton, Campbell entered Trinity College,
Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1902
with first class honours in the physics option of
the Natural Sciences Tripos. Two years later he
became a fellow of Trinity.
For several years Campbell worked on the
ionization of gases and the radioactive proper-
ties of some metals, their salts and other mate-
rials at the Cavendish Laboratory, which was
then under the direction of J.J. Thomson.
Appointed to the Cavendish Research
Fellowship at Leeds when Sir William Bragg
was Cavendish Professor of Physics there,
Campbell continued his research along similar
lines as at Cambridge. He became an honorary
fellow of Leeds University in 1913.
With the outbreak of World War I,
Campbell joined the staff of the National
Physical Laboratory. He worked there with
Clifford C. Paterson on magnetos and the
mechanism of spark discharge in the spark
plugs of internal combustion engines. After the
war, when Paterson undertook the organiza-
tion of the research laboratories of the General
Electric Company, Ltd, Campbell joined him in
1919, remaining until his retirement in 1944.
In 1912 Campbell married Edith Sowerbutts,
and they later adopted two children. Campbell
and his wife retired to their country cottage
near Lulworth in 1944. Later that year, a stray
bomb destroyed the cottage, along with most of
his books and papers, and seriously injured
Mrs Campbell. She died in 1948, and Campbell
died the following year while living with their
daughter near Nottingham.
Although he spent his life as an experimen-
tal physicist, Campbell is remembered primar-
ily for his contributions as a philosopher of
science, a term he would probably have rejected
for himself. Instead, he deemed it essential for
scientists - especially those working in the lab-
oratory - to understand the nature of what
they do. And since scientists best understand
what they do, he also believed that scientists
themselves should write about it. Campbell
was dismissive of 'nineteenth century philoso-

phers who so gaily instructed men of science in
their business', particularly John Stuart Mill,
whom he characterized 'as an awful warning to
those who would pronounce sweeping judge-
ments about science without studying it them-
selves' (Foundations, p. 57).
Campbell's philosophical thought was influ-
enced by the scientific accomplishments of
Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell and JJ.
Thomson; critical writings about physics by
Ernst Mach, Pierre Duhem, Henri Poincare
and others; and the development of quantum
theory and relativity in the early twentieth
century. Campbell's major philosophical inter-
ests focused on the nature of scientific theory
and measurement, and he discussed these topics
repeatedly. His What is Science? (1921) offers
an elementary treatment; his major work
Physics, the Elements (referred to here as
Foundations, and the source of subsequent
quotations) provides their fullest development.
Divided nearly equally between theory and
measurement, Foundations was published in
1920, but was already planned in 1904 and
completely written as separate chapters by
1912.
Campbell took great pains to make clear his
goal in Foundations, spending almost as much
time explaining what the book is not as what
it is. It 'aspires to be a treatise on physics ...
written by a serious student of the science for
other serious students. It is not in any sense a
popular work ...' (Foundations, p. 1). Instead,
Campbell intended a critique of physics.
I want to inquire into the precise meaning of
the many propositions which make up the
science of physics and into the evidence on
which they are based; I want to examine the
significance and connotation of the ideas in
terms of which its results are expressed and
into the character of their mutual relations.
(Foundations, p. 3)
The first half of Foundations focuses on the
nature of laws and theories, and the distinction
between them, a distinction of the utmost
149
CAMPBELL
importance to Campbell. A law is a proposition
asserting a specific relationship, which can be
established by experiment or observation. For
example, Hooke's law asserts the direct pro-
portionality between the extension of a body
and the force acting on it. The experimental
verification of Hooke's law, however, involves
more than just this stated relationship. In the
laboratory, a weight may be hung from a metal
rod and the extension of the rod measured.
That measurement involves some kind of mea-
suring device, perhaps a millimetre scale, a
micrometer, an optical lever or an interference
apparatus. Whatever the device, the assumption
that it yields an accurate measurement of the
rod's extension depends on some other law,
according to Campbell. While the argument
might be made that since the accuracy of each
device depends on a different law, then none of
them is intrinsic to Hooke's law, but Campbell
counters that there is one law relating them all
- they must all yield the same value of extension
for the same force.
Since the force is applied by hanging a weight
from the rod, there is also the assumption that
the force exerted by the weight is the product
of its mass and the acceleration due to gravity.
The weight is not accelerating, however,
because the rod exerts an equal and opposite
force on the weight. Thus, the determination of
the force on the rod depends on the validity of
the laws of dynamics just as the measurement
of extension involves some other law. Campbell
argues that the former relationship is a more
intimate one than the latter because there is no
way of determining the force without the laws
of dynamics.
Campbell concludes 'that the use of certain
words implies the assumption that certain laws are
true, and that any statement in which those words
are involved is without any meaning whatever if
the laws are not true' (ibid., p. 42). Thus, Hooke's
law has meaning only insofar as the terms
involved in it - extension and force - imply other
laws assumed to be true. The terms 'extension'
and 'force' are examples of what Campbell calls
a 'concept', i.e. 'a word denoting an idea which
CAMPBELL
depends for its meaning or significance on the
truth of some other law' (ibid., p. 45).
Like a law, a theory also involves proposi-
tions, but the difference between law and
theory is crucial to Campbell's ideas about
science. A theory consists of two sets of propo-
sitions. One set, termed the 'hypothesis', com-
prises statements about the ideas pertinent to
the theory. The term 'hypothesis' is intended to
convey the idea that these statements cannot be
proved or disproved by themselves, and they
may, in fact, seem to have been chosen quite
arbitrarily. The second set of propositions,
termed the 'dictionary', relates the ideas of the
hypothesis to 'concepts' (as defined by
Campbell), which are not part of the theory.
According to Campbell, the significance of a
theory defined this way is as follows:
The theory is said to be true if propositions
concerning the hypothetical ideas, deduced
from the hypothesis, are found, according
to the dictionary, to imply propositions con-
cerning the concepts which are true, that is to
imply laws; for all true propositions con-
cerning concepts are laws. And the theory is
said to explain certain laws if it is these laws
which are implied by the propositions con-
cerning the hypothetical ideas.
(Foundations, p. 123)
To illustrate his meaning in this abstract
account, Campbell offers a made-up theory,
which has no actual relevance to science, but
provides him with the opportunity to discuss
some of the features of a genuine theory. When
the propositions of the hypothesis involve
mathematical variables, then the propositions
of the dictionary relate them (or functions of
them) to certain concepts, which are measur-
able quantities. If a particular proposition in the
hypothesis is related to a concept by the dic-
tionary, then the variable can be associated
with an experimentally determined value. In
Campbell's example, only two functions involv-
ing four mathematical variables are related to
concepts, so it is impossible to assign a numer-
150
ical value to each variable. It would be possible
to do this if a third function of the variables
were related to a third concept. Moreover, the
relation of a fourth function to yet another
measurable concept would make it possible to
determine the consistency of the values from
one set of three functions with those from a dif-
ferent set of three functions. Actual scientific
theories exhibit the entire range of possible
combinations of variables and concepts.
This made-up theory leads to a relationship
that is identical to the proposition of a true
law and is therefore itself true in the sense that
it explains the law by leading to it. The defi-
ciency of this theory - and the reason why it is
not a genuine theory in Campbell's terms - is
that it does not display an analogy between
the hypothetical ideas and known laws.
According to Campbell, this made-up theory is
formally as satisfactory as any theory in
physics. If nothing but this were required we
should never lack theories to explain our
laws; a schoolboy in a day's work could solve
the problems at which generations have
laboured in vain by the most trivial process
of trial and error. What is wrong with [this]
theory ... is that it does not display any
analogy; it is just because an analogy has
not been used in its development that it is so
completely valueless.
(Foundations, pp. 129-30)
To distinguish a genuine theory from his made-
up one, Campbell analyses the dynamic theory
of gases in terms of its hypothesis and dictio-
nary. This theory leads to an expression in
terms of measurable concepts, which is equiv-
alent to the well-known gas laws of Boyle and
Gay-Lussac. In addition, however, the propo-
sitions of the hypothesis are analogous to the
laws describing the behaviour of a large col-
lection of elastic point masses in a cubical box.
It is exactly this analogy that makes the
dynamic theory of gases valuable, i.e. that gives
the theory its meaning. Thus, Campbell argues
that analogy is an essential aspect of theory

and not merely a heuristic device to be dis-
carded once the theory has been developed.
While a mechanical theory such as that of
gases (a theory of the first type) fits Campbell's
definition of theory extremely well, he next
examines a different kind of theory, a 'mathe-
matical' theory (a theory of the second type).
His rationale for this is in response to the logical
positivists' opposition to mechanical theories
and their predilection instead for mathematical
theories, of which Fourier's theory of heat con-
duction is a paradigmatic example. Fourier's
theory is formally similar in terms of hypothe-
sis and dictionary to the mechanical gas theory
examined previously, but there are two signif-
icant differences. The first is that the variables
of the hypothesis for Fourier's theory - i.e. the
variables themselves and not functions of them
- are directly related to concepts by the dictio-
nary. The second difference, which is more
problematic for Campbell's definition of
theory, is that the only apparent analogy is
with the laws that the theory is meant to
explain. Although this is a much weaker
instance of analogy than that demonstrated in
the case of the gas theory, where the analogy is
with the dynamic laws of point masses,
Campbell claims that 'Fourier's Theory resem-
bles that theory in the fact that some analogy
is essential to it' (ibid., p. 142).
Subsequently, however, Campbell equivo-
cates on the issue of analogy in theories of the
second type. After admitting that analogy is
clearly a less important feature in Fourier's
theory than in the gas theory, he claims that the
former theory has 'an element which plays
exactly the same part as the analogy plays in the
theory of gases ... [and] which gives the theory
its value and distinguishes it from the multitude
of other theories which might be proposed to
account for the same facts' (ibid., p. 143). This
'element' turns out to be simplicity.
In order to generalize the experimental results
in support of Fourier's theory, certain addi-
tional assertions are required. These particular
assertions are chosen rather than some other
equally applicable assertions because they are
151
CAMPBELL
the 'simplest'. The considerations involved in
choosing these particular assertions are exactly
the same, according to Campbell, as those in
choosing a particular analogy, so just as
analogy provides meaning to a theory of the
first type, simplicity provides meaning to one of
the second type.
In theories of both types there is something
over and above the formal constitution,
which cannot be expressed as part of the
formal constitution and yet distinguishes the
theory from all possible alternatives. If this
conclusion is accepted, the difference
between the two types is not very important
for our present purpose.
(Foundations, p. 144)
This is more or less where Campbell leaves the
matter of analogy versus simplicity, though he
goes on to discuss the explanatory power of the
two types of theory, i.e. their 'value' or
'meaning'. He had previously defined expla-
nation as 'the substitution of more satisfactory
for less satisfactory ideas' (ibid., p. 113).
Explanation can be effected through this sub-
stitution in two ways: by substituting the more
familiar for the less familiar and by substitut-
ing the simple for the complex. Explanation in
terms of greater familiarity is associated with
mechanical theories. The dynamic theory of
gases explains the behaviour of gases by
relating it through analogy to more familiar
ideas about the dynamics of point masses
within a confined space.
Since Fourier's theory, as an example of a
mathematical theory, does not have an analogy
(at least not in the same way as a mechanical
theory does), it must offer some other kind of
explanation for the law of heat conduction.
Indeed, all theories of both types provide expla-
nation in the sense that 'the laws deducible
from the theory are common consequences of
a single principle' (ibid., p. 146). While this
kind of explanation is less important to
mechanical theories, it is most important for
mathematical theories. Campbell adds that this
CAMPBELL
kind of explanation is not usually termed
'explanation5 in connection with a mathemat-
ical theory. Rather than an explanation of the
law of heat conduction, Fourier's theory would
be regarded as a generalization of the law. This
is consistent with his basic definition of expla-
nation as substitution, 'for in the second type of
theory there is no change at all in the nature of
the ideas involved; the hypothetical ideas are
directly suggested by those of the laws to be
explained and by no others' (ibid., p. 146).
Campbell qualifies his discussion by pointing
out that explanation through generalization
rarely occurs in its pure form with mathematical
theories. For example, Maxwell's theory of elec-
tromagnetic fields generalizes several laws of
electromagnetism in the same way that Fourier's
theory generalizes the law of heat conduction. In
the last part of his Treatise on Electricity and
Magnetism (1873), however, Maxwell associates
the oscillating electromagnetic field with light.
This constitutes an addition to the theory's dic-
tionary, and since the laws of light are not the
same as those of electromagnetism, this addition
transforms Maxwell's theory from one of the
second type to one of the first type. Indeed, the
importance of Maxwell's theory today is not 'as
a generalisation of the experimental laws of
electric and magnetic action, but rather as an
explanation (in the more limited but more fun-
damental sense) of the laws of the propagation
of light'(ibid., p. 147).
The second half of Foundations provides one
of the first systematic treatments of the major
issues associated with measurement. This con-
stitutes an integral part of Campbell's critique
of physics, which 'might almost be described as
the science of measurement' (ibid., p. 267).
Defining measurement as 'the process of assign-
ing numbers to represent qualities', he states
that its object 'is to enable the powerful weapon
of mathematical analysis to be applied to the
subject matter of science' (ibid., pp. 267-8).
Campbell distinguishes measurable proper-
ties of bodies from those that are not, and he
discusses the role of laws in making measure-
ment possible. He analyses the relations
152
between properties and numbers, the distinc-
tion (and connection) between numbers and
numerals, and also fundamental and derived
measurements, fractional and negative magni-
tudes, units and dimensions, and the two kinds
of errors in measurement (those of method and
of consistency). But measurement is not an end
in itself. Physicists 'express the properties of
systems by numerals only because [they] are
thereby enabled to state laws about them' (ibid.,
p. 328). From this observation, Campbell
connects his discussion of measurement back to
his earlier account of the nature of theory,
specifically that of the second type.
On the basis of his philosophical treatment of
measurement, both in Foundations and in his
later Principles of Measurement and
Calculation (1928), Campbell is recognized as
one of the earliest and most important pioneers
in measurement theory. With this topic, as well
as the nature of scientific theory, Campbell's
influence in the philosophy of science continues
to the present. While some of his ideas are now
regarded as antiquated, others continue to
appear explicitly or implicitly in philosophical
discussions, albeit sometimes in the guise of
new terminology. In The Structure of Science,
for example, Ernest Nagel discusses the three
major components of theories: an abstract
calculus ('hypothesis'), correspondence rules
('dictionary'), and an interpretation or model
('analogy') (Nagel, pp. 90-105). In expressing
his debt to Campbell on this topic, Nagel notes
that Foundations 'has not received the recog-
nition that its generally admirable analyses so
eminently merit' (Nagel, p. 80).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Physics, The Elements (Cambridge, 1920);
repr. as Foundations of Science: The
Philosophy of Theory and Experiment
(New York, 1957).
What is Science? (Cambridge, 1921; repr.
New York, 1952).
An Account of the Principles of Measurement
and Calculation (1928).

Other Relevant Works
Modern Electrical Theory (Cambridge, 1907,
1913,1923).
'1903-1909', in A History of the Cavendish
Laboratory, 1871-1910 (1910), chap. 8.
'Symposium: Measurement and its
Importance for Philosophy' [first paper],
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 17 (1938), pp. 121-42.
Further Reading
Buchdahl, Gerd, Theory Construction: The
Work of Norman Robert Campbell', I sis,
vol. 55, no. 2 (June 1964), pp. 151-62.
Diez, Jose A., 'A Hundred Years of Numbers:
An Historical Introduction to
Measurement Theory 1887-1990, Part I:
The Formation Period', Studies in History
and Philosophy of Science, vol. 28, no. 1
(March 1997), pp. 167-85.
Hacking, Ian, Why Does Language Matter to
Philosophy? (Cambridge, 1975), chap. 11.
Hesse, Mary B., Models and Analogies in
Science (Notre Dame, 1966).
Jeffreys, Harold, 'Symposium: Measurement
and its Importance for Philosophy' [second
paper], Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 17 (1938), pp. 143-51.
Kyburg, Henry E., Jr, Theory and
Measurement (Cambridge, 1984).
Mellor, D.H., 'Models and Analogies in
Science: Duhem versus Campbell?', Isis,
vol. 59, no. 3 (Autumn 1968), pp. 282-90.
Nagel, Ernest, The Structure of Science:
Problems in the Logic of Scientific
Explanation (New York, 1961).
Warwick, Andrew, 'Cambridge Mathematics
and Cavendish Physics: Cunningham,
Campbell and Einstein's Relativity,
1905-1911, Part II: Comparing Traditions
in Cambridge Physics', Studies in History
and Philosophy of Science, vol. 24, no. 1
(March 1993), pp. 1-25.
Richard E. Rice
153
CARLYLE
CARLYLE, Alexander James (1861-1943)
Alexander Carlyle was born on 24 July 1861,
the son of the Revd J.E. Carlyle, Minister of the
Free Church of Scotland in Bombay, and died
in Oxford on 27 May 1943. He was educated
at Glasgow University and Exeter College
Oxford, and ordained in 1888. He was a fellow
of University College and was rector of St
Martins and All Saints, Oxford from 1895 to
1919. He played an important role in the
Christian Social Union, and was an advocate
for social reform and Christian unity. He served
as canon of Worcester Cathedral from 1930 to
1934 and became a fellow of the British
Academy in 1936.
Carlyle's most significant philosophical
works are the six-volume History of Medieval
Political Theory in the West, which he com-
pleted with his brother, Sir R.W. Carlyle, and
Political Liberty. Although the six-volume
history is officially authored by both brothers,
in fact this is a mark of Alexander's affection
for his brother. According to Constantin Fasolt,
most of the writing and most of the interpre-
tation is due to AJ. Carlyle. The History was
influential, not least in propagating the view
that the key turning point in the development
of political philosophy came with the intro-
duction of thinking about individual men that
coincided with the departure from Aristotle:
'There is no change in political theory so star-
tling in its completeness as the change from
the theory of Aristotle to the later philosophi-
cal view represented by Cicero and Seneca'
because, with this later view, 'we are indeed at
the beginnings of a theory of human nature
and society of which the "Liberty, Equality
and Fraternity" of the French Revolution is
only the present day expression' (History of
Medieval Political Theory in the West, vol. 1,
p. 9). Each volume covers a specific period but
takes a consistent topical approach covering
ideas about justice, sources of law and the role
of the people in politics. The work places great
emphasis on the continuities between medieval
political thought and law, which is given pride
CARLYLE
of place. It emphasizes the revolutionary role of
the Stoics, and shows up the role of Roman law
as the source of the principle that all people are
born free by nature. In emphasizing the impor-
tance of the Roman and medieval foundations of
modern political thought, A.J. Carlyle is in some
respects a forerunner of the civic republican
thinkers of today, such as Pocock, Skinner and
Pettit.
Political Liberty was published in 1941. While
it is a meticulous history, Carlyle aims 'to set out
the continuity of the development of the con-
ception of Political Liberty during the Middles
Ages and the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies ... for this has been inadequately appreci-
ated'. The work is directed at those
who think that the pursuit of Political Liberty
is only a passing phase, an abnormal devel-
opment, and that all that is needed for the
development of civilization is authority and
force ... the notion that it is mere force which
has created and which holds together human
society is an absurdity, an irrational and
stupid absurdity.
(Political Liberty, p. vii)
Whilst Carlyle's chief contribution is to schol-
arship of medieval political theory, he also dis-
played a commitment to political liberty in
dark times.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(with R.W. Carlyle), History of Medieval
Political Theory in the West, 6 vols
(Edinburgh, 1903-36).
Political Liberty: A History of the
Conception in the Middle Ages and
Modern Times (Oxford, 1941).
Other Relevant Works
Wages (Mowbray, 1912).
(with J.V. Bartlet), Christianity in History: A
Study of Religious Development (1917).
Further Reading
Fasolt, Constantin, Politics, Society and
154
Social Thought in Europe 400-1300: A
Guide to Reading, http://home.uchicago.edu/
-icon/teach/guidepolmedi.pdf, accessed
October 2004.
Jon Pike
CARR, Herbert Wildon (1857-1931)
Herbert Wildon Carr was born on 1 January
1857 and died in Los Angeles on 8 July 1931.
He was the son of a stock exchange business-
man (who had for a while served in the Baptist
ministry). While training in the city for a
career in business, he studied as an evening
student at King's College London, which
sparked off a lifelong interest in philosophy,
which he pursued as an amateur over the next
thirty-odd years, particularly through his con-
nection with the newly formed Aristotelian
Society, which he joined in 1881. He was for
some fifty years Secretary of the Society, for
two years its President (1916-18), until 1929
the editor of its Proceedings and, together
with Shadworth Hodgson, responsible for
raising its profile from that of a small London
group of philosophical amateurs to that of a
national institution of professionals. It was in
his mid fifties after a life in business that he
began to write what became a flood of philo-
sophical works, and in 1918, at the age of
sixty-one he was made Professor of
Philosophy at King's College London. In 1925
he took up a post as Professor of Philosophy
at the University of Southern California, Los
Angeles, where he worked for six years until
his death.
His early interest was in Bergson, the first
reading of whose Evolution creatrice in 1907
he likened to a religious conversion; it set him
off upon his subsequent philosophical career.
Skilfully translating this difficult work, he was
one of the first in Britain to champion the

French philosopher, and the contemporary
vogue for Bergson's work owed much to his
zealous efforts. Bergsonian vitalism contin-
ued to be a crucial component in his thought.
He was also much influenced by the Italian
idealists, Croce and Gentile, whom he both
translated and expounded.
His other area of interest lay in modern
science and, convinced that they were con-
verging on a common position and that
progress in philosophy was inseparable from
progress in science, he continually urged the
importance of bringing together modern
physics and metaphysics. He stressed the way
in which modern physics, though outwardly
experimental, had a strongly philosophical
basis. He was particularly influenced by
Einstein's new physics of relativity, which he
declared to be idealist in its consequences;
something which he thought to be true of
quantum theory also.
Each of these three influences made their
way into his own rather eclectic and diverse
philosophical position which was expounded
in his Theory of Monads (1922), and further
elaborated in his last work Cogitans cogitata
(1930). The philosophy he advanced was an
essentially Leibnizian monadology, in which
the universe consists in a plurality of spiritual
beings, windowless in the sense that there
exists between them no interaction (however
external it may seem, sense experience really
springs from within), but each of whom
mirrors the universe from its own point of
view. Each monad is possessed of its own self-
sufficient activity. He sought to revitalize the
Leibnizian tradition by relating it to the
advances of modern science. For instance, he
takes Einstein's relativity as confirming the
position that space and time are not fixed
eternal frameworks, but rather phenomena
constructed from individual perspectives. The
result is idealist in that the known (in this
case space-time) is no longer independent of
the perspective of the knower. The basic plu-
ralism of the monadic system is modified to
some degree by Carr's introduction of God as
155
CARR
an immanent universal activity, rather than
some super-individual creating or destroying
the other finite individuals. It is, he claims,
through our inner experience of the
mind-body relation, the inseparable dual
aspects of our being, that we learn the relation
of God to the world. The argument for
idealism is essentially Berkeleyan, positively
embracing the relativistic and solipsistic impli-
cations of that approach, and owing scarcely
anything to that of the neo-Kantians and the
neo-Hegelians. This made Carr's personal
idealism very different from that of his con-
temporaries.
Carr's work with the Aristotelian Society
and in introducing Bergson and the Italian
idealists to British philosophical readers
earned him the respect and gratitude of his
colleagues, and he entered fully into the philo-
sophical debates of his day. His own position,
however, arrived at only late in life, was too
far out of line with contemporary directions of
thought to attract any great interest, and has
been almost wholly ignored by subsequent
philosophers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Henry Bergson: The Philosophy of Change
(1912).
The Philosophy of Change: A Study of the
Fundamental Principle of the Philosophy
of Bergson (1914).
The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce: The
Problem of Art and History (1917).
A Theory of Monads: Outlines of the
Philosophy of the Principle of Relativity
(1922).
Cogitans cogitata (1930).
Other Relevant Works
The Problem of Truth (1913).
The General Principle of Relativity in its
Philosophical and Historical Aspect
(1920).
The Scientific Approach to Philosophy:
Selected Essays and Reviews (1924).
Changing Backgrounds in Religion and
CARR
Ethics (1927).
The Freewill Problem (1928).
The Unique Status of Man (1928).
W. J. Mander
CARRE, Meyrick Heath (1891-1974)
Meyrick Carre was born in Weymouth on 12
December 1891 and died in Cheltenham on
23 June 1974. He served with the Royal West
Kent Regiment during World War I. In 1916 he
was severely wounded on the Somme and was
invalided out of the war. In the same year he
also received the Military Cross. He then went
up to Balliol College, Oxford, taking his MA in
1920. In that year he was appointed as a
lecturer in education at the University of Bristol.
In 1925 he moved to the Philosophy
Department. From 1926 to 1927 he travelled
to America on a Rockefeller Fellowship. Carre
remained at Bristol for his entire career, achiev-
ing the status of reader. He retired from his post
at the University of Bristol in 1957.
Carre's most well-known work is his trans-
lation of Herbert of Cherbury's logical treatise,
De veritate. Published in 1937 (republished in
1992), this remains the only complete transla-
tion of this work. Carre states that he was
drawn to translate this treatise to aid him in
producing a comprehensive commentary on
De veritate. This commentary is included in
the lengthy Introduction to this volume. In his
Introduction Carre argues that the value of
Herbert's work is that it outlines the state of
philosophical and scientific thinking just prior
to the dawn of the more modern philosophical
thought of the mid to late seventeenth century.
Carre continually stresses Herbert's place at
this crossroads in philosophical thinking. He
argues at one point that 'in spite of its tradi-
tional modes of thought De veritate breathes
with a modern air' ('Introduction', p. 65). In
156
particular, Carre argues that Herbert's defence
of innate ideas, although heavily criticized by
his immediate empiricist successors, looks
forward 200 years to the idealism of the late
nineteenth century. Carre is keen to qualify the
assumptions of proto-deism which are often
placed on Herbert. This interpretation, he
argues, has more to do with Toland's use of
Herbert's work, than any actual deism within
Herbert's writing.
Carre also published several introductory
works in philosophy. Phases of Thought in
England (1949) aims to provide 'a brief survey
of the successive movements in the life of phi-
losophy in England from the first age of
Christian culture to the close of the nineteenth
century' (p. ix). Realists and Nominalists
(1946) provides guided readings of various
sections of medieval nominalist thinkers such as
William of Ockham and Duns Scotus. In both
these works Carre expresses a desire to move
the history of philosophy beyond the tradi-
tional study of the great thinkers, whom Carre
lists as Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill and
BRADLEY. Rather, he wishes in both these works
to describe the nature of philosophy between
the fall of the Roman Empire and the
Renaissance. Away from the history of philos-
ophy, Carre also wrote a short guide to clear
thinking in everyday life. Does it Follow?
Material for the Practice in Logical Thinking
uses examples from contemporary publications
to teach the reader to judge more acutely the
logic, or lack of it, that one meets in everyday
conversation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Ed. and trans.), Lord Herbert of Cherbury,
De veritate (Bristol, 1937, repr. Bristol,
1992).
Does it Follow? Material for the Practice in
Logical Thinking (1944).
Realists and Nominalists (Oxford, 1946).
Phases of Thought in England (Oxford,
1949).
Benjamin Carter

CARRITT, Edgar Frederick (1876-1964)
E.F. Carritt was born in Highgate on 27
February 1876 and died in hospital in Ascot on
19 June 1964. The son of a London solicitor, he
was educated at Bradfield College in Berkshire
and at Hertford College, Oxford, where he was
a classical scholar. As an undergraduate he was
taught by H.A. PRICHARD, and he took a first in
Greats in 1898. The legacy of Prichard lasted: he
developed ethical intuitionism farther than either
Prichard or W.D. Ross and applied their theory
of obligation to politics. Carritt won the
Chancellor's Essay Prize in 1901, but was beaten
to a prize fellowship at Merton by Ernest BARKER
and was awarded one at University College.
After travelling, Carritt returned to University
College, where he took the place of Vernon
Storr. He remained at University College until
after World War II: a period of almost fifty
years. He spent one session away as a visiting
professor at the University of Michigan.
Carritt's first publication was a paper on The
Sublime' published in Mind in 1910. His first
book was The Theory of Beauty, published in
1914. Carritt had begun lecturing on aesthetics
in 1902: this was the first course of lectures on
aesthetics that had been given at Oxford. When
The Theory of Beauty appeared, Carritt 'received
a warm note of congratulation about it from
F.H. BRADLEY, which he greatly prized' (Raphael,
p. 441).
Carritt then lectured on the history of philos-
ophy and spent time at the University of
Michigan before turning his attention to moral
philosophy - in 1928 he published The Theory
of Morals. The general form of the book is of a
critical account of the most important theories,
with a positive account of both Prichard and
Croce. By 1931 he had returned to aesthetics,
publishing first Philosophies of Beauty from
Socrates to Robert Bridges and then, the next
year, What is Beauty? This was written originally
as a series of broadcast talks. As a result it was
a rather easier read than Carritt's more measured
works, marked by a rigidly parsimonious prose
style.
157
CARRITT
In 1935 Carritt turned to political philoso-
phy, publishing perhaps his best-known work
outside aesthetics: Morals and Politics (subtitled
'Theories of their Relation from Hobbes and
Spinoza to Marx and Bosanquet'). This work
discusses theories of politics chiefly in relation
to their presuppositions about duty and
interest: in this respect Carritt followed the lead
of Prichard's inaugural lecture of 1928.
Carritt's argument is also indebted to Prichard.
He dismisses talk of the 'general' or 'real' will
and also technical use of terms such as liberty
and rights:
this unfamiliar way of speaking was intended
to describe such very familiar facts as that
men often do obey, and think they ought to
obey, laws as such; but the writers in
question were for certain reasons not content
to treat obligations and rights as realities ...
My object is to show that all attempts to
explain this recognition of political obliga-
tions in terms of something else lead to con-
fusion, self-contradiction, and the evident
misdescription of facts which we cannot
doubt.
(Morals and Politics, pp. 1-2).
The work begins with a historical survey and
the second part is an analysis of key concepts:
it includes an account of dialectical materialism
which built upon Carritt's lectures on the
subject at Oxford. Again, these were the first
lectures to be given on the subject at Oxford.
Carritt wrote in his memoirs that 'J.A. Smith
asked me why I invented such a fancy title
which nobody had ever heard of. In fact it
attracted my largest audience, overflowing the
College Hall, and I was asked if copies of the
Labour Monthly might be sold in the quad'
(Fifty ^ears a Don, cited in Raphael, p. 443).
In 1937 Carritt gave the Annual
Philosophical Lecture to the British Academy:
his subject was 'An Ambiguity of the Word
"Good"' - this showed the influence of
Prichard and Ross, whist criticizing G.E.
MOORE and H.W.B. JOSEPH. Carritt became a
CARRITT
fellow of the British Academy in 1945. He
stayed on as tutorial fellow at University
College throughout World War II, and, on his
retirement continued to publish: producing
Ethical and Political Thinking in 1947 (which
included an attack on AVER'S emotivism) and
An Introduction to Aesthetics in 1949, as well
as a translation of Croce published under the
title (which Carritt disliked) of My Philosophy.
He continued to publish articles in the philos-
ophy journals - his last was The Aesthetic
Experience of Architecture', published in 1963,
when he was approaching his eighty-seventh
birthday.
Carritt's contribution to philosophy lay more
in the criticism of existing ideas and the appli-
cation of the original theses of others in new
areas than in the generation of positive ideas of
his own. Reviewing Ethical and Political
Thinking for the Philosophical Review, Arthur
Murphy argued that it represented the fullest
development of ethical intuitionism - as such,
it was an example of thinking that deserved 'a
place among the major achievements of British
moral philosophy' (Murphy, p. 265). However,
because ethical intuitionism eventually relies
on the self-evident nature of ethical truths, it
speaks narrowly, only to those who find similar
truths self-evident. It is therefore difficult to
avoid 'the parochial dogmatism which arises
from an identification of local orthodoxies with
universal truth, and a consequent inability to do
justice to these moral insights or ideas that fall
outside the list of accredited preconceptions
and linguistic proprieties' (ibid., p. 269). The
second danger, according to Murphy, is that
[s]ince self-evidence is achieved by a retreat
to minimal indubitables cut off from all ques-
tionable associations and commitments, the
fruit of ethical analysis is that duty is duty
though the heavens fall, that moral goodness
presupposes real and binding obligation, and
is irreducible to any other kind of goodness,
and so on ...
(Murphy, p. 270)
158
In the end, an assessment of Carritt's work in
moral philosophy and political philosophy must
depend on the acceptability of the ethical intu-
itionist programme, and the background
approach to philosophy that it ought not to
provide a guide to conduct. Carritt's contribution
fits well with a period in which moral philosophy
sought a rational basis independent of theism, but
ill with an age that is less confident about moral
foundationalism and universality. In aesthetics,
Carritt ought to be remembered as a significant
contributor to the development of serious philo-
sophical thinking about art in the twentieth
century, whose own views were perhaps insuffi-
ciently independent of Croce, according to
RAPHAEL and Adam Fox (Raphael, p. 449).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'The Sublime', Mind, vol. 19 (1910), pp.
356-72.
The Theory of Beauty (Oxford, 1914).
The Theory of Morals (Oxford, 1928).
Philosophies of Beauty from Socrates to Robert
Bridges (Oxford, 1931).
What is Beauty? (Oxford, 1932).
Morals and Politics (Oxford, 1935).
'Hegel and Prussianism', Philosophy, vol. 15
(1940), pp. 190-96.
'Art without Form?', Philosophy, vol. 16 (1941),
pp. 19-26.
Ethical and Political Thinking (1947).
'Professor H.A. Prichard, Personal Recollections',
Mind, vol. 57 (1948), pp. 146-8.
An Introduction to Aesthetics (1949).
'Classicism', Revue Internationale de
Philosophie, vol. 12 (1953), pp. 23-36.
'Croce and his Aesthetic', Mind, vol. 62 (1953),
pp. 452-64.
'Beauty', Revue Internationale de Philosophie,
vol. 9 (1955), pp. 5-15.
'A Reply to Dr Patankar on "Expression"',
British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 2 (1962), pp.
126-31.
'The Aesthetic Experience of Architecture',
British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 3 (1963), pp.
67-9.

Further Reading
Murphy, Arthur E., 'Who are "We"? A
Discussion of Carritt's Ethical and Political
Thinking', Philosophical Review, vol. 58,
no. 3 (May 1949), pp. 265-71.
Raphael, D.D., 'Edgar Frederick Carritt
1876-1964', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 51 (1965), pp. 439-53.
Jon Pike
CASE, Thomas (1844-1925)
Thomas Case was born in Liverpool on 14 July
1844 and died in Falmouth on 31 October
1925. He was educated at Rugby School and
came up to Balliol College, Oxford as a
commoner in 1863. In 1869 he was elected
fellow of Brasenose, where he remained until
1876. From 1883 to 1889 he was lecturer in
Greek history at Christ Church; his first pub-
lished work was Materials for the History of
Athenian Democracy from Solon to Pericles
(1874). In 1889 he was elected to the Waynflete
Chair of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy at
Magdalen, where he remained until 1910. In
1904 he was elected President of Corpus Christi,
while allowed to remain fellow of Magdalen.
Case often intervened in public affairs, writing
numerous letters to The Times, which were
posthumously collected (1827), and many pri-
vately circulated pamphlets. Within his own
university, he opposed in particular the admis-
sion and conferring of degrees to women and
the relaxation of 'Compulsory Greek' for
science students.
Case's first publication in philosophy was a
short essay on Realism in Morals (1877). This
essay forms, along with his book Physical
Realism (1888) and his article on 'Metaphysics'
for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica (1910), which displayed an impres-
sive knowledge of nineteenth-century meta-
159
CASE
physics, the extent of Case's contribution to
metaphysics. His aim of writing a book on that
topic late in his life was never realized. Case
rejected the prevalent neo-Hegelian form of
idealism propounded by T.H. Green, E. Caird
and their English followers. In his first essay he
showed his preference for Aristotle and Francis
Bacon as the point of departure in metaphysics;
he saw them as advocates of a 'Realism without
Materialism' (Realism in Morals, p. 5). He was
to edit, with an Introduction, The Advancement
of Learning (1906) and to publish a translation
of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. His admiration
for Aristotle was such that, at the very end of his
article on 'Metaphysics', he wrote: 'What, then,
is the future of metaphysics? We must return not
to the authority but to the study of Aristotle'
('Metaphysics', p. 253). In Realism in Morals he
defined realism as 'the theory that things really
exist whether we know them or not, while at the
same time we have a power of knowing them, of
transcending both our sensations and our ideas,
and of grasping the real attributes, essences,
causes, and necessary laws of things' (p. 5). This
stance placed him, along with his colleague and
friend at Oxford, John COOK WlLSON, in the
realist tradition initiated by Thomas Reid to
which D. Stewart, Sir W. Hamilton, H.L. Mansel
and J, McCosh belonged. Accordingly, he
rejected the phenomenalism which he attributed
to Hume and which he saw, taken in by Kant,
as the root of the various idealist metaphysics
that rose in the nineteenth century. Against
Green, he wrote that
When Green said that 'Nature is the system
of related appearances, and related appear-
ances are impossible apart from the action of
an intelligence,' he was speaking as a pure
Kantian, who could be answered only by the
Aristotelian position that Nature consists of
related bodies beyond appearances, and by
the realistic supposition that there is a tactical
sense of related bodies, of the inter-resisting
members of the organism, from which reason
infers similar related bodies beyond sense.
('Metaphysics', p. 244)
CASE
Case was aware of his debt to Reid (Physical
Realism, p. 27), but he rejected his appeal to
common sense along the main tenet of the
Scottish school of 'natural realism', according to
which we immediately perceive, without infer-
ence, the external world:
The Scottish school never realized that every
sensation of the five senses is a perception of
a sensible object in the bodily organism; and
that touch is a perception, not only of single
sensible pressure, but also of double sensible
pressure, a perception of our bodily members
sensibly pressing and being pressed by one
another, from which, on the recurrences of a
single pressure, we infer the pressure of an
external thing for the first time.
('Metaphysics', p. 251)
Thus Case, having defined sensation as 'per-
ception of a sensible object', had to adopt a
'representative theory' (Physical Realism, p. 33).
However, because he believed logic to show
that 'all inference is by similarity' (ibid., p. 26),
he rejected as 'illogical' the view, held in his
day by S.H. Hodgson, J. Martineau and A.J.
BALFOUR, that we perceive something mentally
from which we infer something bodily
('Metaphysics', p. 251). In Physical Realism
Case reasoned thus:
Now the rules of logic teach me that whatever
is inferred from similar data ... physical
objects are scientifically inferred from sensible
data. It follows that the sensible objects,
which are these data, must also be physical.
The similar can be inferred only from the
similar, therefore the physical can be inferred
only from the physical.
(Physical Realism, p. 23)
Case was thus left to defend the view, which he
called 'Physical Realism' (ibid., p. 26), accord-
ing to which appearances are to be identified
with 'physical parts of the nervous system,
tactile, optic, auditory, etc., sensibly affected in
various manners' (p. 33). But Case assumed
160
that we perceive appearances: 'I should define
sensation, or sensitive perception, as the imme-
diate apprehension of an internal physical object
within the nervous system of a sentient being'
(ibid.). He was thus left to infer that we perceive
the inside of our own bodies: The hot felt is the
tactile nerves heated, the white seen is the optic
nerves so coloured' (ibid., p. 24); and he further
argued that, on the basis of our perception of
our own nervous systems, we make inferences
about the external world: 'from the hot within
we infer a fire without' (p. 25). Thus Case, who
seems not to have been aware of the sense-
datum theories developed during his lifetime in
Cambridge by G.E. MOORE and B. RUSSELL,
not only conceived of perceiving as a process of
inference, he basically committed the sense-
datum fallacy (which is the inference from the
fact that one perceives a tomato that appears red
to the fact that one perceives a red appearance)
that was to be criticized in Oxford by followers
of Cook Wilson such as H. A. PRICHARD and J.L.
AUSTIN. At any rate, Case's views prompted
F.H. BRADLEY to write mockingly: 'when I smell
a smell, I am aware of the stinking state of my
own nervous system'; his 'Physical Realism' had
no adepts.
In his article on 'Logic' for the Encyclopaedia
Britannica Case displayed a wide knowledge
of the literature (in England, BOSANQUET,
Bradley, Mill, Venn; in Germany, Brentano,
Lotze, Sigwart, Wundt, etc.), although he was
clearly unaware of the developments in Frege,
Peano and Russell which led to modern math-
ematical logic. At all events, he concluded that
the logic of the last quarter of the 19th
century may be said to be animated by a spirit
of inquiry, marred by a love of paradox and
a corresponding hatred of tradition. But we
have found, on the whole, that logical tradi-
tion rises superior to logical innovation. There
are two logics which still remain indispens-
able, Aristotle's Organon and Bacon's
Novum Organon.
('Logic', p. 896)

Case viewed logic as the science of the processes
of inference (analogical, inductive and deduc-
tive) and, although he believed that 'it is the
business of the logician to find the causes of
the judgements which form the premises and the
conclusions of inference, reasoning and science'
(ibid., p. 884), he argued against confusing it, as
he claimed Hegel did, with metaphysics, and
also against giving it foundations in psychology.
He also argued against the view, which he
traced back to Herbart, that categorical judge-
ments are not judgements of existence. The view
that universal judgements are hypothetical was
held at the time by J. Venn in particular and it
has become almost universally accepted since.
Part of Case's argument against it is that 'speech
is only a curtailed expression of thought' and
that a proposition is 'only an imperfect copy of
judgement' (ibid., p. 889). Therefore, a univer-
sal proposition may not state a belief in exis-
tence; according to Case, 'in the judgement the
point is not what we state, but what we think;
and so long as the existence of A is added in
thought, the judgement in question must
contain the thought that A exists as well as that
A is B' (ibid.). On the other hand, Case rejected
Brentano's claim that all categorical judgements
are existential by merely considering that in a
judgement about, say, a centaur, we do not
think that the thing exists.
As far as induction and the scientific method
are concerned, Case based his analyses on
Bacon, whose tables of presence, absence and
comparison he saw as the forerunner of Mill's
methods of agreement, difference and con-
comitant variation. He agreed with Mill that the
scientific method is 'sometimes induction, some-
times deduction, and sometimes the consilience
of both, either by the inductive verification of
previous deductions, or by the deductive expla-
nation of previous inductions' ('Logic', p. 882).
In 'Scientific Method as a Mental Operation'
(1906) he described the method of Newton's
Philosophia naturalis prindpia mathematica as
a 'mixed method', which is 'neither the deduc-
tive Aristotelian, nor the inductive Baconian,
but both' (p. 19), but he argued against Mill that
161
CASE
Newton's discovery that planets gravitate
around the sun inversely proportional to the
square of their distance to it was an example not
of hypothetical deduction but of analytic deduc-
tion, and in his article on 'Logic' he criticized
Jevons for having confused both in his notion of
'inverse deduction' ('Logic', p. 892). Case was
such a firm believer in the natural philosophy of
Newton that, when a now famous experimen-
tum crucis, on the occasion of a total solar
eclipse in May 1919, confirmed the predictions
of Einstein's theory of relativity, he nevertheless
tried to defend Newton's theory of absolute
space in a series of lengthy letters to The Times.
His early essay on Realism in Morals is Case's
only statement on 'moral philosophy', which he
considered to be a secular science (Realism in
Morals, p. 13). Case believed at any rate that his
realism was
of all philosophical theories the most consis-
tent with the Christian Theology, in which the
universe is not a mere system of Divine ideas
but a world of really existing things, distinct
from, though created by, God; God is not a
mere thinker of ideas, but a Creator and
Governor of things; while man is not merely
a soul to be immortal, but a body to be raised.
(Realism in Morals, p. 7)
Case also believed that the argument from
design, which he described as a 'realistic
argument', was sufficient grounds for belief in
the existence of God. He claimed that his
realism is consistent with morality, as idealism
implies solipsism, which would undermine
morality: 'For morality implies the sacrifice of
ourselves to the good of other men; but unless
I know the existence and nature of things
outside myself, I cannot know that there are
other men, much less what they conceive to be
for their good' (ibid., pp. 7-8). By 'Realism in
Morals', Case meant
the theory that man has real, and not merely
an apparent, freedom, because he does not act
at once from his strongest desire, but his intel-
CASE
lect judges whether the objects of desire are
good, and thus causes determinations of his
will to control the desires; that he does
actions, which are really, and not merely
apparently, disinterested, because his intel-
lect comprehends the good of other men,
external to himself, and conceptions thus
formed cause volitions of their good; and that
he has a conscience distinct from his desires,
because his intellect comprehends to good of
all mankind and his will determines to pursue
it, without reference either to the strength of
desire or to considerations of partial good.
(Realism in Morals, p. 9)
Much of the essay was a defence of free will,
which Case saw as a 'postulate of ethics' because
without it there would be no moral responsi-
bility and blame (ibid., pp. 13-14). Case also
rejected Hobbes's theory of self-love, on the
grounds that 'if every man knew only his own
good, each man would have is own ethics;
which is the same thing as saying that there
would be no Moral Philosophy at all' (ibid., p.
26). Finally, Case argued that 'Conscience is
the moral faculty; the general freedom of
mankind is the standard of that faculty' (ibid.,
p. 32), and he defined the moral good as 'that
quality in the character and actions of a man
which make him endeavour to increase, so far
as in him lies, the general exercise of the human
powers in the whole community of mankind',
thus the standard and object of moral good is 'to
increase among mankind natural goods' such as
life, health, rights (pp. 33-4). In accordance
with his stated views, Case, who described
himself as a Talmerstonian Liberal', made insis-
tence on the common good the principle of his
public interventions, as opposed to, for example,
the utilitarian insistence on the greatest good of
the greatest number.
Case has been chiefly remembered as a
scholar of Aristotle; his reputation in the field
resting solely on his article on 'Aristotle' for the
1910 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Case
was the first scholar ever to raise, in that article,
the issue of the development of Aristotle's
162
thought, sketching a picture of Aristotle's system
as gradually emerging from his earlier
Platonism. But when Werner Jaeger published
two years later his Studien zur
Entstehungsgeschichte der Metaphysik des
Aristoteles (1912), Case's article went almost
entirely unnoticed, a fact about which he com-
plained in an article in Mind in 1925. But when
Sir D. Ross and G.E.L. OWEN took up the issue
later on, they gave Case his due credit. In The
Platonism of Aristotle', an article which
probably did more than any other to under-
mine Jaeger's theory, Owen pointed out that
Jaeger crucially relied on a fictitious divorce
between Aristotle's logic and his metaphysics
and sought Aristotle's early 'Platonism' merely
in the latter. Case did not, and his insights
remain relevant to the debate about the devel-
opment of Aristotle's thought, which has gained
renewed vigour in recent years.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Realism in Morals: An Essay (Oxford, 1877).
Physical Realism (Oxford, 1888).
'Scientific Method as a Mental Phenomenon',
in T.B. Strong (ed.), Lectures on the
Method of Science (Oxford, 1906), pp.
1-24.
'Aristotle', Encyclopaedia Britannica, llth
edn (1910), vol. 2, pp. 501-22.
'Logic', Encyclopaedia Britannica, llth edn
(1910), vol. 16, pp. 879-96.
'Metaphysics', Encyclopaedia Britannica,
llth edn (1910), vol. 18, pp. 225-53.
'The Development of Aristotle', Mind, vol. 34
(1925), pp. 80-86.
Letters to 'The Times91884-1922 (Oxford,
1927).
Further Reading
Marion, M., 'Oxford Realism: Knowledge
and Perception', British Journal for the
History of Philosophy, vol. 8 (2000), pp.
299-338,485-519.
Owen, G.E.L., 'The Platonism of Aristotle',
Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 51
(1966), pp. 125-50.

Ross, W.D., The Development of Aristotle's
Thought', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 43 (1957), pp. 63-78.
Wians, W. (ed.), Aristotle's Philosophical
Development (1996).
Mathieu Marion
CATLIN, George Edward Gordon
(1896-1979)
George Catlin was born in Liverpool on 26 July
1896 and died in Southampton on 7 February
1979. He was educated at St Paul's School.
After service in the London Rifle Brigade, he
went up to New College, Oxford, where he
won the Gladstone Prize (1920) and the
Mathew Arnold Memorial Prize (1921) for his
work on Hobbes, which was subsequently pub-
lished. However, Catlin's interest was in the
new discipline of political science rather than
modern history and he moved to pursue
graduate work at Cornell in order to establish
himself, since political science had no standing
in the UK. In 1924 he was appointed to the
faculty at Cornell on the strength of his pub-
lished thesis The Science and Method of Politics
(1927) and he was Professor of Political Science
there (latterly part-time) until 1935. Catlin
returned to Britain in 1929, partly because his
wife, the writer Vera Brittain (their daughter
was Shirley Williams), did not wish to move to
New York permanently, and partly to pursue
his political ambitions in the UK. In the 1930s
Catlin worked briefly for Oswald Mosley, stood
twice for Parliament as a Labour MP (unsuc-
cessfully), and visited Stalinist Russia and civil
war Spain. His career was striking in its geo-
graphic breadth: he held lectureships at Yale,
Calcutta, Peking, Columbia, the University of
California (Berkeley), Bologna and Cologne,
amongst others. However, he was disgruntled
that he was never offered an appropriate
163
CATLIN
academic post in Britain. He was Bronfman
Professor of Political Science at McGill
University (1956-60).
The Science and Method of Politics argued
for a political science that was modeled on
economic science, and aspired to the predictive
power of that discipline. This required a model
'political man' (corresponding to economic
man) who quests for power, and seeks to exert
his will over others. Commenting on the work
for the Philosophical Review, George Sabine
took issue with the strong emphasis on predic-
tion as essential to the study of politics. He
found this implausible, because 'no inductive
procedure can yield results unless the number of
generating conditions for the phenomenon to be
explained is relatively small...' (p. 269).
Reviewing A History of the Political
Philosophers for the Philosophical Quarterly,
J.H. WARRENDER thought that 'the author
contends for what he takes to be the grand tra-
dition of humane and liberal values, discernible
in the history of political philosophy, and for an
empiricism favourable to scientific development'
(p. 283). Idealism therefore takes a subordinate
role: BOSANQUET is dismissed as 'something of
an old woman' (History of the Political
Philosophers, p. 518), and Rousseau is credited
with 'one of the major catastrophes in the
history of human thought'. Such proclivities are
perhaps unsurprising in a thinker strongly influ-
enced by scientific and sociological aspirations
- Catlin edited the first English publication of
Durkheim's Rules of Sociological Method in
1938.
Catlin's contribution to philosophy is not in
the generation of systems or in particularly novel
contributions, but in acquainting the theorists
on each side of the Atlantic with the work of
each other - and especially in bringing to the
fore the Chicago School of political science with
traditional British political philosophy.
Politically, his contribution rests on his
Atlanticism, his capacity as founder of the
Movement for Atlantic Union (UK), his early
advocacy of Indian Independence and support
of Ghandi, and his work on prohibition.
CATLIN
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Thomas Hobbes as Philosopher, Publicist and
Man of Letters (Oxford, 1922).
The Science and Method of Politics (New
York, 1927).
Study of the Principles of Politics (New York,
1930).
Liquor Control (New York and London,
1931).
(Intro.), Emile Durkheim, The Rules of
Sociological Method, trans. Sarah A.
Solovay and John H. Mueller (Glencoe,
Illinois, 1938; 8th edn, 1964).
The Story of the Political Philosophers (New
York, 1939); 8th edn, published in Britain
as A History of the Political Philosophers
(1951).
Mahatma Gandhi (Dublin, 1948).
The Atlantic Community (1959).
Systematic Politics: Elementa Politica Et
Sodologica (Toronto, 1962).
Political and Sociological Theory and its
Applications (Michigan, 1964).
Further Reading
For God's Sake, Go (Gerard's Cross, 1972).
Autobiography.
Sabine, George, Review of The Science and
Method of Politics, Philosophical Review,
vol. 37 (1928), pp. 266-9.
Warrender, J.H., Review of A History of the
Political Philosophers, Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 2 (1952), pp. 283-4.
Jon Pike
CAVENDISH, Anthony Pike, see Basson
164
CHARLTON, William Edward Walmesley
St George (1935-)
William Charlton was born in York on 23
April 1935. After Ampleforth College (open
scholar, 1948-53), he attended New College,
Oxford as an open scholar (1955-9: first class
in Classical Moderations, 1957; first class in
literae humaniores, 1959; MA, 1963). After a
period as assistant in humanity at Glasgow
University (1959-61), he returned to New
College for a BPhil in philosophy (1961-3).
He taught at Trinity College Dublin from 1963
to 1968, initially as junior lecturer, then as
lecturer in mental and moral science. He was
then lecturer and subsequently senior lecturer
in philosophy at the University of Newcastle-
upon-Tyne (1968-88). From 1988 to his retire-
ment in 1994, he was senior lecturer in philos-
ophy at the University of Edinburgh (Head of
Humanities Planning Unit and Chairman,
Department of Philosophy, 1991-4). He was
visiting professor to the Universities of
Bucharest and Cluj in 1991.
Much of Charlton's contribution to the
subject has developed from a concern with clas-
sical philosophy and, in particular, with the
traditional problems of metaphysics. As he
says, 'I never open Plato without being sur-
prised by new proofs of his originality and
acuteness, and my own answers to the tradi-
tional questions were nearly all developed in
efforts to make sense of the dark conclusions of
Aristotle' ('Orientations: Wrilliam Charlton',
p. 108). Perhaps the best overview of
Charlton's concerns is provided in The Analytic
Ambition (1991), which, although described
as 'an introduction to philosophy', is rather an
exercise in philosophy. As such, it does not rest
content with a survey of possible positions, but
rather advances original arguments in a number
of areas: the worthwhileness of the analytical,
Anglo-American tradition in philosophy is
demonstrated by applying it,. Arguing that the
central problems of philosophy are concerned
with the relationship between the dimensions of
reality, language and thought, he contrasts his

own position with that of logical atomism,
which he characterizes by quoting Susan
STEBBING: 'Insofar as the aim of metaphysics
were achieved it would enable us to know pre-
cisely what there is in the world' (The Analytic
Ambition, p. 15). Instead, according to
Charlton, 'Different forms of expression cor-
respond to and reflect (sometimes insincerely or
deceptively) different ways in which things
enter into thought; and to describe how things
do enter into thought is to say how we think
they enter into reality' (ibid., p. 21). In provid-
ing an account of these relationships, 'The
philosopher attains truth in the way
Michelangelo attains truth about the human
figure, not in the way in which a spy attains
truth about a country's military preparations'
(ibid., p. 12).
In his later work, The Physical, the Natural
and the Supernatural (1998) he develops some
of these themes by arguing that the develop-
ment of our way of talking about matter and
mind has been infelicitous, losing the possibil-
ity of a conception of the natural which would
make sense of hopes for a supernatural life.
(This book also contains some interesting
experiments in reviving the presentation of
philosophical arguments in the form of
dialogue.)
Charlton's philosophy, both in his written
work and in his teaching, demonstrates his
understanding of the subject as a civilized art.
Bringing together the influences of classical phi-
losophy, the emphasis on the creative power of
language in modern analytical philosophy and
his Catholicism, his work is valuable, not for
the presentation of any radical theories, but
for an elegant and frequently original engage-
ment with central issues within the subject.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aesthetics, an Introduction (1970).
(Trans, with notes), Aristotle's Physics Books
I and II (Oxford, 1970; rev. edns with
updated bibliographies, 1984,1992).
(with Tatiana Mallinson and Robert
Oakeshott), The Christian Response to
165
CIOFFI
Industrial Capitalism (1986).
Philosophy and Christian Belief'(1988).
"Weakness of Will (Oxford 1988).
(Trans, with notes), Philoponus: On Aristotle
On the Intellect (1991).
The Analytic Ambition (Oxford, 1991).
The Physical, the Natural and the
Supernatural (1998).
(Trans, with notes), Philoponus: On Aristotle
On the Soul 3.19-13 with Stephanus: On
Aristotle On Interpretation (2000).
(Trans, with notes), Philoponus: On Aristotle
On the Soul 3.1-8 (2000).
(Trans, with notes), Philoponus: On Aristotle
On the Soul 2.1-6 (forthcoming).
(Trans, with notes), Philoponus: On Aristotle
On the Soul 2.7-12 (forthcoming).
Other Relevant Works
'Orientations: William Charlton', in
Philosophical Writings, no 1 (January
1996), pp. 107-108.
(with Aidan Reynolds), Arthur Machen, A
Biography (1963; reissued Oxford, 1988).
Undesirable Guests, and Other Stones
(Carlton-in-Coverdale, 2002).
(with Anne Charlton), Putting Poetry First, A
Life of Robert Nichols 1993-1944
(Norwich, 2003).
Stephen Watt
CIOFFI, Frank (1928-)
Frank Cioffi was born in the United States,
where he completed his education. His first
academic appointment was as lecturer in phi-
losophy at the University of Singapore, and he
was subsequently appointed as lecturer in phi-
losophy at the University of Kent at
Canterbury. In 1974 he was invited to set up
the Department of Philosophy at the University
of Essex, where he was its first professor, a
CIOFFI
post from which he retired in 1998. He then
became emeritus professor there, whilst simul-
taneously receiving an honorary senior research
fellowship from the University of Kent. He was
visiting professor at Princeton University in the
United States during the academic year 1998-9.
Throughout his academic career, Cioffi was
one of a great many philosophers working in
Britain who was heavily influenced by
WITTGENSTEIN. In a number of papers pub-
lished over his lifetime, which have recently
appeared as a collection entitled Wittgenstein
on Freud and Frazer (1998), Cioffi deals with
Wittgenstein's views on whether human
customs and institutions stand in need of expla-
nations in terms of their causes and origins in
order to better understand them, or whether
greater understanding can be reached simply by
clarification of the customs or institutions and
our participation in them. Cioffi vividly illus-
trates this problem by asking whether the
question 'Why did she die?' could be most
appropriately answered by handing the ques-
tioner a coroner's report on the death. More
generally, Cioffi sets his work on Wittgenstein
in the context of his enquiry into what sort of
explanation is most appropriate to the social
sciences.
In examining Wittgenstein's contribution to
this problem, Cioffi makes allusion to several
examples which Wittgenstein himself uses. One
such example is Frazer's reference, in The
Golden Bough, to the Beltane fire-festivals, a
ritual in which the peasantry all over Europe
used to light bonfires on certain days of the
year. The historico-genetic explanation which
Frazer gives for this practice is that it began
with the ritual of human sacrifice. Wittgenstein
comments that this explanation does nothing to
account for the reactions of deep unease and
horror of the participants or spectators at any
later, non-sacrificial instances of Beltane fire-
festivals. Instead, a satisfactory account must be
sought elsewhere, in an exploration and self-
clarification of ourselves, our natures and our
reactions to such rituals, which would not be
affected even if the explanation of the origins of
166
the ritual were found to be false. The genetic
explanation is thus inappropriate, as empirical
facts from outside the ritual itself are redun-
dant. Another example to which Wittgenstein
appeals is the issue of the quest for the histori-
cal Jesus. Wittgenstein says that whether or
not Jesus was a historical figure makes no dif-
ference to the faith of Christian believers, and
any explanation of the rituals and practices of
Christianity must be sought elsewhere.
Nevertheless, Cioffi draws attention to a sec-
ondary line of approach in Wittgenstein's
argument, which is that some 'background'
knowledge or belief may be relevant. The
horror of those present at any non-sacrificial
instance of a Beltane fire-festival, and the power
which such festivals still have to provoke such
reactions, may be explained at least partly by
our knowledge of the more general fact that
some men have deliberately burnt others to
death. Wittgenstein further says that the
Christian faith is dependent on the belief in
Christ's resurrection, which if shown to be false
would mean that Christianity has no basis.
However, as Cioffi remarks in support of
Wittgenstein, the resurrection is crucial for sote-
riology, not history; the former requires faith,
whereas the latter requires empirical investiga-
tion. Cioffi goes beyond Wittgenstein in saying
that a causal explanation is sometimes, though
certainly not always, appropriate: the person
who asks 'Why did she die?' can have their
grief assuaged, if not eliminated, or can find
peace, by reading the coroner's report on the
death.
In his paper, 'Wittgenstein on Freud's
Abominable Mess' (reprinted in Wittgenstein
on Freud and Frazer), Cioffi calls attention to
Wittgenstein's accusation that Freud confused
reasons with causes. Whilst Cioffi points out
that this brief judgement is blatantly insufficient
to cover the complexities of the whole of
Freud's work, it acts as a useful pointer for
further investigation of Freud. According to
Wittgenstein, Freud had not separated the issue
of causes from that of the meaning of experi-
ences. A related confusion is that Freud often

overrode his patients' accounts of their own
experiences by his favoured causal and genetic
explanations, and regarded the agreement of his
patients, that the causal explanation was the
true one, as validating his own hypothetical
speculations. Cioffi takes an example to which
Wittgenstein referred as illustrative of these
criticisms. One of Freud's patients described
to him a dream which she considered beautiful.
The patient had dreamt that she had descended
into an area covered by flowers and shrubs, and
had broken off a branch from one of the
shrubs. Freud contended that the only meaning
of this dream has to include some mention of
the branch as a symbol of, or as really meaning,
the phallus. Wittgenstein accuses Freud of
reducing the dream to 'the coarsest sexual stuff,
bawdy of the worst kind' and, more substan-
tially, of asserting that the patient herself was
unaware of the meaning of an experience, when
she alone was aware of the experience itself.
Freud thus confuses possible causes, which lie
outside dreams, with the meaning of dreams,
which emerge from the dreams themselves.
Cioffi further observes that Freud thought that
all dreams were to be covered by a single, uni-
versal, causal explanation in terms of sexuality,
and took every example of a dream as confir-
mation of that theory, often in flagrant disre-
gard of patients' own accounts of their dream
experiences. Both Cioffi and Wittgenstein agree
that people's reports of their dream experiences
should be regarded as authoritative, in the
absence of any indications to the contrary.
Whilst Cioffi's conclusion is that the work of
Freud is thoroughly pseudo-scientific, he is
careful to point out that his view does not rest
on the same grounds as those of the dominant
interpretation of Karl POPPER'S works, which is
that the demarcation between science and
pseudo-science is that the former is falsifiable,
whereas the latter is not. Cioffi points out that
there are some empirical disciplines which are
neither falsifiable nor pseudo-scientific, and
others which are both. For Cioffi, Freud's
methodology is suspect in that he superimposes
his own interpretations on data which could
167
CIOFFI
otherwise falsify his theories. Cioffi states that
scientific psychoanalysis requires both to be
falsifiable and that there are serious attempts at
falsifying it. Freud's theories do not meet either
criterion. Further, Cioffi maintains that in
Popper's work there is at least a suggestion of
the subsidiary thesis that the practice of a truly
scientific discipline must incorporate serious
attempts at its refutation.
In exploring the issue of explanation in the
social sciences, Cioffi takes and elaborates on
the Wittgensteinian distinction between causal
or genetic explanations, and clarificatory ones.
Whereas Cioffi does not follow Wittgenstein
wholeheartedly in holding that the two types of
explanation are always mutually exclusive, he
endorses Wittgenstein's view that the social
sciences need case-by-case explanation, and
cannot, unlike the natural sciences, be covered
by one, or a set of, universal or general laws.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Ed. with Robert Borger), Explanation in the
Behavioural Sciences (1970).
'Wishes, Symptoms and Actions',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society',
suppl. vol. 48 (1974), pp. 97-118.
'Wittgenstein and the Fire-Festivals', in Irving
Block (ed.), Perspectives on the Philosophy
of Wittgenstein (1981), pp. 212-37.
'When do Empirical Methods By-Pass the
Problems which Trouble Us?', in A.
Phillips Griffiths (ed.), Philosophy and
Literature (1984), pp. 155-72.
'Psychoanalysis, Pseudo-Science and
Testability', in G. Currie and A. Musgrave
(eds), Popper and the Human Sciences
(1985), pp. 13-44.
'Exegetical Myth-Making in Grunbaum's
Indictment', in Peter Clark (ed.), Mind.
Psychoanalysis and Science (1998), pp.
61-87.
'Wittgenstein on Freud's Abominable Mess',
Philosophy, suppl. vol. 31 (1990), pp.
169-92.
'Wittgenstein and Obscurantism',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
CIOFFI
suppl. vol. 64, (1990), pp. 1-23.
'Congenital Transcendentalism and the
Loneliness which is the Truth about
Things', Philosophy, suppl. vol. 33 (1992),
pp. 125-38.
Freud and the Question of Pseudo-Science
(1998).
Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer (1998).
The Propaedeutic Delusion: What can
Ethnogenic Science Add to our Pre-
Theoretic Understanding of Loss of
Dignity, Humiliation and Expressive
Failure?', History of the Human Sciences,
vol. 13, no. 1 (February, 2000), pp.
108-23.
'Wittgenstein and the Riddle of Life', in D.M.
Sharrock (ed.), The Third Wittgenstein
(2004), pp. 215-30.
Kathryn L. Plant
CLEOBURY, Frank Harold (1892-1981)
F.H. Cleobury was born in London on 6
November 1892 and died in Herne Bay, Kent
on 25 March 1981. Following secondary edu-
cation at Aske's Boys' School, Cleobury entered
the British Civil Service in 1908. Private reading
in philosophy and theology led to studies at the
University of London part-time (BA, 1932;
PhD, 1941). He retired from public service as
a principal in the administrative grade in 1950
and, following a brief term at Wycliffe Hall,
Oxford, was ordained priest in the Church of
England (1951). He served as a rector in
Hertfordshire until his retirement in 1964, but
continued philosophical writing for some years
afterwards.
Cleobury was influenced first by the work of
A.E. TAYLOR and F.H. BRADLEY. Rejecting
Bertrand RUSSELL and AJ. AYER'S views on
religion, he undertook a PhD thesis - 'Finite
and Infinite Experience: A Study in Contrasts'.
168
Completed in 1941, and published in 1947 as
God, Man, and the Absolute, it called for a re-
evaluation of the 'objective idealism' of Bradley
and Bernard BOSANQUET - though it also drew
on the work of A.S. PRINGLE-PATTISON and
Taylor.
Cleobury held that idealism was not only
compatible with Christian thought, but
provided a rational basis for religious belief.
Idealist logic (such as that of Bosanquet)
explains how finite beings can be part of a sys-
tematic unity. Cleobury saw this as also entail-
ing the existence of an Infinite Mind - a 'Mind
which eternally achieves the ideal' - which he
identified with God or the Absolute. Cleobury
insisted that idealists, even Bradley, leave room
for orthodox Christian dogmas in their meta-
physics - including belief in an afterlife, and the
reality of freedom, sin and divine grace. The
concept of the good life was largely that
outlined by Plato and Bosanquet; moral oblig-
ation arises from the immanence of an Absolute
or universal mind.
Though Cleobury initially published in the
principal philosophical journals, he often wrote
for church-affiliated publications (e.g., the
Modern Churchman) and supported the pop-
ularization of philosophy. He contributed to
the Philosopher - the journal of the
Philosophical Society (which was open to the
broad public, mixing traditional themes with
practical and esoteric interests) - and served as
the society's President (1962-77).
In Christian Rationalism and Philosophical
Analysis (1959) Cleobury argued for a rational
'natural theology', drawing extensively on
Berkeley. While idealism was out of fashion
by this time, Cleobury used it to defend theism
against '20th century philosophical analysis'.
Cleobury insisted that we have every reason to
believe in minds, even if we do not have demon-
strative proof of the existence of material
things. Against widely held atomistic material-
ist and dualist accounts, Cleobury insists that all
experience must be interpreted within 'our
existing thought' - that 'experience is a unity
which links observer and observed'. This is

idealism. (Later, Cleobury came to call this
'personalism.')
Cleobury argued for natural theology and
'liberal Christian orthodoxy' in a series of
books and articles through the 1960s and early
1970s. He devotes over half of his 1976 'auto-
biography', From Clerk to Cleric, to a restate-
ment of his idealism, its compatibility with con-
temporary science (particularly relativity theory
and quantum mechanics), and the problem of
evil.
While Cleobury's work has been of little
influence in academic circles, it is valuable both
as continuing an idealist critique of atomism
and realism, and as attempting to bring
together Bradley, Berkeley and philosophical
theology.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
God, Man, and the Absolute (1947).
'Post-Kantian Idealism and Modern
Analysis', Mind, vol. 61 (1952), pp.
359-65.
Christian Rationalism and Philosophical
Analysis (1959).
'Some Finalities in the Philosophy of Theism',
The Philosopher, vol. 14 (1963).
From Clerk to Cleric (Cambridge, 1976).
William Sweet
COHEN, Gerald Allan (1941-)
Gerald A. Cohen was born in Canada and
educated at the Morris Winchesky School, run
by the United Jewish People's Order. He then
studied at McGill University, where he took his
BA with first class honours in politics and phi-
losophy in 1961, and Oxford, where he took
the BPhil in 1963. He was appointed to a lec-
tureship in philosophy at University College
London (UCL) in 1964 and stayed in London
until his appointment as Chichele Professor of
169
COHEN
Social and Political Theory and fellow of All
Souls, Oxford in 1985, the same year that he
became a fellow of the British Academy.
It is possible to discern three phases to
Cohen's work so far. The first phase covers his
articulation and defence of core parts of
Marxism. The second and third phases cover
an engagement with normative political phi-
losophy in the Anglo-Saxon world, first with
libertarian thought, and then with liberal egal-
itarianism. In these engagements Cohen is
explicit about the influence of his early years in
the Canadian Communist Party and the beliefs
that he acquired in that period: his work is a
continuous reflection and frequent engagement
with the doctrines of Marxism, as found in the
Canadian Communist Part. However, his work
is of interest far beyond the ranks of those who
share this background and set of beliefs:
because of his employment of the standard
techniques of Anglo-Saxon philosophy -
analysis, close reading, attention to clarity and
the avoidance of ambiguity or vagueness - his
work is influential.
Cohen's early teaching was in moral and
political philosophy at UCL, but his indepen-
dent work was in the articulation and defence
of a form of historical materialism which was
published in his first major book, Karl Marx's
Theory of History: A Defence (1978). Cohen
reports that 'in so far as I was a Marxist, I was
not a philosopher, and in so far as I was a
philosopher, I was not a Marxist' (Self-
Ownership, Freedom and Equality, p. 2). Karl
Marx's Theory of History presented Cohen's
version of the famous 1859 Preface to a
Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, and, in particular, it focused on
giving a clear and consistent account of the
forces and relations of production, and the rela-
tionship between the base and the superstruc-
ture. Because Cohen conceived of these rela-
tionships as functional ones, he was drawn to
give a general outline and defence of functional
explanation in the social sciences as such.
Foregrounding these elements of historical
materialism meant placing less emphasis on
COHEN
alienation and class struggle, and this relative
neglect was criticized by some Marxists.
Overall, however, the book was well received,
both amongst many of those receptive to
Marxism and also amongst many who were
hostile to it, because of the clarity and rigour of
Cohen's writing. The book won the Isaac
Deutscher Prize in 1978. The work is philo-
sophical in the sense that it outlines a coherent
and precise formulation of functionalist expla-
nation, which shows that, interpreted in this
way, the claims of the 1859 Preface are non-
contradictory and contentful. Whether they are
empirically filled out is, of course, another
matter: Cohen's central task was not to show
that particular Marxist explanations of histor-
ical change were true, rather that they were
conceptually coherent.
The debate over the coherence of functional
explanation was joined by, among others, John
Elster and John Roemer, who were working
independently on the analytical foundations of
Marxism, Roemer with a particular interest in
formulating an account of exploitation that
did not require any of the dubious metaphysi-
cal claims associated with the Labour Theory
of Value. Together with others, they formed an
entirely new school in the academy known as
analytical Marxism, 'no-bullshit' Marxism, or,
more specifically, as the September Group -
which included Sam Bowles, Bob Brenner,
Hillel Steiner, Philippe Van Parijs and Erik
Wright. This group played an important role in
altering the intellectual climate of political phi-
losophy in Britain. Marxist thought had been
influential in universities, but not in philosophy
departments: the opacity of continental theo-
rizing, and the aspirations of Marxist to 'sci-
entific' status endorsed by Althusser and others,
had meant that Marxist thought had had little
penetration into analytical philosophy depart-
ments. The emergence of the journal Radical
Philosophy - friendly to Althusserianism - had
been one response to this hostility. The analyt-
ical Marxists changed this. Amongst other
activities, Cohen, Roemer and Wright edited
the influential series 'Studies in Marxism and
170
Social Theory' published by CUP; its driving
aspiration was that 'with the tools of non-
Marxist social science and philosophy ...
Marxist thought will thereby be freed from the
increasingly discredited methods and presup-
positions which are still widely regarded as
essential to it and that what is true and impor-
tant in Marxism will be more firmly estab-
lished' (see, for example, Self-Ownership,
Freedom and Equality). However, Cohen's
engagement with Marxism became increasingly
critical. In particular, he became increasingly
concerned about the impact of environmental
constraints on the feasibility of a socialism
based on abundance, and, second, about the
'obstetric metaphor' - that the new society was
to be found in the womb of the old. These and
other critical points were expounded in
History, Labour and Freedom.
Cohen moved on directly to engage with
normative political philosophy. Here again,
however, the nature of his engagement was
determined by critical reflection on his social-
ist beliefs. According to his own account, he
was troubled by the need to respond to the lib-
ertarian and inegalitarian philosophy of Robert
Nozick, contained in Anarchy State and
Utopia, and in particular by Nozick's attack on
redistributive taxation systems in the name of
individual self-owner ship. This was particu-
larly troubling to Cohen, since Marxism
seemed to make some use of a similar principle,
when it prescribed the return to the workers of
the 'full fruits' of their labour, or conceived of
exploitation as the theft from workers of what
rightly belonged to them. If expropriation by
capitalists was to be condemned in the name of
self-ownership, what theoretical resources
remained to respond to libertarians who con-
demned expropriation by redistributive gov-
ernments in the name of self-ownership?
what we discover in Marx and in the wider
socialist tradition are socialist values that are
not properly distinguished from deeply bour-
geois values about people's ownership of
themselves and their consequent right to the

product of their labour, which are thought to
ride along with the socialist values in an
unproblematic way.
('An Interview with G.A. Cohen', p. 8)
In Self-ownership, Freedom and Equality
Cohen embarked on an investigation of notion
of self-ownership and its compatibility with
equality, concluding that a commitment to self-
ownership ought to be dropped from left-wing
politics.
In doing so, Cohen brought his thinking close
to that of more conventional normative polit-
ical philosophers such as Rawls and DWORKIN,
and his most recent work has been an engage-
ment with these figures. Again, however, his
engagement is conditioned by his earlier com-
mitments: Rawls and Dworkin are both taken
to task for failing to follow through on egali-
tarianism: 'there's the bit where you say it and
the bit where you take it back', Cohen
comments, echoing J.L. AUSTIN ('An Interview
with G.A. Cohen', p. 10). Cohen has at times
endorsed a 'luck-egalitarian' viewpoint, accord-
ing to which egalitarians are concerned with
those inequalities that arise from bad luck,
rather than those which arise from autonomous
choices made by individuals. But Cohen is
inclined to see the imperative for actions that
are conducive to egalitarian outcomes pene-
trating much farther into individual lives.
Endorsing the slogan that 'the personal is polit-
ical' in the Gifford Lectures of 1996, Cohen
argues for an 'egalitarian ethos' which covers
personal actions and thus augments the way in
which the basic structure of a society, its
coercive institutions and its laws are conducive
to justice. Justice, for Cohen, goes far beyond
the basic structure, and includes norms of indi-
vidual behaviour; these are in part assessable in
terms of their conformity to religious (espe-
cially Judaeo-Christian) beliefs, as Cohen
argues in the Gifford Lectures.
Cohen's interest in the basic structure and the
egalitarian ethos arises from a concern with
the argument pressed by Rawls and others that
some inequalities are justified by their incentive
171
COHEN
effects. In this way, unequal distributions of
income can be seen as concessions to human
nature. This concern with how normative polit-
ical principles ought to fit with facts about the
world forms the focus of his very latest work in
the paper 'Facts and Principles', which argues
for the independence of the most basic norma-
tive commitments and for a general engage-
ment with and criticism of 'constructivism' (see,
for example, Rawls on Kantian constructivism).
It is fairly straightforward to see this as a reflec-
tion of the early terrain of this thought, since it
is prompted by reflection on the 'human nature'
objection to socialism. Whilst Cohen now
explicitly abjures significant sections of the
Marxist political diagnosis and programme,
and whilst he has switched the terrain of his
thought decisively, it is still clear that he is pre-
occupied with problems and arguments that
arise from that programme.
The influence of Cohen is very considerable.
Analytical Marxism has perhaps not endured
well, since many of its proponents have moved
on to other concerns distinct from the debates
around historical materialism. Nonetheless, it
has significantly changed the perception - and
ended the dismissal - of Marxist insights in the
Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition. In his
work on distributive justice Cohen is clearly the
most influential British political philosopher
today.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Karl Marx and the Withering Away of
Social Science', Philosophy and Public
Affairs, vol. 1 (1972), pp. 182-203
'Marx's Dialectic of Labor', Philosophy and
Public Affairs, vol. 3 (1974), pp. 235-61.
Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence
(Oxford, 1978).
'Functional Explanation, Consequence
Explanation, and Marxism', Inquiry, vol.
25 (1982), pp. 27-56.
'The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom',
Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 12
(1983), pp. 3-33.
'Are Workers Forced to Sell their Labor
COHEN
Power?', Philosophy and Public Affairs,
vol. 14 (1985), pp. 99-105.
History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from
Marx (Oxford, 1989).
'On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice',
Ethics, vol. 99 (1989), pp. 906-44.
'Incentives, Inequality, and Community', in
Grethe B. Peterson (ed.), The Tanner
Lectures On Human Values, VI3 (Salt
Lake City, 1992).
'Equality of What?', in Martha C. Nussbaum
and Amartya Sen (eds), The Quality of
Life (Oxford and New York, 1993).
Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality
(Cambridge, 1995).
'The Pareto Argument for Inequality', Social
Philosophy and Policy, vol. 12 (1995), pp.
160-85.
'Where the Action Is: On the Site of
Distributive Justice', Philosophy and
Public Affairs, vol. 26, no. 1 (1995), pp.
3-30.
If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're
So Rich? (Harvard, 2000).
'Facts and Principles', Philosophy and Public
Affairs^ vol. 31, no. 3 (Summer 2003).
Other Relevant Works
'An Interview with G.A. Cohen', Imprints,
vol. 1, no. 1 (June 1996), pp. 7-25.
Further Reading
Elster, Jon, Making Sense of Marx
(Cambridge, 1985).
Roberts, Marcus, Analytical Marxism
(1996).
Jon Pike
172
COHEN, Laurence Jonathan (1923-)
Laurence Jonathan Cohen was born in London
on 7 May 1923. He was educated at St Paul's
and at Balliol College, Oxford, interrupted by
his service as a code-breaker in Naval
Intelligence from 1942 to 1945. After leaving
Oxford in 1947, Cohen became an assistant in
the Department of Logic and Metaphysics at
the University of Edinburgh. He left Edinburgh
in 1950 to take up a position as a lecturer in
philosophy at the University of St Andrews in
Dundee, where he remained until 1957. From
1957 to 1990, Cohen was a fellow and pra-
elector in philosophy at Queen's College,
Oxford, serving as senior tutor from 1985 to
1990. Cohen was elected fellow of the British
Academy in 1973. He retired in 1990. Cohen's
many visiting fellowships and professorships
include visits at Princeton and Harvard uni-
versities, as a Commonwealth Fund Fellow
(1952-3), at Columbia University (1967-8),
Yale University (1972-3) and Northwestern
University (1988), all as a visiting professor,
and as a visiting fellow at the Research School
of Social Sciences at the Australian National
University (1980).
After taking an early interest in political phi-
losophy, culminating in his Principles of World
Citizenship (1954), Cohen increasingly turned
his focus toward research in the philosophy of
language, the philosophy of science, the analysis
of induction and probability, and epistemology.
His books on these topics include The Diversity
of Meaning (1962), The Implications of
Induction (1970), The Probable and the
Provable (1977), An Introduction to the
Philosophy of Induction and Probability (1989)
and An Essay on Belief and Acceptance (1992).
Cohen also published a work of meta-philoso-
phy, The Dialogue of Reason: An Analysis of
Analytic Philosophy (1986), and a collection of
essays, Knowledge and Language (2000).
As the titles of his work suggest, Cohen has
published widely and deeply in a number of
areas. However, in the course of his career a
few themes have emerged as particularly impor-

tant. Here we will consider merely three: the
development of a Baconian practice of induc-
tive inference and the support of that practice
as an alternative to mathematicist accounts of
probability; the defence of the reasoning com-
petence of untutored subjects against the claims
of cognitive psychologists and other critics; and
the introduction of a distinction between belief
and acceptance, and the defence of the impor-
tance of that distinction for epistemology, ratio-
nality and explanation of behaviour.
Cohen's most sustained work has been on
inductive reasoning and rationality. His most
controversial claim is that there are types of
probability that do not conform to the standard
probabilistic calculus, and that these types of
probability underlie many of our inductive and
scientific practices, as well as judicial reasoning.
On the basis of this claim, Cohen advocates a
pluralist view of probability. Just as there are
different types of provability, there are also dif-
ferent types of probability, among them relative
frequency, personalist, propensity and Cohen's
favored 'Baconian' inductive logic, which he
terms the 'method of relevant variables'.
Cohen sees the history of the philosophy of
induction as involving primarily two distinct
traditions. One tradition, the one that Cohen
wishes largely to supplant, has its roots in
Pascal's writings on probability, and is perhaps
most strongly embodied in the work of Carnap.
According to this tradition, the notion of cause
does not play a significant role in inductive
practice, but belongs rather to metaphysics. In
this, 'mathematicist', tradition induction is, in
the first instance, enumerative. That is, the goal
of experiment for the mathematicist is to arrive
at statistically representative samples of the
phenomena under investigation.
Cohen places himself in the tradition whose
roots extend back to Bacon, through Mill,
Whewell, and, in the twentieth century, von
Wright. This tradition, which takes as its fun-
damental notion that of cause, is one according
to which induction is, in the first instance, elim-
inative. That is, on this view, the goal of exper-
iment is the elimination of possible causal
173
COHEN
hypotheses rivalling the hypothesis under inves-
tigation. The more rival hypotheses are elimi-
nated, the better the support for the remaining
hypothesis.
In formulating the method of relevant vari-
ables, Cohen considers an attempt to test some
generalization, say, that L: 'All As are Bs'.
Testing L then involves attempting to find some
A that is not B. Of course, one constructs those
tests so as to consider not all As, but only those
most likely not to be Bs. That is, in testing L,
one considers only those relevant circumstan-
tial variables that the scientific community
deems relevant to the testing of L. Which vari-
ables are relevant is itself an empirical matter,
one determined by considering the testing of
generalizations materially similar to L. The
variables chosen as relevant to the testing of L
will be those under which those other, materi-
ally similar, generalizations were falsified.
Suppose we have now arrived at a list of
variables {Vp ..., Vn}, to be employed in our
test of L. In this case, tn+1 tests will be con-
ducted. In the first, t p all variables Vp ..., Vn
will be screened out. This is to ensure that being
A does not itself rule out also being B. In the
second, t2, all variables, V2, ..., Vn, will be
screened out. And so on until, in tn+1, L is tested
under all combinations of variables. Thus, the
set of tests, t p ..., tn+1, is a 'telescopic' series
ordered according to their thoroughness, with
t n+1 being the most thorough. According to
Cohen, as soon as we have tested a hypothesis
through test t in the series, we may say that,
based upon the evidence, the hypothesis is sup-
ported to degree i out of a maximum of n+1.
Cohen has demonstrated that the results thus
obtained may then be formalized in a general-
ized modal logic containing levels of modality
lower than that of physical necessity, in which
universal generalizations may be 'true in worlds
subject to only some of the inductively testable
uniformities to which the actual one is subject'
('From A Historical Point of View', p. 25).
Cohen draws evidence for the centrality of
Baconian induction from a number of sources,
including Karl von Frisch's testing of hypothe-
COHEN
ses regarding the colour discriminations of bees,
explanations of the psychology of language
acquisition, and the evaluation of medical diag-
noses. However, Cohen has drawn some of
the most intuitively powerful arguments for
the failure of traditional, mathematicist,
accounts of probability - and, thus, for the sig-
nificance of his alternative conception - from
the realm of legal reasoning.
For example, Cohen suggests that mathe-
maticist accounts of probability, which dictate
that the probability of a conjunction is equal to
the product of the probabilities of each of the
conjuncts, can lead to paradox in civil suits in
which a plaintiff must prove each of two or
more independent contentions. Supposing that
this requires proof at a level of confidence
greater than 0.5, then the plaintiff could sepa-
rately prove each of the two contentions - say,
with a level of confidence of 0.6 for each of the
contentions - but, because of the conjunction
rule, lose the case because of the fact that the
conjunction thus has a level of confidence only
of 0.36, well below the threshold of above 0.5.
Further, mathematicist accounts of proba-
bility would fail to yield the right answer,
according to Cohen, in the paradox of the gate-
crasher. If uncontested evidence establishes that
there were 1,000 people at a rodeo, only 499
of whom paid for admission, then, assuming
that victory in a civil suit requires merely a pre-
ponderance of evidence in favour of the plain-
tiff, anyone chosen at random from the
audience and sued for non-payment would be
liable. Since this is clearly unjust, Cohen
suggests again that this provides evidence that
legal reasoning cannot be based upon mathe-
maticist probability.
Additionally, Cohen notes that the standard
of proof beyond reasonable doubt, in criminal
trials, requires that the evidence exclude any
reason for doubting any of the elements of the
crime. Thus, proof of guilt follows the method
of relevant variables, establishing each of the
points that demonstrate all elements of the
crime, as opposed simply to reaching some
appropriately high level of mathematical prob-
174
ability. Finally, and also with respect to the
criminal courts, standards of justice seem to
require that the accused be presumed innocent
and that the triers of fact rely in their decision
only upon those pieces of evidence concerning
the accused that have been properly entered
into the court record. Mathematicist accounts
of probability, Cohen argues, must run afoul of
both of these assumptions, since the only way
in which a guilty verdict would be possible is if
the prior probability of the accused's guilt is set
at some level greater than zero.
Such arguments, however, have failed to win
a following among those committed to the
mathematicist tradition. In two very detailed
and sensitive critiques, Kyburg (1972) and
(1980) has suggested that technical difficulties
with Cohen's inductive logic, and particularly
with the notion of relevant variables, make the
method of relevant variables untenable. On
another count, HESSE (1980) does not object to
the tenability of Cohen's method, but suggests
rather that it is susceptible to a Bayesian rein-
terpretation, and is thus not a genuine alterna-
tive to the mathematicist tradition.
In the study of rationality, Cohen examined
the attempts of Tversky, Kahneman and others
to demonstrate systematic errors in the proba-
bility judgements of the untutored. In earlier
work Cohen reviewed cases in which subjects
seemed to employ the 'Gambler's Fallacy' to
misjudge the probability of conjunctions or to
fail to account for the significance of the ration
of sample size to population size. In such cases,
Cohen suggested, subjects in fact employ tacit
assumptions that, in each of the cases, causes
were in play, and then construe the solution to
the cases in Baconian terms. When explicitly
prompted to assign degrees of belief in such
cases, however, untutored subjects attempt to
assign Pascalian probabilities and, being
untrained, often do so erroneously. Such errors,
Cohen suggested, are better understood as ones
of performance rather than ones of competence.
Cohen's later attempt to account for the poor
performances of subjects in all such tests, and
not merely those susceptible to Baconian

analysis, resulted in perhaps his single most
influential article. That paper, 'Can Human
Rationality Be Experimentally Demonstrated'
(1981), published in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, was the subject of forty-three open
peer commentaries in that journal from 1981 to
1984, in addition to three separate responses by
Cohen. In this debate, Cohen suggests that the
process by which philosophers ought to engage
in both descriptive and normative programmes
concerning human rationality is analogous to
that by means of which linguists examine gram-
matical competence. If this is the case, Cohen
suggests, then the way to arrive at the norma-
tive principles governing reasoning is to reach
reflective equilibrium, with our intuitions about
what constitutes good reasoning serving as the
data for our deliberations. However, the same
method - that of reaching reflective equilib-
rium while employing our intuitions about
what constitutes good reasoning as data - is
also the method by which to arrive at a descrip-
tive theory of reasoning competence. Since both
theories come from the same process of
reaching reflective equilibrium, and are based
on the same data involving our intuitions as to
what constitutes good reasoning, it is impossi-
ble for our theories concerning what consti-
tutes reasoning competence to come apart from
our theories concerning what constitutes good
reasoning. Stein (1996) contains a detailed dis-
cussion and critique of this argument.
Finally, Cohen has more recently argued that
it is theoretically fruitful to draw a distinction
between mere belief and acceptance. According
to Cohen, beliefs are merely passive, in that
they are dispositions to feel and, like other
feelings, are merely caused and involuntary.
Because causes can fail, Cohen argues, beliefs
carry with them no intellectual commitments.
Furthermore, he suggests, we are not responsi-
ble for what we believe, nor, strictly speaking,
may we be praised or blamed for what we
believe. Finally, Cohen claims that beliefs are
not essentially linguistic, as can be seen from the
fact that both children and animals have beliefs.
In contrast, Cohen takes acceptance to be
175
COHEN
active, a decision to employ premises or infer-
ence rules in reasoning or acting. Because we
usually justify our accepting something, Cohen
argues, acceptance is inherently linguistic.
Cohen suggests that, unlike belief, acceptance
is closed under deduction - i.e. that if one
accepts p, and accepts p only if q, one must
accept q. Thus, unlike belief, acceptance is an
attitude for which one is responsible, and is
therefore more properly the object of praise or
blame.
In support of the distinction between accep-
tance and belief, Cohen discusses a number of
areas in which the distinction is valuable. He
suggests that purposive behaviour - including
the behaviour of organizations, corporations,
unions, etc. - will be better understood if
analysed in terms of acceptances and goals, as
opposed to beliefs and desires. Furthermore, the
distinction in computer science and computa-
tional psychology between serial and parallel
processes mirrors that between acceptance and
belief. Cohen suggests that, although the fun-
damental data of science must be believed,
much of the cognitive work of scientists
involves acceptance rather than belief. This is
because it is acceptance, rather than belief, that
is deductively closed, thus explaining the sci-
entific demand for overall consistency.
Furthermore, scientists deserve praise for
accepting a theory, but would not deserve such
praise for a mere belief. Scientists, Cohen
argues, may also accept a theory that he does
not believe, when he takes such a theory to be
a useful idealization. Perhaps the most surpris-
ing claim that Cohen makes is that one can
thus accept a theory for good reason, and there-
fore, according to Cohen, know it, despite the
fact that the theory is false.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Principles of World Citizenship (Oxford,
1954).
The Diversity of Meaning (1962).
The Implications of Induction (1970).
The Probable and the Provable (Oxford,
1977).
COHEN
The Dialogue of Reason: An Analysis of
Analytic Philosophy (Oxford, 1986).
An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Induction and Probability (Oxford, 1989).
An Essay on Belief and Acceptance (Oxford,
1992).
Knowledge and Language, ed., with an
Introduction, by James Logue (Dordrecht,
2000).
Other Relevant Works
'Can Human Irrationality be Experimentally
Demonstrated?', The Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, vol. 4 (1981), pp. 317-31,
359-70.
'From a Historical Point of View', in Eells
and Maruszewski (1991), pp. 22-37.
Further Reading
Cohen, Jonathan and Mary Hesse (eds),
Applications of Inductive Logic (Oxford,
1980).
Eells, Ellery and Tomasz Maruszewski,
Probability and Rationality: Studies on L.
Jonathan Cohen's Philosophy of Science
(Amsterdam, 1991).
Hesse, Mary, 'Inductive Appraisal of
Scientific Theories', in Cohen and Hesse
(1980), pp. 202-17.
Kyburg, Henry E., 'Jonathan Cohen on
Induction', The Journal of Philosophy, vol.
69 (1972), pp. 106-14.
, 'Jonathan Cohen, The Probable and
the Provable', Nous, vol. 14 (1980), pp.
623-9.
Radford, Colin, 'An Essay on Belief and
Acceptance, by L. Jonathan Cohen', Mind
vol. 104 (1995), pp. 154-62.
Stein, E., Without Good Reason: The
Rationality Debate in Philosophy and
Cognitive Science (Oxford, 1996), chap. 5.
Joseph H. Shieber
176
COLE, George Douglas Howard
(1889-1959)
G.D.H. Cole was born in Cambridge on 25
September 1889 and died in Hampstead on 14
January 1959. As an avid reader during his
youth at St Paul's School, Hammersmith, he
was attracted to the libertarian socialist ideas of
William Morris. At Balliol, Oxford from 1908
to 1911 Cole developed a reputation as a
powerful socialist orator. Now, however, he
supported the centralist Fabian Society. After
graduating in 1911 he began a long involve-
ment in the Workers' Educational Association
and briefly lectured in philosophy at Armstrong
College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In 1912 he
returned to Oxford as a prize fellow of
Magdalen College. By then he had begun to
progress through the ranks of the Fabian
Society and was elected in 1914 to the
Executive Committee. In 1918, one year before
the end of his fellowship, he married his fellow
socialist Margaret Postgate, with whom he
would co-author several books. As a Magdalen
fellow he continued to influence students, includ-
ing the slightly younger Harold Laski who
would later become his great socialist intellectual
rival. Upon completion of the fellowship Cole
was involved in various intellectual activities,
including as a political philosopher, socialist
activist, journalist, publisher and researcher,
before returning to Oxford once again in 1925
as reader in economics and fellow of University
College. His association with Oxford would
continue for the rest of his life, including his
tenure from 1944 to 1957 as Chichele Professor
of Social and Economic Theory.
If Cole had been influential as a youthful
Fabian activist, it was as a pluralist socialist
during and for several years after World War I
that he made his greatest impression. His book
The World of Labour had established his repu-
tation in 1913 as a theorist of workers' partic-
ipation. Thereafter, he participated in the guild
socialist movement that had been pioneered
by writers such as A.J. Penty and S.G. Hobson
in A.R. Orage's radical journal, The New Age.

Cole's shift to this associationalist position was
reflected in his resignation from the Fabian
Society in 1915. As the war progressed, he
became the most prominent guild socialist
theorist and organizer. His pluralist political
philosophy provided intellectual support for
his schemes for workers' participatory democ-
racy. One can trace the growth of his enthusi-
asm for guild socialism in the several editions
of The World of Labour published from 1915
to 1919.
Cole's guild socialist ideas differed funda-
mentally from those of some other major
figures in the movement, such as Hobson and
Ramiro de Maeztu. They believed that the
guilds should control the workers and also be
responsible for consumer interests. Cole's
version was more democratic, thus also distin-
guishing his view of direct action from that of
the revolutionary syndicalists. Although, Cole
insisted, wealth should be owned collectively,
workers in the guilds should have real decision-
making authority and power. He was indecisive
regarding the position of consumers, suggesting
sometimes that they would be represented by a
range of associations in a functional congress,
but at other times that they should be repre-
sented by the state or some other inclusive
body. The general point, however, was that
consumers would be represented independently
of the producers' guilds. In 1920, after several
years of writing and organizing as a guild
socialist, he published Guild Socialism
Restated, in which he devised a complex insti-
tutional structure of producer and consumer
organizations, in which at various levels the
relevant decisions would be made. In that book
Cole also discussed the democratic and liber-
tarian socialist philosophy that underpinned
his plans for widespread political participation.
People should participate in ruling rather than
rely on representatives. Democracy, further-
more, should not, as was commonly assumed,
be conceived in a narrowly political sense but
more comprehensively, covering all acts in
which people engaged in association with
others. Otherwise, democracy would be per-
177
COLE
verted by social and economic inequality. This
fuller democracy was, moreover, essential if
people were to experience real freedom, which
required them to enjoy the maximum oppor-
tunity for personal and social self-expression.
Cole first set out his pluralist philosophical
grounds for guild socialism in 1915, in the
paper 'Conflicting Social Obligations' that he
delivered to the Aristotelian Society in London.
In that paper he employed the concept of the
general will innovatively in an attempt to rec-
oncile individualism and concern for the social
good. Throughout his life he would maintain
that the emphasis on will in Rousseau's thought
was a valuable resource for philosophers who
sought grounds for legitimacy in politics. In
1913 he had edited and provided an analytical
introduction to a popular selection of
Rousseau's writings. He also planned to write
a full-length book on Rousseau (a project that
never came to fruition). Nevertheless, Cole did
not accept Rousseau's ideas without crucial
qualification. In his paper of 1915 Cole argued
that there were general and self-oriented aspects
to each person's will, and that a network of
functional associations would be more likely
than the state to express the general-oriented
aspects. On the socialist basis that individuals
and associations should always consider the
good of the community as a whole, he argued
that the general-oriented aspect should guide
the individual's loyalty. This might mean
loyalty to the group when its demands con-
flicted with those of the state.
Cole was seeking a system of participatory
democracy in which citizens would express
their wills, rather than have them represented.
An important question that this had led him to
neglect in 'Conflicting Social Obligations' was
that of how a leader of an association or state
could express the actual general-oriented
aspects of each member's will. He was over-
looking the quite basic point that the leader
could only ever represent, rather than express,
the multiple wills of members. The leader
would need to judge the point at which there
was unity of will.
COLE
In his lecture 'Rousseau's Political Theory' of
1948, published in his Essays in Social Theory
(1950), Cole conceded that there could only
metaphorically be an association with a group
mind, which possessed a common will. He had,
indeed, by then been aware for many years of
the difficulty involved in attempting to argue
that the will of a group comprises the socially
inspired will of each member. The process of
change in his philosophy can be detected in his
book Social Theory, first published in 1920, in
which he conceded that when associations and
the state were judged to express or even
embody the wills of their members, the general
will was being construed as a metaphysical
entity that was in fact imaginary. He stressed
that in using the concept of the general will
one should always bear this in mind, and
remember that strictly speaking there are only
the cooperating wills of the individual
members. Bernard BOSANQUET had, indeed,
intimated that this was so in a critical note on
'Conflicting Social Obligations' that appeared
in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society in
1915. Nevertheless, unlike the far more con-
servative Bosanquet, who argued that the state
and its constitution should interpret the general
will, Cole still believed that will could be inter-
preted and expressed most accurately and effi-
ciently through functional associations.
A problem that such a line of thought must
face is that of finding agreement among citizens
on the association or agent that expressed the
general will in any particular case. Cole, indeed,
did not fully address the question whether such
an agent could in fact exist. To identify such an
agent would, moreover, have involved the rep-
resentative politics that Cole sought to replace
in large part with a form of direct participatory
democracy. He introduced the notion of true
representation, whereby associations with func-
tional objects represented only those aims and
efforts that were relevant to their particular
functions. But he conceded that even this form
of representation would inevitably involve
some distortion of the individual contributions
to be united.
178
In the 1920s Cole became increasingly aware
of the problems of trying to create Utopian
schemes of participatory democracy in existing
society. He also began to take a rather differ-
ent line on the question of will. This can be
detected in his paper 'Loyalties', which he read
to the Aristotelian Society in 1926. What was
now important was for people to realize that
human sociality involves natural will that is
not purely individual. Human sociality was a
matter of natural will 'in becoming if not
wholly in being, in intention if not thoroughly
in fact' ('Loyalties', p. 154). These words illus-
trate the change that had been gradually taking
place in Cole's thought on will. After much
thought he had arrived at the view that the
general will was not something that was nec-
essarily distributed among people in society.
Rather, people should aspire to the general will
and seek the social conditions that would be
natural for a cooperative society. If all can
arrive at an informed concern for the common
good, then they will have arrived at what could
be considered, albeit metaphorically, as a
general will. The harmony that was thus
required would itself require a common plan
that would indicate and promote the common
good. Otherwise associative will might be anti-
social, rather than general-oriented.
Nevertheless, as loyalty involves will and thus
must be voluntary, promotion must not involve
coercion.
With regard to this question of harmony,
Cole had become convinced that Marx's
thought was of great significance. Harmonized
ideas and institutions, he insisted in 'Loyalties',
would in turn need to be in harmony with the
underlying conditions of life, thus helping to
bring about the best possible use of material
resources given the extent of people's power
over nature. People could not, otherwise, be
expected to have the ability to behave in accor-
dance with the general will. By conquering
selfish and selfish motive, he would argue in
Socialism in Evolution in 1938, economic
problems could be addressed and humanity set
free for the pursuit of happiness.

As Cole's political philosophy underwent
change, so did his position within the socialist
political spectrum. Indeed, in 1926 he rejoined
the Fabian Society and adopted a social demo-
cratic position from which, three years later, he
would publish a major study: The Next Ten
Years in British Social and Economic Policy
(1929). Aware that the social conditions of the
times were not conducive to the associational
promotion of the general will, he was con-
cerned with what could be achieved for and by
the working class in the short term.
Nevertheless, his radicalism never entirely
waned, and in the 1930s he experimented with
Marxism, elements of which he tried to amal-
gamate with his idiosyncratic version of social
democracy. In What Marx Really Meant
(1934) he acknowledged that he now consid-
ered Marx's methods of social analysis to be
crucial to the understanding of fundamental
economic and political problems in the twenti-
eth century. Furthermore, he never abandoned
guild socialism as an ideal, hinting in various
places during that decade and the 1940s that
this would be his aim once permitted by social
and economic conditions.
In addition to his role as political philoso-
pher, Cole wrote and published widely as an
economist, historian, political scientist and jour-
nalist. Indeed, the bibliography below, which
includes some major philosophical writings and
other relevant works, lists only the most sig-
nificant items, selected from dozens of books
and hundreds of other works including pam-
phlets, chapters and articles. Interested readers
will find that his political philosophy creeps
into many of the writings he produced in his
other roles as a public, socialist intellectual.
His final major role towards the end of his life
was as a historian of political thought. The
fruits of his labour in this role were the five
volumes of his A History of Socialist Thought
(1953-60), which is still widely considered to
be unsurpassed as a comprehensive, lively study
in its field.
In recent decades Cole's own ideas have
attracted renewed interest. The pluralist tradi-
179
COLE
tion in political philosophy has been revived as
many thinkers have sought associationalist
alternatives to state centralism and bureaucracy
on the one hand, and liberal individualism and
free market capitalism on the other. As argu-
ments for significant participation and influence
at the group level have flourished, Cole's ideas
have been considered as a resource. Although
his early work was not without weaknesses,
readers who track his intellectual development
will find that his later writings do much to
overcome those weaknesses.
Cole's work is notable for another reason.
Although Cole clung to his associational ideas,
he came to recognize that the participatory
democracy he craved faced stiff opposition in
the existing social and economic climate. As he
experimented with combinations of social
democratic and Marxist tenets, he did so with
realistic political, social and economic policy in
mind. Considering that, since the revival of
political philosophy in the early 1970s, the
most prominent works in the discipline have
been normative ones written in the hope of
influencing public policy, Cole's philosophy is
characterized by a remarkably fashionable
quality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Intro.), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social
Contract and Discourses (1913; rev. edn
1993).
The World of Labour (1913; rev. edns, 1915,
1917, 1919).
'Conflicting Social Obligations', Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 15
(1914-15), pp. 140-59.
Self-Government in Industry (1917, rev. edns
include 6th edn, 1922).
Guild Socialism Restated (1920; repr. with
an Introduction by Richard Vernon, New
Brunswick, 1980).
Social Theory (1920; 2nd edn, 1921; rev. 3rd
edn, 1923).
'Loyalties', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 26 (1925-6), pp. 151-70.
Theories and Forms of Political Organisation
COLE
(1932).
What Marx Really Meant (1934).
Socialism in Evolution (Harmondsworth,
1938).
Essays in Social Theory (1950).
Other Relevant Works
Workshop Organization (Oxford, 1923;
repr. with an Introduction by A.I. Marsh,
1973).
The Next Ten Years in British Social and
Economic Policy (1929).
'Socialist Control of Industry', in Sir Stafford
Cripps et al., Problems of a Socialist
Government (1933).
A Plan for Democratic Britain (1939).
'A Socialist Civilization', in H.J. Laski, H.
Nicolson, H. Read et al., Programme for
Victory (1941).
Fabian Socialism (1943; repr. 1971).
'Plan for Living', in G.D.H. Cole et al., Plan
for Britain (1943).
A History of Socialist Thought, 5 vols (1953;
1954; 1956, 2 pts; 1958, 2 pts; 1960; repr.
2002).
Further Reading
Bosanquet, Bernard, 'Note On Mr. Cole's
Paper', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 15 (1914-15), pp. 160-62.
Carpenter, L.P., G.D.H. Cole: An Intellectual
Biography (Cambridge, 1973).
Cole, Margaret, The Life of G.D.H. Cole
(1971).
Hirst, Paul Q. (ed.), The Pluralist Theory of
the State: Selected Writings of G.D.H.
Cole, ].N. Figgis and H.]. Laski (London
and New York, 1989).
, Associative Democracy: New Forms
of Economic and Social Governance
(Cambridge, 1994).
Laborde, Cecile, Pluralist Thought and the
State in Britain and France, 1900-25
(London and New York, 2000).
Lamb, Peter, 'G.D.H. Cole on the General
Will: A Socialist Reflects on Rousseau',
European Journal of Political Theory, vol.
180
4, no. 3 (2005).
Runciman, David, Pluralism and the
Personality of the State (Cambridge, 1997).
Stears, Marc, 'Guild Socialism and
Ideological Diversity on the British Left,
1914-1926', Journal of Political
Ideologies, vol. 3, no. 3 (1998), pp.
289-305.
Wright, A.W., G.D.H. Cole and Socialist
Democracy (Oxford, 1979).
Peter Lamb
COLLINGWOOD, Robin George
(1889-1943)
Robin George Collingwood was born at
Gillhead, Cartmel Fell in the Lake District on
22 February 1889 and died from pneumonia
after a series of strokes at Lanehead, the family
home in Coniston on 9 January 1943. His
mother was Edith Mary Isaacs (1857-1928), a
talented artist and pianist, and his father
William Gershom Collingwood (1854-1932),
artist, writer, archaeologist and secretary to
Ruskin. Collingwood was educated at home in
the Lake District until he was thirteen years of
age by his father, mother and sisters. He learnt
Greek, Latin, and ancient and modern history
in the mornings, and was left to his own devices
for the rest of the day to pursue collective and
individual activities. He was taught to sing,
play the piano, draw and paint. The preco-
cious young Collingwood acquired a passion
for philosophy after encountering Kant at the
age of eight. At thirteen Collingwood attended
Rugby School. The quality of teaching failed to
stimulate and he applied himself to independent
study in medieval Italian history and early
French poetry. He followed in his father's foot-
steps in 1908 by entering University College,
Oxford. It was here that R.Cr. Collingwood
developed bad study habits that were to have

an adverse effect upon his health. In order to
indulge his insatiable appetite for learning he
became an insomniac, and a semi-recluse. In
1910 he took a first in Classical Moderations
and in 1912 a first in literae humaniores, and
was elected to a philosophy fellowship at
Pembroke College, where, with a brief spell in
the Admiralty Intelligence Service from 1916 to
1918, he remained until 1935. At the Admiralty
he became an expert on the Benelux countries.
In 1927 he obtained a highly unusual university
lectureship in philosophy and Roman history.
He had been taught by F. J. Haverfield, the
pioneer of the academic study of Roman
Britain, as an undergraduate and was some-
thing of his protege and therefore wished to
continue his work, which he did very success-
fully until he set it aside to complete more
pressing matters in 1938. After his father
became ill Robin Collingwood helped him out
as joint editor, between 1924 to 1933, of
Transactions of the Cumberland and
Westmoreland Antiquarian and Archaeological
Society. He became a fellow of the British
Academy in 1934, and in 1935 he was
appointed Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical
Philosophy, a position he resigned in 1941
because of ill health. He left Oxford for his
late father's home, Lanehead, in Coniston with
Kathleen Edwardes, whom he married in 1942.
They had a daughter Teresa. Collingwood also
had a son and a daughter by his first wife Ethel.
When a young student, Collingwood had
been influenced by the Oxford realist John
COOK WILSON, and felt some affinity with G.E.
MOORE, but changed his faltering allegiance
over to idealism under the influence of J.A.
SMITH, who championed Italian idealism in
Britain. Because of his distancing from the
realism that came to dominate Oxford
Collingwood portrayed himself as much more
isolated than he actually was. Collingwood
was in fact quite gregarious and became close
friends with C.CJ. WEBB, J.A. Smith and
Harold H. JOACHIM, the second edition of
whose The Nature of Truth Collingwood
prepared for publication. Collingwood fre-
181
COLLINGWOOD
quently called upon J.D. MABBOTT, and had
considerable admiration for AJ. AYER, whose
Language Truth and Logic Collingwood
addresses in his An Essay on Metaphysics
(1940). Many of Collingwood's philosophical
opponents were fellow delegates or advisers to
Oxford University Press and warmly supported
the publication of his books (with the exception
of An Autobiography because of its personal
comments about colleagues and its political
radicalism).
Collingwood was very close to his father,
who was not only Ruskin's secretary and biog-
rapher, but had been taught by Bernard
BOSANQUET and was impressed by the crusad-
ing social philosophy of T.H. Green.
Collingwood disliked being associated with the
idealist movement in philosophy, and under-
played it considerably in his Autobiography,
but privately, for example in his letters to the
Italians Guido de Ruggiero and Benedetto
Croce, he readily confessed to being a Hegelian.
While his first book Religion and Philosophy
(1916) leaned somewhat towards Hegelianism
and shows traces of Giovanni Gentile's influ-
ence, it was nevertheless described by
Macmillan's reader as so thoroughly conven-
tional in its Anglicanism that he wondered why
the author did not take orders. Collingwood's
Hegelianism becomes unrelenting in his major
works between 1919 and 1932. This was cer-
tainly the case with his unpublished works,
Libellus de generatione and Truth and
Contradiction (only one chapter of which
survives). In his 1919 address 'Ruskin's
Philosophy' Collingwood attributes to Ruskin
a Hegelian philosophy, despite Ruskin's hos-
tility to metaphysics as a futile and dangerous
undertaking. In both of his philosophical books
of the 1920s Collingwood is engaged in idealist
projects. In Speculum mentis (1924)
Collingwood explores experience as a whole
and tries to determine why the unity of experi-
ence had been fragmented into the forms of
experience. This fragmentation he regards as a
sign of the crisis of civilization, only one of the
many features, including positivism and illu-
COLLINGWOOD
minism, that he was later to attribute to the
condition.
He traces the emergence of the forms of expe-
rience, relying to some extent on Gentile and
Croce, through art, religion, science, history
and philosophy, each of which has its practical
counterpart, play, convention, utilitarian ethics,
duty and absolute duty. The forms of experi-
ence are examined from the point of view of the
participants, and each form creates its own
object of study. Each is found to be self-con-
tradictory: history, for example, purports to
retrieve the whole world of fact that is in itself
an impossible objective. Each of the forms in
being self-contradictory becomes transformed
into a higher, each being linked to the others in
an ascending scale of forms. Philosophy is the
pinnacle of the forms of experience and
includes within itself what is positive in all of
the other forms, at a much higher level of
attainment. In Speculum mentis Collingwood
had, following Croce, taken the differentiae of
art to be pure imagination. In Outlines of a
Philosophy of Art (1925) he explores this idea
much more thoroughly and places it in the
linked hierarchy of a scale of forms. It is here
that he uses the analogy of a spiral staircase to
capture the relation in which each of the forms
stands to the others. His aim is not merely to
follow the likes of Coleridge and Croce, but
also to draw out the full implications of con-
ceiving art as pure imagination.
Collingwood significantly revised his ideas on
aesthetics in his 1938 book The Principles of
Art, in which art is no longer characterized as
pure imagination, but is taken to be the expres-
sion of emotion, and is differentiated from craft
and magic because both posit a utilitarian
means-end relationship. In craft the object is
conceived for its practical purpose, and then
made to fulfil that purpose, for example an
ornate drinking vessel. It may have aestheti-
cally pleasing features, but it is not art. In
magic, a certain type of emotion is evoked, for
example in ritual or dance, in order to be chan-
nelled into a specific practical outcome. This is
not art proper because in arousing certain
182
emotions it is also concerned to suppress others.
In a war dance, for example, emotions of
courage and fearlessness are aroused, while
cowardice and fear are suppressed. Art as
amusement is accused of being a form of
pseudo-art because it deliberately arouses
emotions that are immediately dissipated,
without being channelled into any practical
activity. The arousal of the emotion becomes a
substitute for action. Hence pornography is a
substitute for sex, instead of the arousal of
emotion in magic, for example, where a fertil-
ity ritual is the preparation for sex. Art proper
in Collingwood's view is not premeditated, it is
the articulation of an emotion that is acknowl-
edged in its expression. The work of art and the
expression of emotion are one and the same,
they cannot be separated, and the one is not
first formulated and then expressed. During
the 1960s and 1970s Collingwood's Principles
of Art was required reading in aesthetics.
Collingwood's popularity waned with a move
away from the history of aesthetics. The
problem Collingwood set himself was why it
shouldn't be a matter of indifference whether or
not something was art. In identifying art with
the expressions of emotion, and the suppression
of this emotion with the corruption of a healthy
consciousness, resulting in serious consequences
for society, he was able to conclude that when
a person expresses his or her feelings suffi-
ciently to make them accessible to others, that
is to evoke those very same emotions in others,
that person has produced a work of art.
The Principles of Art exemplifies the features
of what Collingwood identified as a philo-
sophical concept, as opposed to a scientific
concept, in his 1932 Essay on Philosophical
Method. In the view of T. Malcolm KNOX, it is
Collingwood's most accomplished book, and
one that the author thought: his most fully
polished. In it he declared that the aim of phi-
losophy is to come to know better and differ-
ently something that is already understood.
This was not unusual in itself. G.E. Moore,
Bertrand RUSSELL and L. Susan STEERING on
the surface would have concurred. The simi-

larity is, however, superficial. The method of
the Cambridge realists was 'decompositional'.
Each subject had to be broken down into its
structure and components. This is very much
the method identified with G.E. Moore's
common sense philosophy. For Collingwood,
the method was regressive, concerned with the
postulates, principles and presuppositions from
which conclusions are drawn. Philosophy is
normative insofar as it articulates the ideals
and criteria by which a man or woman can
judge his or her conduct successful or unsuc-
cessful.
The main purpose of An Essay on
Philosophical Method is to differentiate the
philosophical from the scientific concept. The
received view of the scientific concept,
Collingwood suggests, is that the species of a
genus are distinct, exclusive and exhaustive.
The species of a philosophical concept have an
entirely different logical relation to each other.
Each species of a philosophical genus does not
embody the generic essence to an equal degree,
and therefore their relation is not that of co-
equals. The essence is realized in various
degrees, and therefore in different forms related
to each other in a scale of forms, the higher of
which embody the generic essence more ade-
quately than the lower, but nevertheless include
in themselves that which they supersede. In this
respect, for example, all action includes utili-
tarian, regularian and dutiful elements. The
higher both negates the lower and affirms it.
The species of a philosophical genus are related
in that they overlap by combining differences of
degree with differences of kind, and in uniting
opposites and distincts. What this means is that
a species of a genus that embodies a certain
variable, or essence, will differ from other spec-
ifications in degree, and in the way that it spec-
ifies or exhibits the generic essence it differs
from others in kind. In Collingwood's view,
there is no point on the philosophical scale of
concepts at which the generic essence is com-
pletely absent, and each specification in being
a different specification is a fusion of oppo-
sites and distincts. Take the philosophical
183
COLLINGWOOD
concept of goodness. Goodness and badness are
not merely two distincts. Goodness is present to
a low degree in badness, and is therefore con-
sidered bad or opposed to it in relation to those
degrees above it. In itself, it has the character of
good, but in relation to the higher embodiment
it is considered thoroughly bad. At every point
on the scale, opposition and distinction are
fused.
Collingwood admired the argument of AJ.
Ayer's Language Truth and Logic.
Collingwood's An Essay on Metaphysics was a
clever attempt to rescue metaphysics from
Ayer's contention that because metaphysical
statements were neither analytical, true by def-
inition, nor inductive and capable of conform-
ing to the principle of verification, they were
nonsense. Collingwood argued that metaphys-
ical statements were in fact absolute presup-
positions, that is they were ideas upon which
the rest of our knowledge was built: they are
the postulates upon which thought rests. In
Newtonian mechanics, for example, the
absolute presupposition upon which the whole
theory rests is that everything has a cause. This
is a metaphysical statement, an absolute pre-
supposition and not a proposition.
Ayer was wrong in thinking that the verifi-
cation principle had to be applied to meta-
physical statements. Instead, for Collingwood,
the work of the metaphysician is to detect what
absolute presuppositions were being absolutely
presupposed at any given time. In
Collingwood's view, Ayer had quite rightly
described metaphysical statements as lacking
the features of propositions, but Ayer failed to
determine what sort of statements they were.
Since metaphysical propositions were not
analytic because they were not true by defini-
tion, nor empirical and hence could not be val-
idated with reference to fact, they fell, for
Collingwood, into a third category of state-
ments, the philosophical, to which the question
of truth and falsity is inapplicable. Absolute
presuppositions are absolutely presupposed, or
they are not. They are not like propositions,
that is answers to questions, and therefore
COLLINGWOOD
whether they are true cannot logically arise.
We do not derive absolute presuppositions
from experience.
Collingwood's political philosophy has been
relatively neglected until recently, mainly
because in the Preface to the Idea of History
(1946) Malcolm Knox disparaged it as the
ravings of a dying man. The New Leviathan
(1942) was originally to be the subtitle of a
book called The Principle of Politics. The
Principles of History (what survives of it), the
book that Collingwood abandoned to complete
his political philosophy, and the New
Leviathan are integrally related. History, for
Collingwood, is self-knowledge of the mind,
and the New Leviathan gives an account of
the development of such a mind. In the New
Leviathan history is the highest form of theo-
retical reason. The New Leviathan is concerned
with the levels of practical reason, utility, right
and duty, and their relation to society and civ-
ilization. Duty, the highest level of practical
reason, is the counterpart of the highest form of
theoretical reason, history.
Freedom is the essence of mind, and is culti-
vated by reason which gradually eliminates
capriciousness from rational choice. Obstacles
to free rational choice, or self-determination,
indicate the existence of force. While the elim-
ination of force in the body politic can never be
complete; the ideal of civility presupposes its
gradual reduction among members of the same
community, between communities in their
external relations, and between ourselves and
nature. Collingwood's political philosophy is a
self-conscious, if unusual, contribution to the
social contract tradition. It attempts to provide
the social contract with a historical dimension.
He wants to show that at a certain level of cog-
nitive competence, the level being different from
community to community, a continuous
process of conversion from the non-social to the
social condition occurs within the body politic.
In other words, there is a constant replenish-
ment of the ruling class by the ruled. Even
though it is a historical philosophy, it is not rel-
ativist. Reason defined as the gradual elimina-
184
tion of caprice, freedom as the capacity for
rational choice, and civility as the gradual elim-
ination of force constitute universal criteria by
which to judge civilizations and the degree to
which barbarism, that is the conscious subver-
sion of these ideals, is present in them.
Collingwood's most notable contribution to
philosophy has been in the area of the philos-
ophy of history. Collingwood is the reference
point against which all serious discussions of
the subject are judged. The posthumously pub-
lished Idea of History is a philosophical exam-
ination of the development of historical prin-
ciples from Thucydides to the present, and a
reasoned examination of the conditions of
attaining historical knowledge. History is an
organized body of knowledge, and therefore
scientific in the broadest sense of the term. It is
based upon rational principles and inferred
from evidence. Collingwood, following Dilthey,
argues that we are at home everywhere in this
historically understood world and that there is
no meaning in it apart from that to be dis-
cerned in the activities of the actors in their
interrelations with each other. He attempts to
establish the autonomy of historical under-
standing in the face of positivist claims to the
monopoly of knowledge.
For Collingwood, the past is a living past. In
being known it has to be re-thought, or re-
enacted, by the historian. This is the central
theme throughout the book and is used to
sustain all of Collingwood's most important
doctrines, such as the overcoming of the mind
and its objects dichotomy, the idea that the
past is dead, the unification of the inside and the
outside of an event, and the argument that the
historian is the criterion of his own evidence.
The Idea of History is not just a work of phi-
losophy, it is also intensely political. History for
Collingwood is self-knowledge of the mind.
Historical knowledge of the past better
prepares us for the problems we face in the
present and future. This assumes that there is
no impermeable distinction between theory
and practice. It is practice that sets the problems
out of which theory arises, and it is back to

practice that theory returns in its conclusions.
A false theoretical conception cannot help but
have insidious implications for practice. If each
person is regarded as a means to an end, then
such a utilitarian foundation to one's thought
is bound to affect the relations in which a
person stands to others.
Collingwood's The Principles of History
was never completed, but parts IV and V of
The Idea of History and much of An
Autobiography provide discussions of what
Collingwood intended to cover. In An
Autobiography we have the logic of question
and answer. The meaning of each statement
can only be fully understood in relation to
the question that gave rise to it. Each state-
ment is an answer to a question, and in turn
each question is itself an answer relative to
another prior question. It followed for
Collingwood that no two propositions could
be accused of being contradictory unless they
were meant as answers to the same question.
The logic of question and answer was central
to Collingwood's claim that there are no
perennial problems in philosophy. Critics of
the Idea of History have suggested that
Collingwood attributes too high a degree of
rationality and purposiveness to historical
actors. They claim that human beings are
often unreasonable. To confine historical
enquiry to intentional rational activity is to
make it far too intellectualist. In The
Principles of History we get a more qualified
account of what he actually meant by restrict-
ing the subject-matter of history to reflective
thought. He does not delude himself into
thinking that human beings are perfectly
rational. He believes that they are only inter-
mittently so. He did not wish to exclude
unreasonable actions from the subject-matter
of history. Unreasonable thoughts are just as
interesting as those of reasonable people. Even
unreasonable people have reasons, they are
simply have bad ones. The Idea of History
uncompromisingly distinguished between
thoughts and feelings. Emotions are incapable
of being re-enacted, whereas thought can be
185
COLLINGWOOD
revived time and time again in different
contexts. Only thoughts are re-enactable.
Emotions and feelings are the context in which
thoughts occur. The Principles of History
requires us to modify this rigid distinction,
which in any case is uncharacteristic of
Collingwood, who was dissatisfied with
dualisms of any kind. Invoking the theory of
mind found in The Principles of Art, language
as the expression of rational thought does not
entirely exclude the emotions. Collingwood
distinguishes between the essential and the
inessential emotions. There are necessarily
essential emotions implicated in thought and
inextricably bound up with the thoughts of the
person who performs an action. For example,
fear may accompany an act of bravery.
Collingwood suggests that if we know what a
person's thoughts are we know what essential
emotions accompanied them.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Religion and Philosophy (1916).
Ruskins Philosophy (Kendal, 1922).
Speculum mentis: Or the Mirror of the Mind
(Oxford, 1924).
Outlines of a Philosophy of Art (Oxford,
1925).
An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford,
1933).
The Principles of Art (Oxford, 1938).
An Autobiography (Oxford, 1939).
An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford, 1940;
rev. edn, ed. Rex Martin, 1998).
The New Leviathan (Oxford, 1942; rev. edn,
ed. David Boucher, 1992).
The Idea of Nature (Oxford, 1945).
The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946; rev. edn,
ed J. van der Dussenn, 1993).
Essays in Political Philosophy', ed. David
Boucher (Oxford, 1989).
The Principles of History, ed. William H.
Dray and J. van der Dussen (Oxford,
1999).
further Reading
Ayer, A.J. Language Truth and Logic (1936).
COLLINGWOOD
Boucher, David, The Social and Political
Thought ofR. G. Collingwood
(Cambridge, 1989).
Connelly, James, Metaphysics, Method and
Politics (Exeter, 2003).
D'Oro, Giuseppina, Collingwood and
Metaphysics of Experience (2002).
Dray, William H., History as Re-Enactment
(Oxford, 1995).
Dussen, Jan van der, History as a Science
(The Hague, 1981).
Helgeby, Stein, Action As History (Exeter,
2004).
Hughes-Warrington, Marnie, How Good an
Historian Shall I Be (Exeter, 2004).
Johnson, Peter, R. G. Collingwod: An
Introduction (Bristol, 1998).
Mink, Louis O., Mind, History and Dialectic
(Bloomington, 1969).
David Boucher
COLLINSON, Diane June (1930-)
Diane Collinson was born in Westcliff-on-Sea on
13 June 1930. She was educated at Loughton
County High School, the Royal Academy of
Music (LRAM), and at the University of London
(BA) and the University of Essex (PhD). The main
part of her academic career was spent at the Open
University, where she was, at the time of her
retirement, senior lecturer in the Department of
Philosophy, having been appointed as staff tutor
in 1970.
Collinson's major contribution to philosophy
has been in the teaching of the subject, particularly
in the development of the distance learning courses
involved in Open University study. Beyond this,
she has also written, edited and contributed to a
number of publications introducing the works of
key thinkers (e.g., Fifty Major Philosophers, 1987)
as well as student guides to the writing of good
English (e.g., Plain English, 1992).
186
Her research interest has focused on the area
of aesthetics. In her paper 'Aesthetic Education'
(1973) she argues that aesthetic education
should primarily foster the ability to become
involved with an artwork aesthetically rather
than the ability to discuss artworks ('aesthetic
involvement' rather than 'aesthetic commen-
tating'). Among other elements, such a foster-
ing involves the development of two qualities of
mind: open-mindedness and willingness to
explore. The self-forgetting of the aesthetic
attitude thus characterized is further explored
in 'Ethics and Aesthetics are One' (1985), in
which she interprets WITTGENSTEIN'S remark
which forms the title of the paper as being
based in the sub specie aeternitatis attitude
which he attributes to both aesthetics and
morality, 'an attentive seeing that is unimpeded
by any manifestation of the empirical self
('Ethics and Aesthetics are One', p. 271).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Aesthetic Education', in Glenn Langford and
D.J. Connor (eds), New Essays in the
Philosophy of Education (1973).
'The Aesthetic Theory of Stephen Dedalus',
British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 23
(Winter 1983), pp. 61-73.
'Ethics and Aesthetics are One', British
Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 25 (Summer
1985), pp. 266-72.
fifty Major Philosophers: A Reference Guide
(1987).
Other Relevant Works
'Art and Imagination' [book review], Music
and Letters, vol. 56 (July-October 1975),
pp. 390-92.
'Schopenhauer' [book review], Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 31 (October 1981), pp.
381-2.
'Heart and Mind' [book review],
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 33 (October
1983), pp. 410-11.
'The Philosophy of Schopenhauer' [book
review], Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 34
(October 1984), p. 510.

Writing English (Aldershot, 1986).
(with Rob Campbell), Ending Lives (Oxford,
1988).
'Aesthetic Experience', in Oswald Hanfling
(ed.), Philosophical Aesthetics: An
Introduction (Bristol, 1992).
(with Gillian Kirkup, Robin Kyd and Lynn
Slocombe), Plain English (Buckingham,
1992).
(with Robert Wilkinson), Thirty-Five
Oriental Philosophers (1994).
(Ed. with Stuart Brown and Robert
Wilkinson), Biographical Dictionary of
Twentieth-Century Philosophers (1996).
'Introduction', in Wordsworth Classics
Edition of John Locke, Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (Ware, 1998).
(Ed. with Stuart Brown and Robert
Wilkinson), One Hundred Twentieth-
Century Philosophers (1998).
(with Kathryn Plant and Robert Wilkinson),
Fifty Key Eastern Thinkers (1999).
Further Reading
'Diane Collinson', in Who's Who in
Education (1974).
Stephen Watt
COOK WILSON, John (1849-1915)
John Cook Wilson was born in Nottingham on
6 June 1849 and died on 11 August 1915 in
Oxford. The son of a Methodist minister, he
was educated at the Grammar School of Derby.
He came up to Balliol College in 1868, where
he read both classics and mathematics. He also
studied philosophy with T.H. Green and B.
Jowett and went to Gottingen in 1873 or 1874
to study with R.H. Lotze. He was elected fellow
of Oriel in 1874 and Wykeham Chair of Logic
in 1889, in replacement of Thomas Fowler.
He became fellow of New College in 1901 and
187
COOK WILSON
fellow of the British Academy in 1907. He was
awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws
from the University of St Andrews in 1906.
The bulk of his publications were in his
chosen fields of study, classics and mathemat-
ics. In the former, he published a study on the
structure of seventh book of Aristotle's
Nicomachean Ethics whose main claim was
that the seventh book contained traces of three
versions probably written by some peripateti-
cian later than Eudemus. However, in a post-
script to the revised version (1912), he claimed
that the variants were probably different drafts
written by Aristotle himself. He also published
in 1889 a polemical pamphlet, On the
Interpretation of Plato's Timaeus, written in
reaction to R.D. Archer-Hind's 1888 edition of
Plato's Timaeus. Some of Cook Wilson's
smaller points of language were later discussed
and sometimes approved of by A.E. TAYLOR
and F.M. Cornford in their own commentaries.
In mathematics, Cook Wilson published a
study in geometry and two papers on proba-
bility theory. His work was generally regarded
as insufficiently cognizant of the new mathe-
matical theories of his day and had no impact.
However, his work on Bernouilli's theorem on
inverse probabilities displayed an objectivist
view of probabilities which influenced William
KNEALE'S Probability and Induction (1949).
In philosophy, where his subjects of predilec-
tion were logic and the theory of knowledge,
Cook Wilson published precious little during
his lifetime. After his death, his lecture notes,
privately circulated pamphlets and letters were
collected in the two volumes of Statement and
Inference (1926). (All references hereafter are to
this book.) Cook Wilson's reluctance to publish
is due in great part to his belief that 'the
(printed) letter killeth' (p. 871). Cook Wilson's
influence on Oxford philosophy thus came
from his teaching and from pupils such as
H.W.B. JOSEPH, H.A. PRICHARD and Sir W.D.
Ross. Although these authors did not share a
particular set of views, one can nevertheless
speak of Cook Wilson as having been the ini-
tiator of a movement, which is commonly
COOK WILSON
referred to as 'Oxford realism'. Since the likes
of Prichard and Joseph were clearly influential
teachers during the 1920s and 1930s, these
'realists' helped sway Oxford away from
idealism (hence COLLlNGWOOD's resentful
remarks in his Autobiography) and pave the
way to analytical philosophy; Cook Wilson
had, mainly through Prichard, a profound
influence on figures such as W. Kneale, H.H.
PRICE, G. RYLE and, from the 1930s, J.L.
AUSTIN, I. BERLIN, H.L.A. HART and J.O.
URMSON. His ideas thus had a profound and
lasting impact on Oxford philosophy through-
out the twentieth century.
Cook Wilson believed that the 'true method'
in philosophy is to 'try to get at the facts of con-
sciousness and not let them be overlaid as is so
commonly done with preconceived theories'
(p. 328), and he believed concomitantly that
ordinary language is 'true to distinctions which
have value in our consciousness' (p. 102) and
thus that 'distinctions current in language can
never safely be neglected' (p. 46). Indeed,
according to him,
distinctions made or applied in ordinary
language are more likely to be right than
wrong. Developed, as they have been, in
what may be called the natural course of
thinking, under the influence of experience
and in the apprehension of particular truths,
whether of everyday life or of science, they
are not due to any preconceived theory.
(Statement and Inference, p. 874)
Thus, Cook Wilson believed that we did not
need 'reflective thought', which would be
'abstract', but careful scrutiny, with ordinary
language as a guide and safeguard, of the 'facts
of consciousness'. Furthermore, he considered
it 'repugnant to create a technical term out of
all relation to ordinary language' (p. 713). This
shows that, the influence of G.E. MOORE on
Austin notwithstanding, Cook Wilson should
be given his rightful place at the origin of
'ordinary language philosophy'. But his stance
is not fully 'linguistic' yet and his writings are
188
replete with analyses of the 'facts of con-
sciousness' that are reminiscent of descriptive
psychology of the Brentano school, a fact
repeatedly emphasized by Ryle in his criticisms
of Husserl and Heidegger.
Although a student of Green, Cook Wilson
moved away from idealism. He came to believe
that 'there is no necessity in the thought or
apprehension save the apprehension of an
objective necessity' (p. 630). Using the example
of a collision between two billiard balls (p. 74),
he argued against F.H. BRADLEY that the fact
that an object is apprehended does not imply
that it is merely a part of the 'apprehending
consciousness' and he further criticized
Bradley's doctrine of relations in a short
passage which was considered as definitive in
Oxford (pp. 692-5). The keystone of Cook
Wilson's realism was his claim that knowing
makes no difference to what is known:
You can no more act upon the object by
knowing it than you can 'please the Dean
and Chapter by stroking the dome of St.
Paul's' ... Obviously if we 'do anything to'
anything in knowing, it is not done to the
object known, to what we know, for that
simply contradicts the presuppositions of the
act of knowledge itself.
(Statement and Inference, p. 802)
Unfortunately, Cook Wilson did not explain
what he meant by 'apprehension'. It appears to
designate an immediate cognitive relation
between a subject and an object, where the
subject does not doubt the existence of the
object. This notion is at the same time close to
Aristotle's noesis and to RUSSELL'S 'acquain-
tance'. However, Cook Wilson's particular
brand of realism had distinguishing features
that were to mark Oxford philosophy through-
out the twentieth century. As opposed to
Cambridge realists such as Moore or Russell or
to his colleague Thomas CASE, Cook Wilson
stood in the tradition of Aristotle and Thomas
Reid and rejected all epistemological interme-
diaries or 'representatives' in perception (p.

769). He flatly rejected that notion as 'not only
useless in philosophy but misleading' (p. 772),
arguing first that it is impossible to know
anything about the relation between the repre-
sentative and the object, since one can never
truly compare the former to the latter, second,
that representationalist theories are always in
danger of leading towards idealism, since one
must then somehow 'prove' the existence of
the object which is, so to speak, 'behind' its rep-
resentative, and, finally, that all such theories
are begging the question, since the representa-
tive has to be apprehended in turn by the mind;
not only this further 'apprehension' remains
unexplained, it would require that the mind
be equipped with the very apparatus that the
representationalist theories were, to begin with,
devised to explain. This stance is at the source
of numerous criticisms at Oxford of epistemo-
logical intermediaries such as the notion of
'sense-data', from Prichard's 'Appearances and
Reality' to Austin's Sense and Sensibilia.
Cook Wilson also sharply criticized the tra-
ditional theory of judgement, rejecting the dis-
tinction between judgement and inference and
claiming instead that 'if we take judging in its
most natural sense, that is as decision on
evidence after deliberation, then inferring is
just one of those forms of apprehending to
which the words judging and judgement most
properly apply' (p. 86). He argued further that
to judge is to decide, thus that judgement
implies indecision and doubt (p. 92). Since
knowledge excludes doubt, it is not judgement.
Accordingly, Cook Wilson criticized idealists
for also thinking that judgement is a common
form which includes knowledge, along with
belief, opinion, etc. (pp. 86-7). Instead, he
claimed that knowledge, in the form of 'appre-
hension', is presupposed by all other activities
of thinking. This led him to a peculiar stance on
the nature of the relation between knowledge
and belief: 'belief is not knowledge and the
man who knows does not believe at all what he
knows; he knows it' (p. 100). It is a conse-
quence of this view that one cannot define
knowledge in terms of belief; as Prichard put it
189
COOK WILSON
in Kant's Theory of Knowledge: 'Knowledge is
sui generis and therefore a "theory" of it is
impossible. Knowledge is simply knowledge,
and an attempt to state it in terms of something
else must end in describing something which is
not knowledge.' This is a distinctive feature of
many Oxonian theories of knowledge, which
was upheld by Prichard, Price, Austin and,
today is upheld by John McDoWELL and
Timothy Williamson.
Cook Wilson further argued that 'the con-
sciousness that the knowing process is a
knowing process must be contained within the
knowing process itself (p. 107) or that
knowing that p implies knowing that one
knows that p. This was later argued for by
Prichard and, on other grounds, by Jaakko
Hintikka. But Cook Wilson also appears to
have committed himself to the view that it is
necessary that 'if I know that /?, then /?' or, as
Austin put it in 'Other Minds': 'If I know, I
can't be wrong.' Error about knowledge is
ruled out. To avoid some obvious difficulties
here, Cook Wilson introduced considerations
about a further 'form of consciousness' which
he called 'being under the impression that'
(pp. 109-111), such as seeing the back of Smith
on the street and, without thinking, mistaking
him for Jones. This notion played an important
role, also under names such as 'thinking
without question' or 'taking for granted', in
the writings of Prichard and Kneale, while Price
considered this as an important contribution to
the traditional 'occurrence', as opposed to dis-
positional, analysis of beliefs. But, as H.P.
GRICE argued, there is then no guarantee that
the totality of our knowledge is not just 'being
under the impression that'.
Cook Wilson offered Euclid's Axiom of
Parallels as a prime example of knowledge
which is sui generis. He simply believed that this
axiom is 'absolutely self-evident' (p. 561) and
that the idea of a non-Euclidean space for
which it would not hold is a 'chimera' (p. 456).
His claim was that he 'knows' or 'apprehends'
that Euclid's axiom is true, in his restricted and
strong sense of 'knowing': if one knows that /?,
COOK WILSON
then p is the case. His only reply to someone
who would claim not to apprehend the truth of
p would be to try and remove, by exercises or
otherwise, whatever prejudice preventing that
person from apprehending that p is true. This
obvious mistake greatly undermines Cook
Wilson's theory.
In conjunction with his realist epistemology,
Cook Wilson defended a moderate nominalist
view of universals as 'particularized qualities'
(pp. 335, 343, 713), which is close to that of
G.F. STOUT. He thus argued that perception of
an individual involves apprehension in thought
of a universal, which is 'a real unity in objects'
(p. 344). However, he could not accept the
view of universals as abstract entities or as
'mere thought of ours' (pp. 335, 344) and
argued that universals are not distinct from but
depend on the particulars that have them (pp.
157,208). According to Cook Wilson, what is
apprehended in the particular is a 'characteris-
tic being' (the nature of which he did not elu-
cidate), which is neither apprehended as uni
versal nor as particularized (p. 343). He argued
further that it is a mistake to 'reflect' on this
only to conceive of the universal as 'abstract'
and he claimed that the relation of the univer-
sal to the particular is 'something sui generis,
presupposed in any explanation of anything it'
(p. 348) and that it 'requires no explanation' (p.
335): the mistake of philosophers had been to
try and 'explain the nature of the universal in
terms of something other than itself (p. 348)
Cook Wilson further claimed that 'ordinary
language' reflects faithfully 'a true metaphysics
of universals' (p. 208) and argued that in a
statement such as 'a is a circle' one could not
substitute for a anything else than a noun for a
particular but that the advent of 'reflective and
abstract thought' (p. 349) brought with it
impossible linguistic forms such as 'circularity
is a universal', which implies by analogy that
'circularity' is a particularization of the uni-
versal 'universalness'. But, Cook Wilson
argued, 'in the ordinary and correct use of uni-
versal, different universals may indeed have a
universal common to them, but they are never
190
particulars of this common universal, only dif-
ferentiations of it' (p. 350). He thus concluded
that 'the treatment of the form of statement
with the universal for its nominative must be a
fallacy' (p. 350). These views on universals ar
at the source of some of the least convincing
consequences of Cook Wilson's views, such as
his unsuccessful attempt to resurrect Plato's
doctrine of 'unaddible numbers' against
Dedekind's now standard definition of conti-
nuity (pp. 352-3), the argument being that
numbers, understood as universals, 'cannot be
counted' (p. 348), and his erroneous belief that
Russell's paradox is a 'mere fallacy of language'
(p. ex); he argued at length (pp. 422-32,
477-500,501-18) against Russell that there is
no more class of class than 'universalness' can
be said to be the universal of universals.
Cook Wilson was at any rate a staunch
opponent of modern mathematical logic
because he believed that logical inferences are
exhausted by syllogistic and that 'mathematical
inference as such is not syllogistic' (p. xcvi).
His aversion for modern logic had a lasting
impact: it was only in the 1950s that mathe-
matical logic was taught for the first time at
Oxford. But at least one of his theses in philo-
sophical logic played a significant role: namely
his description of indicative conditionals of the
form 'if p, then cf as 'the apprehension of a con-
nexion between questions or problems based
upon a knowledge of reality' (p. 539). As such
they are not bona fide statements but the
expression of relations 'of problems, not of
statements' (p. 552). This view was taken up by
Ryle, who argued in '"If", "So", and
"Because"' that conditionals, not being state-
ments, cannot be assessed as true or false.
Cook Wilson wrote almost nothing on moral
issues. However, in 'Rational Grounds of Belief
in God' Cook Wilson argued that in the case of
'emotions as are proper to the moral con-
sciousness', such as the feelings of gratitude or
reverence, 'reason in them can only manifest
itself emotionally' (p. 860) and there must be
something of which they are 'a real experience'
(p. 861). Cook Wilson claimed further that the

feeling of 'reverence with its solemnity and
awe' is in itself 'something quite sui generis' (p.
861) and, from this, that the existence of the
feeling of reverence presupposes that God
exists. Thus, he did not merely sketch an
attempt at a proof of the existence of God, but
also put forth a form of moral realism based on
the epistemic role of emotions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotelian Studies I. On the Structure of the
Seventh Book of the Nicomachean Ethics,
ch. i-x (Oxford, 1871; 2nd edn, 1912).
On an Evolutionist Theory of the Axioms, an
Inaugural Lecture (Oxford, 1889).
On the Interpretation of Plato's Timaeus.
Critical Studies with Reference to a Recent
Edition (Oxford, 1889).
'Inverse or "a posteriori" Probability',
Nature, 13 December 1900, pp. 154-6.
'Probability - James Bernoulli's Theorem',
Nature, 14 March 1901, pp. 465-6.
'On the Platonist Doctrine of the asumblhtoi
ariqmoi', The Classical Review, vol. 18
(1904), pp. 247-60.
On the Traversing of Geometrical Figures
(Oxford, 1905).
Statement and Inference with Other
Philosophical Papers, 2 vols, repr. (Bristol,
2002).
Other Relevant Works
Prichard, H.A., Kant's Theory of Knowledge
(Oxford, 1909), chap. 6.
Price, H.H., Perception (Oxford, 1932).
, 'Some Considerations about Belief,
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol
35 (1934-5), pp. 229-52.
Kneale. W., Probability and Induction
(Oxford, 1949).
Prichard, H.A., Knowledge and Perception.
Essays and Lectures (Oxford, 1950).
Austin, J.L., Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford,
1962).
Price, H.H., Belief (1969).
Ryle, G., '"If", "So", and "Because"', in
Collected Papers (Oxford, 1971), vol. 2,
191
COOK WILSON
pp. 234-49.
Austin, J.L., 'Other Minds', in Philosophical
Papers, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1979), pp.
76-116.
McDowell, J., Meaning, Knowledge, and
Reality (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), essays
17,18.
Williamson, T., Knowledge and its Limits
(Oxford 2001).
Further Readings
Beck, R.L., 'John Cook Wilson's Doctrine of
the Universal', The Monist, vol. 41 (1931),
pp. 552-82.
Collingwood, R.G., Autobiography, rev. edn
(Oxford, 1978).
Foster, M.B., 'The Concrete Universal: Cook
Wilson and Bosanquet', Mind, vol. 40
(1931), pp. 1-22.
Furlong, E.J., 'Cook Wilson and the Non-
Euclideans', Mind, vol. 50 (1941), pp.
122-39.
Grice, H.P., Studies in the Way of Words
(Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
Hintikka, J., Knowledge and Belief (Ithaca,
1962), chap. 5.
Joseph, H.W.B., 'Professor John Cook
Wilson', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 7 (1916), pp. 555-65.
Marion, M., 'Oxford Realism: Knowledge
and Perception', British Journal for the
History of Philosophy, vol. 8 (2000), pp.
299-338, 485-519.
, 'Introduction', in J. Cook Wilson,
Statement and Inference, repr. (Bristol,
2002), pp. v-xxvii.
Passmore, J., A Hundred Years of Philosophy
(Harmondsworth, 1968), chap. 10.
Prichard, H.A., 'Professor John Cook
Wilson', Mind, vol. 28 (1919), pp.
297-318.
Robinson, R., The Province of Logic: An
Interpretation of Certain Parts of Cook
Wilson's 'Statement and Inference' (1931).
Tacelli, R.K., 'Cook Wilson as Critic of
Bradley', History of Philosophy Quarterly,
vol. 8 (1991), pp. 199-205.
COOK WILSON
Travis, C, The Uses of Sense (Oxford, 1989).
Urmson, J.O., Trichard and Knowledge', in
J. Dancy, J.M.E. Moravcsik, C.C.W.
Taylor (eds), Human Agency. Language,
Duty, and Value (Stanford, 1988), pp.
11-24.
Mathieu Marion
COOPER, Neil Louis (1930-)
Neil Cooper was born in Ilford, Essex on 25
April 1930. He was brought up in the London
area and educated at the City of London
School, winning a State Scholarship in classics
tenable at Balliol College, Oxford in 1947.
After national service he went up to Oxford in
1949, and he was awarded a Domus Exhibition
in classics at Balliol in 1950. He gained a first
in Classical Honour Moderations (1951) and
also in literae humaniores (1953). From 1953
to 1955 he was a senior scholar in philosophy
at New College, Oxford, gaining a BPhil (phi-
losophy) in 1955. In 1954 he won the
University's John Locke Scholarship (Prize) in
mental philosophy. In 1956 he was appointed
lecturer in philosophy at Queen's College,
Dundee (University of St Andrews). He was
promoted to a senior lectureship in the
University of Dundee in 1967 and a readership
in 1969, becoming Acting Head of the
Department of Philosophy in 1980 and subse-
quently Head in 1982. In 1981 he was
appointed to a personal chair in moral philos-
ophy and in 1992 to the established Chair of
Philosophy, retiring in 1995 as professor
emeritus and becoming an honorary lecturer in
the department. He was elected fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1987. In 1991 he
was British Council link fellow to the Institute
of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences, Beijing, also visiting and giving
lectures at other Chinese universities. He joined
192
the editorial board of the Philosophical
Quarterly in 1982 and was Editorial Chairman
from 1985 to 1992. He was President of the
Mind Association in 1994.
Cooper's book The Diversity of Moral
Thinking (1981) argues for a new approach to
traditional and important problems of moral
philosophy. Cooper claims that a balanced def-
inition of what a morality is can be arrived at
through recognition of the diversity of moral
judgements. He goes on to argue that although,
because of their direction of fit, there is nothing
to which fundamental moral judgements have
to correspond, they are justifiably classed with
assertions; moreover, to be rational, they have
to respond not only to structural constraints
but also to factual constraints arising from the
human condition. By applying these constraints
we can resolve conflicts between arguments in
support of competing normative conceptions of
moral thinking, for example conflicts between
moralities which contain reasons and those
which do not. While recognizing that any res-
olutions of the conflicts or antinomies arising
from the diversity of moral thinking are con-
testable, the author claims that a combination
of structural and factual constraints yields a
complex argument for the rationality of
altruism, thus resolving any conflict between an
individual's morality, the contemporary social
morality and traditional morality which has
altruism at its core. The possibility of disci-
plined argument in moral theory ensures that,
although moral judgements do not admit of
objectivity in any strong sense, the logical
respectability of moral discourse is vindicated.
Another area that attracted Cooper's atten-
tion in the 1990s is epistemology of under-
standing. In his paper on this subject he aimed
to question the conventional wisdom on two
points: firstly, he argues that cognitive under-
standing is neither identical with nor reducible
to knowledge-why, and that it is a multiform
capacity which adds value to knowledge, true
belief and human creative activity. Essential to
understanding is epistemic ascent, the rising
above bare knowledge, to assess, appraise,

compare, contrast, emphasize, connect and so
on. Different modes of understanding are dis-
tinguished and an accompanying vocabulary of
mode-indicators (expressing Fregean 'colour').
Secondly, he argues for the unity and continu-
ity of understanding and rejects any
Diltheyesque idea of a great divide between so-
called 'explanation' and 'understanding', a
divide which has sometimes been used to make
a sharp demarcation between the natural
sciences and the humane studies and sciences.
The idea that there is in every case a uniquely
right understanding is rejected and the role of
multiple descriptions in both the natural
sciences and humane understanding is empha-
sized.
Cooper's other philosophical interests and
publications cover a wide range, including
Greek philosophy (Plato and Aristotle), phi-
losophy of logic and language, philosophy of
science and philosophy of law. It is not possible
to do justice to this range here. He has contin-
ued his philosophical activities, including
involvement in research groups, since his retire-
ment, and his most recent work on vagueness
reflects this involvement.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'The Concept of Probability', The British
Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol.
16 (1965), pp. 226-38.
'Two Concepts of Morality', Philosophy, vol.
41 (1966), pp. 19-33; repr. in G. Wallace
and A.D.M. Walker (eds), The Definition
of Morality (1970), pp. 72-90.
The Law of Excluded Middle', Mind, vol. 87
(1978), pp. 161-80.
The Diversity of Moral Thinking (Oxford,
1981).
'Between Knowledge and Ignorance',
Phronesis, vol. 31 (1986), pp. 229-42. On
Plato's Republic, Book 5.
The Art of Philosophy', Philosophy, vol. 66
(1991), pp. 169-76.
'Understanding', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 68 (1994),
pp. 1-26.
193
COPLESTON
The Epistemology of Understanding',
Inquiry, vol. 38 (1995), pp. 205-15.
'Paradox Lost: Understanding Vague
Predicates', International Journal of
Philosophical Studies, vol. 3 (1995), pp.
244-69.
'Plato's Theaetetus Reappraised', Apeiron,
vol. 33 (2000), pp. 25-52.
'Steps Towards a Speech-Act Theory of
Vague Predicates', read at St Andrews,
http://weka.ucdavis.edu/~ahwiki/pub/
Arche/VaguenessSeminarl8Aug2004/Speec
h-ActTheoryofVaguePredicatesCooper,
accessed December 2004.
Other Relevant Works
(Ed. with David Bell), Meaning, Truth and
Knowledge: Reflections on the Analytic
Tradition (Oxford, 1990).
(Ed. with Pascal Engel), New Inquiries into
Meaning and Truth (Brighton, 1991).
Further Reading
Harrison, Jonathan, Critical Study of The
Diversity of Moral Thinking, 'Pure
Morality and Impure Truth', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 129 (1982), pp.
374-81; repr. in a volume of Harrison's
collected papers, Ethical Studies, vol. 1
(Aldershot, 1993), pp. 225-32.
Stuart Brown
COPLESTON, Frederick Charles (1907-94)
Frederick C. Copleston was born near Taunton
in Somerset on 10 April 1907 and died in
London on 3 February 1994. His family back-
ground was a rather privileged one. His father
worked in the upper reaches of the Indian Civil
Service, and two of his uncles were bishops of
the Anglican Communion. He was sent as a
boarder to Marlborough public school at the
COPLESTON
age of nine, where Louis MacNeice, John
Betjeman and Anthony Blunt were among his
fellow students. He wrote once that he was 'cer-
tainly not miserable' at Marlborough, though it
seems that his interest in religious matters
isolated him somewhat from his peers (Memoirs
of a Philosopher, p. 14). During his time there he
became progressively disenchanted with the
Church of England, and in his final year, he was
received into the Roman Catholic Church. His
attraction to mystical prayer played a not
insignificant role in this conversion, the writings
of St Teresa and St John of the Cross in partic-
ular influencing him. He had come to feel that
mystical religion of this type was, as he put it, 'a
foreign body in the Church of England' (ibid.,
p. 31). Another crucial factor in this conversion
seems to have been his conviction that any
church founded by the Incarnate Son of God
must speak with an authoritative voice.
Copleston went up to Oxford in 1925, where
he studied classics and had his first encounter
with philosophy. The moral theories of H.W.B.
JOSEPH, H.A. PRICHARD and W.D. Ross domi-
nated discussion at the time, but his own
interest was only aroused when he came to
read metaphysics. Towards the end of his
undergraduate years he had become quite
involved with philosophy, and the compre-
hensive sweep of the Hegelian system in par-
ticular appealed to him.
After Oxford Copleston spent a year
studying for the secular priesthood at Oscott
College. He decided, however, to join the
Society of Jesus, and began his novitiate at
Roehampton in September 1930. One might
have anticipated that his Hegelianism would
constitute a problem when he went on to take
his courses in philosophy at Heythrop College,
Oxfordshire; but in fact he 'became or claimed
to have become a Thomist', as he somewhat
enigmatically put it towards the end of his life
(Memoirs of a Philosopher, p. 68). His
Memoirs unfortunately provide no account of
the intellectual considerations that presumably
influenced this philosophical transition, if that
indeed is what it was.
194
After his theological studies Copleston was
ordained in 1937, and following a memorable
visit to a turbulent Germany, he began what
was to be his life's work as a historian of phi-
losophy. He spent the war years lecturing to
Jesuit students at Heythrop College. His first
book, Friedrich Nietzsche: Philosopher of
Culture (1942), was well received, though as
the second edition (1975) reveals, he later came
to have considerable reservations in its regard.
A second book, Arthur Schopenhauer:
Philosopher of Pessimism (1946), was also a
considerable success.
It was, however, Copleston's dissatisfaction
with the standard seminary textbooks on the
history of philosophy that led to his greatest
contribution as an author. He projected a
complete history of the subject in three
volumes, one on the ancients, the second on
medieval thought, and a third on modern and
contemporary philosophy. In fact, the work
was eventually to consist of nine volumes in the
hardback edition. It is noteworthy that the first
volume, published in 1946, presupposes a
knowledge of Greek, Latin and English, the
second, third and fourth volumes merely Latin
and English, while subsequent volumes, five to
nine, require English alone. (This may explain
why a tenth volume never appeared!) Such a
continuous decline in linguistic expectation is,
of course, partly to be accounted for by the
enormous enlargement in Copleston's prospec-
tive readership, as his History was eagerly
adopted by university departments in England,
Ireland, Australia and the United States - in fact
throughout the whole of the English-speaking
world.
In the 'Introduction' to the first volume, the
author asserted his belief in a philosophia
perennis, and claimed that this could be iden-
tified with 'Thomism in a wide sense' (A
History of Philosophy, vol. 1, p. 7). Yet there
is surely at least an echo of his earlier
Hegelianism in the notion of the development
of philosophy in and through the succession of
thought systems that is also adumbrated there.
He clearly hoped to be able to show that

Thomism in a wide sense' develops in and
through the successive philosophical systems. In
practice, however, he was unable to carry this
argument through in subsequent volumes. This
does not imply, of course, that the thesis is
indefensible, or even that Copleston himself no
longer held it. In his final publication, the
Memoirs already cited, he reaffirmed his com-
mitment to a 'religiously oriented metaphysics'.
He conceived this metaphysics as a construction
of reason that is carried forward in such a way
that it facilitates a 'movement of self-criticism
and self-limitation ... puncturing determinate
systems'. This metaphysics, he wrote, thus
makes possible, though it does not necessitate,
'a reaching out towards an ultimate reality
transcending all that is visible or that can be
conceptually mastered, though it can be
thought in terms of analogies' (Memoirs of a
Philosopher, p. 216). It is surely not fanciful to
detect in these words the influence of both the
medieval Dominican and the nineteenth-
century German idealist.
It remains, nevertheless, that as Copleston's
great History developed, this complex thesis
was quietly dropped, and the author himself
disappeared from his work in the best post-
modern manner. Subsequent volumes confined
themselves to presenting dispassionate accounts
of the thought of the various philosophers
selected for treatment (Memoirs of a
Philosopher, p. 95). The enormous value of
the middle and later volumes in particular
comes from the author's detachment and the
degree of objectivity this made possible. His
quite extraordinary gifts for accurate exposition
and balanced judgement evoke continuing
admiration in readers. If parts of the History are
now beginning to show their age in terms of
more recent scholarship, the series still enjoys
the confidence of many university teachers of
remarkably varied commitment.
Copleston published a number of further
excellent works in philosophy in the years that
followed. His very useful book on Aquinas
from the 1950s was among the earliest attempts
to mediate the thought of this thinker to readers
195
COPLESTON
influenced by the new movements of logical
positivism and linguistic analysis. This was sup-
plemented with a fuller History of Medieval
Philosophy in 1972. Religion and Philosophy
came out in 1974; Philosophers and
Philosophies appeared in 1976; On the History
of Philosophy became available in 1979; his
D'Arcy Lectures at Oxford were published
under the title Philosophies and Cultures in
1980; the Gifford Lectures on Religion and the
One: Philosophies East and West were issued
in 1982; and his Philosophy in Russia: From
Herzen to Lenin and Berdyaev appeared in
1986. All these books were widely and
favourably reviewed, and each made its own
important contribution. Their author, never-
theless, continued to be best known for his
superb and wide-ranging History of
Philosophy.
Copleston came to the notice of a much
wider audience when the famous and much
anthologized radio debate between himself and
Bertrand RUSSELL on the topic of the existence
of God took place in 1948. Though the Jesuit
felt he was 'debating with a national
monument' (Memoirs of a Philosopher, p.
138), he defended his theistic stance extremely
well, and many listeners considered that he had
the best of the exchange. He himself liked to
recount the story of the two undergraduates,
one a theist and the other an atheist, who
listened to the debate. At the end the theist had
become an atheist and the atheist a theist!
Towards the end of his life Copleston pointed
out on a number of occasions that the tradi-
tional arguments for the existence of God
involve certain presuppositions, and he felt that
more emphasis should be placed on the exam-
ination of these presuppositions. 'A formally
valid argument for the existence of God is
doubtless possible', he wrote, 'given certain
premises. But as the premises may be chal-
lenged, it is important to state and discuses
them' (ibid., p. 135).
Copleston believed that his debate with
Russell was less successful academically than
the radio debate on logical positivism with A J.
COPLESTON
AYER the following year, 1949 (Memoirs of a
Philosopher, pp. 138-9). At that time, the
second edition of Language, Truth and Logic
was only four years old, and logical positivism
was still a vibrant force. If this version of pos-
itivism has long since succumbed to powerful
criticisms in academic circles, Copleston always
regarded it as a continuing and pervasive
general outlook in Western culture. 'A good
many people believe implicitly that to be or to
exist is to be a possible (in principle) object of
sense-perception, and logical positivism can be
seen as attempting to justify theoretically this
widespread implicit belief (Memoirs of a
Philosopher, p. 139). Such a belief, of course,
engenders a certain closure to ultimate meta-
physical inquiry, as well as being quite inimical
to many forms of religion.
Copleston enjoyed travel and knew most of
the countries of Europe well. During the 1950s
and 1960s he taught for the first semester of
each academic year at the Gregorian University
in Rome, returning to lecture at Heythrop from
February to June. This continued until 1968,
when he became Dean of Philosophy at
Heythrop. When that college migrated from
Oxfordshire to London in 1970, he was
appointed its first Principal, and he became
also a Professor of the University of London.
Though he did not much enjoy administration,
he remained in both posts until 1974, when he
retired. After retirement, Copleston continued
to travel and to teach. He was a visiting pro-
fessor at the University of Santa Clara in
California for a time, and also taught at the
University of Hawaii at Honolulu. He visited
Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India
and Japan, before finally returning to Oxford
and to London, where he spent his last years.
Copleston's massive scholarly achievements
did not imply a remote intellectualism. This
eminently theoretical man was utterly con-
vinced of the importance of practice. He often
inveighed against the conception of philoso-
phy as a kind of game played in academic
reservations without any connection with
concrete moral judgement. (It is plausible to
196
suggest that he had in mind certain strands of
the linguistic philosophy dominant in Britain
during the twenty or more years that followed
World War II.) This same engagement was also
central to his religious vision. Initially attracted
into the Roman Catholic Church largely on
account of its strong authoritarian spirit, he
very much welcomed the change of emphasis in
that church that followed Vatican II. He
insisted that Christianity involves the consistent
effort to contribute 'not only to the establish-
ment of better relations between individuals as
such, but also to the realization of a harmo-
niously united world-society'. This in particu-
lar, he wrote, requires the overcoming of 'social
injustice and the transcending of war as a
means of settling disputes or differences' (ibid.,
p. 224).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Friedrich Nietzsche: Philosopher of Culture
(1942; 2nd edn, 1975).
Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosopher of
Pessimism (1946).
A History of Philosophy, vol. 1, Greece and
Rome (1946; reiss. 1976),
A History of Philosophy, vol. 2, Medieval
Philosophy, Augustine to Scotus (1950;
reiss. 1976).
A History of Philosophy, vol. 3, Ockham to
Suarez(1953-,rdss. 1978).
Aquinas (1955; reiss. 1991).
A History of Philosophy, vol. 4, Descartes to
Leibniz (1958; reiss. 1976).
A History of Philosophy, vol. 5, Hobbes to
Hume (1959; reiss. 1976).
A History of Philosophy, vol. 6, Wolff to
Kant (1960; reiss. 1976).
A History of Philosophy, vol. 7, Fichte to
Nietzsche (1963; reiss. 1976).
A History of Philosophy, vol. 8, Bentham to
Russell (1966; reiss. 1976).
A History of Medieval Philosophy (1972).
Religion and Philosophy (Dublin, 1974).
A History of Philosophy, vol. 9, Maine de
Biran to Sartre (1975).
Philosophers and Philosophies (1976).

On the History of Philosophy and Other
Essays (1979).
Philosophies and Cultures (Oxford, 1980).
Religion and the One: Philosophies East and
West (1982).
Philosophy in Russia: from Herzen to Lenin
and Berdyaev (Tunbridge Wells, 1986).
Memoirs of a Philosopher (Kansas City,
1993).
Other Relevant Works
The Existence of God; A Debate between
Bertrand Russell and F. C. Copleston', in
Bertrand Russell, Why I am Not a
Christian and Other Essays (1957).
'In Appreciation of Bernard Lonergan. From
an Historian of Philosophy', Continuum,
vol. 2 (1965), pp. 311-13.
(with A.J. Ayer), 'Logical Positivism - A
Debate', in Paul Edwards and Arthur Pap
(eds), A Modern Introduction to
Philosophy: Reading from Classical and
Contemporary Sources (New York, 1965),
pp. 726-56.
T. J. Lynch
CORBETT, John Patrick (1916-99)
Patrick Corbett was born in Send, Surrey on 5
March 1916 and died on 4 December 1999. He
was educated at the Royal Naval College in
Dartmouth and at Magdalen College, Oxford,
where he was an undergraduate from 1933 to
1937. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in
the Royal Artillery in 1940 but was captured
and was a prisoner of war in Germany from
1940 to 1945. He was a fellow of Balliol
College, Oxford from 1945 to 1961, when he
was appointed as the first Professor of
Philosophy at the new University of Sussex in
Brighton. He was thereafter Professor of
Philosophy at Bradford University from 1972
197
CORBETT
to 1976. Corbett was President of the Mind
Association in 1969. He held visiting appoint-
ments at Yale and Toronto.
Corbett had a particular interest in social
philosophy and in the way ideas impinged on
the conduct of human life. He had an interest
in the intellectual aspects of the project of
European integration and took a fellowship
under the auspices of the Council of Europe to
explore the ideas that might underpin such
integration, such as systematic innovation,
natural law, progress, competitive enterprise,
democracy, liberty and equality. His first book,
Europe and the Social Order (1959), gave the
results of those studies.
Corbett became the academic editor of the
Hutcheson series of 'Philosophers at Work'
books, whose authors belonged to 'the liberal,
empiricist traditions of British thought' and
which sought to show the relevance of philos-
ophy to problems drawn from contemporary
life. His Ideologies (1965) was his own contri-
bution to this series and in it he, like the others,
sought 'to re-express, in a form that fits the
time, the liberal vision of man and society'
(Ideologies, Foreword). He defined 'ideology'
broadly as
any intellectual structure consisting of: a set
of beliefs about the conduct of life and the
organisation of society; a set of beliefs about
man's nature and the world in which he lives;
a claim that the two sets are interdependent;
and a demand that those beliefs should be
professed, and that claim conceded, by
anyone who is considered a full member of
a certain social group.
(Ideologies, p. 12)
Examples of 'ideologists' (who propagate ide-
ologies in the sense specified) to whom he gives
some attention are Marxists, Catholics and
(American) Democrats. The first part of
Ideologies presents these three sets of beliefs
and a second, longer, part presents a sceptical
critique of them. Corbett attempts, in a third,
to mediate in the dispute between ideologist
CORBETT
and sceptic. His own method is, he claims,
'both logical and sociological'. It is a mistake,
he believes, to oppose these as if they were
'separate realms'. On the contrary 'the neces-
sities of thought are always partly relative to the
necessities of the society where the thought is
taking place' (ibid., p. 195). Thus he argues
that 'concepts like those of freedom, equality,
and man, have a special regulative function in
the economy of thought, which both ideologists
and sceptics misunderstand' (ibid., p. 194). He
is not wholly negative in his view of ideology
since such systems of belief are what he calls
'complementary probings of the potentialities
of man' (ibid., p. 195).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Europe and the Social Order (1959).
Ideologies (1965).
Other Relevant Works
'The Concept of Welfare in Economies',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 27 (1953), pp. 211-30.
'Innovation and Philosophy', Mind, vol. 68
(1959), pp. 289-308.
'Ethics and Experience', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 43 (1969),
pp. 1-10.
Stuart Brown
CORNFORTH, Maurice Campbell
(1909-80)
Maurice Cornforth was born in the Willesden
district of London on 28 October 1909 and
died in Islington in late 1980. He attended
University College School, where he became a
vegetarian and socialist follower of George
Bernard Shaw, and, according to his school
friend Stephen Spender, 'wrote plays quite as
good as' his mentor (Grossman et al., p. 234).
198
In 1925 he went up to University College
London as a student of philosophy, hoping to
find the answer to the Shavian question: 'What
is the "life force" of human history?'
(Communism and Philosophy, p. 2). He grad-
ually became interested, however, in logical
analysis and came to think that such questions
were meaningless. After graduating from
London in 1929 Cornforth went to Trinity
College, Cambridge, where he took a special-
ized course - he was the only student - on
logic. He was taught by MOORE, BRAITHWAITE
and, for one year, WITTGENSTEIN himself. He
was thus provided, as he later claimed, 'with a
good deal of insight into modern "logico-
analytic philosophy"' (ibid., pp. 2-3).
Cornforth took the second part of the Moral
Sciences Tripos in 1931 and did well enough to
win a three-year scholarship for postgraduate
work at Trinity. Moore, in particular, seems to
have had high hopes for him. Cornforth had
not forgotten his socialist ideals, however, and
he marked the conclusion of his examinations
by becoming a member of the Communist
Party. His work as a party activist gradually
eclipsed his research on logic and, in 1933, he
dropped out of Cambridge to become the full-
time District Organizer for the Communist
Party in the Eastern Counties.
Cornforth was, in the years that followed,
preoccupied with his duties as a party worker.
Nonetheless he found time to prepare a paper
for the Joint Session of the Mind Association
and the Aristotelian Society in 1934, when he
joined a symposium with Max BLACK and John
WISDOM on the question whether analysis was
a useful method in philosophy. He took the
opportunity to offer a Marxist critique of
analytic philosophy. He argued that the whole
tendency of philosophical analysis was in the
direction of phenomenalism, a tendency that he
claimed had been 'enormously accelerated' by
the work of Wittgenstein ('Is Analysis a Useful
Method in Philosophy', p. 97). He supported
his argument by reference to the reductive
analysis offered by Wisdom in his contribu-
tion, and, in particular, by reference to

Wisdom's remark that individuals are more
fundamental than societies and sense-data more
fundamental than individuals. He concluded
that modern analytic philosophy was just
another version of bourgeois idealism to which
the enlightened materialism of the Marxist was
opposed.
Cornforth seems to have left philosophy to
one side until after the outbreak of war, when
he was rejected by the army on medical
grounds and sent instead to do farm work,
which occupied him in the early 1940s. He
found that 'hoeing long rows of sugar beet'
was conducive to reflection and began to think
that it was 'about time' that he put his knowl-
edge of philosophy 'to some use' (Communism
and Philosophy', p. 4). He thus embarked on his
first book, Science versus Idealism, though it
was not published until 1946. Cornforth, fol-
lowing Engels and in line with his own Joint
Session paper, conceived of philosophy as
divided into 'two camps': the progressive, 'sci-
entific' materialists, on the one hand, and the
reactionary bourgeois forces of idealism, on
the other. The account was over-simple, to say
the least, and was criticized as such even by the
then leading philosophical spokesman of the
Communist Party of Great Britain, John Lewis.
Lewis used counter-examples to show that
materialists could sometimes be reactionary,
as Hobbes was on some matters, such as his
egoism, and that idealists could sometimes be
progressive, as Kant was on the arguments for
the existence of God (Lewis, p. 14).
Philosophy, for Cornforth, was a general
account of the nature of the world and our
place in it. Marxist philosophy was, in partic-
ular, 'a means of meeting the needs of people by
helping them understand the nature of the
world and man's place within it, thus enabling
us to help change the world and transform
human society' (Science versus Idealism, p. 12).
Both views of philosophy were equally
outlawed by the movement Cornforth refers to
broadly as 'positivism', and his In Defence of
Philosophy (1950) was specifically directed
against this critique of traditional philosophy
199
CORNFORTH
which he saw as becoming increasingly influ-
ential in Britain and whose influence he wished
to see curtailed.
In addition to critiques of contemporary
British philosophy from a Marxist perspective,
Cornforth wrote what he took to be orthodox
statements of Marxism. The most important of
these was his Dialectical Materialism: An
Introduction (1954), which consisted of three
volumes entitled Materialism and the
Dialectical Method, Historical Materialism and
Theory of Knowledge. This third volume
includes a materialist account of the mind-body
relation and a theory of ideology. The work
went to three editions, with many reprints, and
underwent considerable revision as Cornforth
took note of criticisms that had been made and
sought to make his position more defensible.
He later acknowledged that he had been, in his
early work, too doctrinaire:
in the original edition of the three volumes,
not only was Marxism regarded as (to quote
a phrase of Lenin) 'omnipotent because it is
true', but Stalin was the greatest Marxist,
and the Soviet Union, under the direct
guidance of Stalin, could, as the current
phrase went, 'do no wrong'.
(Communism and Philosophy, p. 5)
Where Cornforth remained, at least in his own
estimation, a Cambridge philosopher was in the
importance he attached to clarity.
Soon after he had published his Dialectical
Materialism, Cornforth began to consider that
some of his earlier views needed to be revised,
including the 'two camps' theory of philosophy
to which Lewis had objected. He also began to
think he should think further about some
issues, such as 'how "values" could be founded
not on merely personal or class preferences but
on "objective" grounds' (ibid., p. 7). This
rethinking resulted in the 'rather drastic'
revision he made of his first two books in the
amalgamated edition of 1955. It also led him to
explore a more constructive rapprochement
between Marxism and the later philosophy of
CORNFORTH
Wittgenstein, which he had to concede was
moving away from subjectivism and positivism.
Cornforth's Marxism and the Linguistic
Philosophy (1965) was, he himself later
admitted, 'as much a critique of some of my
own earlier ideas about Marxism in the light of
linguistic philosophy as a critique of linguistic
philosophy in the light of Marxism'
(Communism and Philosophy, p. 8).
By the time he produced the second edition
of his reply to Karl POPPER'S critique of
Marxism in 1977 Cornforth had moved a long
way from his publications of thirty years
before. In The Open Philosophy (1968) he
offers a critique of Popper's demarcation cri-
terion that anticipates that of LAKATOS.
Cornforth denies that scientists abandon
theories just on the basis of a single 'falsifying'
instance. They may rather make use of a 'sup-
plementary hypothesis' which accommodates
the anomalous evidence and so protects the
broad theoretical structure. Thus, he claimed,
Kepler's work on the irregularities of the plan-
etary orbits could be accommodated within
the broad framework of Ptolemaic thought.
Likewise, a Marxist can find ways of accept-
ing the existence of full employment in a cap-
italist economy without abandoning his theo-
retical framework. And in this way, or so
Cornforth claims, Marxism is no different
from the physical sciences.
Yet, on many matters, Cornforth finds
common ground with Popper. He agrees about
rejecting historicism but denies this is a Marxist
commitment. He agrees about the desirability
of an open society and an open philosophy, but
argues that Marxism is an 'open philosophy'
and that its goal is an open society. The 'dog-
matism' and 'tyranny' that Popper thought
essential to Marxism are, on the contrary, 'alien
outgrowths on Marxism, which arose in one
particular (heroic but unhappy) period now
coming to an end' (The Open Philosophy,
p. 23). So far from Marxism being a system of
dogmas, according to the later Cornforth, 'it
systematises a way of thinking to open our
minds to the appreciation of things as they are
200
and the practical possibilities of changing them
for the better' (ibid., p. 21).
In his last book, Communism and
Philosophy (1980), Cornforth accepted the
implication of thinking of Marxism as a
'science' in a twentieth-century sense. Marx
and Engels should be seen, he now acknowl-
edged, as on a par with Darwin and Galileo, as
founders of new ways of scientific thought, but
not as incorrigible or beyond 'reform'. Thus,
for instance, Cornforth, apparently encouraged
by discussions with J.D. BERNAL, came to
regard the dialectical materialism of Engels as
a residually Hegelian doctrine which a modern
Marxist was not obliged to accept. He sought
to draw a distinction between reformers, such
as he had become, and 'dogmatists' (such as he
once was) and 'revisionists' who compromise
Marxism by accommodating it to contempo-
rary bourgeois philosophy. The roots of a
reformed Marxism should, he came to think, be
sought, not in philosophy at all, but in a social
science such as sociology. But his distinction
between reformers and the despised 'revision-
ists' was not developed well enough to clear
him from the suspicion of having become, at
the end of the day, just another revisionist
himself.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Is Analysis a Useful Method in Philosophy?',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 13 (1934), pp. 90-118.
Science versus Idealism: An Examination of
'Pure Empiricism' and Modern Logic
(1946).
In Defence of Philosophyy against Positivism
and Pragmatism (1950).
Dialectical Materialism: An Introduction, 3
vols (1954; 3rd rev. edn, 1961).
Science versus Idealism: In Defence of
Philosophy, against Positivism and
Pragmatism (1955).
Philosophy for Socialists (1959).
Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy
(1965).
The Open Philosophy and the Open Society:

A Reply to Dr Popper's Refutations of
Marxism (1968).
Communism and Human Values (1972).
Communism and Philosophy: Contemporary
Dogmas and Revisions of Marxism (1980).
Other Relevant Works
The Battle of Ideas in Science (1949).
(Ed.), Reader's Guide to the Marxist Classics
(1952).
further Reading
Barnes, W.H.F., Review of Science versus
Idealism, Philosophy, vol. 23 (1948), pp.
280-83.
Grossman, R.H.S. et al., The God that Failed:
Six Studies in Communism (1950).
Hinton, J.M., Review of Marxism and
Linguistic Philosophy, Philosophy, vol. 42
(1967), pp. 284-7.
Lewis, John, Marxism and Modern Idealism
(1947).
Roberts, Edwin A., The Anglo-Marxists: A
Study in Ideology and Culture (New York,
1997).
Stuart Brown
COULSON, Charles Alfred (1910-74)
Charles Coulson was born in Dudley on 13
December 1910 and died in Oxfordshire on 7
January 1974. Dudley was in the heart of the
'black country' manufacturing district, where
the father of Charles and his twin John was
Principal of the local technical college and
Superintendent of the Sunday school in the
Wesleyan Methodist chapel, his mother a teacher
descended from a line of inventors. In 1920 his
father moved to Bristol, as His Majesty's
Inspector responsible for technical education in
the West of England. Charles attended Clifton
College and won a scholarship to study mathe-
201
COULSON
matics at Cambridge in 1928. After graduation,
he stayed on to research, and became part of the
team of scientists and mathematicians grouped
around the Rutherford laboratory who were
unravelling the secrets of the atom.
At Cambridge he came under the influence of
the Methodist chaplain W.H. Beales, and in
1931 underwent a conversion, similar to several
of those described graphically a few months
earlier in the book A Group Speaks. As a prac-
tising scientist with a powerful religious expe-
rience, Coulson was influenced by Arthur
EDDINGTON, a leading scientist at Cambridge,
Charles RAVEN, pacifist and theologian, and
J.D. BERNAL. His writing on science and religion
was assessed - remarkably for a publication
devoted to scientific achievement - in the bio-
graphical memoir published by the Royal
Society after his death (Altmann and Bowen,
1974). His 1953 Riddell Memorial Lectures,
published as Christianity in an Age of Science,
and the widely read paperback Science and
Christian Belief (1955), based on the John
Calvin McNair Lectures of 1954, established
him as a leading speaker and debater on science
and religion. At a time when militant logical
positivism and resurgent scientific humanism
were receiving considerable attention in the
media, and popularizing the view that science
had undermined religion, Coulson's Science
and Christian Belief reassured many, both
because of the personalist argument advanced
against scientific reductionism, and because an
eminent scientist had come forward to
propound it.
Coulson's writings on science and religion
are as much addressed to the scientific com-
munity as to theologians, and draw on the
experiences of scientists who were also
Christians, back at least to Newton and the
foundation of the Royal Society in 1645, to
show how science is itself a process of discov-
ery, requiring faith, intuition and an open mind
- characteristics which he also associated with
religious belief. They were complementary
ways of understanding the universe. What was
not acceptable was a 'god of the gaps', in which
COULSON
religion was used to explain what could not at
that time be explained by science. With that
interpretation, the domain of religion would get
ever smaller as more scientific understanding
was gained.
Charles Coulson was one of the leading sci-
entists of his generation - Professor of
Theoretical Physics (King's College London,
1947-51), Rouse Ball Professor of Applied
Mathematics (Oxford, 1951-72) and inaugural
Professor of Theoretical Chemistry (Oxford,
1972^1). His scientific work involved the use of
mathematical techniques and computers to
unravel 'the shape and structure of molecules',
and in doing so he became the father and guru
of a British school of theoretical chemistry. He
was also Vice-President of the Methodist
Conference (1959-60), a member of the
Central Committee of the World Council of
Churches (1962-8) and Chairman of Oxfam
(1965-71).
He was a powerful spokesman and debater,
on radio programmes such as The Brains Trust,
speaking to conferences, school sixth forms
and university societies, and preaching regu-
larly, not only in Methodist churches. His
powerful belief in theologies of creation, and
the wonders of science and technology, on the
back of a self-confident statement of personal
faith, influenced several generations of students
and others. The fact that he combined so many
activities and interests, and was an effective
and well-organized administrator, has meant
that this influence continued long after his pre-
maturely early death from cancer in 1974. His
extensive correspondence and papers were cat-
alogued by his widow Eileen, and deposited in
the Bodleian Library in Oxford, as part of a
project to conserve the papers of influential
scientists.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Christianity in an Age of Science (Oxford,
1953).
Science and Christian Belief (Oxford, 1955).
Science, Technology and the Christian
(1960).
202
The Shape and Structure of Molecules
(Oxford, 1973; 2nd edn, rev. by Roy
McWeeney, 1982).
Further Reading
Altmann, S.L. and Bowen, E.J., Charles
Alfred Coulson 1910-1974, Biographical
Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society,
vol. 20 (December 1974).
Anon., A Group Speaks (1931).
Andrew Coulson
CRANSTON, Maurice William (1920-93)
Maurice Cranston was a Londoner, who was
born in Tottenham on 8 May 1920 and who
died at his home in Regent's Park on 5
November 1993. He was educated at the
Tunbridge Wells Technical Institute which, as
he himself reports, 'was run in the 1930s by a
fervent Germanophile ... as a kind of
Technische Hochschule'' ('Postscriptum',
p. 252). He there acquired a competence in
languages that was to stand him in good stead.
He was able to go to the Jesuit Touraine
Institute in France, where he began to develop
the interest in French intellectual culture that
was to become one of his traits. He had
planned to go to King's College London, and to
pursue a career in political journalism. But the
war intervened and he found himself, as a con-
scientious objector, working in the Civil
Defence. More influential was his volunteer
work with refugees, where his knowledge of
German proved invaluable. The friendships he
then made with German refugees, one of whom
presented him with a copy of Spinoza's
Tractatus logico politicus, first introduced him
to political philosophy. Towards the end of
the war he enrolled in philosophy courses at
Birkbeck College and, when it had ended, he
went up to St Catherine's, Oxford, where he

read PPE. At Oxford he was persuaded by
Friedrich WAISMANN and T.D. WELDON that
'linguistic analysis was a proper method for
philosophy' though he remained unpersuaded
that it was 'a method that would dissolve the
traditional problems of metaphysics or tradi-
tional political philosophy' ('Postscriptum', p.
252). After taking his BA in 1948, Cranston
proceeded to a research degree at Oxford and
completed a BLitt in 1951. His thesis formed
the basis for his first book, on Freedom (1953).
In the meantime Cranston was appointed as
a part-time lecturer in social philosophy at the
University of London, from 1950 to 1958,
during which time he was also researching the
recently acquired Locke manuscripts in
Oxford's Bodleian Library. His book on Locke
impressed OAKESHOTT and secured for
Cranston an appointment as a lecturer in polit-
ical science at the London School of Economics
(LSE). In 1964 he was promoted to a reader-
ship in the University of London and in 1968
he became Professor of Political Science,
remaining at the LSE until he retired in 1985.
Cranston held visiting posts at a number of
universities, both in Europe and in America. He
was President of the Institut Internationale de
Philosophic Politique from 1976 to 1979.
Cranston's book on freedom shows a concern
to apply the methods of linguistic analysis and
to unfold ambiguities in the term. This he saw
as an essential preliminary. The book's two
major sections are concerned with political
freedom and freedom of the will. In the politi-
cal section Cranston distinguished different
kinds of 'liberalism': English, French, German
and American. He drew a distinction between
'Lockean' liberalism and the 'etatiste' freedom
he associated with Rousseau in particular, a dis-
tinction he later aligned with a distinction better
publicized by Isaiah BERLIN, in his 1956 lecture
on Two Concepts of Liberty, as that between
'negative' and 'positive' freedom. Unlike Berlin,
however, Cranston wished, at least at that time,
to present himself as an 'ideological neutral'
between the two competing conceptions of
freedom, and indeed he thought Berlin was too
203
CRANSTON
hostile to positive liberty. He was dismayed, he
reported, to find himself classified as 'liberal-
conservative' (Tostscriptum', p. 253). His
Freedom book already showed a considerable
interest in and knowledge of the history of
political ideas, and one way in which he
followed it up was through his work on two of
the historical champions of the rival kinds of
freedom: Locke and Rousseau, for each of
whom he wrote intellectual biographies and
for whose texts he produced editions. He also
followed up his interest in freedom with his
Human Rights Today (1955). In this book he
sought to develop a theory of human rights
that avoided either of the then prevalent
extremes: that of philosophers such as
Bentham, BRADLEY and Marx, who denied that
there were any 'rights', strictly speaking, and
those 'progressive social theorists' (including
the drafters of the Declaration of Human
Rights of 1948) who insisted on what seemed
to him an excessive list of rights such as
holidays with pay. For Cranston a 'right',
properly speaking, was a freedom that any gov-
ernment should uphold and which would be
upheld in any 'open' society. It was important
to distinguish such rights from economic and
social rights, so-called, like the right to a job or
holidays with pay, which may be very desirable
but which may, in practice, be out of reach.
Cranston was unusual for his generation of
British academic philosophers in two respects.
Firstly, he published almost nothing in
academic journals but preferred the more
popular media of magazines and radio. He
contributed frequently to Encounter and the
New Statesman, and his broadcast talks
appeared regularly in the Listener. His subjects
were, nonetheless, nearly always philosophi-
cal topics or individual philosophers. Secondly,
Cranston was more than usually European in
his interests for a twentieth-century British
philosopher. While at Oxford he developed an
independent interest in French phenomenol-
ogy and existentialism, especially in the thought
of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Wahl and Hyppolite.
He was one of only a few of his generation to
CRANSTON
take an interest in French existentialism - par-
ticularly, in his case, in Sartre, on whom he
wrote a book as well as three articles in
Encounter and about whom he gave a series of
broadcast talks in Canada. He was co-orga-
nizer, with Alan MONTCFIORE, of a historically
unique colloquium at Royaumont in 1957,
which brought together a number of the then
leading lights of British philosophy (including
RYLE, AUSTIN, AYER and Strawson) with their
counterparts in France (who included Merleau-
Ponty, Goldmann, Alquie and Weil). He
welcomed the opportunity to discuss political
philosophy with philosophers on the continent
when it arose, as it did when he was seconded
as Professor of Political Science to the European
University Institute in Florence between 1978
and 1981.
Cranston's most substantial contributions
and the ones that took up most of his time
were his biographies on Locke and Rousseau.
His biography of Locke was awarded the James
Tait Memorial Prize and was acclaimed by
Cameron McDonald as 'a model of what his-
torical biography should be' (McDonald,
p. 321). Much of the last twenty years of his life
was occupied on the massive three-volume
biography of Rousseau. The last volume of this
biography was not complete at the time of his
death, though it was completed, by Sanford
Lakoff, on the basis of Cranston's other
Rousseau publications, and published posthu-
mously.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Freedom: A New Analysis (1953; 3rd rev.
edn, New York, 1967).
Human Rights Today (1955; rev. edn, 1962).
John Locke: A Biography (1957; new edn,
1985).
Sartre (Edinburgh, 1962).
The Mask of Politics and Other Essays
(1973).
Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau; 1712-54 (1983).
Philosophers and Pamphleteers: Political
Theorists of the French Enlightenment
204
(Oxford, 1986).
The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
1754-1762 (Chicago, 1991).
The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in
Exile and Adversity (Chicago, 1997).
Other Relevant Works
'Freedom, Discipline and Bondage',
Philosophy, vol. 24 (1949), pp. 133-43.
John Locke (1961).
John Stuart Mill (1961).
(Ed.), Locke on Politics, Religion and
Education (New York, 1965).
(Ed.,) A Glossary of Political Terms (1966).
(Ed.), Western Political Philosophers (1967).
Political Dialogues (1968).
(Trans.), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social
Contract (Harmondsworth, 1968).
Philosophy and Language (Toronto, 1969).
(Ed.), The New Left: Six Critical Essays
(1970).
The Quintessence ofSartrism (Montreal,
1970).
Politics and Ethics. An Inaugural Lecture
(1972).
(Ed. with R.S. Peters), Hobbes and Rousseau
(New York, 1972).
What are Human Rights? (1973).
(Ed. with Peter Mair), Ideology and Politics
(Brussels, 1980).
(Trans.), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse
on Inequality (Harmondsworth, 1984).
'Postscriptum', in Feaver and Rosen, Lives,
Liberties and the Public Good (1987), pp.
251-8.
Further Reading
Berlin, Isaiah, Two Concepts of Liberty
(Oxford, 1956).
Feaver, George and Frederick Rosenk (eds),
Lives, Liberties and the Public Good: New
Essays in Political Theory for Maurice
Cranston (1987). Contains bibliography
up to 1986.
McDonald, Cameron, Western Political
Theory, from its Origins to the Present
(New York, 1968).

Raphael, D.D., 'Maurice Cranston
(1920-1993)', Utilitas, vol. 6 (1994), pp.
1-7.
Stuart Brown
CRAWSHAY-WILLIAMS, Rupert
(1908-77)
Rupert Crawshay-Williams was born in
London on 23 February 1908 and died in the
Ardudwy district of west Wales on 12 June
1977. The great-grandson of T.H. Huxley, he
received his education at Queen's College,
Oxford, and until 1939 worked for
Gramophone Records and High Fidelity
Reproduction, supporting himself and his wife,
Elizabeth, as a music critic. In 1942, due to
circumstances created by World War II, he
relocated to Portmeirion Estate, North Wales,
to teach English, French and mathematics at its
preparatory school. After the war, Crawshay-
Williams dedicated his time to philosophy,
while he and Elizabeth continued to live in a
cottage on the estate. While at Portmeirion, he
met Bertrand RUSSELL in 1947. The two
remained friends until Russell's death in 1970,
after which Crawshay-Williams published a
memoir, Russell Remembered (1970). He was
also a founding member of the Classification
Society, and an honorary associate of the
Rationalist Press Association.
Crawshay-Williams published his first philo-
sophical book, The Comforts of Unreason, in
1947. The book is a light and witty expose of
the human inclination towards deception, self-
deception in particular. The Comforts of
Unreason identifies and catalogues forces that
lead minds astray - fallacious reasoning,
euphemism, propaganda and unacknowledged
desires. Crawshay-Williams followed Russell
and W.K. Clifford in emphasizing the necessity
of basing beliefs on available evidence.
205
CRAWSHAY-WILLIAMS
Philosophers, he noted, sometimes use 'unifying
formulae' to direct and confine attention to
apparently supportive facts - a deceptive tactic
used by Hegel (the Absolute), Marx (dialectical
materialism) and Spencer (evolution), among
others.
Crawshay-Williams's best known and most
important work is Methods and Criteria of
Reasoning (1957). In this less popular and
more technical book he attempts to explain
why so many theoretical and philosophical
controversies seem to be intractable. One
reason, he argues, is that the criteria each party
uses to gauge the truth-value of propositions
are tacitly assumed instead of being made
explicit. The principal aim of Methods and
Criteria of Reasoning is to expose the hidden
methodological agendas found in all contro-
versial theoretical and philosophical arguments,
which are less concerned with justification than
with recommendation, and thus pave the way
for more efficient methods of reasoning.
Statements used in arguments, Crawshay-
Williams asserts, contain information that is
intended to influence decision making, inter-
pretation and classification. Philosophical argu-
ments, in particular, are riddled with 'indeter-
minate statements'. Indeterminate statements,
and the criteria used to test them, are condi-
tional and contextual, untestable unless
assigned a purpose. That is, given a certain
purpose or goal X, this particular course of
action or way of thinking Y is likely to be most
effective.
Today, Crawshay-Williams is best known
as an early influence in the fields of argumen-
tation theory, rhetoric and communications
studies. His influence is apparent in the work of
Stephen TOULMIN, and was acknowledged by
the Belgian philosophers Lucy Olbrechts-
Tyteca and Chaim Perelman, who developed
ideas from Methods and Criteria of Reasoning
in their book La Nouvelle rhetorique (The New
Rhetoric).
In 1977 Elizabeth became crippled with
paralysis. On 12 June, she and Crawshay-
Williams each swallowed a lethal dose of
CRAWSHAY-WILLIAMS
sleeping tablets and died together, in an
embrace. At the time of his death, Crawshay-
Williams was working on a third philosophical
book, The Directive function of Language.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Comforts of Unreason: A Study of the
Motives Behind Irrational Thought (1947).
Methods and Criteria of Reasoning: An
Inquiry into the Structure of Controversy
(1957).
Other Relevant Works
'The Obstinate Universal', Polemic, no. 2
(January 1946), pp. 14-21.
Russell Remembered (1970).
'Mental and Verbal Confusions', Free Mind,
no. 2 (Spring 1948), pp. 3-6.
'True Truth; or the Higher the Deeper', The
Rationalist Annual (1948), pp. 21-30.
'Verbal Rationalisation: I. Emotive and
Informative Language', Free Mind, no. 2
(Autumn 1948), pp. 8-12.
'Verbal Rationalisation: II. The Belief in True
Meaning', Free Mind, no. 2 (February
1949), pp. 8-13.
Further Reading
Russell, Bertrand, 'Review of Rupert
Crawshay-Williams, The Comforts of
Unreason [1947]', The Collected Papers of
Bertrand Russell, Volume 11: Last
Philosophical Testament 1943-68, ed.
John G. Slater (1997), pp. 321-7.
Spadoni, Carl, 'Rupert Crawshay-Williams's
Bequest', Russell: The Journal of the
Bertrand Russell Archives, vol. 3, no. 1
(Summer 1983), pp. 29-40.
Michael Potter
206
CROMBIE, Alistair Cameron (1915-96)
Alistair Cameron Crombie was born in
Brisbane, Australia on 4 November 1915 and
died in Oxford on 9 November 1996. Crombie
completed his first degree in zoology at the
University of Melbourne in 1938, and moved
to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he took a
doctorate in the same subject. While at
Cambridge, Crombie studied philosophy infor-
mally with Charlie Dunbar BROAD and began
work in the history and philosophy of science.
In 1942, one year before his marriage to Nancy
Hey, he was awarded a PhD for a dissertation
on population dynamics. After a period of
research in this area, Crombie moved, in 1946,
to a lectureship in the history and philosophy
of science at University College London.
It was at University College that Crombie
wrote his first two books, which led him to the
forefront of historians of science claiming con-
tinuity from medieval to seventeenth-century
science. Crombie argued that the recovery in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries; of the full tradi-
tion of Greek and Arabic science meant a new
conscious effort to explain observed facts ratio-
nally. Consequently, seventeenth-century
methods of experiment and mathematical
abstraction, first expounded and used in a
mature form by Galileo, were indebted to thir-
teenth and fourteenth-century natural philoso-
phers for their creation. Crombie's focus on
Grosseteste as a source for scientific methodol-
ogy up to and including Galileo offered a new
interpretation of the connection between the
Greek scientific tradition and modern science.
In 1953 Crombie was appointed senior
lecturer in the history of science at Oxford. His
arrival in Oxford, in 1954 (after a year visiting
the University of Washington, Seattle), estab-
lished history of science within normal teaching
and research at that university. From 1949 to
1954 Crombie edited the British Journal for the
Philosophy of Science. He was one of the
founders of the journal History of Science in
1961. Crombie also helped to found the British
Society of the History of Science, of which he

was President from 1964 to 1966. From 1968
to 1971 he was President of the Academic
Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences. Elected
fellow of Trinity College in 1969, Crombie
received this same year the Galileo Prize of the
Domus Galileana in Pisa for his work on the
seventeenth century, which particularly focused
on the figures of Galileo, Descartes and
Mersenne. In 1972 he failed to be elected to the
newly created chair of the history of science at
Oxford. Eleven years later he retired from his
position at this university, but he continued
lecturing overseas. He held a part-time appoint-
ment as professor at Smith College,
Northampton, Massachusetts, and similar posi-
tions not only in his native Australia, but also
in cities such as Delhi, Princeton, Rome, Tokyo
and Paris. He was made honorary fellow of
Trinity College in 1994, the same year that he
was elected member of the Pontifical Academy
of Sciences. As holder of honorary doctorates
at the universities of Paris, Sassari and Durham,
his reputation led him to be awarded the
European Premio Dondi in 1995.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Augustine to Galileo (1952).
Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of
Experimental Science 1100-1700 (Oxford,
1953).
Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and
Early Modern Thought (1990).
Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European
Tradition (1994).
Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and
Modern Thought (1996).
Other Relevant Work
Scientific Change: Historical Studies in the
Intellectual, Social and Technical
Conditions for Scientific Discovery and
Technical Invention, from Antiquity to the
Present, ed. A.C. Crombie (Oxford, 1963).
The Rational Arts of Living, ed. A.C.
Crombie and N.G. Siraisi (Northampton,
Mass., 1987).
207
CROMBIE
Further Reading
North, J.D. and J.J. Roche, The Light of
Nature: Essays in the History and
Philosophy of Science Presented to A.C.
Crombie (Dordrecht, 1985). Includes bibli-
ography.
Pedro Ruiz-Castell
CROMBIE, Ian MacHattie (1917-)
Ian M. Crombie was born in Sidcup, Kent on
26 October 1917. He was educated at
Winchester College (1931-6) and New College,
Oxford (1936-40), where he took a double
first in classics. His wartime service, as a con-
scientious objector, was in civil defence.
Appointed, in 1946, as a lecturer in philosophy
at Balliol College, Oxford, he moved, in 1947,
to a fellowship in philosophy at Wadham
College, Oxford, retiring in 1983.
Crombie is best known for his work on Plato
and in the philosophy of religion. His magnum
opus is the two-volume work An Examination
of Plato's Doctrines (1962-3). This book, a
landmark in mid-twentieth-century Plato
studies, offers a thematic interpretation of
Plato's philosophy. That An Examination still
commonly appears on undergraduate reading
lists is testimony to its clarity and balance. It is
a model in two senses. First, it treads skilfully
the difficult path of a thematic study of Plato,
by approaching the themes of Plato's work
through an insightful, detailed study of the
Dialogues. Second, Crombie, setting out to dis-
tinguish Plato from Platonism, depicts a
nuanced and fluid thinker, whose Dialogues
defy easy systematization and who strove to
give 'logical shape' to distinctions (such as those
between belief, knowledge and perception) that
continue to figure in contemporary discussions.
Crombie's examination, in three influential
essays, of the logical nature of religious belief
CROMBIE
offers a stimulating and complex perspective on
theological language. Responding to the empiri-
cist charge that religious beliefs, putatively
assertive, are equivocal, unfalsifiable and there-
fore meaningless, Crombie argues two con-
nected theses. First, noting the typical ambigu-
ity of religious beliefs, he argues that this reflects
in-built paradoxes that arise from the attempt
to use ordinary concepts to refer to that which
lies outside human experience, namely God.
Religious beliefs are, therefore, necessarily ana-
logical and not precise in character, but, since
their function is primarily religious and not
descriptive, they are not diminished by this fact.
Moreover, the religious efficacy of certain
analogies rests on their authorization by the
incarnate Christ. Second, Crombie holds that
religious beliefs are concerned with states of
affairs and that, as such, they are falsifiable in
principle though not in practice. It is possible to
specify states of affairs that would falsify reli-
gious beliefs, but, since it is only after death that
full information about the divine purpose will
be available, in practice it is impossible to falsify
a religious belief. Crombie's views have stimu-
lated much discussion. He has been charged
with circularity in his reliance on Christian
beliefs as elements in his argument for the
meaningfulness of religious language. Some,
however, find his rigorous analysis of a cogni-
tivist view of religious belief suggestive.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Theology and Falsification', in Anthony
Flew and Alasdair Macintyre (eds), New
Essays in Philosophical Theology (1955),
pp. 109-30.
The Possibility of Theological Statements', in
Basil Mitchell (ed.), Faith and Logic
(1957), pp. 31-83; repr. in curtailed form
in Basil Mitchell (ed.), The Philosophy of
Religion (Oxford, 1971), pp. 23-52.
An Examination of Plato's Doctrines, 2 vols
(1962-3).
Plato: The Midwife's Apprentice (New York
and London, 1964).
'Eternity and Omnitemporality', in William J.
208
Abraham and Steven W. Holtzer, The
Rationality of Religious Belief (Oxford,
1987), pp. 169-88.
Other Relevant Works
'Ryle's New Potrait of Plato, Philosophical
Review, vol. 78 (1969), pp. 362-73.
'A Dream of Socrates', Philosophy, vol. 64
(1989), pp. 29-38.
'Being, Identity and Truth - C J F Williams',
International Philosophical Quarterly, vol.
33 (1993), pp. 465-72.
"Socratic Definition', Paideia (offprint).
Further Reading
Neilsen, Kai, An Introduction to the
Philosophy of Religion (1982).
Adam Hood
CROSS, Robert Craigie (1911-2000)
Robert Cross was born in Glasgow on 24 April
1911 and died in Edinburgh on 13 September
2000. His father was a schoolmaster in
Dumbartonshire. Cross gained first class
honours in classics at the University of Glasgow
in 1932 (graduating 1933). At Oxford (Queen's
College) he was awarded a first in classical
moderations (1934) and 'Greats' (1936). After
a brief spell in the Department of Logic and
Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh
(1936-7), he became a lecturer, then fellow
and tutor, at Jesus College, Oxford. From 1941
to 1945 he served first in the navy and then in
the Admiralty. He returned to Oxford after
the war, and was senior tutor at Jesus
(1948-53). From 1953 to 1978 he was Regius
Professor of Logic at the University of
Aberdeen. He was Vice-Principal of the
University (1974-7), and also served on the
University Grants Committee (1965-74) and
on other bodies. He was awarded the CBE in

1972, and became a fellow of the Royal Society
of Edinburgh in 1977.
Cross is best known for the book on Plato's
Republic which he wrote jointly with A.D.
WOOZLEY. Chapters 7 to 10, in particular, were
drafted by Cross. The work was intended to
'serve as something of an introduction to phi-
losophy via the Republic, rather than a spe-
cialised Platonic study' (Plato's Republic, p. v).
It is clear and accessible. Naturally, it has lim-
itations, but it was well received and has been
widely used, and remains a significant and
useful work. In his article on logos and forms
Cross had questioned what he called 'the
orthodox view' that for Plato forms were
simple nameables with which we could be
acquainted: in his opinion some passages
implied that forms can be displayed in the pred-
icates of statements, and that we talk with
forms rather than about them (cf. in particular
Plato's Republic, pp. 142, 194-5). In some
earlier pieces Cross criticized both the emotive
theory of ethics and certain accounts according
to which ethical sentences were either true or
false, and suggested that there is moral knowl-
edge but that it is a matter of knowing how to
deal with situations correctly and intelligently.
In discussion, Cross could see the main point
and express it clearly and simply. He was a
dedicated teacher who cared deeply about edu-
cation, a conscientious head of department, a
congenial and unpretentious colleague; and,
although he was no bureaucrat, he had a gift
for committee work and administration.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Logos and Forms in Plato', Mind, vol. 63
(1954), pp. 433-50; repr. in R.E. Allen
(ed.), Studies in Plato's Metaphysics
(1965), pp. 13-31.
(with A.D. Woozley), Plato's Republic: A
Philosophical Commentary (1964).
Other Relevant Works
The Emotive Theory of Ethics [pt] 3',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 22 (1948), pp. 127-40.
209
CROWLEY
'Virtue and Nature', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 50 (1949-50), pp.
123-37.
'Ethical Disagreement', Philosophy, vol. 25
(1950), pp. 301-15.
'The Philosopher's Paradoxes' [inaugural
address], Aberdeen University Review, vol.
35 (1953-4), pp. 255-65.
'The Modern Predicament' [a discussion of
H. J. Paton, The Modern Predicament,
1955], Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 6
(1956), pp. 359-65.
'Category Differences', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 59 (1958-9), pp.
255-70.
Appendix and revised bibliography, in G.C.
Field, The Philosophy of Plato, 2nd edn
(Oxford, 1969), pp. 156-64,166-9.
'Alexander Bain', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 44 (1970),
pp. 1-13.
Further Reading
Ryle, G., 'Logical Atomism in Plato's
Theaetetus', with Foreword by M.F.
Burnyeat, Phronesis, vol. 35 (1990), pp.
21-46. Published posthumously, this
contains the remarks which prompted
Cross's 1954 article.
Patricia Clarke
CROWLEY, Theodore (1910-90)
Crowley was born in County Kerry, Ireland
on 14 September 1910 and died in Belfast on
13 (or 14) February 1990; he was buried in
Glasnevin (Dublin). He was christened
Cornelius but on joining the Franciscans was
given the name Theodore, by which he has
since become generally known. After attending
a Franciscan school Crowley joined the Order
of Friars Minor (OFM) in 1927 and was
CROWLEY
ordained in 1933 (or 1934). He studied phi-
losophy at Louvain and theology at Rome and
Lou vain, gaining an LScHist in 1936 and a
PhD in 1939. He was accepted as a Maitre
Agrege at Louvain (one of only twenty-four) in
1949. Thereafter he divided his time between
Louvain and Ireland, and for certain periods
was at Gravesend in England (and in 1960 was
acting President of the Louvanian University in
Zaire). He held many appointments at
Franciscan chapters, and was lecturer (1951-4),
reader (1954-68/9), and professor at the
Queen's University, Belfast (1968/9-75), when
he retired as emeritus professor, but returned to
Louvain as professor (1975-8) and Gravesend
as lecturer (1978-86). He then returned to
Belfast, where he died.
Though popular as a teacher Crowley pub-
lished comparatively little, with only one book
(on Roger Bacon). He was engaged in the
1970s in editing a volume to celebrate the
seventh centenary of the death of St
Bonaventure, but this apparently never reached
print. He published a handful of articles and a
fair number of reviews in the Irish Theological
Quarterly and elsewhere, as well as encyclope-
dia articles.
Roger Bacon is usually thought of as a
pioneer of science, and Crowley's
Encyclopaedia Britannica article brings this
out, but his book treats mainly one narrow
area, the nature of the soul in Bacon's early
writings. The book is scholarly and often diffi-
cult, like most of Crowley's work, with
frequent quotations in not always translated
Latin (for useful summaries see pp. 110,
114-15, 158-9, 195-8). It begins however,
with a long chapter on Bacon's life, claiming in
particular a relatively late date (1219/20) for his
birth, and that he wrote the Opus maius
(followed, not preceded, by the Opus minus
and Opus tertium as clarifications) as a rather
hurried response to a demand for a copy of his
major scientific work from the Pope, who mis-
takenly thought it was already completed rather
than merely projected.
A long in-depth discussion follows of Bacon's
210
changing views, against the background of thir-
teenth-century philosophy and theology at
Oxford and Paris, on the soul, its parts (espe-
cially the nutritive/sensitive and rational) and
how they form a unity, how many of them are
specially created, how many are immortal, and
how the whole doctrine relates to the
Aristotelian doctrine of form and matter, with
a final chapter on the fate of the Aristotelian
distinction between the active and passive intel-
lects. A separate article discusses Bacon's views
on universals. Crowley sees Bacon as mainly
influenced by Aristotle, despite accepting inter-
pretations of him uncritically and misunder-
standing him when trying to reconcile him with
Christianity. Correspondingly, Crowley down-
plays the influence of Augustine, Avicenna,
Averroes, etc., though allowing Neoplatonist
influence.
In an unusual foray into modern times
Crowley has an accessible and useful critique of
logical positivism in 'Metaphysics and Professor
AJ.Ayer'.
A colleague said of Crowley when he became
a Maitre Agrege that he 'simply soared on tran-
scendental wings into the metaphysical
empyrean' (quotation by courtesy of Fr
Fennessy of the Franciscan Library Dublin).
Perhaps it is fitting that his later inaugural
lecture at Belfast was entitled Transcendencel
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Roger Bacon: The Problem of the Soul in his
Philosophical Commentaries (Louvain and
Dublin, 1950).
Other Relevant Works
'John Peckham, O.F.M. Archbishop of
Canterbury, versus the New
Aristotelianism', Bulletin of the John
Rylands Library, vol. 33, no. 2 (March
1951), pp. 242-55.
'Roger Bacon: The Problem of Universals in
his Philosophical Commentaries', Bulletin
of the John Rylands Library, vol. 34, no. 2
(March 1952), pp. 264-75.'
'Roger Bacon and Avicenna', Philosophical

Studies [The Philosophical Society, St
Patrick's College, Maynooth], vol. 2 (June
1952), pp. 84-8.
'Metaphysics and Professor AJ. Ayer',
Philosophical Studies [The Philosophical
Society, St Patrick's College, Maynooth],
vol. 3 (June 1953), pp. 89-99.
Transcendence [inaugural lecture, The
Queen's University, Belfast, 25 February
1970], Belfast (1970), pp. 4-18.
211
CROWLEY
'St Bonaventure Chronology Reappraisal,
Franziskanische Studien, vol. 56, Heft 2-4
(1974), pp. 310-22. Technical.
'St Bonaventure of Bagnioregio,
O.Min.1221-1274', The Capuchin Annual
(1975), pp. 56-63. Popular,
A. R. Lacey
 D
D'ARCY, Joseph Eric (1924-)
Eric D'Arcy was born in Melbourne on 25
April 1924. He studied at the Catholic regional
seminary, Corpus Christi College, and was
ordained a priest in 1949. He completed an
MA in philosophy at the University of
Melbourne and proceeded to doctoral work in
Rome and Oxford. He taught philosophy at
Melbourne from 1962 to 1981 when he
resigned to accept appointment as bishop of the
diocese of Sale in Victoria. He was appointed
Archbishop of Hobart in 1988, retiring from
that office in 1988.
D'Arcy's first book was Conscience and its
Right to Freedom (1961). The historical
context of the book was the conviction of
powerful figures in the Vatican that the slogan
'Error has no rights' accurately expressed the
just claims of Catholic theocracy. This doctrine
was repudiated by the Second Vatican Council
but the pre-conciliar years were a time of con-
siderable struggle on the issue. D'Arcy's case for
freedom is strong and unequivocal. His tone is
persuasive and irenic, his method both histor-
ical and philosophical, and the book stands up
well after forty years. A memorable feature of
the work, given its title, is the argument that the
slogan 'Error has no rights' involves a category
mistake, error not being within the range of sig-
nificant positive or negative attributions of that
kind. This is a fair point, and a good one ad
hominem, but surely the argument would also
apply to the book's title. It is possible that the
contradiction was a joke on D'Arcy's part: he
212
was well known at Melbourne for his propen-
sity for donnish jokes.
In Human Acts: An Essay in their Moral
Evaluation (1963) D'Arcy discusses acts in their
moral dimension, not by way of delivering sub-
stantive moral judgements of classes of acts, but
rather of delineating what features of act-
descriptions are relevant to such moral
appraisal. He stresses, for example, the limits
allowable in identifying acts by their conse-
quences. A sheriff shoots an innocent prisoner
in order to mollify a rampaging mob; he
succeeds, and four innocent lives are saved at
the cost of one. D'Arcy says that it is not allow-
able to describe the act as 'saving four innocent
lives'. The point is not that the implied moral
approval is known to be unjustified, but that
killing is so important an event in human life
and evaluation that obscuring its presence in
the event is a serious violation of the require-
ment of candour and an obstacle to a sound
moral judgement. The book also contains pen-
etrating discussions of omission and circum-
stances, inter alia.
Two later works, appearing in 1967 and
1975, were editions and translations of parts of
the Prima secundae of St Thomas Aquinas's
Summa theologiae, contributions to the
Blackfriars sixty-volume edition. They rank
with the better volumes in the project, though
the translation of the earlier volume is occa-
sionally mannered to the point of occluding
the message, if not obscuring it altogether. The
choices of the Greek orexis to translate appeti-
tus and the English transport for extasis are

unfortunate - the question addressed at
Ia2ae.28.3 disconcertingly becomes 'Is trans-
port an effect of love?' The disposition to play
with words may have gone too far here, but the
faults are venial in the context of the scholarly
effort.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Conscience and its Right to Freedom (1961).
Human Acts: An Essay in their Moral
Evaluation (Oxford, 1963).
(Ed. and trans.), The Emotions: St Thomas
Aquinas' Summa theologiae lalae 22-30
(1967).
(Ed. and trans.), Pleasure: St Thomas
Aquinas' Summa theologiae Ia2ae 31-39
(1975).
Brian Scarlett
D'ARCY, Martin Cyril (1888-1976)
Martin D'Arcy was born in Bath on 15 June
1888 and died in London on 20 November
1976. In 1906 he entered the Jesuit novitiate at
Roehampton, Surrey and after completing his
novitiate studied philosophy at St Mary's Hall,
Stonyhurst in Clitheroe, Lancashire from 1909
to 1912. At Stonyhurst he studied Thomistic
philosophy with the Jesuits Michael Mahrer
and John RlCKABY, but it seems he was more
impressed with the newer transcendental
Thomism of the French Jesuit Pierre Rousselot
than with the more traditional Thomism of his
teachers. He then was sent to Campion Hall,
Oxford from 1912 to 1916 for further educa-
tion, where he studied philosophy with the
Oxford realist John COOK WILSON and the
idealist Harold JOACHIM and received a second
in Moderations and a first in Greats, as well as
winning the Charles Oldham Prize in 1915 and
the John Locke Scholarship in Mental
Philosophy in 1918 (later on he also won the
213
D'ARCY
Green Moral Philosophy Prize at Oxford in
1923). He briefly returned to Stonyhurst
College as master of poetry and assistant prefect
of studies before undertaking theological
studies in 1919 at the Theologate of the Lyons
Province of the French Jesuits which had been
moved to Ore Place, Hastings, East Sussex
during World War I, and later at St Beuno's in
St Asaph, Denbighshire, North Wales.
D'Arcy was ordained a priest in 1921. He
then began his academic career in earnest,
serving as master of poetry at Stonyhurst
College from 1923 to 1927, as lecturer at
Campion Hall, Oxford from 1927 to 1933,
finally becoming Master of Campion Hall in
1933, during which time he also lectured in
philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford. He
moved to Farm Street, London in 1945, when
he became the Provincial of the English Jesuits,
a post which he held until 1950, when much to
his dismay he was removed from office. He
lectured widely in Europe, the United States
and Asia throughout his life, and was the recipi-
ent of several honorary degrees. In 1960 he
was elected a foreign honorary member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He
became a chaplain to the Knights of the Order
of Malta in 1954, received the Loyola Gold
Medal in Chicago in 1963, and the Aquinas-
Spellman Medal of the Catholic Philosophical
Association of America in 1967.
D'Arcy's interests were very diverse: he com-
missioned Edwin Lutyens to design the New
Campion Hall, Oxford and also became a col-
lector of art (nicknamed the objets d'Arcy), for
which reason there is a Museum of Art named
after him at Loyola University, Chicago. He
was also one of the first to rediscover and pub-
licize the writings of the Jesuit poet Gerard
Manley Hopkins, and was instrumental in the
conversions of the authors Evelyn Waugh and
Edith Sitwell to Catholicism. His key works
are The Nature of Belief (1931) and The Mind
and Heart of Love (1945). He also made an
important contribution to the philosophy of
history in The Sense of History (1959), which
defends the possibility of historical knowledge
D'ARCY
and discusses the nature of divine providence.
D'Arcy was a neo-Thomist, although one
who was not afraid of developing Aquinas's
thought in new directions. In The Nature of
Belief D'Arcy criticizes strict empiricism and
asserts that knowledge goes beyond mere seeing
(immediate perception). He asserts that the
empiricists relegate the function of intellect to
a lumber room, a mere collector of logs, and
fail to recognize that humans apprehend truths
with the mind and not just with the senses.
The proper function of the intellect is to know
the object as it is, to grasp reality, to even
achieve a kind of union with the known object,
possess it and discover ourselves in knowing it.
Unfortunately, this kind of knowing rarely
occurs on earth, and really awaits us in the
next life in the beatific vision of God. While on
earth we must be satisfied with just a few self-
evident truths, such as the principle of contra-
diction and that I exist, as well as probable
inferences (D'Arcy is influenced by Rousselot
here). Yet D'Arcy also introduces a special act
of the intellect - interpretation - that can
provide for certitude (the active recognition of
the truth of a proposition that brings freedom
from doubt). Interpretation occurs when the
intellect discerns an intelligible unity and deter-
minate character in a group of phenomena;
here the mind actively synthesizes and inte-
grates the data of experience in accordance
with the real essence and determinate whole
that it reveals. The certitude of such interpre-
tations rests upon the fact that there is a massive
context of concordant evidence (too abundant
to list) and inextricably interwoven beliefs
which manifest a truth, such as that England is
an island. That is to say, we can reach a state
of certitude because there is infinitely complex
and consistent evidence for certain beliefs: they
are guaranteed by an infinite number of cer-
tainties and facts, all of which would have to be
wrong if the belief were not true. That is why
D'Arcy states that certitude occurs when there
is a unity of indirect reference wherein a belief
is supported by our whole world of discourse.
Were this belief to be false then our whole
214
world of communicable knowledge would
collapse. For example, the belief that England
is an island is supported by innumerable refer-
ences in our conversations to travelling, defence
spending, education, commerce and politics.
D'Arcy claims that it is through interpretation
that we know with certitude that we will die,
that we need food to live, and that arsenic is
poisonous (inductive truths), that individual
humans exist and retain the same identity over
time (basic scientific and metaphysical truths),
what our ruler said (testimony), that World
War I happened (historical truths), what a
sentence means, that a work of art is not a
forgery, and also that God exists.
D'Arcy took up the challenge of defending
the existence of God in Mirage and Truth
(1935) and No Absent God (1962). In these
works he argues that as God is a spirit and not
material it would be useless and improper to
seek empirical evidence of God as the posi-
tivists suggest. God cannot be directly observed
in this world. Rather, we know God through
reflection on the nature of the world; we find
that the existence of the world does not make
sense without its having been created by a self-
existing being. D'Arcy in particular develops
the argument from contingency for God. He
states that we recognize the dependency or con-
tingency of all finite things (i.e. there are things
whose existence is not necessary), and that in
order to explain their existence, we must posit
a necessary or self-subsistent being, God, who
created them. D'Arcy also accepts less tradi-
tional arguments for God, asserting that
humans can come to know God through the
rational emotion of reverence and awe for the
numinous or holy, as well as through the objec-
tive moral order and beauty that they discover
in the world.
In The Pain of this World and the Providence
of God (1935) D'Arcy (if we take the Reader
of the Paper as espousing his views) argues that
God is justified in creating creatures with free
will, knowing that they may sometimes do evil,
as this is just what humans do. Humans choose
to have children in this world, even knowing

that they may suffer and sin. Human law also
allows people many freedoms, knowing that
they may do evil due to this gift of liberty. This
goes to show that life on earth is worth living
despite its pain and suffering. If life were really
so bad then it seems humans should choose
not to engage in reproduction and allow the
human race to die out. Moreover, physical trial,
effort and suffering are necessary accompani-
ments of virtue and a stimulus to perfection.
Free will itself needs dangers and risks, for
human agents perfect themselves through their
responses to pain and illness, and pain and
illness allow for compassion, sympathy and
tenderness. Hence a world without pain and
suffering would be less perfect for us than the
actual world.
D'Arcy's Christian Morals (1937) asserts
that moral judgements, although accompanied
by emotion, reveal a real right and wrong and
are not just a matter of taste. Moral judge-
ments are based upon an objective and
unchanging moral standard founded upon
truth and wisdom. Moreover, moral law is
implanted in our conscience by God: our con-
science is but the shadow of 'love outstretched
caressingly' (Christian Morals, p. 98). D'Arcy
also rejects the divine command theory of
morality, arguing that God is goodness itself
and ordains an act as it is in accordance with
this goodness. What is morally right and wrong
is not due to the arbitrary will of God, but
comes from God's whole essential nature as
goodness.
D'Arcy next set to work on the philosophy
of the mind and in 1942 published Death and
Life. Here he argues that the human soul is
not wholly determined by the body and is
immortal. He presents several arguments as to
why the mind cannot be fully explained in
material terms. For instance, if the mind were
wholly determined by material causes then the
judgements of science would not make sense, as
we would not be able to use reason to formu-
late and verify hypotheses or know the truth.
For if thoughts are material then they are the
result of necessary collocations of matter and a
215
D'ARCY
true theory is no different in this regard from a
false one. He also states that as our mind can
know the world, admire its laws and in a sense
become all things, as Aquinas says, it must be
distinct from the world. Indeed only an imma-
terial and not a material thing could know
material things other than itself, not to mention
know itself as well. D'Arcy also points out that
the mind can think about non-temporal, uni-
versal, abstract ideas such as irrational numbers
and ideals such as beauty, goodness and truth,
which indicate that it is spiritual rather than
material. So too the body is measurable, made
of parts and subject to decay, whereas the mind
is not. Finally, the human soul has free will
and can choose between two possible desires,
something for which there is no room in a
materialist system.
In The Mind and Heart of Love D'Arcy
made one of the earliest contributions to the
now blossoming field of the philosophy of love,
again under the influence of Pierre Rousselot.
D'Arcy here presents the view that there are
two aspects of the human being and so two
kinds of love basic to human nature. There is
an essential self, and there is an existential self.
The essential self expresses itself through the
intellect (it is the animus), and it is the instru-
ment of self-realization and the origin of Eros
as its movement is directed inward to the per-
fection of self. The existential self, on the other
hand, expresses itself in the operation of the will
(it is the anima), and it is the instrument of
self-sacrificing ecstatic love and the origin of
Agape as its movement is from itself to others.
So, according to D'Arcy, human love has a
dual nature: there is an erotic love in the essen-
tial self of humans which is animus, male,
Apollonian, Lion, egoistic, selfish, taking, cen-
trifugal, dominating, possessing, active, reason,
and concerned with the individual; and there is
an agapic love in the existential self of humans
which is anima, female, Dionysian, Unicorn,
altruistic, unselfish, giving, centripetal, sub-
missive, surrendering, passive, irrational
longing, and concerned for the whole. These
two selves, or types of love, are both necessary
D'ARCY
for human fulfilment, mutually complemen-
tary when properly ordered, and present
together in all true acts of love. For in perfect
love there is both a desire of the self to give its
all and also a desire to be oneself, to be perfect,
and to find one's good and happiness; in other
words in true love there is a perfect correspon-
dence between taking and giving, self-regard
and self-surrender. As Martin C. D'Arcy
explains in a nice passage:
Both the loves, as we now see, must be active
and co-operative. A person as an end in
himself, independent, and unique and self-
owning, cannot surrender himself so entirely
as to deny or maim his own personal per-
fection. Nevertheless, he too is swayed by a
love which takes him outside himself to other
persons whom he has no right to possess, and
to God to whom he owes everything. We
must look at the whole of man, and leave
nothing out, if we are to understand him, and
set his love in the right perspective.
(The Mind and Heart of Love, p. 330)
Ultimately, D'Arcy holds that the egoistic essen-
tial self has to learn the paradox that it gains by
giving, and that by joining hands with the cen-
tripetal and altruistic existential movement it
will attain to that self-realization which it
craves.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Spirit of Charity (1929).
St. Thomas Aquinas (1930).
The Nature of'Belief'(1931, 3rd edn, Dublin,
1958).
Mirage and Truth (1935).
The Pain of this World and the Providence of
God (1935).
Christian Morals (1937).
Death and Life (1942).
Belief and Reason (1944).
The Mind and Heart of Love: Lion and
Unicorn, A Study in Eros and Agape
(1945).
Communism and Christianity
216
(Harmondsworth, 1956).
The Meeting of Love and Knowledge:
Perennial Wisdom (New York, 1957).
The Sense of History, Secular and Sacred
(1959); also published as The Meaning and
Matter of History: A Christian View (New
York, 1959).
No Absent God: The Relations Between God
and the Self (1962).
Facing God (1966); also published as
Dialogue with Myself (New York, 1966).
Facing the Truth (1969).
Humanism and Christianity (New York,
1969).
Further Reading
Burns, Tom, 'Ecce sacercos', The Tablet, vol.
230, no. 7114, 20 November 1976, pp.
1141-2.
Copleston, Frederick, 'Father Martin
D'Arcy', The Month, vol. 10, no. 1
(January 1977), pp. 22-4.
D'Arcy, Martin, Laughter and the Love of
Friends: Reminiscences of the
Distinguished English Priest and
Philosopher Martin Cyril D'Arcy, S.J., ed.
William Abell (Westminster, Maryland,
1991).
Kay, Hugh, 'D'Arcy, Martin Cyril', New
Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd edn
(Washington, DC, 2003), vol. 4, p. 526.
Newman, Jay, 'The Illative Sense vs.
Interpretation: D'Arcy's Critique of
Cardinal Newman's Approach to Insight
and Inference', American Catholic
Philosophical Quarterly, suppl. vol. 73,
pp. 179-91.
Sire, H.J.A., Father Martin D'Arcy:
Philosopher of Christian Love
(Leominster, 1997).
Stevens, Gregory, 'The Disinterested Love of
God', Thomist, vol. 16 (July 1953), pp.
307-33.
Alan Vincelette

DAVIE, George Elder (1912-)
George Elder Davie was born in Dundee on 18
March 1912 and was educated at Dundee High
School and the University of Edinburgh. He
graduated in 1935 with first class honours in
classics and was appointed assistant to his
teacher, Norman KEMP SMITH, in the
Department of Metaphysics. He remained in
the post until wartime army service. On demob
in 1945 he was appointed lecturer in logic and
metaphysics at Queen's University, Belfast. In
1953 he was awarded the degree of DLitt by
Edinburgh for his thesis The Scotch
Metaphysics. He returned to Edinburgh as
senior lecturer in metaphysics in 1959. He
retired in 1992 as reader emeritus in philoso-
phy. A graduand honoris causa of the univer-
sities of Dundee and Edinburgh, he was
appointed honorary editor of the Journal of
Scottish Philosophy on its foundation. He has
been awarded the Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun
Medal for services to Scotland.
Davie's long-standing celebrity (nothing less)
in Scotland has been as pioneer investigator of
the Scottish Enlightenment, as author of The
Democratic Intellect (1961) and as an associ-
ate since his undergraduate years of the major
Scottish poet, publicist and agitator Hugh
MacDiarmid (C.M. Grieve, 1892-1978).
Sometimes referred to as 'nationalist', Davie
would prefer the older appellation 'patriot'.
His 'consciously chosen tradition' (the phrase
is an important one for Davie) has precedents
well before the rise of nationalist ideologies in
the nineteenth century. He has been student,
scholar and not uncritical champion of long-
standing Scottish institutions. His scorn of
putative applications of post-colonial theory
to Scotland is founded on a historical appreci-
ation of Scottish intellectual attainments
matching that of larger European countries.
The erosion of intellectual traditions, notably
in education, philosophy, law and political
thinking, he views in terms not of 'the end o an
auld sang' but within the wider arena of con-
tinuing philosophical disagreements, and of
217
DAVIE
more than historical concern. Often a process
referred to as reform has been rather a dis-
mantling and supplanting of established insti-
tutions with insufficient philosophic scrutiny of
their character and priorities.
Davie's insights into roots of the Scottish
Enlightenment might be related to his own
experience as an undergraduate in the 1930s,
and association with MacDiarmid and such
intellectually stimulating contemporaries as the
great Gaelic poet, and scholar, Sorley MacLean.
He is notably acute on the undergraduate intel-
lectualism in Edinburgh of some two centuries
earlier. Thomas Aikenhead's execution for
heresy in 1696, on evidence of his unorthodox
philosophical-theological speculations, remains
a historical landmark. The stridency and excess
of that attempted move to preserve a theocratic
regime, one founded on the established mis-
reading of neo-Calvinist theology by parochial
minds misapplying concepts from Roman law,
inspired Moderate thinking within the kirk.
Some seeds of the Scottish Enlightenment
sprouted, according to Davie. Undergraduate
minds, keyed up for the intellectual challenge of
a bankrupt church theology, began to find far
more interest in new intellectual movements
beyond the country's borders: the philosophy of
Berkeley and the observational science of Boyle
and Newton. These provided topics for student
discussion clubs such as the Rankenian, whose
memberships included Thomas Reid's subse-
quent teacher George Turnbull, as well as
David Hume. As Norman Kemp Smith's
student and then assistant, Davie has pursued
further the explorations which led to Kemp
Smith's breakthrough in understanding Hume
in relation to Francis Hutcheson.
Rather than take a view of philosophy as
represented by and taking its trajectory from
big books internationally recognized, Davie
has drawn attention to neglected discussions
within Scotland. He has brought out both their
quality in a historical assessment, and their
potential as contributions to continuing debate.
Davie's investigation of Hume's contemporary
discussions with Lord Kames and with
DAVIE
Alexander Gregory has resulted in a greater
appreciation of the detail of Hume's arguments.
Davie has given very detailed attention to
Scottish philosophy and the environment of
practical concerns which attended its historical
working out. His awareness of the custom or
habit of reading earlier Scottish works has had
more recent development in appreciations of
the importance of late mediaeval and
Renaissance texts to the Scottish eighteenth
century. An enemy of the parochialism of
fashion, Davie has acknowledged influence
from Wyndham Lewis's Paleface (1929) in
recognition of the failures of enthusiasts of
many an exotic option to perform critical inves-
tigation of their own native culture in depth and
detail, far less identify it. Lewis's epithet 'revo-
lutionary simpleton' recurs with some force in
Davie's writings.
Concern with his native Western culture in
Scotland was deepened and intensified by
Davie's reading in 1936 of Torgny Segerstedt's
The Problem of Knowledge in Scottish
Philosophy (Lund, 1935). The continuity of its
discussions of Dugald Stewart, Thomas Brown,
Sir William Hamilton and especially J.F. Ferrier
afforded something of a revelation. What Davie
does not scruple to call the modernity of
Ferrier's discussions has contributed to Ferrier's
recognition as a pioneer of phenomenology.
In Davie's 1953 DLitt thesis, Ferrier comes at
the end of a lengthy, very close discussion of
perception pursued in the undergraduate clubs
and continued by Hume, Reid, Stewart, Brown
and Hamilton. He finds in that discussion of
perception the point of orientation for the phi-
losophy of each of these men, their respective
accounts of universals and other topics.
In a slim volume completed in his nineties,
Davie's advocacy of Ferrier continues with clar-
ification of the course of Ferrier's intellectual
career, from the early great achievement of
'Berkeley and Idealism'. He sees a widely per-
vasive legacy of Adam Smith, whose meta-
physical acumen he holds in the highest regard,
in Schelling and in Ferrier's relation to
Schelling. Crucial is the account of the coming
218
into being of the individual, the infant whose
assumption is that it is at the centre of the
universe; and of the undoing of that delusion:
the child's consequent humanization, in recip-
rocal interaction with adults. Smith's internal
spectator, and conscience and responsible
selfhood come into being.
The Democratic Intellect has of late been
read as urging that Scottish intellectual life
suffered terminal collapse in the 1870s. Davie
writes in terms rather of a major injury. He has
not ignored William Robertson Smith (and the
importance of the mathematics curriculum in
philosophical dispute) and John BURNET has
long been Davie's major inspiration in a
concern to demonstrate the intellectual integrity
of the Scottish universities' traditions - sound
institutions within a distinct culture or civi-
lization - and the political and academic-polit-
ical operations which had in the middle nine-
teenth century begun their undermining.
In Burnet's day priorities of teaching pro-
gramme and individual subject curriculum had
begun to be disrupted. A redefinition of
academic subjects had begun to deprive each of
its service of a generalist pedagogy sensitive to
the perils of specialized ignorance. Ceasing to
be the sort of institutions into which they had
been organized, the Scottish universities were
forfeiting their cultural centrality with their
raisons d'etre, leaving a cultural or moral
vacuum.
Davie has considerable enthusiasm for the
account of the Scottish polity in Ferrier's
pamphlet 'Church and State', in its day an
ignored contribution to debates which were
broken off abruptly in 1843 by the secession of
'Free Kirk' clergy from the General Assembly of
the Church of Scotland. Read in the wake of
that 1843 'Disruption', Ferrier's analysis of the
sixteenth-century Knoxian conception of the
Christian community plainly argued that theo-
logically the Free Kirk case was wrong.
Consequent power struggles reclassified Ferrier
in the terms which denied his exceptional
quality the recognition and base of influence of
an Edinburgh chair. This and attendant pro-

paganda, often chauvinist denunciation of his
transactions with German philosophy, were an
insult to the philosophy and intellectual insti-
tution within which Ferrier worked.
The effect on Ferrier's philosophy was a
drastic revision of perspective, with an excessive
and hastily polemical reaction against nation-
alistic charges that he had been working to
supplant the native philosophy with (as
slogans insisted) German Hegelianism. By dint
of its bulk, Ferrier's Institutes of Metaphysic
(1854) had sometime been taken for his
magnum opus. Davie finds both that book
and that judgement about it aberrations. With
its account of the later work, and signs of a
recovery which Ferrier's relatively early final
breakdown in health curtailed, Davie contin-
ues his long-standing presentation of dialogue
between the Scottish philosophy and Europe
and modernity.
Davie's critics among historians have pre-
sumably appreciated the potential awkward-
ness of a labour to integrate accounts composed
on Davie's historiographical principles into a
bounded synoptic account. His awareness of
the often subsequently buried detail of con-
temporary debates disturbs the pretences to
inclusiveness of pat summaries. He is aware
alike of the modes both of the bracketing
standard histories commonly apply, and of the
modes of possible revisions of detail.
The Democratic Intellect draws attention to
- among much else - the dispute between
Francis Jeffrey and Dugald Stewart which was
reminiscent of an earlier instance of the Two
Cultures debate. The book was appreciatively
reviewed by C.P. Snow. Jeffrey was an apostle
of science and his challenge to his former
teacher advanced the proposition that forth-
coming discoveries about the world would
render otiose the study of moral philosophy. In
Davie's account Stewart's is the case on behalf
of culture, as already knowledge, as against
revolutionary naturalistic convictions and
promises of ultimate explanation.
Davie's Dow Lecture (in The Scottish
Enlightenment) discusses another version of
219
DAVIE
the same debate, as between the gladly accepted
moderate neo-Calvinist teachings integral to
nineteenth-century Scottish ideas of education,
and social reform; and the Benthamite presup-
position that man can be made anew.
Following a widespread material social reform,
ignoring the cultural aspect and tradition in
the name of scientific doctrine, the Benthamite
project envisaged deployment of revolutionary
new or merely anticipated psychological tech-
niques. These would bring the masses liber-
ated from poverty to an educated state such as
would enable them, in Davie's phrase, to storm
the seats of the Gods. Where Davie talks of
secular Calvinism he has very much in mind
what he sees as the merits of the Scottish case
against Bentham. His teacher Kemp Smith
made very explicit reference to Calvin; Davie is
in general terms sympathetic to the viewpoint
of John Passmore's The Perfectibility of Man.
In The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect
(1985) Davie further works out the implicit
model of culture and philosophy as inseparable
which emerged from the studies that went into
his first book. There is a detailed discussion of
the battles which had gone on in Davie's youth
between educationists and government parties,
and whose presence in folk memory certainly
informed his attention to the nineteenth
century. His interest was perhaps intensified
by Kemp Smith's confession that he could not
study the Scottish nineteenth century because
that entailed attention to disputes he was not
alone in finding still too painful to read about.
Kemp Smith is one presence in the Crisis,
whose concern extends across various mani-
festations identifiable as survivals or echoes of
the earlier culture whose centre was university
philosophy. Davie's views on the analytical tra-
dition and its post-1945 heyday are not so dif-
ferent from Bryan MAGEE'S. He draws attention
to a Scottish philosopher on the older cultural
pattern, John ANDERSON in Australia.
Anderson's cultural role and influence he finds
exemplary, going beyond Brian Kennedy's
biography of Anderson by relating aspects of
Anderson's thought, crucially on education, to
DAVIE
his experience still resident in Scotland while
aforementioned wars between educators were
being waged.
During the period the book discusses, the
first eighty or so years of the twentieth century
in Scotland, MacDiarmid was the major pro-
ponent of a viewpoint challenging on Scotland's
behalf the dominant forces to whose preva-
lence Davie attributes protracted decline. Davie
is intrigued that MacDiarmid was so fascinated
by perception as to have in effect done philos-
ophy in treating of the topic in his earlier Scots
poems. For MacDiarmid's later neo-Marxism
Davie has no enthusiasm. MacDiarmid's neo-
Nietzschean fabrication of an image of a kind
of Scotland he might want presumably directed
Davie to essay an account of Scottish intellec-
tual culture historically founded.
MacDiarmid's essays in the Scottish
Educational Journal were certainly the major
effort towards a reasonably systematic critical
discussion of the country in the 1920s. Davie
sees their importance as having filled a void in
debate created by cultural changes he deplored.
Davie would not have been an unqualified
enthusiast for the creation in 1876 of the
journal Mind as hiving off philosophical dis-
cussions into a specialized organ. He has
retained a great enthusiasm for the old
Blackwood's Magazine and the milieu within
which it existed in intellectual symbiosis. It was
in that general cultural journal that, for
instance, Ferrier's most important writings were
printed.
While the history of ideas has been central in
Davie's exertions over a long life, his work has
ever been that of a philosopher debating with
others. In a tighter description of philosophical
writing his work is not sheerly historical but
can be characterized as a species of classicism
in which he finds in Ferrier, Hume, Adam
Smith, Reid and others cases worth advancing
in contemporary discussions of, for instance,
Rorty and Derrida, with no small critical
engagement on his own part. His concerns have
included appropriations from his studies to
effect rapprochements between older Scottish
220
philosophers and Merleau-Ponty and Husserl
(cf. A Passion for Ideas, 1994). The quality of
the older Scottish thinkers is made plain, the
phenomenologists' work is clarified in a context
which allows no automatic superiority to the
new. In a wider perspective there may be a
restoration of real issues which have been
buried under feverish ramifying discussions by
individuals to whom Davie has not denied the
name of trendies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Democratic Intellect (Edinburgh, 1961,
1962; photo, repr. 1981).
The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect
(Edinburgh, 1985).
The Scottish Enlightenment and Other
Essays (Edinburgh, 1991).
A Passion for Ideas - Essays on the Scottish
Enlightenment, vol. II (Edinburgh, 1994).
The Scotch Metaphysics (2001).
Ferrier and the Blackout of the Scottish
Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 2003).
Robert R. Calder
DAY, John Patrick de Cormelie (1919-99)
Patrick Day was born in Cairo on 9 January
1919 and died on 29 October 1999 in
Wythenshawe, Greater Manchester. He was
educated at Shrewsbury School and at
Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied
PPE under J.L. AUSTIN and T.D. WELDON, grad-
uating with a first class degree in 1940. Day
then joined the Royal Artillery and worked in
Intelligence, first in MI5 and then MI6.
Towards the very end of the war he acted as an
independent witness at the newly discovered
concentration camp at Dachau. After the war
Day returned to Magdalen, where he took the
BPhil, supervised by Gilbert RYLE. He then
moved to Queen's University, Ontario and

then, successively, to Yale and Bowdoin College
Maine. In 1954 he came back to Britain to
take up a lectureship at the University College
of North Staffordshire, which became the
University of Keele, and he remained at Keele
until his retirement in 1986. After his retiremen
he went to the University of Georgia for a year,
and then returned to Keele as a fellow of the
university, entering into a very productive
period that lasted almost until his death in
1999.
His writing reflected his intellectual roots in
the Oxford of Austin and Ryle, and is notable
for its range. He wrote on philosophy of
science, political philosophy, economic theory,
and moral philosophy and the history of phi-
losophy. In Inductive Probability (1961) Day
argues that the meaning of probable 'is partly
evaluative and partly descriptive. Saying that a
proposition is probable both recommends its
assertion and says that a certain procedure
show it to be the case.' His approach here
reflects that of R.M. HARE'S account of moral
language, and is evidence of a method that he
brought to political philosophy. In a series of
articles Day became influential as a significant
supporter of the negative concept of liberty,
and attempted to disentangle it from, and deny
the applicability of, a positive concept. To this
end, in 'On Liberty and the Real Will' (1970),
Day defends negative freedom. He provides a
criticism of six 'real will' arguments, which he
finds false, since they are all based on the false
assumption that to be free to do something
one has to desire to do it. In fact, desire (or will)
is irrelevant to freedom: the confusion arises
from the muddling of the idea of feeling free to
do something with being free to do it. Once the
link between desiring to do something and
being free to do it is severed, theorists of
freedom have no trouble with the contented
slave, who is unproblematically unfree. In
'Threats, Offers, Law, Opinion and Liberty'
(1977) Day makes the related claim that offers
cannot be coercive. (Offers seem to have some
of the same characteristics as threats, and
threats seem to be coercive. But if offers and
221
DAY
threats are both coercive then there is very little
space for negative freedom.) Again, his
approach rests partly on linguistic analysis: the
notion of a 'coercive offer' does seem contra-
dictory. Day also condemns the 'self-owner-
ship' thesis as based on linguistic confusion. It
results from the confusion of different uses of
possessive pronouns. Day's account here was
picked up on by Brian Barry and others in the
debate over self-ownership initiated by G.A.
COHEN in the 1990s. In each of these cases
Day's method is to focus on linguistic analysis
and to employ those techniques in reaching
Millian liberal - and sometimes libertarian -
conclusions.
In his collection of essays Liberty and Justice
(1987) Day shows the influence of both Mill
and H.L.A. HART, and his significance is as a
philosopher who revised and reformulated
fairly conventional views in a rigorous and
careful manner.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Inductive Probability (1961).
'On Liberty and the Real Will', American
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 6 (1970), pp.
89-102.
'Threats, Offers, Law, Opinion and Liberty',
American Philosophical Quarterly', vol. 14
(1977), pp. 252-72.
Liberty and Justice (1987).
'Self-Ownership', Locke Newsletter, vol. 20
(1989), pp. 77-85.
'Hope: A Philosophical Inquiry', Acta
Philosophica Fennica, vol. 51 (1991), pp.
11-101.
Other Relevant Works
'Artistic Verisimilitude, Part I', Dialogue, vol.
1(1962), pp. 163-87.
'Artistic Verisimilitude, Part IF, Dialogue,
vol. 2 (1962), pp. 278-304.
'Hope', American Philosophical Quarterly,
vol. 6 (1969), pp. 89-102.
'Retributive Punishment', Mind, vol. 87
(1978), pp. 498-516.
'Individual Liberty', Of Liberty: Supplement
DAY
to Philosophy 1983 (Cambridge, 1983),
pp. 17-30.
'Economic Liberty and Economic Justice',
Cogito (1985), pp. 39-59.
The Indefeasibility of Justice', Cogito (1985),
pp. 55-90.
'More about Hope and Fear', Ethical Theory
and Moral Practice, vol. 1, no. 1 (1998),
pp. 121-3.
Jon Pike
DEARDEN, Robert Frederick (1934-)
Robert Dearden was born in Liverpool on 6
April 1934. He studied at Southall Grammar
School. After an initial career as a draughtsman,
he went to Borough Road College for training
as a primary schoolteacher. He then studied
philosophy part-time at Birkbeck and in his
final year studied on a full-time basis. From
1956 until 1964 he taught in primary schools
and in 1964 he was appointed as a lecturer i
philosophy of education at the University of
London Institute of Education, where he was
became reader in the philosophy of education
in 1972. In 1978 he was appointed to a chair
in education at the University of Birmingham.
As a lecturer and reader at the Institute, he
played an important role, alongside R.S. PETERS
and P.H. HlRST, in developing philosophy of
education as a significant discipline within
initial and in-service teacher education.
Dearden wrote widely on topics in the phi-
losophy of education, but is probably best
known for his work on the philosophy of
primary education, about which he wrote two
books in 1968 and 1976, respectively. He w
a colleague at the Institute of Education of two
other of the best-known philosophers of edu-
cation of the 1960s and 1970s, Peters and
Hirst, and his work reflects their influence, par-
ticularly in his commitment to a liberal con-
222
ception of education, and, in the case of Hirst,
to the forms of knowledge thesis that the latter
developed. Dearden was both a commentator
on and critic of the history and the development
of primary education in the UK. He wrote in a
critical vein about some of the developments in
primary education that emerged from the
Plowden Report of 1967 on primary education,
on such topics as the concepts of needs, inter-
ests, happiness and discovery learning as these
related to the primary curriculum, arguing that
these were interpreted in a tendentious way by
some of the more enthusiastic followers of the
Rousseau and Froebel-inspired progressive
regime, with the consequence that they were
largely evacuated of useful descriptive meaning
and turned over to ideological purposes.
He was not, however, content merely to
comment critically on the Tlowden
Revolution'. Dearden advocated a form of
primary education that emphasized intellectual
as well as emotional development, and he also
was an early champion of autonomy as a sig-
nificant educational aim. By the possession of
autonomy, he meant that someone who was
autonomous should be capable of forming their
own judgements on what to think and do, that
they should be able to reflect critically on such
judgements, and that they should be able to
integrate their belief and conduct around their
first-order and critical judgements. In order to
become adults who were able to do this,
children needed an intellectual education that
gave them a grasp of central concepts, of typical
patterns of reasoning and truth testing, and a
critical capacity to be reflective about and to
evaluate their own judgements. He was clear
that the specifics of intellectual mastery
depended on the subject-matter that was being
mastered and, although he did not dismiss the
idea that there could be general, transferable
abilities, he maintained that they could never be
sufficient to attain intellectual mastery.
Dearden however, wrote clearly and innov-
atively about a range of topics that had received
relatively little attention within philosophy of
education. These included: the relationship

between theory and practice in education;
assessment; and the concept of training. He
also wrote critical, philosophically informed,
commentaries on developments taking place
in educational policy-making in the UK at the
time.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Philosophy of Primary Education
(1968).
Problems in Primary Education (1976).
Theory and Practice in Education (1984).
Christopher Andrew Winch
DE BURGH, William George (1866-1943)
William George De Burgh was born in London
on 24 October 1866 and died in Toller
Pocorum, Dorset on 27 August 1943. Educated
at Winchester and Merton College, Oxford,
he became briefly an assistant master at Derby
School, a tutor at Toynbee Hall, London and
a University Extension lecturer in Stepney.
From 1896 to 1907 he taught classics at the
University Extension College in Reading,
adding philosophy from 1908. On the estab-
lishment of University College, Reading in 1907
he became Professor of Philosophy (relin-
quishing classics in 1910) and Dean of the
Faculty of Letters, holding both positions until
he retired in 1934. That he retained his classi-
cal interests is clear from his well-received
books, The Legacy of Greece and Rome (1912)
and The Legacy of the Ancient World (1926).
He was a leading promoter of the University of
Reading, which received its charter in 1926, a
loyal member of the Church of England and a
fellow of the British Academy (1938).
De Burgh's works reveal both his interests in
ethics, aesthetics and religion, and his method
of drawing upon thinkers ancient and modern,
but also medieval - these last being too fre-
223
DE BURGH
quently overlooked by his professional con-
temporaries, he thought. In his British Academy
Philosophy Lecture of 1935, The Relations of
Morality to Religion', he argues that religion
and morality are independent forms of experi-
ence, between which there is no necessary con-
nection: 'Religion enjoins modes of conduct
that fall outside the range of moral duty' (p. 7).
Religious experience is both theoretic and theo-
centric: it yields knowledge, the object of which
is God. But religion is not to be equated with
philosophy, for it is concerned with both
theoria and praxis.
These themes are more fully treated in
Towards a Religious Philosophy (1937). This
is not a philosophy of religion, but concerns 'a
speculative outlook upon the world and life,
which, as philosophy, must be grounded on
reason, and, as religion, must be centred in
God' (p. v). Underlying the work is De Burgh's
conviction that truth is more than a matter of
logically impeccable propositions. Religious
truth is revealed to us and appropriated by
faith. While its source is independent of other
sources of knowledge, it does not conflict with
knowledge otherwise acquired. Faith appeals
not to emotion or to logic, but to an intellectual
intuition. Since God is transcendent he cannot
be known by speculative argument. Hence,
'The familiar "proofs" either fail as proofs, or,
in what they prove, conclude to something
other than the God of religion' (ibid., p. 40).
In his Gifford Lectures, From Morality to
Religion (1938), the predominant theme is that
while morality and religion are both concerned
with moral behaviour, the end of the former is
this-worldly, while that of the latter is the
beatific vision. In religion, the noblest insights
of morality are incorporated and transfigured,
for 'the new motive, the love of God, involves
a transvaluation that is radical and all-perva-
sive' (From Morality to Religion, p. 239). A
Christian philosophy of the kind he proposes
has, he is convinced, a message both for the
individual and for the fractured world at large.
De Burgh took Knowledge of the Individual
(1939) as the topic of his Riddell Memorial
DE BURGH
Lectures. He discusses historical, aesthetic and
religious knowledge on the basis that there is a
hierarchy of truth. He notes, 'pace certain
eminent German theologians of our own time'
(Barth and his followers) that far from being
wholly other, God is knowable in direct expe-
rience. Religious knowledge, apprehended by a
reasonable faith, is the highest form of knowl-
edge, for reason is '"the candle of the Lord
within us" ... "in whom there is no darkness at
all"' (Knowledge of the Individual, p. 60).
In his posthumous work, The Life of Reason
(1949), De Burgh returns to his view that
reason may not be confined to the analytic pro-
cedure of logical inference, but concerns intu-
itive thinking, aesthetic and scientific imagina-
tion, the higher levels of emotion, and moral
and religious faith. Reason's essential function
is synthesis, analysis and inference being impor-
tant, but secondary functions. Christianity, he
argues, may be defended by appeal to its truth
and its fruit; but the former has primacy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Legacy of Greece and Rome (1912).
The Legacy of the Ancient World (1926).
The Relations of Morality to Religion'
[British Academy Philosophy Lecture]
(1935).
Towards a Religious Philosophy (1937).
From Morality to Religion [Gifford Lectures]
(1938).
Knowledge of the Individual (1939).
The Life of Reason (1949).
further Reading
Sell, Alan P.P., The Philosophy of Religion
1875-1980 (1988; Bristol, 1998).
Taylor, A.E., 'William George De Burgh,
1866-1943', Proceedings of the British
Academy (1943), pp. 371-91.
Alan P.P. Sell
224
OILMAN, flham (1930-2003)
Ilham Dilman was born in Turkey and died in
Swansea. He attended Robert College, Istanbul,
where in 1950 he received his BSc. He the
came to Britain to study at Cambridge
University for the Moral Sciences Tripos, which
he received in 1953. He was awarded his PhD
from Cambridge in 1958. His first academic
appointment was as lecturer at University
College, Swansea, from 1961 to 1967. He was
senior lecturer at the University of Hull from
1968 until 1971, and then he returned to
Swansea as Professor of Philosophy until his
retirement in 1995. Thereafter he was emeritus
professor. He held various visiting professor-
ships in the United States: at the University of
California in Los Angeles in 1965; at the
University of California in Santa Barbara from
1967 to 1968; and at the University of Oregon
at Eugene in 1968.
Although Dilman arrived in Cambridge after
WITTGENSTEIN had resigned his chair there, he
was one of the many philosophers in Britain in
the twentieth century whose studies and sub-
sequent academic career were heavily influ-
enced by Wittgenstein. Towards the end of his
life, in the abstract of a paper entitled 'On
Wittgenstein' (2001), Dilman wrote of
Wittgenstein, 'Philosophy was no specialism
for him ... his work bore the marks of his life
and the difficulties he found in it. What I have
learned from it has enriched my life and
thinking and has enhanced my appreciation of
human life and thought.' Fittingly, Oilman's
career began and ended with major publica-
tions on Wittgenstein.
In Induction and Deduction: A Study in
Wittgenstein (1973) Dilman examines the con-
tribution of Wittgenstein to these two areas of
reasoning, which shows how the scepticism of
both Hume and RUSSELL is misguided. Hume's
scepticism about the future results from a futile
appeal to the Uniformity Principle, which is
not known to be true. Wittgenstein counters
this move by saying that scepticism about
induction is a pseudo-problem: induction needs

no justification beyond itself, as evidence about
the past makes possible our predictions about
the future. Similarly, Wittgenstein maintained
that there is no need to go outside the propo-
sitions of a formal or deductive inference in
order to justify that inference: there is no 'jus-
tification of justifications', or deductive guar-
antee of deductive reasoning, but only common
practice or the application of the rules of our
language-game, which themselves are
embodied in our deductive inferences. In his
later publications, Dilman broadened his dis-
cussion of Wittgenstein's insights into language-
games: in Dilman's view, Wittgenstein held
that our forms of life, with their language-
games, can themselves give rise to philosophi-
cal problems and apparent paradoxes, to which
philosophers can then contribute.
Dilman's interest in philosophical logic
extended to thinkers besides Wittgenstein. He
maintains that Quine's views on ontology are
mistaken, especially the contention that we
accept most easily the existence of physical
objects because our statements about them are
derived from sensory stimuli which we suppose
to emerge from contact with them. Dilman
comments that Quine's ontology plays into the
hands of the natural scientists, dehumanizes
the world and ignores the fact that ontology is
multifarious and multifaceted. He also argues
that Quine's brand of empiricism is simplistic
and inadequate, and that his rejection of the dis-
tinction between necessary and contingent
truths is unnecessary and unwarranted.
Dilman followed Wittgenstein closely in their
joint concerns with philosophical scepticism.
Dilman remarked that Wittgenstein did not
accept the assumption that there is a general
solution to, or overall guarantee against, philo-
sophical scepticism in its many manifestations;
there is no 'metaphysical certainty' of the sort
that philosophers such as Descartes were
seeking. Previous attempts to defeat scepticism
have accepted the assumption which the
sceptics make that there is the possibility of
doubt; but Wittgenstein attempts to show us
that the various sorts of scepticism are inco-
225
OILMAN
herent, though in different ways. Cartesian
doubt begins with the view that everything can
be doubted except the existence of oneself.
Wittgenstein's counter to the Cartesian use of
doubt in the search for the foundation of
knowledge is to maintain that we cannot think
without language, and that there can be no
language without the existence of a common
world and other users of language.
Another of Dilman's major interests was
Freud. In various of his works, Dilman
examined Freud's tripartite structure of the self
into the ego, the superego and the id. Of the
three, Dilman was most interested in the
superego, which is constituted by a person's
culturally induced moral precepts, and the id,
which is constituted by his instincts and sub-
conscious instinctual behaviour. Dilman offered
an alternative interpretation of what Freud says
about both the superego and the id. The pre-
vailing view of Freud's concept of the id, which
is solidly founded on evidence from Freud's
work, is that sex is confined to the search for
pleasure. Dilman contends that there is also a
case for Freud's having held that the sexuality
that is limited to pleasure-seeking is the infan-
tile form found in arrested development. Such
infantilism may extend into adult life, but adult
sexuality is life-affirming and expressive of love.
Similarly, the dominant view of the superego
and morality is that the moral code prevailing
in society is internalized into the superegos of
its members, and thus nobody can be truly
autonomous, or develop their moral codes for
themselves. By contrast, on Dilman's interpre-
tation of Freud, the ego can prevail over the
superego by developing a genuine conscience,
which makes us truly autonomous.
Dilman later expanded on his work in philo-
sophical psychology by maintaining that psy-
chology as a science is limited to general
descriptions and their application to individual
cases, and that this prevents us from fully
understanding the uniqueness of concrete situ-
ations and the personal conduct which marks
us out as unique human beings. The generali-
ties of psychology thus need to be supple-
DILMAN
mented by accounts of individuals in their par-
ticular circumstances, including examples
found in literature, especially the novel, which
deals with pivotal moments in the lives of its
characters. Some novelists cut away the inessen-
tials of mundane life in order to present their
readership with the essential structure of the
lives and motivations of their characters, which
can teach us about the lives and motivations of
real people, including ourselves. We can learn
from psychological accounts, but in a detached
way, whereas we feel the sufferings or joy of
characters in literature. In a number of his works,
Dilman has dealt in detail with a novel popular
amongst Wittgensteinians: Dostoyevsky's Crime
and Punishment, of which he says that it
predates Freud. Dilman's interpretation of this
work is that Raskolnikov is alienated from
goodness after he has murdered his landlady, but
overcomes this alienation when he transforms
himself by taking on responsibility for, and has
repented of, his crime.
His interest in Dostoyevsky and the anti-
hero Raskolnikov reflects Dilman's wider
concern with existentialism, and particularly
with Sartre and his view of personal identity.
Dilman articulates Sartre's basic insight that
we have a choice about what we are to become,
and that when we think that we have to live up
to a predetermined role in life we are acting
inauthentically. For Sartre, as for Dilman, ethics
necessarily includes autonomy, and there can be
no autonomy without choice.
In several of his publications, Dilman also
develops his more general theories about all
forms of art. He maintains that our interest in
and production of works of art emerges from
certain of our natural activities as children.
Works of art uniquely embody what artists
want to say about life, and can say in no other
way. By what we learn from them, some works
of art are effective in altering our view of and
approach to life.
Freud, Sartre and Wittgenstein are three of
the sixteen philosophers whose writings on free
will are included in Dilman's publication, Free
Will: A Historical and Philosophical
226
Introduction (1999). Dilman succeeds in
bringing out various philosophers' insights into
the issue of free will, whilst drawing attention
to their shortcomings. According to many of his
interpreters, Freud's division of the self into
the ego, the superego and the id sets up
immutable and insuperable structures which
inevitably enslave the will. Dilman, by contrast,
says that this division can be construed as dis-
sociations of the personality, which can be
overcome by the transformation of the self,
and thus the will can be set free. Sartre claims
that people are inevitably free, in that they
always have to make choices, but nevertheless
lack relative freedom, as they often sink into
bad faith and inauthenticity. Wittgenstein states
that we, as human beings, have the capacity for
choice and thus for determining what we are
and do, but we are often prevented by
weakness or deficiency, and crucially in many
different ways, from making actual choices.
Dilman's output in a wide range of philo-
sophical disciplines was prolific, and he has
contributed to our understanding of many
major philosophical topics and several major
figures of the twentieth century, not least
among whom was Wittgenstein.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Life and Meaning', Philosophy, vol. 40, no.
154 (October 1965), pp. 320-33.
'Wittgenstein, Philosophy and Logic',
Analysis, vol. 31 (December 1970), pp.
33^2.
'On Wittgenstein's Last Notes (1950-1951)
On Certainty', Philosophy, vol. 46, no.
176 (April 1971), pp. 162-8.
Induction and Deduction: A Study in
Wittgenstein (1973).
'Paradoxes and Discoveries', in J. Wisdom,
Twelve Essays, ed. R. Bambrough (1974),
pp. 78-105.
Matter and Mind (1975).
Morality and the Inner Life: A Study in
Plato's 'Gorgias3 (1979).
Studies in Language and Reason (1981).
Freud and Human Nature (1983).

Freud and the Mind (1984).
Quine on Ontology, Necessity and
Experience (1984).
'John Wisdom and the Breadth of
Philosophy', 'Our Knowledge of Other
People', 'Philosophy and Scepticism', in
Ilham Dilman (ed.), Philosophy and Life:
Essays on John Wisdom (1984), pp. 1-26,
145-78, 317^5.
Freud, Insight and Change (1988).
'Sartre and our Identity as Individuals',
Philosophy, suppl. (1991), pp. 245-64.
'Can Philosophy Speak about Life?',
Philosophy, vol. 33, suppl. (1992), pp.
109-23.
Philosophy and the Philosophic Life: A Study
of Plato's 'Phaedo' (1992).
Existentialist Critiques of Cartesianism
(1993).
'Art and Reality', Philosophical
Investigations, vol. 18, no. 3 (July 1995),
pp. 264-80.
'Wisdom', Philosophy, vol. 71, no. 278
(October 1996), pp. 577-90.
'Science and Psychology', in Anthony O'Hear
(ed.), Verstehen and Humane
Understanding (1996).
Language and Reality: Modern Perspectives
on Wittgenstein (1998).
Love: Its Forms, Dimensions and Paradoxes
(1998).
Free Will: A Historical and Philosophical
Introduction (1999).
Raskolnikov's Rebirth: Psychology and the
Understanding of Good and Evil (2000).
'Psychology and Human Behaviour: Is there a
Limit to Psychological Explanation?',
Philosophy, vol. 75, no. 292 (April 2000),
pp. 183-201.
'On Wittgenstein', Philosophical
Investigations, vol. 24, no. 2 (April 2001),
pp. 116-21.
'Body and Soul', Philosophical Investigations,
vol. 25, no. 1 (January 2002), pp. 54-66.
Wittgenstein's Copernican Revolution
(2002).
227
DINGLE
Other Relevant Works
(with D.Z. Phillips), 'Sense and Delusion
(1971).
Kathryn L. Plant
DINGLE, Herbert (1890-1978)
Herbert Dingle was born in London on 2
August 1890 and died in Hull on 4 September
1978. He was brought up in Devonshire by
his widowed mother, and was largely self-
educated until college. He obtained his degree
in physics from Imperial College London, and
stayed on to teach there, which he did from
1918 to 1946. In 1935 he became Head of the
spectroscopy section, and was promoted to a
chair in natural philosophy in the Physics
Department in 1937. During World War II,
when G.P. Thomson was away on government
service, he became the acting head of the
department. He was later to attack Thomson
publicly over asymmetric ageing to begin the
'twin paradox' controversy. He was elected a
fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in
1922 and served as President from 1951 to
1953. In 1946 he moved to University College
London, where he headed the newly revived
Department of History and Philosophy of
Science until his retirement in 1955. Dingle
played a central role in founding the British
Society for the History of Science in 1947, and
served as its President from 1955 to 1957. In
1948 he founded the Philosophy of Science
group of the British Society for the History of
Science, which later developed into the British
Society for the Philosophy of Science. In 1950
he founded its journal, The British Journal for
the Philosophy of Science, to which he con-
tributed often.
Dingle is best known for the controversy he
stirred up in 1956 over 'the clock paradox' or
'twin paradox'. It is now often simply regarded
DINGLE
by historians as an episode in the resistance to
Einstein's special theory of relativity. He was,
however, considered an expert on relativity
theory, and he had initially accepted the theory
fully. Indeed, his position in the controversy
was that nobody understood relativity theory
clearly enough, and its short historical evolution
had been forgotten. He wrote a popular
textbook on relativity in 1922, Relativity for
All, and a short textbook in 1940. Clearly
without being such an expert Dingle could
never have then created the controversy that he
did. As Hasok Chang has pointed out, Dingle's
conduct in his relativity controversies needs to
be understood within the context of his philo-
sophical views about science in general. Indeed,
his position was developed over a much larger
time-frame than that just of the 1956-8 con-
troversy: starting from at least 1939 up until his
death in 1978 at the age of eighty-eight,
Dingle's main opponent in the controversy was
William H. McCrea, although many became
involved, Max Born being his last respondent.
Dingle really wanted some sort of physical
explanation of the purported asymmetric
ageing and saw McCrea's mathematical
argument as irrelevant whilst not disputing its
correctness. The correspondence was all pub-
lished in Nature. Dingle wanted to know, if
moving clocks were said to run slowly, what
would slow them down physically, would
actual clocks exhibit the relativistically required
time dilation? His conventionalist interpreta-
tion of special relativity ruled out asymmetric
ageing.
Dingle wrote an Introduction for the first
publication of an English translation of Henri
Bergson's controversial book Duration and
Simultaneity in 1965. He very much allied
himself with Bergson against all of the misun-
derstandings and confusions he saw over the
interpretation of special relativity. He saw
profound confusion as arising from the
muddling and mixing of two entirely different
theories - that of Lorentz of 1904 and that of
Einstein - and the forgetting of this muddle:
attributing sole originality to Einstein, believing
228
in 1919 that the new general theory was
entirely continuous with the special theory of
1905. The problem being that for Lorentz's
physical explanation using the ether, relativity
was merely apparent, whilst for Einstein it was
entirely real. It was forgotten that Einstein had
conceived the theory as Lorentz had, to
preserve the invariance of the electromagnetic
equations to the relation between space and
time in relatively moving systems (the 'Lorentz
transformation'), and to justify the
Maxwell-Lorentz theory after the damaging
Michelson-Morley experiment, rather than
conceiving it to measure distant events. Indeed,
no clocks are used in the Michelson-Morley
experiment to compare the times taken by
beams of light to traverse different paths and to
explain this in terms of the modification of
these times by the motion of the apparatus;
only interference fringes are observed. Time is
introduced simply by interpreting the fringes in
terms of the Maxwell-Lorentz theory which
supposes that they are caused by light having a
constant velocity c, a frequency n, and a wave-
length X, which are related by the equation,
c - rik. Because c and n involve time, time
enters the description. But according to Dingle
the purpose of the experiment shows this to be
illegitimate: as it was designed to decide
between Newtonian mechanics and the
Maxwell-Lorentz electromagnetic theory, it
must not be presupposed that either of these is
true, which is what is happening. When the
Maxwell-Lorentz theory is presupposed, only
two explanations are possible: that Newtonian
mechanics is wrong or that there is some dis-
turbing factor that has been missed. Einstein
chose the first explanation., and Lorentz the
second. Michelson's superficial explanation
that electromagnetic theory is wrong is ruled
out by the terms in which the experiment is
described, Dingle points out, which was to be
ignored by everyone but Ritz, who was to die
shortly afterward and so, as Dingle says, could
then be forgotten easily. Dingle states the fun-
damental error as he sees it in the Introduction:

The 'contraction' of moving bodies, for
example, which to Lorentz (and FitzGerald)
was an ordinary physical effect like the con-
traction through cooling, and to Einstein was
merely the result of the difference in times
that were regarded as simultaneous by rela-
tively moving observers, was regarded as a
single conception, but whether it was 'real' or
'apparent', or whether there was any longer
a difference between reality and appearance,
nobody except Lorentz and Einstein seemed
to know.
(Duration and Simultaneityr, p. xxiv)
The two theories were generally regarded as the
same theory since their mathematical content
was the same, notwithstanding that they were
physically fundamentally different, Lorentz
relying upon its motion through the ether
retarding the clock, Einstein regarding the def-
inition by which it is set giving it a later time
than the clock in motion. So, for Dingle,
Lorentz's theory requires asymmetrical aging
and Einstein's does not. Dingle's inability to
make himself understood, or to carry out the
constructive dialogue he so hoped for with his
peers, lay in the fact that for him the disproof
of the theory lay not in its mathematics, to
which his opponents constantly referred, but in
the fact that, with an inconsistency in the
physical part of the theory, it had physical
implications for him that were both inescapable
and incompatible with one another. Except for
Einstein's special relativity, Dingle was also
particularly critical of Milne's 'kinematical rel-
ativity', the steady-state universe theory of
Hoyle, Bondi and Gold, and cosmological spec-
ulations advanced by established physicists such
as EDDINGTON and Dirac.
Dingle's oppositions were grounded in a
somewhat Utopian vision of science and its
democratization. He saw himself as rallying
against the obfuscating excesses of mathemat-
ical physics where many were spellbound by the
new language of relativity theory, afraid of
challenging it in common sense terms. Dingle
had high ambitions indeed for the unification
229
DINGLE
of science and philosophy, spelt out in among
other places his trilogy of works on philosophy
and science, Science and Human Experience
(1931), Through Science to Philosophy (1937)
and The Scientific Adventure: Essays in the
History and Philosophy of Science (1952). He
did not see himself as a philosopher in the sense
of having a 'whole system up one's sleeve'
(Science and Human Experience, p. 12), but he
sought to expose that the 'distinction that is
often assumed to exist between Science and
Philosophy is a false one' (The Scientific
Adventure, p. 193); indeed, that science is
'Scientific Philosophy', for which he shows the
historical evidence, a philosophy that only
made its real advances after separating off from
the other areas of philosophy after the seven-
teenth century. He was a pupil of A.N.
WHITEHEAD, from whom he drew much of his
approach to philosophy whilst retaining a
critical distance. Among other influences upon
his philosophy were T.H. Huxley, in his
analysis of Science as 'organised common-
sense', and Professor E.A. Burtt with his
Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.
But most important to him was Bergson in his
warning against mistaking ideas for experi-
ences. Dingle states: 'We must accept whatever
experience reveals to us, and the theories we
form to rationalize it must be logically impec-
cable' (Duration and Simultaneity, p. xxxix).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Relativity for All (Boston, 1922).
Science and Human Experience (1931).
Through Science to Philosophy (Oxford,
1937).
The Special Theory of Relativity (Norwich,
1940).
The Scientific Adventure: Essays in the
History and Philosophy of Science (1952).
The Sources ofEddington's Philosophy
(Cambridge, 1954).
'Relativity and Space Travel', Nature, vol.
177 (1956), pp. 782^.
Science at the Crossroads (1972).
DINGLE
Other Relevant Works
Modern Astrophysics (1924).
Mechanical Physics (1942).
Sub-Atomic Physics (1942).
Science and Literary Criticism (1949).
Practical Applications of Spectrum Analysis
(1950).
A Hundred Years of Spectroscopy (Oxford,
1951).
(Intro.), Henri Bergson, Duration and
Simultaneity: With Reference to Einstein's
Theory, trans. Leon Jacobson
(Indianapolis, 1965).
Further Reading
Chang, Hasok, 'A Misunderstood Rebellion.
The Twin-Paradox Controversy and
Herbert Dingle's Vision of Science', Studies
in the History and Philosophy of Science,
vol. 24, no. 5 (1993), pp. 741-90.
Andrew Aitken
DOWNIE, Robert Silcock (1933-)
R.S. (Robin) Downie was born in Glasgow on
19 April 1933. He was educated at the High
School of Glasgow and the Universities of
Glasgow and Oxford. At Glasgow University
he studied philosophy with W.G. MACLAGAN
and C.A. CAMPBELL, and took his MA with
first class honours in philosophy and English lit-
erature, later proceeding to Oxford to take a
BPhil in philosophy. At Oxford he was much
influenced by H.H. PRICE and by F. WAISMANN;
Waismann inspired in him a lifelong interest in
the history and philosophy of science.
Returning to Glasgow, he was appointed
lecturer in moral philosophy in 1959, senior
lecturer in 1968 and Professor of Moral
Philosophy in 1969. On his retirement in 2002
he was appointed honorary professorial
research fellow. During his career he has held
230
visiting professorships in a number of univer-
sities and medical schools all over the world. He
has also served on a number of public service
committees in the field of medical ethics,
notably the Advisory Group on
Xenotransplantation in 1996, and from 1975
to 1976 was the Chairman of a working party
on the teaching of the value bases of social
work, under the auspices of the Central Council
for Education and Training in Social Work.
He is a fellow of the Royal Society of
Edinburgh (elected 1986) and of the Royal
Society of Arts (elected 1994).
Downie's contribution to philosophy cannot
be characterized as the propounding of partic-
ular doctrines in the manner of, say, John
Rawls or R.M. HARE. Rather, his work demon-
strates a particular approach to philosophy,
and in particular to moral and political philos-
ophy. From the beginning he rejected the
assumptions, common in the 1960s, that moral
philosophy has no bearing on any first-order
moral issues and must be sharply distinguished
from anything empirical: thus, in his first book,
Government Action and Morality (1964), he
analysed the ways in which governments could
be moral agents, morally accountable, and illus-
trated his arguments with examples drawn
from recent political events. Again, in his paper
'Moral Philosophy in the University' he speaks
with approval of W.G. Maclagan, his prede-
cessor in the Chair of Moral Philosophy at
Glasgow, as conveying to his students that
'there is no logical gap between thinking within
the practical concerns of life and thinking about
them' and that 'however abstract and intricate
philosophical arguments were forced to become
by the impetus of their own logic, they arose
out of, and in the end illuminated, practical
concerns' (p. 143).
Downie's own moral and political philoso-
phy, both in his teaching arid in his publica-
tions, is conducted in the same engaged spirit,
but his style and approach is far less 'abstract
and intricate' than that of his predecessor. This
is partly because of his conception of the nature
of philosophy in general. Downie sees philos-

ophy, not as an abstract discipline in the spirit
of mathematics in which theses can be proved
once and for all, but as an ongoing debate, and
one which needs to be sensitive to the com-
plexities and particularities of its subject-matter.
In medical ethics, the area in which he has pub-
lished more work than in any other, he has
usually written in partnership with a doctor or
doctors working in the relevant field; this is
precisely in order to ensure that the work does
justice to the detailed nature of the ethical
problems encountered by medical practitioners.
His work in medical ethics shows an interest in
what may called the importance of the partic-
ular - in casuistry and hermeneutics, and in
literature as presenting vivid particular
examples which increase ethical awareness -
and a resistance to the idea that the answers to
particular ethical problems, whether in
medicine or elsewhere, can simply be deduced
from general principles.
Some will ask whether Downie's (or
anybody's) work in medical ethics is 'really
philosophy'. The answer, as usual in this kind
of case, is that it all depends on what is meant
by philosophy. It is not philosophy of the
abstract or Platonic kind. And parts of the
works set the scene and give the facts; it can be
said that these parts are not philosophy. But
they are a vital part of the whole, because the
point of the kind of approach that Downie
adopts is that the ethical analysis, if it is to be
meaningful, must be done in the light of the sit-
uation as it is. To these complex situations he
brings the recognizably philosophical tools of
conceptual analysis (where the concepts are not
only general ones, such as rights or duties, but
also those particular to the subject-matter) and
assessment of the weight of the different argu-
ments advanced by those in the field. In this
work he shows a conceptual sensitivity, clear-
headedness and moral insight, combined with
clear English and freedom from technical philo-
sophical jargon, which have made him a leading
practitioner in the field of medical ethics.
Downie began writing works on other
aspects of what would now be called applied
231
DOWNIE
ethics at a time when most professional philoso-
phers were not much interested in it. I have
already mentioned Government Action and
Morality, which was very unusual for its time
and attracted great interest, both academically
and more widely. He also published Education
and Personal Relationships with Elizabeth
Telfer and Eileen Loudfoot in 1974, following
in the footsteps of R.S. PETERS'S ground-
breaking Ethics and Education. Caring and
Curing (1980), written with Elizabeth Telfer,
linked themes in the ethics of medicine and of
social work. Social work, social welfare and
social policy are topics which feature widely in
Downie's work; his discussions of issues of
public policy show how general principles are
needed in this area and form another part of
applied ethics, complementing the detail of con-
sidering individual cases. Another work, Roles
and Values (1971), aims to show the impor-
tance of social roles as well as general moral
principles in understanding morality and
society: moral agents act and are morally
assessed not only as individuals in isolation but
also as possessors of a number of roles. The
concept of a role also features in several of his
smaller pieces.
As well as the large body of work which
may be regarded as to a greater or lesser degree
'applied', Downie has published a number of
works on traditional philosophical topics such
as responsibility, punishment and forgiveness,
promising, and hypothetical imperatives.
Respect for Persons (1969), written with
Elizabeth Telfer, is an early example of these
more traditional works; it is an exploration of
the notion, originally Kantian, of respect for
persons as ends. This book has many links with
Downie's later work, including his applied
work. The idea of respect for the individual is
of course a central notion in medical ethics,
the ethics of social work and the ethics of edu-
cation, and the ideas of respect for oneself and
self-development find an echo in Downie's
works on education. There is also a theme in
several of Downie's works which is in fact non-
Kantian, but which has links with the idea of
DOWNIE
respect for persons: that of individual persons
as unique, and valuable partly because they
are so, and of personal relationships as essen-
tially between individuals seen in this way.
Downie is strongly interested in the great
philosophers of the past, believing that they
are both fascinating in their own right and able
to shed light on modern debates. He has pub-
lished works on two of his great predecessors
in the Chair of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow
University: several papers on Adam Smith, and
an edited selection from the works of Francis
Hutcheson with a substantial Introduction.
Hutcheson is not as well known as he should
be, having been eclipsed by Hume, and
Downie's useful edition is an important step
towards bringing his attractive writings to a
wider public. Downie brings to these philoso-
phers a sympathetic and knowledgeable sense
of their period; he understands where they are
'coming from' and does not expect them to
write like modern analytic philosophers.
It is impossible to do justice in a few words
to all aspects of Downie's very large and varied
output (the extensive bibliography below is by
no means complete). One can however try to
assess his contribution to philosophy in general
terms. As was said earlier, he is notable not for
a body of doctrine but for an approach to his
subject-matter. His readers find faithfulness to
the particular nature of the subject-matter,
clarity of expression, freedom from philosoph-
ical jargon and pseudo-technicality, subtle and
rigorous argument with a certain quality of
imagination, and a strong moral concern
combined with common sense, humanity,
humour and a sympathy with other points of
view. One might say that his work does justice
to the Scottish university tradition which
regards philosophy as a subject, not for a few
specialists, but for all thinking people.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Government Action and Morality (1964).
(with Elizabeth Telfer), Respect for Persons
(1969; New York, 1970; repr. 1970,
1971).
232
Roles and Values (London and New York,
1971; repr. 1976,1977).
'Moral Philosophy in the University', The
Philosophical Journal, vol. 7, no. 2 (July
1970), pp. 142-55.
(with Elizabeth Telfer and Eileen Loudfoot),
Education and Personal Relationships
(London and New York, 1974).
(with Elizabeth Telfer), Caring and Curing
(London and New York, 1980; Japanese
trans., Kansai, 1986).
(with K.C. Caiman), Healthy Respect: Ethics
in Health Care (1987; repr, 1989; 2nd edn,
Oxford, 1994).
(with Carol Fyfe and Andrew Tannahill),
Health Promotion: Models and Values
(Oxford, 1990; repr. 1991,1992; 2nd edn,
1996).
(with Fiona Randall), Palliative Care Ethics:
A Companion for All Specialties (Oxford,
1996; repr. 1996,1998; 2nd edn, 1999;
repr. 2001).
(with Jane Macnaughton), Clinical
Judgement: Evidence in Practice (Oxford,
2000; repr. 2001).
Other Relevant Works
'Forgiveness', Philosophical Quarterly, vol.
15, no. 5 (April 1965), pp.~2-8.
'Mill on Pleasure and Self-Development',
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 62,
(January 1966), pp. 69-71.
(with Elizabeth Telfer), 'Autonomy',
Philosophy, vol. 46, no. 178 (1971), pp.
293-301.
'The Justification of Punishment', in James
Rachels (ed.), Moral Problems (New York
and London, 1971; 2nd edn, 1975), pp.
219-27.
Values in Social Work, Central Council for
Training and Education in Social Work
Paper 13 (1976).
'Sympathy and Self-interest: A Comment', in
T. Wilson and A.S. Skinner (eds), The
Market and the State (Oxford, 1976), pp.
99-106.
'The Hypothetical Imperative', Mind vol. 93

(October 1984), pp. 481-90.
Three Accounts of Promising', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 140 (July 1985),
pp. 259-71.
Traditional Medical Ethics and Economics
in Health Care: A Critique', in Gavin
Mooney and Alistair McGuire (eds),
Medical Ethics and Economics in Health
Care (Oxford, 1988), pp. 40-55.
'Adam Smith and Casuistry', in Andrew
Skinner and Peter Jones (eds), Adam Smith
Reviewed (Edinburgh, 1992), pp. 119-41.
The Ethics of Medical Involvement in
Torture', Journal of Medical Ethics, vol.
19 (1993), pp. 135-7.
(Ed. with Preface), Francis Hutcheson:
Philosophical Writings (1994).
(Ed. with intro.), Medical Ethics (Aldershot,
1996).
(with K.C. Caiman), 'Ethical Principles and
Ethical Issues in Public Health', in The
Oxford Textbook of Public Health
(Oxford, 1997), vol. 1, pp. 391^02.
(with Harald Jodalen), '"I-Thou" and
"Doctor-Patient": A Relationship
Examined', in H. Jodalen and AJ. Vetlesen
(eds), Closeness: An Ethic (Oslo, 1997),
pp. 129-41.
(with Fiona Randall), 'Parenting and the Best
Interests of Minors', The Journal of
Medicine and Philosophy, vol. 22 (1997),
pp. 219-31.
(with Jane Macnaughton), 'Public Morality
and Moral Education', in Rem Edwards
and E. Edwards Bittar (eds), Advances in
Bioethics, vol. 5, Bioethics for Medical
Education (Stamford, Connecticut, 1999),
pp. 17-29.
'Personal and Impersonal Relationships', in
David Fergusson and Nigel Dower (eds),
John Macmurray: Critical Perspectives
(New York and Oxford, 2002), pp.
119-31.
'Research on Dead Infants', Theoretical
Medicine, vol. 24 (2003), pp. 161-75.
Elizabeth Telfer
233
DRURY
DRURY, Maurice O'Connor (1907-76)
Maurice O'Connor Drury was born of Irish
parents in Marlborough, Wiltshire on 3 July
1907 and died in Dublin on 25 December
1976. He attended Grammar School in Exeter
and became interested in philosophy. He went
to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1926, and
there fell under the spell of Ludwig
WITTGENSTEIN. After graduation, Drury entered
the Cambridge theological college, Westcott
House, but left after one year. He next worked
in projects for the unemployed before enrolling
in the medical school of Trinity College Dublin,
qualifying in 1939. Following the declaration of
war, Drury joined the Royal Army Medical
Corps and was first posted to Egypt. He later
took part in the Normandy landings. In 1947
he was appointed Resident Psychiatrist at St
Patrick's Hospital, Dublin. He married the
matron of St Patrick's, Eileen Herbert, in 1951,
and set up home at St Edmundbury, a private
clinic in Lucan, County Dublin. For a consid-
erable period, Drury gave lectures in 'normal'
psychology to medical students at Trinity
College and the Royal College of Surgeons in
Dublin. In 1969 he was promoted to Senior
Consultant Psychiatrist. About this time, he
began to suffer anginal pain and in 1970 he
moved to a private residence in Dublin.
Most of Drury's publications are collected in
The Danger of Words and Writings on
Wittgenstein (1996). The following account of
his work draws not only on his publications but
also on archival material held by the present
writer. Drury's special contribution lies in his
vivid depictions of Wittgenstein's personality.
In addition, he is widely acknowledged to be an
important source for Wittgenstein's views on
religion. What has been ignored, however, is
the linked challenge to widely held views that
suggest a disjunction rather than, as Drury
deeply believed, a continuity between the
Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations.
These contributions are dealt with below, but
what should also be made clear is that through
his professional and writing exertions he honed
DRURY
and exhibited his own philosophical con-
sciousness. This is especially manifest in his
insights into the limits of psychology and the
limitations of psychiatry.
Drury's philosophical education was a priv-
ileged one. His tutors included G.E. MOORE
and C.D. BROAD, as well as Wittgenstein, who
in 1929 returned to Cambridge and began to
initiate a revolution in Anglophone philoso-
phy. As Drury understood it, the burden of
Wittgenstein's message was that the then
canonical analysis of knowledge as a process
where the world impresses itself on the knower,
who then expresses his knowledge in language,
is transformed by the realization that without
language, knowledge is impossible. Language
sets the limits of the knower's world.
Intellectual influence apart, student and teacher
began a friendship that was to be fateful for
Drury, who, in turn, was to be the link that
facilitated Wittgenstein's stays in Ireland,
where, according to one of Wittgenstein's
literary executors, Rush RHEES, 'Wittgenstein
liked living, and did some of his best work'
(Rhees to Drury, 24 May 1968).
Rhees encouraged Drury in 1965 to write
down the recollections that are a widely used
source in Wittgenstein studies. They were even-
tually published in two formats, firstly as
'Notes' and then as a journal entitled
'Conversations with Wittgenstein'. The journal
gives an intimate picture of Wittgenstein in his
maturity although it is not entirely reliable in
matters of dating, and Drury was not always
privy to important aspects of his friend's life.
The conversations centred on religion. Rush
Rhees believed that Wittgenstein spoke to
Drury about religion 'perhaps more than to
anyone else' (Rhees to Drury, 9 October 1970).
The two men rejected 'natural theology' and
were particularly interested in problems of
biblical interpretation. Drury's record also
reveals an openness in both men to prayer and
worship. Wittgenstein considered, however,
that Drury's Anglo-Catholic tradition was too
narrow, and he counselled him to read more
widely in the field of religion and to participate
234
in various forms of worship so that he would
sense the many ways in which religious feeling
is expressed.
It was Wittgenstein who organized the finan-
cial subvention that made it possible for Drury
to study medicine at Trinity College Dublin.
The two men spent several holidays together in
Ireland and also with the Drury family in
England in the 1930s. In 1947, the year in
which Drury returned to Dublin after the war,
Wittgenstein resigned his Cambridge profes-
sorship in philosophy and came to Ireland to
write. For the duration of his stay (c. eighteen
months), Drury devoted himself to the consid-
erable needs of his former teacher. Drury
became interested in depressive illnesses and
engaged in the introduction of drugs to treat
them. As already noted, he gave lectures on
psychology. However, he discontinued these
lectures because he 'began to have serious
doubts about the truth' (Drury to Rhees, 10
July 1968) of what he was saying. What these
doubts were is most accessible in his only pub-
lished book, The Danger of Words. The point
of this work, which has been described in Ray
Monk's The Duty of Genius (1990) as 'the
most truly Wittgensteinian book published by
any of Wittgenstein's students' (p. 264), is to
bring the 'critique of language' to bear on the
practice of medicine. The 'danger of words' is that
we can be 'dazzled by what we know' (p. 114).
Compounding this was the promise of a science
of psychology that putatively would give control
over the mind comparable to the control over
matter achieved by physics and chemistry. But
Drury observed that this was a promissory note
whose date of delivery was always receding. In
principle, psychological or sociological researches
that identify statistical patterns in behaviour can
never touch an individual's problems in their
uniqueness. Besides, intractable difficulties arise
because the instrument of knowing (the mind) is
also the object of knowing. The relevant com-
parison is to a telescope that can be trained on
any object except itself.
The Danger of Words is based on talks that
Drury gave to the Medico-Psychological Club

at the University of Swansea and what he refers
to variously as the 'Medical', 'Journal' and
'Psychiatric' clubs in Dublin. In these talks he
wanted to teach his fellow practitioners a
modesty in their clinical practice. Philosophical
awareness of the logical limits of what can be
said (and therefore known) intensifies a salutary
sense of wonder at what remains inexpressible
and unknowable, beginning with how it is
possible that we come to use language at all.
The sense of wonder in which philosophy is
rooted is especially appropriate when dealing
with the mentally ill. Their symptoms are not
easily distinguishable from the experiences
reported by mystics - or by those (such as
Aldous HUXLEY) who were experimenting with
psychotropic drugs. Drury had no easy answer
as to when it is appropriate to treat for disease
and when to allow a spiritual journey to take
its course, but he was clear that the second
cannot be reduced to the first.
He considered psychiatry to be in a 'fearful
muddle'. First, the accepted classification of
mental illness did not bring sufficient order
into the 'mass of phenomena' to be accounted
for. Second, although there were successful
methods of treatment for some conditions, their
effectiveness could not be explained. In address-
ing these difficulties, he found that the tradi-
tional psychologists were of 'no help' and that
he had grown more and more sceptical of psy-
choanalytical doctrines. On the other hand, he
did not believe that those who were taking a
physiological approach could give a complete
account of mental illness. Drury was attracted
by the behaviourist approach because it oscil-
lated 'between physiology and psychology',
although it too was confused, in his view. The
irreducible question was 'how far can the
behaviour of living creatures be explained
without introducing terms like thinking, feeling,
intention, etc. etc.?' (Drury to Rhees, 10 May
1969). He noted that 'most psychiatrists write
as if no one is ever responsible but all is deter-
mined either psychologically or neurologically;
but they all act as if people were responsible'
(Drury to Rhees, 3 July 1970). All in all,
235
DRURY
Socrates had got it right: we must acknowl-
edge both the role of causes and of reasons in
understanding human behaviour.
After Wittgenstein's death, a small group of
his former students Rhees, Elizabeth
ANSCOMBE, Raymond Townsend, Norman
Malcolm, G.H. von Wright and Drury - acted
as keepers of the Wittgenstein flame. For his
part, Drury believed that the importance
Wittgenstein attached to his work in the phi-
losophy of mathematics was not appreciated.
More broadly, he was far from convinced that
the interpretation of Wittgenstein that had
become standard in analytic circles was
accurate. He identified the promoters of this
canonical view as A.J. AYER, J.L. AUSTIN and
Gilbert RYLE. He doubted that Ryle in partic-
ular appreciated that, even in Wittgenstein's
logical work, he was following ethical and reli-
gious imperatives. Drury put this blindness
down to a Ciceronian understanding of phi-
losophy as an activity fit for gentlemen but not
one that might change one's life entirely, as it
had done his own. Using Schopenhauer's char-
acterization, he alleged that the 'professorial'
philosophers assumed that the finely honed
methods of conceptual analysis would lead to
'something entirely compatible with common
sense' and with the new civilization shaped by
science and technology - but Wittgenstein, who
was 'revolted by our modern bourgeois
smugness' (Drury to Rhees, 21 May 1967), did
not believe that his thought would be under-
stood by his contemporaries. This was because
instead of distancing themselves from widely
prevalent, but false, philosophical assumptions,
they subscribed to them.
All through his life, Drury attempted to for-
mulate what he understood philosophy to be.
Already as a medical student, he read a paper
at Trinity College Dublin on 'The Method of
Philosophy' (1935) which takes a standard
logical positivist position: 'Philosophy is con-
cerned with meaning not with truth.' Its task is
to distinguish the nonsensical from the mean-
ingful in the various fields of knowledge. This
orientation seems to have changed by 1954,
DRURY
when he wrote an introduction to philosophy
in the form of a series of 'Letters' addressed to
a neophyte 'Student of Philosophy5. In these
letters he maintained that the metaphysical per-
plexities that had attracted him to philosophy
as an adolescent - about the nature of what is
real, good, true and beautiful - were not 'dis-
solved' by Wittgenstein's method as the logical
positivists had believed. Linguistic analysis,
rather, should arouse and intensify the passion
for what lies beyond language.
In the lecture given in University College
Dublin in 1967, in which he had attacked Ayer,
Austin and Ryle, Drury maintained that the
transcendent purpose of philosophical activity
- a purpose explicitly acknowledged in the
Tractatus (with its reference to 'Das Mystice')
- was implicitly assumed in the Philosophical
Investigations. It was wrong to see the second
book as a kind of corrective of the first - at least
in this respect. The point of 'displaying the
speakable' was still to 'signify the unspeakable'
(Tractatus, 4.115).
In Simone Weil, Rush Rhees and he found a
contemporary thinker who complemented
Wittgenstein. Drury was attracted by Weil's
view that 'science to-day will either have to seek
a source of inspiration higher than itself or
perish' (Drury to Rhees, 12 March 1969). Drury
also believed, perhaps too readily, that her
attempt to find a 'religious manner of working'
(Drury to Rhees, 22 March 1969) in all areas of
human endeavour found an echo in
Wittgenstein, who once told him: 'I am not a reli-
gious man but I cannot help seeing every
problem from a religious point of view' ('Notes',
p. 79). Despite the declarations in his writings
about how Wittgenstein was to be understood,
it appears from his correspondence that Drury
was insecure about his stance and sought reas-
surance (perhaps advisedly) from Rhees. On the
other hand, he did not want to show 'cowardice'
(Drury to Rhees, 28 July 1966) in respect of the
duty to be faithful to his teacher.
Drury did not share Moore's belief that if one
could solve certain problems in epistemology
then everything else would fall into place. He
236
thought that 'there is no one central problem in
philosophy, but countless different problems.
Each has to be dealt with on its own'
('Conversations', p. 111). Wittgenstein had
explained to Drury that philosophy is like
trying to open a safe with a combination lock:
'each little adjustment of the various dials seems
to achieve nothing, it is only when all these are
in the right position that the door opens' ('1967
Dublin Lecture', p. 7). Clearly, this was an
arduous activity but Drury subscribed to the
promise in Plato's seventh letter that 'as a result
of continued application to the subject' an
epiphanic experience will come when truth is
'brought to birth in the soul of a sudden, as
light that is kindled by a spark'.
Drury was convinced that each generation
has to tackle from scratch the philosophical
questions that raise themselves in its particular
time and place. Philosophical questions and, a
fortiori, answers, are not simply inherited.
Indeed, it is scarcely possible to understand
why previous generations thought particular
problems 'absolutely vital'. What great philoso-
phers do is to solve 'completely and defini-
tively' the problems which were holding up the
development of thought in their time. These
problems, rooted in the unexamined assump-
tions of their age, are a source of 'human
bondage'. When formulated they lose their
'absolute power' and are seen to be just 'one
way of looking at things' (Drury to Rhees, 2
March 1959). Withal, Drury did not believe
that 'man's salvation' comes from 'philosoph-
ical reasoning and speculation' but saw it rather
as 'an act of God in history' addressed to those
'who have lost confidence in their own power,
and despair' (Drury to D.Z. Phillips, 23 July
1964).
Towards the end of his life, Drury happily
turned from writing philosophy to psychiatry
where he felt more secure. He wrote a mono-
graph on hypnosis that has never been pub-
lished. He did not seek to prove scientifically
the value of hypnosis for phobic disorders but
rather advised his (medical) readers to try it
for themselves and showed them how to do so.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Danger of Words and Writings on
Wittgenstein, ed. with an Introduction by
David Berman, Michael Fitzgerald and
John Hayes (Bristol, 1996). This volume
reprints The Danger of Words' (1973),
Tact and Hypothesis' (1974), 'Some
Notes on Conversations with
Wittgenstein' (1976) and 'Conversations
with Wittgenstein' (1981), and contains
the '1967 Dublin Lecture on
Wittgenstein'.
Other Relevant Works
'A Symposium', in K.T. Fann (ed.), Ludwig
Wittgenstein: The Man and his
Philosophy (New Jersey, 1967), pp.
57-78.
'Letters to a Student of Philosophy', with an
Introduction by Desmond Lee,
Philosophical Investigations, vol. 6
(1983), pp. 76-102,159-74.
Further Reading
Flowers, Berry (ed.), Portraits of
Wittgenstein (Bristol, 1999), vol. 4.
Phillips, D.Z., Rush Rhees on Religion and
Philosophy (Cambridge, 1997).
John Hayes
DUMMETT, Michael Anthony Eardley
(1925-)
Michael Dummett was born in London on
27 June 1925. He was educated at Sandroyd
School and Winchester College. In 1944 he
was converted to Roman Catholicism. From
1943 to 1947 he served in the armed forces.
Afterwards he studied PPE at Christ Church,
Oxford, graduating with first class honours in
1950. He was then elected to a fellowship at
All Souls, Oxford and was assistant lecturer in
237
DUMMETT
philosophy at Birmingham in the year
1950-51. In 1951, he married Ann Chesney
and over time they had five children.
For his final examinations in 1950 Dummett
was required to read J.L. AUSTIN'S translation
of Frege's Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik.
Dummett was so impressed by this book that,
in order to obtain a better understanding of
Frege's work, he began to study German and
mathematics. This willingness to engage in
depth with mathematics led him to adopt a
philosophical method quite different from that
associated with J.L. Austin and Gilbert RYLE,
the two most celebrated Oxford philosophers
at the time. Dummett's philosophical writing is
dense, employing technical vocabulary and
making no concessions to the reader who is
unwilling to follow a complicated train of
thought. Indeed, when he submitted his first
book for publication to Oxford University Press
in 1958, Austin recommended that it be pub-
lished, but on grounds of style, asked that it be
rewritten. It was never rewritten to Dummett's
satisfaction.
In 1962 he became reader in the philosophy
of mathematics at Oxford and by 1964 his first
book on Frege was almost completed.
However, he chose to give up philosophical
research in order to devote his time to the fight
against racism. In 1965 he was one of the
founding members of the Oxford Committee
for Racial Integration; from 1965 to 1966 he
was a member of the Executive Committee of
the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination;
and from 1966 to 1968 he was a member of th
Legal and Civil Affairs Panel of the National
Circle for Commonwealth Immigrants. He then
decided that because of the alienation of
minority groups in Britain, a white person
could not play a leading role in the struggle
against racism. Although he did not completely
abandon his political activities, he was able to
resume his study of Frege and by 1973 Frege:
Philosophy of Language, his first published
book, was completed. Following its publica-
tion, he moved on from being reader in the
philosophy of mathematics to take up a
DUMMETT
position as senior research fellow of All Souls
in 1974.
Frege: Philosophy of Language consists of an
evaluation of Frege's general account of the
workings of language. Dummett explains that
Frege thinks that our understanding of the
meaning of a statement is to be explained in
terms of our grasp of what it is for that state-
ment to be true or false. According to this
position, which Dummett labels 'realism', a
meaningful assertion is always determinately
true or false, although we may never be in a
position to discover which. In order to assess
Frege's position, Dummett compares it with
what he considers to be the strongest alterna-
tive, although it is not an alternative that Frege
himself ever contemplated. Dummett calls this
alternative position 'anti-realism'. The anti-
realist explains understanding in terms of our
ability to recognize whether an assertion has
been verified or falsified. Thus the anti-realist
has no reason to support the principle that
every meaningful proposition is determinately
true or false, that is the principle of bivalence,
and rejecting this principle entails rejecting the
laws of classical logic. The Dutch topologist
L.E.J. Brouwer had made just such a proposal
in the early years of the twentieth century, and
developed an alternative to classical logic,
which is known as intuitionistic logic. In 1977
Dummett published a study of intuitionistic
logic, Elements of Intuitionism.
Dummett had in fact been publishing articles
dealing with realism and anti-realism, amongst
other topics, since the 1950s, and in 1978 his
first anthology, Truth and Other Enigmas, was
published. A recurring theme in this anthology
is that there are a number of analogous but
independent debates between realists and anti-
realists. Each debate deals with a different
subject-matter, such as the reality of the past,
the reality of numbers or the reality of physical
objects. The debates are analogous because, in
each case, what is at stake is whether one
should accept the principle of bivalence, or
should instead follow the intuitionists in
proposing a revision of classical logic. They
238
are independent because one might be a realist
with regard to some areas, and an anti-realist
with regard to others. Dummett argues that
such debates may be solved by providing a sat-
isfactory theory of meaning, that is an account
of what it is to understand a language. This
formed the topic of the William James Lectures
that he delivered at Harvard in 1976. These
lectures were published in a much expanded
form in 1991, entitled The Logical Basis of
Metaphysics. This book is Dummett's most
detailed study of how a theory of meaning can
be used to settle disputes about realism and
anti-realism.
By 1979, when he succeeded AJ. AYER as
Wykeham Professor of Logic., (relinquishing
his position at All Souls), Dummett's reputation
as a contributor to contemporaiy philosophical
discussion was firmly established, but doubts
were expressed about his historiography. In
Frege: Philosophy of Language Dummett's
attention was focused on considering how
Frege might have responded to the work of his
successors, rather than placing Frege in his
intellectual context. He made no systematic
attempt to engage with the existing secondary
literature about Frege and, by a remarkable
oversight, the first edition contained practically
no textual references. In 1981 Dummett com-
pleted work on a second edition of Frege:
Philosophy of Language, complete with foot-
notes, and a lengthy defence of his exegesis of
Frege, entitled The Interpretation of Frege's
Philosophy. This book provoked further debate
about the interpretation of Frege's work, and in
1991 Dummett published a collection of papers
entitled Frege and Other Philosophers. In these
papers Dummett examines Frege's work in the
light of his contemporaries and predecessors,
rather than his successors.
In 1987 he gave a series of lectures in the
University of Bologna which were mainly
devoted to a comparison of Frege and Edmund
Husserl. These lectures were published as
'Origins of Analytical Philosophy' in the Italian
journal Lingua e Stile in 1988. Joachim Schulte
translated the lectures into German, and inter-

viewed Dummett. The lectures and interview
were published as Urspriinge der analytischen
Philosophie in 1988, and an English version of
this book, with a revised text, was published in
1993 as Origins of Analytical Philosophy.
Dummett argues that both Frege and Husserl
recognized that, in order to study the nature of
thoughts, philosophers should not study private
mental sensations. A 'thought', in this context,
means the content that is grasped by several
people who can be said to share the same
thought. Obviously, it is essential to a thought,
in this sense, that it is something that can be
shared, that is public rather than private. The
founding insight of analytical philosophy,
according to Dummett, is that only by studying
the structure of language can we understand the
structure of thought. Although Frege does not
explicitly subscribe to this doctrine, it is sug-
gested by the way that he deals with philo-
sophical questions, and so Dummett describes
him as being the grandfather of analytical phi-
losophy. He credits WITTGENSTEIN as being the
first philosopher to state explicitly the doctrine
that was implicit in Frege's best work. Origins
of Analytical Philosophy is not simply a
description of what analytical philosophy is
and how it began. It is also an attempt to justify
the primacy that analytical philosophers attach
to philosophy of language.
In 1991 Dummett published Frege:
Philosophy of Mathematics, the long-awaited
sequel to Frege: Philosophy of Language.
Although he concludes that Frege was 'the
greatest philosopher of mathematics yet to have
written' (Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics, p.
321), still Dummett sees it as his main task to
pinpoint where Frege's philosophy of mathe-
matics went wrong. On one level the answer to
this question is already well known to anyone
who has studied even a little philosophy of
mathematics. Frege's aim was to prove that
arithmetic was a branch of logic, and he
thought that the first volume of his Die
Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, published in
1893, provided the logical foundations of arith-
metic. But, as is well known, in 1902 Bertrand
239
DUMMETT
RUSSELL demonstrated that it was possible to
derive a contradiction from Frege's fifth axiom.
Dummett's concern is to explain the underlying
philosophical error that induced Frege to
believe his fifth axiom was acceptable. He
argues that Frege's error was to suppose that
infinite domains, such as the sequence of
natural numbers, exist independently of our
ability to prove things about them. Dummett
argues that rather than thinking of such
domains as having a permanent existence as
infinite totalities, we should instead think of
them as constructions that can be indefinitely
extended. Once again, acceptance of the anti-
realist position requires that we abandon clas-
sical logic in favour of intuitionistic logic,
although in this case the argument would only
affect mathematics.
It was in 1992 that Dummett retired as
Wykeham Professor of Logic, becoming
Wykeham Professor Emeritus. His valedictory
lecture was included in his 1993 anthology The
Seas of Language. He has continued to publish
on philosophy, and in other fields where he is
an expert: the history of card games, voting
systems and the question of immigration.
Although he has held positions at Oxford for
the whole of his professional career, he is widely
travelled, having held visiting positions at many
other universities. He was knighted in 1999.
One of the most striking features of twenti-
eth-century British philosophy is the linguistic
turn. To some, excessive interest in philoso-
phy of language has led to a trivialization of
philosophy, because traditional metaphysical
problems have been ignored. To others, the
value of the linguistic turn is precisely that it
provided a way out of metaphysical debates
that could never be conclusively settled, because
the positions under discussion lacked any
meaningful content. Dummett's position is that
philosophy of language is of central impor-
tance because it enables us to understand and
solve long-standing metaphysical debates.
The title of his most extensive treatment of
this topic, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics
(1991), indicates not merely that one can use
DUMMETT
logical arguments within metaphysical debates,
but that metaphysical debates, or at least the
metaphysical debates between realists and anti-
realists with which Dummett is concerned, are
to be understood as debates about logic. When
the realist and the anti-realist mathematician
disagree about the validity of a proposed math-
ematical proof, because they do not agree about
the correct set of logical laws for mathematics,
it is clear that we do not have a pseudo-dis-
agreement that lacks real content. So, if
Dummett is right, in order to resolve a meta-
physical debate we need to determine the
correct means for justifying logical laws.
A logical law can be justified by providing a
semantic theory, a theory that explains how the
truth-value of a complex expression is deter-
mined by its parts. An example of a logical law
is the law of excluded middle, which tells us
that for any proposition, P, 'P or not-P' is a true
statement. Classical semantics, that is the type
of semantics favoured by the realist, tells us
that P has the value True or the value False; that
it is determinate which of these values it has;
that not-P has the opposite value to P; and that
a complex proposition 6x or y' is true if and
only if at least one of x and y is true. It is easy
to see how these principles of classical seman-
tics justify the law of excluded middle. What
might seem puzzling is that this semantic theory
is seen as constitutive of a realist metaphysics.
The connection between semantics and meta-
physics becomes clearer when we consider a
particular example, such as Goldbach's con-
jecture: 'Every even number is the sum of two
primes.' Currently, there is neither a proof nor
a disproof of this conjecture, nor is there any
guarantee that it will ever be possible to find
one. If classical semantics is correct however,
Goldbach's conjecture must be determinately
true or false. In explaining our deep-seated
assumption that the conjecture must be true or
false, we tend to invoke a certain metaphysical
picture of the complete series of prime numbers
existing in some platonic space, waiting for us
to discover them, each of them either having or
not having the property of being the sum of two
240
primes. The anti-realist rejects in one stroke
the semantic theory and the metaphysical
picture that accompanies it. Dummett argues
that the metaphysical picture has no content
apart from the semantic theory: once we know
what the correct semantic theory is, there is no
further metaphysical question to be debated.
He then argues that a semantic theory is to
be justified by providing the basis for a viable
meaning-theory. When we are confronted with
entirely new sentences in a familiar language,
we are able to work out the meaning. Indeed,
this does not usually require any conscious
thought on our part. A meaning-theory explic-
itly states a set of rules that we implicitly follow
when we interpret a sentence, or at least a set
of rules that could serve this function. So, in
order to evaluate a meaning-theory, we need to
know exactly what it is to understand a
sentence correctly. Dummett uses the term
'theory of meaning' for an account of what it
is to understand a sentence correctly, so the
task of a theory of meaning is to provide criteria
by which we can evaluate a meaning-theory.
Dummett thinks that questions about what it is
to understand a language, while they may be
exceedingly difficult, are capable of being defin-
itively resolved. It is, after all, a matter of
offering a satisfactory account of a human
ability. It is on the basis of this long chain of
connections that Dummett claims that what
seems at first to be an intractable metaphysical
puzzle can in fact be solved by proper attention
to philosophy of language.
Dummett views Frege's work on sense and
reference as providing a model for the con-
struction of a semantic theory. But when he
comes to the crucial question of what it is to
understand a sentence correctly, Dummett finds
Frege's suggestion unsatisfactory. Frege
described our understanding of a thought as
involving an unexplained human ability to
grasp entities in a platonic third realm, beyond
the world of spatio-temporal objects, or the
world of the mental, that is the private domain
of the individual mind. Dummett dismisses
Frege's theory as a myth, and turns instead to

Wittgenstein's suggestion that meaning is use.
As interpreted by Dummett, the slogan
'meaning is use' implies that to say that
someone understands a language is not to spec-
ulate about an inner world to which nobody
else has direct access, it is to ascribe to that
person a skill that is manifested in their practice.
The doctrine that meaning is use provides
Dummett with a reason for being optimistic
that his approach to metaphysical problems
will lead to definitive solutions. It also provides
him with a reason for doubting whether the
solutions will be favourable to realism. When
we respond correctly to evidence for or against
a statement, by affirming or denying the state-
ment, we demonstrate our ability to under-
stand what has been said, and an account of
what it is to understand a situation must
include some reference to situations in which it
is appropriate to recognize that the available
evidence justifies or refutes a statement. What
is distinctive about a realist theory is that it
allows for occasions when a statement may be
true, even though there is no possibility of jus-
tifying it, or false when there is no possibility of
disconfirming it. We cannot however describe
a situation in which someone recognizes that a
statement is true but unjustified by the evidence,
because for the person to act correctly in rec-
ognizing that the statement is true, there would
have to be some evidence. The concept of a
truth that completely transcends our ability to
discover it seems to be superfluous to an
account of how we respond to utterances of
sentences.
It must be emphasized that the line of
thinking that is summarized here is not pre-
sented by Dummett as a knock-down argument
against realism. Dummett's willingness to coun-
tenance a philosophical challenge to common
sense and classical logic is a bold move, and it
has, rightly, attracted a lot of attention.
However, so much attention has been devoted
to what Dummett says about the case for anti-
realism that the impression is sometimes given
that Dummett's aim is to vindicate anti-realism.
What he advocates is not that we adopt anti-
241
DUMMETT
realism as the correct theory, but that we carry
out further research in philosophy of language,
in the course of which he hopes we will uncover
the principles that will enable us to solve
disputes between realism and anti-realism.
There is no presumption that either side will be
correct in every case. In his valedictory lecture
at Oxford, he described the situation in this
way: 'Justificationist [anti-realist] and truth-
conditional [realist] meaning-theories do not
stand opposed to one another as rivals. Neither
is a worked-out theory: the justificationist prin-
ciple is an unavoidable starting-point, the truth-
conditional one no more than a hoped-for goal'
(Seas of Language, p. 4 74).
It is true that Dummett assigns a privileged
role to intuitionistic logic: 'If that [intuitionis-
tic logic] is not the right logic, at least it may
serve as a medium by means of which to discuss
other logics' (Logical Basis of Metaphysics, p.
300). Although the adoption of a semantic
theory is intended to settle a dispute about
what are the correct logical laws, the discussion
of semantic theories cannot itself take place in
a logical vacuum. Some logical laws will be
invoked in the process of justifying a logical law
by a semantic theory. So, it would be ideal if,
in order to resolve disputes about controversial
logical laws, logicians could agree upon a set of
laws that are so far beyond reproach that they
do not require a semantic justification.
Dummett uses the technical apparatus of proof
theory to establish which logical laws are in no
need of self-justification, and on these grounds
he assigns a special status to intuitionistic logic.
It need not be the case that the logical laws
which are agreed upon at this stage as being
beyond reproach will be the same as the logical
laws that are ultimately justified by whatever
emerges as the preferred semantic theory, any
more than we need suppose that a set of pro-
cedures followed when discussing a new con-
stitution will themselves be incorporated in the
final document. It is also true that in Frege:
Philosophy of Mathematics Dummett comes
very close to endorsing an anti-realist view of
arithmetic, based on his argument about indef-
DUMMETT
initely extensible concepts. However, this is an
argument that applies only to one particular
debate about realism.
So far from being a dogmatic advocate of
anti-realism, Dummett has argued that the
thesis of global anti-realism, that is the thesis
that the anti-realist position is always correct,
may well be unsustainable (Truth and Other
Enigmas, p. 367). Some of his most important
papers are concerned neither with his general
argument for anti-realism, nor with the history
of philosophy, although a connection with
issues of realism and anti-realism is often
apparent. He has, for example, made important
contributions to the philosophy of time and
causation, the understanding of vagueness and
the debate about the reality of possible worlds.
Even a book such as The Interpretation of
Frege's Philosophy, which is primarily histori-
cal, contains lengthy and penetrating discus-
sions of Peter GEACH'S theory of relative
identity, and Saul Krikpe's view that proper
names are 'rigid designators' picking out the
same object in every possible world.
Dummett's work has exercised a consider-
able influence. It is fair to describe the publi-
cation of Frege: Philosophy of Language in
1973 as marking a watershed in the study of
Frege. It is true that there was already a
growing revival of interest in Frege, but the
book placed the work of Frege at the centre of
attention for analytical philosophers, and set
the agenda for the study of his writings for at
least a couple of decades. More recently, atten-
tion has turned to Frege's philosophy of arith-
metic, and much of the most influential work
on this topic has been carried out by philoso-
phers who studied with Dummett: Crispin
WRIGHT, Bob Hale and the late George Boolos.
Dummett's work on anti-realism has inspired
other philosophers, notably Crispin Wright and
Neil Tennant, to work on issues of semantics
from an anti-realist perspective. No less impor-
tant is his influence on philosophers such as
Christopher PEACOCKE who have tried to meet
the challenge of his anti-realist arguments.
However, to understand Dummett's place in
242
British philosophy, it is not enough simply to
list those who have been directly influenced by
him.
Dummett's work exemplifies a certain trend
within analytical philosophy, a trend that
became dominant in Oxford in the 1970s. Since
much of the inspiration for this trend came
from the work of the American philosopher
Donald Davidson, it is sometimes called the
'Davidsonic boom'. Although it would not be
correct to describe Dummett as a follower of
Davidson, they share some ideas and themes,
partly as a result of mutual influence. Important
amongst these shared ideas are the primacy of
philosophy of language, a focus on the link
between meaning and truth, the desirability of
adopting a systematic rather than a piecemeal
approach to philosophy and a willingness to
engage in metaphysical questions. The work of
philosophers within this group is aimed pri-
marily at other professional philosophers, since
it cannot be understood without some prior
study of formal logic. Dummett's work
combines a careful study of recent history of
philosophy with a detailed proposal for a
research programme, and thus he has a ratio-
nale for saying why certain philosophical
methods have come to seem important at this
point in history, and what results we can hope
to achieve by using them. Whether or not he is
correct, it is necessary for anyone who is con-
cerned with the value of a significant movement
in recent British philosophy to consider whether
Dummett's rationale is convincing. He can thus
be described as one of the most important
British philosophers of the latter part of the
twentieth century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Frege: Philosophy of Language (Cambridge,
Mass, and London, 1973; 2nd edn, 1981).
Elements of Intuitionism (Oxford and New
York, 1977; 2nd edn, 2000).
Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge,
Mass, and London, 1978).
The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy
(Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1981).

(Trans.), Joachim Schulte, Ursprunge der
analytischen Philosophie (Frankfurt,
1988).
Frege and Other Philosophers (Oxford and
New York, 1991).
The Logical Basis of Metaphysics
(Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1991).
Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics
(Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1991).
Origins of Analytical Philosophy
(Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1993).
The Seas of Language (Oxford and New
York, 1993).
The Dewey Lectures 2002: Truth and the
Past', Journal of Philosophy, vol. 100, no.
1 (January 2003), pp. 5-53.
Other Relevant Works
(Ed. with John Crossley), Formal Systems
and Recursive Functions: Proceedings of
the Eighth Logic Colloquium, Oxford
1963 (Amsterdam, 1965).
Catholicism and the World Order: Some
Reflections on the 1978 Reith Lectures
(1979).
The Game ofTarot (1980).
(with Sylvia Mann), The Game ofTarot:
From Ferrara to Salt Lake City (1980).
Immigration: Where the Debate Goes Wrong
(1981).
Voting Procedures (Oxford, 1984).
The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards (New York,
1986).
Grammar and Style for Examination
Candidates and Others (1993).
'Bivalence and Vagueness', in Theoria^ vol.
61, no. 3 (1995), pp. 201-16.
The Context Principle: Centre of Frege's
Philosophy', in Max Ingolf (ed.), Logik
und Mathematik: Frege-Kolloquium Jena
1993 (Hawthorne, New York, 1995).
'Force and Convention', in Pranab Kumar
Sen (ed.), The Philosophy of P. F. Strawson
(New Delhi, 1995).
'Reply to Boolos', in Matthias Schirn (ed.),
Frege: Importance and Legacy
(Hawthorne, New York, 1996).
243
DUMMETT
'Existence, Possibility and Time', in Georg
Meggle (ed.), Analyomen 2, Volume I:
Logic, Epistemology, Philosophy of
Science (Hawthorne, New York, 1997).
(with Ronald Decker and Thierry Depaulis),
A Wicked Pack of Cards (1996).
Principles of Electoral Reform (Oxford,
1997).
'Coimbra Lecture: Meaning and Justification'
in Brian McGuinness (ed.), Language,
Logic and Normalization of Knowledge
(Gaeta, 1998).
The Philosophy of Mathematics', in A.C.
Grayling (ed.), Philosophy 2: Further
Through the Subject (Oxford and New
York, 1998).
'La existencia de los objetos matematicos', in
Teorema, vol. 17, no. 2, (1998), pp. 5-24.
Truth from the Constructive Standpoint', in
Theoria, vol. 64, nos 2-3 (1998), pp.
122-38.
'Sentences and Propositions', in Roger
Teichmann (ed.), Logic, Cause and Action
(Cambridge, 2000).
'On Frege's Term "Bedeutung"', in
D.P.Chattopadhyaya (ed.), Realism:
Responses and Reactions (Essays in
Honour of Pranab Kumar Sen) (New
Delhi, 2000).
'Is Time a Continuum of Instants?', in
Philosophy, vol. 75, no. 294 (October
2000), pp. 497-515.
'Victor's Error', in Analysis, vol. 61, no. 1
(January 2001), pp. 1-2.
On Immigration and Refugees (New York,
2001).
'Meaning in Terms of Justification', in Topoi,
vol. 21, nos 1-2 (2002), pp. 11-19.
'Sense and Reference', Kwartalnik-
Filozoficzny, vol. 30, no. 2 (2002), pp.
107-28.
The Two Faces of the Concept of Truth', in
Richard Schantz (ed.), What Is Truth?
(Berlin, 2002).
'"Yes", "No", and "Can't Say'", in Mind,
vol. Ill, no. 442 (April 2002), pp.
289-95.
DUMMETT
'Gottlob Frege, "Uber Sinn und Bedeutung"
(1892): A Fundamental Distinction', in
Jorge J.E. Gracia (ed.), The Classics of
Western Philosophy: A Reader's Guide
(Maiden, Mass., 2003), pp. 416-22.
Further Reading
Brandl, Johannes L. and Peter Sullivan (eds),
New Essays on the Philosophy of Michael
Dummett (Amsterdam, 1998).
Demopoulos, W. (ed.), Frege s Philosophy of
Mathematics (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).
Green, Karen, Dummett, Philosophy of
Language (Cambridge, 2001).
Gunson, Darryl, Michael Dummett and the
Theory of Meaning (Aldershot, 1998).
Heck, Richard (ed.), Language, Thought and
Truth (Oxford and New York, 1998).
McGuinness, B. and G. Oliveri (eds), The
Philosophy of Michael Dummett
(Dordrecht, 1994).
Matar, Anat, From Dummett's Philosophical
Perspective (Berlin and New York, 1997).
Taylor, Barry (ed.), Michael Dummett,
Contributions to Philosophy (Dordrecht,
1987).
Tennant, Neil, Anti-Realism and Logic
(Oxford, 1987).
, The Taming of the True (Oxford,
1997).
Weiss, Bernhard, Michael Dummett
(Princeton and Chesham, 2002).
Benjamin E. Murphy
DUNCAN, Alistair Robert Campbell
(1915-93)
A.R.C. Duncan was born in Edinburgh on 12
July 1915 and died in Kingston, Ontario on 23
December 1993. The son of Leslie and Jean
(Anderson) Duncan, he was educated at George
Watson's Academy and the University of
244
Edinburgh (MA with first class honours in phi-
losophy, 1936). The following year he was a
German exchange student at the University of
Marburg, where he met Franchise Pellissier.
They were married in 1938 and had three
children. Duncan served as assistant lecturer at
Edinburgh (1937-8) followed by a year as
lecturer at University College London. During
World War II, he served as regimental officer in
the Royal Artillery and as general staff officer
with Military Intelligence in North Africa, Italy
and the War Office. He returned to Edinburgh
University in 1945 as lecturer and Director of
Studies. In 1949 Duncan was appointed John
and Ella Charlton Professor of Philosophy and
Head of the Department of Philosophy at
Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, a post
he held until his retirement in 1980. He served
as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
from 1959 to 1964.
Known affectionately as 'Sandy', Duncan
developed a well-deserved reputation at
Queen's as a teacher of rare distinction in larger
introductory courses as well as smaller upper-
year seminars. In 1977 he received the Alumni
Award for Excellence in Teaching, and in 1980
the Queen's Distinguished Service Award. The
philosophy department continues to recognize
Duncan's contributions as a teacher through
the A.R.C. Duncan Award for Excellence in
Tutoring. Duncan helped form the Canadian
Philosophical Association, of which he was
twice President (1960-61, 1966-7). He was
Visiting Traux Professor at Hamilton College
(1974) and visiting professor at Sir Wilfred
Grenfell College (1982), and was awarded the
DLitt (honoris causa) by Lakehead University
(1979).
Duncan's gift for translating philosophical
ideas into the language of the non-professional
resulted in his giving lectures to many groups
outside the university, including a series of
radio lectures on CBC University of the Air
which were published under the title, Moral
Philosophy. In these lectures Duncan challenges
emotivist theories of ethics which were preva-
lent at the time, and argues that moral judge-

ments are objective, albeit not absolute, and
that logical analysis must be extended to
include issues in metaphysics and religion.
Duncan had a deep interest in Kant's moral
philosophy and in 1957 published Practical
Reason and Morality: A Study of Immanuel
Kant's Foundations for the Metaphysics of
Morals. In this book he provides an original
and controversial reading of Kant's
Foundations, distinguishing between what he
calls the metaphysical, the ethical and the
critical interpretations, and arguing that ethical
views expressed in the book are incidental to
Kant's main purpose. According to Duncan, we
best capture Kant's intent by taking up the
critical interpretation in which Kant is held to
be setting forth the presuppositions of ethics,
showing how practical synthetic a priori judge-
ments are possible. By focusing not on moral
principles but on the question 'How is pure
ethics possible?', argues Duncan, we can avoid
many of the confusions and misunderstand-
ings generated by the ethical interpretation of
Foundations.
Duncan was a long-time friend of the
Scottish philosopher, John MACMURRAY, a
student of his thought and he shared his con-
viction concerning the significance of the
concept of the personal. In 1990 Duncan pub-
lished On the Nature of Persons, in which he
provides a comprehensive introduction to
Macmurray's thought and seeks to systematize
his main teachings around the themes of the
nature of the personal and human rationality,
and the freedom and faith of the human being.
In this sympathetic although not uncritical
study, Duncan demonstrates the centrality of
the concept of being a person in community to
Macmurray's wide-ranging reflections on
science, ethics and politics, and religion and
metaphysics.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Practical Reason and Morality: A Study of
Immanuel Kant's Foundations for the
Metaphysics of Morals (1957).
Moral Philosophy (Toronto, 1965).
245
DUNCAN-JONES
On the Nature of Persons (New York, 1990).
Other Relevant Works
(Trans.), HJ. de Vleeschauer, The
Development of Kantian Thought: The
History of a Doctrine (1962).
(Ed. with Intro.), John Macmurray,
Interpreting the Universe (New Jersey,
1996).
Eugene T. Long
DUNCAN-JONES, Austin Ernest (1908-67)
A.E. Duncan-Jones was born in Cambridge on
5 August 1906 and died in Birmingham on 2
April 1967. He was the son of the Very Revd
Arthur Stuart Duncan-Jones (1879-1955), the
Dean of Chichester. He was educated at
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and in
1934 was appointed as assistant lecturer in
philosophy at the University of Birmingham,
where he became professor in 1951. He was the
founding editor of Analysis, which he edited
from 1933 to 1948, President of the Mind
Association in 1952, and President of the
Aristotelian Society from 1960 to 1961. He
was married to Elsie Elizabeth Phare.
Duncan-Jones's main area of interest was
meta-ethics, on which he wrote throughout his
career, from his first paper published in Mind
in 1933, in which he discussed and defended -
albeit rather tentatively - a form of ideal utili-
tarianism. In both motivation and style he was
very much influenced by G.E. MOORE. His
main work was Butler's Moral Philosophy,
published in 1952, which, as he remarks in the
Preface, is as much a Butlerian study in ethics,
offering a general introduction to ethics, as a
study of Butler's own ethics. There are chapters
on Butler's theory of human nature, conscience,
egoism, the content of morality, desert, the
place of God in Butler's ethics, and a final
DUNCAN-JONES
chapter entitled 'Some Ultimate Problems of
Ethics'. The main aim of the book is, as he
puts it, 'to extract from Butler's writings a
moral philosophy conceived in purely natural
terms: that is to say, in which there is, or need
be, no mention of the supernatural' (Butler's
Moral Philosophy, p. 142). This is justified, he
argues, by Butler's own statement of his
method, which starts 'from a matter of fact,
namely what the particular nature of man is ...;
from which it proceeds to determine what
course of life it is which is correspondent to this
whole nature', as Duncan-Jones quotes Butler
(ibid.). What Duncan-Jones thus offers might
be described as a Moorean rational recon-
struction of Butler's ethics. The moral philoso-
phy he extracts, and endorses, is summarized at
the end of the book:
There must be moral qualities, which human
actions or their results may possess or lack.
The presence or absence of a moral quality
depends on the intrinsic nature of those
actions or results: if an action is good, any
other similar action, at any place or time,
must be good, unless the latter, or some effect
of it, or some whole to which it belongs,
differs in some morally relevant way from the
former. We have some power of knowing the
moral qualities of things and actions. There
is a distinctive relation of fittingness, or
'intrinsic stringency', between moral qualities
and conduct, in virtue of which actions and
moral judgements may conform or fail to
confirm to moral truths. The nature of this
relation may be felt, but cannot be analysed.
(Butler's Moral Philosophy, pp. 188-9)
Moore influenced Duncan-Jones not just in his
ethics, but also in the range of his philosophi-
cal interests. He wrote on many of the topics
that had occupied Moore - for example, the
relationship between universals and particu-
lars, the distinction between implication and
entailment, and most importantly of all,
analysis. He was very much concerned to apply
and defend the method of analysis that he saw
246
as characteristic of Cambridge philosophy at
the time. His most important paper on the
subject was his contribution to a symposium on
'Does Philosophy Analyse Common Sense?'
with A.J. AVER at the Joint Session of the
Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association
in 1937. He draws the distinction that had
become familiar by then, between 'same-level'
and 'new-level' analysis. An example he gives
of the former is the definition of being in awe
as fearing and admiring, and of the latter the
analysis of 'the average man' in terms of indi-
vidual men ('Does Philosophy Analyse
Common Sense?', p. 142). He then states what
he calls 'the common sense thesis', namely, that
'(1) the common sense view of the world is
true, and (2) analysis, including new-level
analysis, states what everyone means by some
common sense proposition' (ibid., p. 144).
However, while he allows that same-level
analysis captures sameness of meaning, he finds
the claim that new-level analysis does so highly
problematic. He considers various objections to
the claim, and possible responses, and discusses
three attempts to specify a weaker relation than
sameness of meaning. But he ends the paper
without any clear answer to the problem.
In common with other philosophers of the
period, Duncan-Jones came to reject 'new-level'
analysis. But he remained an advocate of what
might broadly be characterized as analytic phi-
losophy in its linguistic phase (which practised
'same-level' analysis). In 1964 he published an
insightful essay review of J.L. AUSTIN'S
Philosophical Papers, critical of individual
points but sympathetic to the general concern
with the detailed functioning of terms such as
'know' and 'promise'. In concluding with a dig
at Austin's euphuistic style, however, he
remarks: 'Which is in the end more fruitful:
the Austin grind? Or the Moore grind?' The
paper ends without an answer; but it is clear, I
think, where he stood. He remained a Moorean
throughout his life.
Duncan-Jones's advocacy of what came to be
known as the Cambridge School of Analysis
was reflected, most substantially, in his work as

founding editor of the journal Analysis, which
may well prove to have been his most signifi-
cant contribution to twentieth-century philos-
ophy. He was the driving force behind its estab-
lishment in 1933, and he edited it until 1940,
when the war intervened and no further issues
appeared. He restarted it in 1947, although he
only continued as editor until 1948, when
Margaret MACDONALD took over. The aim of
the journal was set out in the 'Statement of
Policy' that opens the first issue:
Analysis will be mainly devoted to short dis-
cussions of questions of detail in philoso-
phy, or of precisely defined aspects of philo-
sophical questions. Analysis is not designed
to support any particular set of conclusions.
But the contributions to be published will
be concerned, as a rule, with the elucidation
or explanation of facts, or groups of facts, the
general nature of which is, by common
consent, already known; rather than with
attempts to establish new kinds of fact about
the world, of very wide scope, or on a very
large scale.
Again, we can see here the influence of Moore's
conception of philosophy. But from the begin-
ning, the journal - through the influence, in
particular, of Susan STEBBING (who was on the
editorial committee, with C.A. MACE and
Gilbert RYLE) - also embraced the work of the
logical positivists, and published work critical
of the Cambridge and Vienna schools. Its
Moorean roots may have been forgotten, but
the journal itself, with its emphasis on short
contributions and criticisms of specific argu-
ments, is now firmly established as one of the
main journals of analytic philosophy in Britain.
In 1974 Duncan-Jones's widow deposited
papers and correspondence relating to his edi-
torship of Analysis in the University of
Birmingham Library. There are letters from,
amongst others, ANSCOMBE, Ayer, BLACK,
Hempel, Moore, Ryle, Schlick, Scholz, Stebbing
and WISDOM, and together they provide a fas-
cinating glimpse into the development of
247
DUNCAN-JONES
analytic philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, a
development in which Duncan-Jones played a
key role, in both his own writings and his pro-
fessional activities.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Ethical Words and Ethical Facts', Mind, vol.
42 (1933), pp. 473-500.
'Does Philosophy Analyse Common Sense?',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 16 (1937), pp. 139-61.
Symposium with AJ. Ayer.
Butler's Moral Philosophy (1952).
'Performance and Promise', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 14 (1964), pp. 97-117.
Other Relevant Works
'A Statement of Policy', Analysis, vol. 1
(1933), pp. 1-2.
'Universals and Particulars', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 34 (1933-4).
'Is Strict Implication the Same as
Entailment?', Analysis, vol. 2 (1935), pp.
70-78.
'Intention, Motive and Responsibility',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 19 (1945), pp. 267-88.
Symposium with W.H.F. Barnes and W.D.
Falk.
'Are all Philosophical Questions Questions of
Language?', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 22 (1948), pp. 49-62.
Symposium with S. Hampshire.
'Assertions and Commands', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 52 (1951-2)
pp. 189-206.
'Deadlock in Ethics', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 26 (1952)
'Intrinsic Value: Some Comments on the
Work of G.E. Moore', Philosophy, vol. 33
(1958), pp. 240-73.
'Authority', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 32 (1958), pp. 241-60
Symposium with R. Peters and P. Winch.
'Notional Choice', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 61 (1960-61), pp.
1-18.
DUNCAN-JONES
'Man's Mortality', Analysis, vol. 28 (1968),
pp. 65-70.
Michael Beaney
DURRANT, Michael (1934-)
Michael Durrant was born on 1 January 1934
in Northampton, where he received his sec-
ondary education at Eaglehurst College. From
1952 until 1954, he undertook National
Service in the Army Education Corps, stationed
in York. He then went to the University of
Leeds, where he was awarded his BA in phi-
losophy and history in 1958. He gained his
BPhil from St Catherine's College, Oxford in
1962. Except for a visiting professorship at the
University of Nebraska in the academic year
1965-6, the whole of his academic career has
been spent at the University College of South
Wales and Monmouthshire, now Cardiff
University. He was appointed as assistant
lecturer in philosophy in 1962, as lecturer in
1963, as senior lecturer in 1972, and as reader
in philosophy in 1978. Having retired from
full-time academic work in September 1999, h
was appointed honorary senior research fellow.
He was on the Council of the Royal Institute of
Philosophy until 2003. More importantly, he
was a member of the executive committee of
the British Society for the Philosophy of
Religion at its inception, and a founder member
and first President of the European Society for
the Philosophy of Religion, both of which are
forums for leading academics in philosophy
and theology.
Durrant's interests include ancient philoso-
phy, the philosophy of religion and philosoph-
ical logic, and much of his work can be con
sidered as a fruitful interrelation of the differ-
ent and seemingly disparate areas of philo-
sophical logic and the philosophy of religion.
Thus, for example, in Theology and
248
Intelligibility (1973), he examines, by recent
techniques in philosophical logic, one proposi-
tion from natural theology, that God is the last
end of rational creatures, and the Trinitarian
doctrine from revealed Christianity, that God
is Three Persons in One Substance, to deter-
mine whether or not either or both is intelligi-
ble. He comes to the conclusions that there is
no sense to the proposition, and that the tradi-
tional Trinitarian formula is unintelligible. He
does not however further conclude that all reli-
gious or theological discourse is similarly unin-
telligible: each proposed proposition or doctrine
must be examined separately. In The Logical
Status of 'God' (1973) Durrant argues that, in
some propositions in which 'God' appears, the
term is treated as a proper noun, whereas in
others, it is treated as a descriptive term. Thus
there is no one single account of how 'God'
functions, as the logics of proper names and
descriptive terms are different and incompati-
ble. In the last chapter of the work he examines
and rejects contemporary attempts to construe
sentences containing 'God' as non-proposi-
tional.
Durrant's latest work, Sortals and the
Subject-Predicate Distinction (2001), con-
tributes to a contemporary problem in philo-
sophical logic. He defines sortals as having the
grammatical form of common nouns which
can take an indefinite article or a plural form or
both, and logically provide us with the princi-
ple which enables us to count particulars, and
to distinguish them, or groups of them, from
each other. He then contends that sortals are
logically prior to, and thus make possible, the
two categories of subject and predicable, with
the latter being a term for what becomes a
predicate when it is attached to a subject.
Durrant's originality in, dedication to and
flair for teaching philosophy have been greatly
appreciated over many years by his colleagues
and students.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Religion as the Inexpressible', pts I and II,
Sophia, vol. 3 (April 1965), pp. 14-21; vo

4 (July 1965), pp. 3-9.
'God and Analogy', Sophia, vol. 8 (October
1969), pp. 11-24.
'Feature Universals and Sortal Universals',
Analysis, vol. 31 (December 1970), pp.
49-52.
The Use of Pictures in Religious Belief,
Sophia, vol. 10 (July 1971), pp. 16-21.
'Numerical Identity', Mind, vol. 82 (January
1973), pp. 95-103.
The Logical Status of 'God' (1973).
Theology and Intelligibility (1973).
'Is the Justification of Religious Belief a
Possible Enterprise?', Religious Studies,
vol. 9 (December 1973), pp. 449-55.
'General Terms and Logical Subjects',
Canadian journal of Philosophy, vol. 3
(June 1974), pp. 525-38.
'Essence and Accident', Mind, vol. 84
(October 1975), pp. 595-600.
'Reference and Critical Realism', Modern
Theology, vol. 5 (January 1989), pp.
133-43.
'Scepticism: Three Recently Presented
Arguments Examined', Philosophical
Investigations (July 1991), pp. 252-68.
Transcendence, Instantiation and
Incarnation - An Exploration', Religious
Studies, vol. 29, no. 3 (Spring 1993), pp.
337-52.
Sortals And the Subject-Predicate Distinction,
ed. Stephen Horton (2001).
Other Relevant Works
(Ed.), Aristotle's De anima in Focus (1993).
Kathryn L. Plant
DWORKIN, Ronald Myles (1931- )
Ronald M. Dworkin was born on 11 December
1931 in Worcester, Massachusetts. He received
a BA degree from Harvard University in 1953,
249
DWORKIN
another BA and an MA from the University of
Oxford in 1955 and the LLB from Harvard in
1957. For the next year he served as Harvard
Law School clerk for Judge Learned Hand at
the United States Court of Appeals for the
Second Circuit in Manhattan. Dworkin then
became an associate at the Sullivan &
Cromwell law firm in New York in 1958 and
was admitted to the bar in 1959.
Dworkin's academic career started as assis-
tant professor of law at Yale University in
1962. He was promoted to professor in 1965,
and was Wesley N. Hohfeld Professor of
Jurisprudence in 1968-9. In addition, he was
visiting professor of philosophy at Princeton
University in 1963, Gauss seminarian in
1965-6, visiting professor of law at Stanford
University in 1967, and Case Lecturer at Case
Western Reserve University in 1967. In 1969
Dworkin went to England as Chair of
Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford, suc-
ceeding H.L.A. HART, and he held this chair
until 1998. He was also fellow of University
College, Oxford, during this time.
Dworkin returned to America to teach at
Princeton University in 1974, and then became
Professor of Law at New York University in
1975, while continuing to hold his chair at
Oxford. Dworkin has also served as Rosenthal
Lecturer at Northwestern University in 1975,
academic freedom lecturer at the University of
Witwatersrand in South Africa in 1976, pro
fessor-at-large at Cornell University from 1976
to 1982, visiting professor of philosophy and
law in 1977 and visiting professor of philoso-
phy from 1979 to 1982 at Harvard University,
and as Roscoe Pound Lecturer at the University
of Nebraska in 1979. At present he holds joint
appointments as Frank Henry Sommer
Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy
at New York University; he is Quain Professor
of Jurisprudence at University College London
(since 1998), and he works with philosophers
and lawyers at both institutions. Additionally,
Dworkin served as a delegate to the Democratic
National Convention in 1972 and 1976. He is
a member of Democrats Abroad, having served
DWORKIN
as Chairman from 1972 to 1974, the
Democratic Charter Commission, the
Programme Committee of the Ditchley
Foundation, and is a consultant on human
rights to the Ford Foundation. He has received
honorary degrees from Yale University,
Williams College and John Jay College of
Criminal Justice, and is a fellow of the British
Academy and the American Academy of Arts
and Letters.
Dworkin's ground-breaking work in the phi-
losophy of law and in legal theory will be a
major influence for years to come in the United
States as well as the United Kingdom. Lauded
by liberals and respected by conservatives for
his expertise in and contributions to jurispru-
dence, as well as for the originality of his liberal
views, Dworkin has gone from 'the Yank at
Oxford' to a world-renowned figure in con-
temporary legal theory and political philoso-
phy. Honoured by philosophers, political sci-
entists, and legal experts, he has published a
number of books and numerous articles in
various journals and law reviews. Dworkin's
scope crosses a number of different disciplines;
he weaves together sophisticated legal, political,
and philosophical theories and inquiries with a
great deal of clarity. His extensive work in the
New York Review of Books is also notable - he
published eighty articles there between 1968
and the spring of 2003 - as is his work for the
United States Congress on legal aspects of
Alzheimer's disease. His debates with H.L.A.
Hart and Catherine MacKinnon, and his com-
mentary on the 2000 US presidential election
have also garnered interest towards his work.
Dworkin's major writings bring together the
views of influential judges, philosophers, and
politicians in sophisticated analyses, which gen-
erally deal with important contemporary issues
such as constitutional law. His observations
often include a detailed account of the political
and social implications of defective past and
present practices, as well as advice on the
improvement of our present conditions.
Dworkin's account of law is directly connected
with a view of moral principles, with an ethics.
250
In holding onto the democratic ideal of equality
as a fundamental virtue, he advances a theory of
interpretation of law that rests on a moral base.
His addition of integrity as a means for inter-
preting law is as admirable as it is inspirational.
After pointing out the shortcomings of more
traditional and present ruling methods of inter-
pretation, Dworkin builds a theory rooted in
the foundation of morality with integrity and
equality at its core. Additionally, he hopes to
promote a system that would increase the con-
sistency and fairness of verdicts made by judges
by rooting their decisions in a moral framework.
Dworkin always stands up for the rights of the
individual, but never in a blind or unqualified
fashion.
Rather than leave the ideal of equality as vague
and undefined, Dworkin expresses a connection
with one's ability to share in the national pros-
perity. His theory also entails a certain perspec-
tive on life, as one is responsible towards society
to assist the maintenance of the legal system by
following the laws set forth. Within this illus-
tration, Dworkin exemplifies an important
overlap between law and ethics. Equality is also
defined in terms of the equal concern for the
interests and well-being of all citizens within a
community. Further, he identifies constitutional
law as the greatest current concern in judicial
affairs. This concern, according to Dworkin, lies
in two parts. The first deals with the topic of the
liberty a citizen holds in a democracy. He claims
that we must find the line that separates the
majority's rights to determination and the rights
of the individual that the majority may not deter-
mine. Second, Dworkin claims that constitu-
tional law must also deal with a clear conception
of equality that can be set as a reachable goal. A
major issue in this debate from Dworkin's per-
spective is found in the distribution of wealth and
opportunity.
The greater portion of his major works con-
tributes additions of a moral perspective to
various aspects of the American legal system.
However, his distinction between the 'inside-
out' and 'outside-in' relationships between
theory and practice may also prove to be quite

influential to the more general philosophical
world. In explaining his methods of approach
in Sovereign Virtue (2000), Dworkin may have
uncovered the solution to the contemporary
philosophical debate over theory and practice.
According to Dworkin, one manner of inquiry,
which he labels the inside-out approach, begins
with a controversial issue and works towards
a structure of theory. On the other hand, one
may begin with theory and seek to apply it by
some practical means later. This is his illustra-
tion of the outside-in approach. This distinction
drawn by Dworkin certainly will have
American pragmatists scratching their heads
over their blur of any concrete distinction
between theory and practice at all.
Dworkin's first book, Taking Rights
Seriously (1977), was both highly acclaimed
and controversial. In it, he deems the 'ruling
theory' of law as defective. According to
Dworkin, this ruling theory is made up of two
distinct parts: legal positivism and utilitarian-
ism. Both of these parts fail in their treatment
of individual rights. He argues that the phe-
nomenological failure of legal positivism is
found in its view that individuals have rights,
but only to the extent that they have been
created by law or social practice in some
explicit manner. On the other hand, the utili-
tarianism of Jeremy Bentham completely denies
the existence of natural rights altogether. In
response to the inadequacies of their combined
effect, Dworkin provides his own 'liberal theory
of law', by which individual rights are not dis-
tinguished by or demanded in relation to
liberty, but are determined in relation to
equality. The impact of this step is tremendous,
as it defuses the long-time conflict between
liberty and other important values. Rights,
according to Dworkin, are not always had
merely because of explicit legislation; they exist
prior to such action and the justification for
these rights is found in equality. He identifies an
ethical basis as the fundamental purpose of all
law, which is the equal treatment of all citizens
within a community. In addition, Dworkin
applies his theory to several important court
251
DWORKIN
cases and deals with social issues such as civil
disobedience, reverse discrimination, and the
controversial aspects of rights.
His defence of liberalism in his 1983
'Neutrality, Equality, and Liberalism' advances
his view that certain important ideals are not in
conflict with each other. In this case, he deals
with the importance of the neutrality of gov-
ernment regarding affairs of personal morality
and the responsibility of the government to
reduce economic inequality. In this essay,
Dworkin provides his argument against the
conception of a moral majority, as made
famous by the Reverend Jerry Falwell, for
example, and the economic views of the 'New
Right'. In addition, he clarifies the meaning of
the term 'liberalism' by explicating its principles
noted above, and raises important questions
regarding the distribution of wealth in a society
of equal individuals.
Dworkin's A Matter of Principle (1985)
includes the roots of much of the work that
would follow it. For example, here we find an
illustration of the practice of adjudication as
primarily an issue not of policy, but of princi-
ple. Additionally, Dworkin includes a good
deal of discussion on and explanation of his
conception of liberalism. Each essay in this
work deals with important issues of political
philosophy and legal theory. In this book,
Dworkin claims to combine practical problems
with philosophical theory. The collection
demonstrates a number of contexts in which he
advances the relationship between moral prin-
ciple and law. Other topics in these essays deal
with discrimination (both academic and
employment), methods of adjudication, cen-
sorship and the freedom of the press.
Dworkin's 1986 book Law's Empire
provides a further point of view on law with a
heavy philosophical slant as well as a detailed
analysis on interpretation of law. The primary
topic of his discussion revolves around his
answer to the question over the ability of law
to rule based on the silence, lack of clarity and
ambiguity of law books. Judges, according to
Dworkin, do not merely apply past legal deci-
DWORKIN
sions to present cases - they must also interpret
these past decisions as well. After dismissing the
contemporary conventionalist and pragmatist
points of view on the interpretation of law
based on their shortcomings, Dworkin provides
his alternative view of 'law as integrity'. The
conventionalist method is too rooted in tradi-
tion and the established authority for
Dworkin's taste, while the pragmatist perspec-
tive is so disconnected that one may interpret
the law in a manner that suits the individual's
advantage. In constructing a method by which
the past may be read into the future regarding
legal decisions, Dworkin illustrates a further
injection of morality into the legal system.
In Life's Dominion (1993) Dworkin channels
his attention on the issues of abortion and
euthanasia. Regarding the 1973 case of Roe v.
Wade, Dworkin maintains that by deciding the
Texas law against abortion was unconstitu-
tional, the Supreme Court, which he notes is an
appointed and unelected branch of government,
in effect made law. In this work, Dworkin sifts
through the rhetoric of both sides of the issue of
abortion, provides an analysis that is both philo-
sophic and scientific, and relates this all to con-
stitutional law. From his perspective, abortion is
not a matter that rests on the rights of the foetus,
but on the intrinsic value of human life. Not
only does Dworkin shed new light on this issue
that includes important constitutional and polit-
ical implications, he also defuses the religious
controversy that has dominated the debate over
abortion and replaced it with philosophic debate.
Dworkin further compares the question of
abortion with that of euthanasia and again
provides a detailed philosophical discussion on
human life, highlighting the social and political
implications of euthanasia. According to his
view, the debate over euthanasia must include
recognition for respect for the choice of the
patient, his or her best interests, and the intrin-
sic value of human life. In addition, Dworkin
echoes his perspective of ethical individualism,
i.e. the view that humans have a moral respon-
sibility to actualize their potential to the fullest
and make something good out of life.
252
His 1996 work Freedom's Law provides
additional suggestions for a stronger bond
between ethics and the legal system in order to
enhance the latter. In this book, Dworkin
advances his perspective of the American
Constitution and the interpretation of this
document by Supreme Court Judges in the
United States. Claiming that Americans are
confused over the meaning of the Constitution
and the procedures for its interpretation,
Dworkin analyses different methods. The
moral reading of the Constitution that he rec-
ommends preserves the ideals that he deems are
found in any real democracy, by which certain
types of constitutional clauses are seen as
'moral principles'. In his observations on rep-
resentative government, Dworkin provides a
detailed view of how collective action relates to
the decisions made based on interpretations of
the Constitution. It is clear that his influence in
the future of legal interpretation will be mon-
umental. This work also deals with important
social issues such as abortion, euthanasia, affir-
mative action, race, homosexuality and free
speech, while analysing major decisions such as
Roe v. Wade, the Cruzan case and the New
York Times v. Sullivan. The inclusion of his
debate with Catherine MacKinnon over the
legality of pornography is also noteworthy, as
is his discussion of the defeat of Judge Robert
Bork and the nomination of Judge Clarence
Thomas.
Dworkin ends Freedom's Law on a personal
note, with a tribute to Judge Learned Hand. In
the 1890s, Hand studied philosophy with
George Santayana, Josiah Royce and William
James at Harvard. Hand, a liberal who would
turn off the lights in his own and other judges'
chambers before leaving for the day in order to
save the taxpayers' money, was a great influ-
ence on Dworkin and deeply respected by him.
This is evident from chapter 17, 'Learned
Hand'. Further, Dworkin identifies Hand as
one of the best judges the United States has
ever had in Law's Empire. In addition to Hand,
Dworkin also often refers to Isaiah BERLIN and
John Rawls in his writings, and he has been

influenced by the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg
Gadamer.
His 1996 essay 'We Need a New
Interpretation of Academic Freedom' exposes
the depth and scope of Dworkin's work. Not
only has he contributed a great deal to politi-
cal philosophy and jurisprudence, he also has
provided an insightful analysis of academic
freedom with important suggestions as to how
this liberty ought to be interpreted. In this essay,
he maintains a strong connection between
ethical individualism and academic freedom.
This connection gives rise to certain duties to be
upheld by the citizens of a community.
According to Dworkin, citizens have direct
responsibilities to speak out for that which they
believe to be true, and not to declare what they
believe false. His view of ethical individualism
demands that each person live life in a thought-
ful manner. Academic freedom, he claims, relates
to the responsibility to preserve independence in
our culture. However, he admits that this
freedom may be compromised only when
another value of greater importance or urgency
must be protected, and illustrates lines that
academic freedom must not cross in regards to
free speech. His 'DeFunis v. Sweatt', which
includes discussion on equal treatment of citizens
by institutions of higher education, is also an
important contribution to the academic world.
Dworkin's Sovereign Virtue provides a further
inquiry into the subject of equality among
citizens. In it he returns to a number of themes
from his previous writings. The expansion of
his view of equality presented in his first book
Taking Rights Seriously is quite notable.
Dworkin identifies equality as the fundamental
virtue to any democracy and as key for the legit-
imacy for any form of government. In this work,
he explores different models of equality, such as
that of welfare and resources, and illustrates
equality of resources as the more desirable
model. Equality is properly defined in terms of
the equality of concern over the citizens of a
community according to Dworkin. Since 'indis-
criminate equality' is never an acceptable
practice, he maintains that society should set
253
DWORKIN
out as a goal the equal concern for all and notes
the implications this view would have on the
making and enactment of law. He also returns
to an examination of the relationship between
equality and liberty, again rejecting the tradi-
tional view that these two ideals are exclusive of
one another and in direct conflict with each
other. In addition, Dworkin includes another
primary message from his prior works: his
theory of ethical individualism. The responsi-
bility each person holds for the success of their
life and the choices they make is an integral
acknowledgement for the advancement of
society. Dworkin further treats current social
issues such as campaign finance reform, health
care, genetic experimentation and affirmative
action, among others, in this work.
His latest offering to the American legal
system is found in A Badly Flawed Election
(2002), a collection of essays Dworkin edited,
with contributions by him, Judge Richard
Posner, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr and Lawrence
Tribe, among others. Dworkin claims that the
situation was completely mishandled and refers
to the Supreme Court's decision as 'pragmatic
adjudication'. However, he not only critically
analyzes the results of the 2000 election and the
fallout from the decision, but also provides
suggestions for election reform to ensure that
such an unprecedented fiat and national fiasco
will never happen again.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, Mass.,
1977).
The Philosophy of Law (Oxford, 1977).
A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, Mass.,
1985).
Law's Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
A Bill of Rights for Britain (1990).
Foundations of a Liberal Equality (Salt Lake
City, 1990).
Life's Dominion: An Argument about
Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual
Freedom (New York, 1993).
Freedom's Law: The Moral Reading of the
American Constitution (Cambridge, Mass.,
DWORKIN
1996).
Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of
Equality (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
Other Relevant Works
'On Not Prosecuting Civil Disobedience',
New York Review of Books (6 June 1968):
14-21.
'DeFunis v. Sweatt', in Marshall Cohen,
Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon (eds),
Equality and Preferential Treatment
(Princeton, 1977), pp. 63-83.
The Bakke Decision: Did it Decide
Anything?', The New York Review of
Books, 17 August 1978, pp. 20-25.
'Neutrality, Equality, and Liberalism', in
Douglas MacLean and Claudia Mills (eds),
Liberalism Reconsidered (Totawa, N.J.,
1983), pp. 1-11.
'Pragmatism, Right Answers, and True
Banality,' in Michael Brint and William
Weaver (eds), Pragmatism in Law and
Society (Boulder, Col., 1991), pp. 359-88.
'We Need a New Interpretation of Academic
Freedom', in Louis Menard (ed.), The
Future of Academic Freedom (Chicago,
1996), pp. 181-98.
(Ed.), A Badly Flawed Election: Debating
Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court, and
American Democracy (New York, 2002).
(Ed. with Mark Lilla and Robert Silvers), The
Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (New York, 2002).
The Court and the University', New York
Review of Books (15 May 2003): 8-11.
254
Further Reading
Cohen, Marshall, Ronald Divorkin and
Contemporary Jurisprudence (Totawa,
1984).
Forsyth, Murray G., H.M.A. Keens-Soper
and Maurice Keens-Soper (eds), Political
Classics: Green to Dworkin (Oxford,
1996).
George, Robert P., Making Men Moral: Civil
Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford,
1993).
Gordon, Richard and Richard Wilmot-Smith
(eds), Human Rights in the United
Kingdom (Oxford, 1997).
Guest, Stephen, Ronald Dworkin (Stanford,
1991).
Honeyball, Simon and James Walter,
Integrity, Community and Interpretation:
A Critical Analysis of Ronald Dworkin s
Theory of Law (Aldershot, 1998).
Hunt, Alan and Andrew Altrnan (eds),
Reading Dworkin Critically (New York,
1992).
Posner, Richard, Overcoming Law
(Cambridge, Mass., 1995).
Scalia, Antonin, A Matter of Interpretation:
Federal Courts and the Law (Princeton,
1997).
Jeffrey R. Post
 E
EDDINGTON, Arthur Stanley (1882-1944)
Arthur Stanley Eddington was born in Kendal
on 28 December 1882 and died in Cambridge
on 22 November 1944. Both of his parents
came from Quaker backgrounds. After the
death in 1884 of his father, Arthur Henry
Eddington, a schoolmaster, his mother, Sarah
Ann Shout, took her two young children to
live with her mother-in-law in Weston-super-
Mare. As a child, Eddington was schooled at
home, then attended Brynmelyn, a small private
school, and in 1895 was placed at the
Cambridge Junior Locals.
Eddington early distinguished himself in
mathematics. Awarded a Somerset County
Scholarship to Owens College, Manchester, he
matriculated in 1898 before he was sixteen
years of age. He studied mathematics under
Horace Lamb and physics under Arthur
Schuster, and he graduated in 1902 with a BS
with first class honours in physics. Later that
year, with an entrance scholarship, Eddington
entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he
studied mathematics and was Senior Wrangler
in 1904. He received the BA in 1905 and the
MA in 1909.
In February 1906 Eddington became chief
assistant to the Astronomer Royal at
Greenwich. He assumed the Plumian
Professorship of Astronomy at Cambridge in
1913, and the following year he also became
Director of the Cambridge Observatory, posi-
tions he held until his death. Shortly after being
named Director, he was elected a fellow of the
255
Royal Society, having been a fellow of the
Astronomical Society since 1906. He received
thirteen honorary degrees, as well as at least
seven gold medals and major prizes from
various societies. Eddington received a knight-
hood in 1930 and the Order of Merit in 1938.
Early in the twentieth century knowledge of
the universe - its structure and dynamics - wa
rather limited, and Eddinton's ground-breaking
theoretical work on the motions of star systems
helped create the field of stellar dynamics.
During World War I, in which he did not par-
ticipate because of his religious convictions, he
received the only copy of Einstein's 1915 paper
on relativity to reach England and quickly rec-
ognized its significance. In 1923 he published a
mathematical treatment of Einstein's theory to
which he made his own original contributions.
About the same time Eddington began his theo-
retical study of the internal composition of
stars, in which he drew important conclusions
from the assumption of radiation, rather than
convection, as the means of heat transfer.
With the appearance of P.A.M. Dirac's 1928
paper, which incorporated relativity into the
quantum-mechanical description of the
electron, Eddington attempted to integrate the
two theories more generally. By choosing a
problem that could be solved exactly by the
methods of both relativity and quantum
mechanics, he was able to deduce relationships
among several fundamental constants of
nature. Eventually he calculated values for
twenty-seven such constants from theoretical
considerations alone. Eddington's scientific rep-
EDDINGTON
utation suffered in his later years as he
attempted to develop his so-called fundamen-
tal theory, but modern physics has moved
towards a similar goal during the subsequent
half century.
Beginning in 1928, Eddington wrote on
various philosophical and religious issues, espe-
cially as they related to the new physics of rel-
ativity and quantum theory. He first discussed
particular developments in physics and/or
astrophysics and then the philosophical and/or
religious implications of these scientific topics.
Eddington was among the first scientists to
examine the broader implications of the new
physics, including the absence of causality, inde-
terminacy as embodied in the Heisenberg
Uncertainty Principle, and his own belief in a
world of concepts and symbols rather than
material objects. For Eddington, these impli-
cations cleared away some of the obstacles in
classical physics to religion and enabled him to
separate the metrical (scientific) aspects of expe-
rience from the non-metrical (non-scientific).
Both of these worlds, consisting of symbols
organized by the mind, were equally valid, but
different representations of reality. 'It is almost
as though' - he wrote - 'the modern conception
of the physical world had deliberately left room
for the reality of spirit and consciousness' (New
Pathways in Science, p. 320).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Nature of the Physical World [Gifford
Lectures, 1927] (Cambridge, 1928).
Science and the Unseen World [Swarthmore
Lecture, 1929] (1929).
New Pathways in Science [Messenger
Lectures, 1934] (Cambridge, 1935).
The Philosophy of Physical Science [Tarner
Lectures, 1938] (Cambridge, 1939).
further Reading
Dingle, Herbert, The Sources of'Eddington s
Philosophy (Cambridge, 1954).
Douglas, A. Vibert, The Life of Arthur
Stanley Eddington (Edinburgh and New
York, 1956).
256
Jacks, L.P., Sir Arthur Eddington: Man of
Science and Mystic (Cambridge, 1948).
Johnson, Martin, Time and Universe for the
Scientific Conscience (Cambridge, 1952).
Kilmister, C.W., Sir Arthur Eddington
(Oxford, 1966).
, Eddington s Search for a
fundamental Theory: A Key to the
Universe (Cambridge, 1994).
Ritchie, A.D., Reflections on the Philosophy
of Sir Arthur Eddington (Cambridge,
1947).
Whittaker, Edmund, Eddington s Principle in
the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge,
1951).
Yolton, John W., The Philosophy of Science
of AS. Eddington (The Hague, 1960).
Adrian Rice
EDGELL, Beatrice (1871-1948)
Beatrice Edgell was born in Tewkesbury,
Gloucestershire on 26 October 1871 and died
in Cheltenham on 10 August 1948. She was
educated chiefly at Netting Hill High School
for Girls (1886-91) and at the University
College of Wales, Aberystwyth, from where
she graduated with a BA in mental and moral
science in 1894 (the degree being awarded by
the University of London). She gained distinc-
tion in the Teacher's Diploma of the University
of London in 1896, and was subsequently
awarded an MA (1899) and a DLitt (1924) by
the University of Wales. She undertook her
doctoral studies abroad, under Oswald Kiilpe
at the University of Wiirzburg, where she
received training in the new experimental psy-
chology, presenting her thesis, Die Grenzen
des Experiments als Einer Psychologischen
Methode, in 1901. She became the first woman
graduate of the University of Wiirzburg and the
first British woman to be awarded a doctorate

in psychology. She was appointed lecturer in
philosophy and Head of the Department of
Mental and Moral Science at Bedford College
London, a post which she held from 1898 to
1933. The title of reader in psychology was
conferred on her in 1913, and she became the
first woman Professor of Psychology in Britain
in 1927.
Edgell established one of the first psycho-
logical laboratories in the country. She played
an important role in developing the status of
psychology, both locally in London University
- as a teacher in a women's college, training a
number of women who later played a promi-
nent role in the development of scientific and
professional psychology - and nationally, partly
through her work with the British Psychological
Society. She was the first woman President of
four learned societies: the Mind Association
(1927), the British Psychological Society
(1929-31), the Aristotelian Society (1930-31)
and the Psychology Section of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science
(1932).
Edgell wrote three books and about thirty
articles. Theories of Memory (1924) was a
scholarly and critical review of concepts and
theories of memory. Mental Life (1926) was an
introduction to psychology for social science
students and Ethical Problems (1929) an intro-
duction to ethics for hospital nurses and social
workers. The first part of the latter surveys
moral philosophy from Plato to Sidgwick; the
second part discusses the application of moral
principles to specific practical problems. She
read eight papers to the Aristotelian Society, on
topics such as sensory perception, imagery (the
subject of her presidential address), memory,
recognition and conception; and wrote ency-
clopedia entries - including the one on
'Memory' (unattributed) in the fourteenth
edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (1929) -
and book reviews.
Edgell also made substantial contributions to
empirical research: an investigation, with
William Legge Symes, of the calibration of the
Wheatstone-Hipp chronoscope, an instrument
257
EDGLEY
for measuring reaction times; and experimen-
tal studies of memory. One was a large-scale
study of the development of memory in
children (described in her presidential address
to the Psychology Section of the British
Association), demonstrating gender differences
- work that has scarcely been superseded.
Edgell produced no original theory of her
own, which may account for her relative obscu-
rity. She tended to favour the theory of G.F.
STOUT, particularly his concept of 'conative
unity', the unity in mental life supplied by a
purpose or direction, which inspired her exper-
imental work on memory and possibly the title
of her textbook on psychology. Her strength
lay in expounding, comparing and evaluating
the work of others. She also had considerable
talents, and made a substantial contribution
as a teacher and as a chairman.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Theories of Memory (Oxford, 1924).
Mental Life (1926).
Elizabeth R. Valentine
EDGLEY, Roy (1925-99)
Roy Edgley was born in Northampton on 19
June 1925 and died in Brighton on 11 April
1999. He attended Northampton Grammar
School from 1939 to 1941 and, on leaving,
worked in local journalism. From 1944 to 1948
he served in the Royal Air Force as a radar
engineer, partly in India. He was a student at
Manchester University from 1948 to 1952,
graduating with a first class honours degree in
philosophy. In 1954 he obtained a BPhil degree
at Oxford University under the supervision of
Gilbert RYLE. From 1954 to 1970 he was suc-
cessively an assistant lecture, lecturer and senior
lecturer in philosophy at Bristol University. In
1960 he was a visiting lecturer at the University
EDGLEY
of Ghana and in 1969 was Ellis Visiting
Professor of Philosophy at Read College, USA.
He was appointed Professor of Philosophy at
the University of Sussex in 1970 and took early
retirement from that post in 1981, a retirement
in which his philosophical work was increas-
ingly hampered by ill health. He played an
active part in the life of the university at Sussex
and achieved a degree of national notoriety as
leader of the opposition to the visit there of
Professor Samuel Huntington, then best known
as one of the presumed architects of American
policy in Vietnam. A lifelong socialist, Edgley's
thinking while at Sussex took an explicitly
Marxist turn. As the other Chair in Philosophy
was held for much of his time there by the dis-
tinguished Hungarian Marxist thinker, Istvan
Meszaros, the university became in this period
the main centre of Marxist philosophy in
Britain. Edgley was a central figure in the group
which produced the journal Radical
Philosophy. He exercised considerable influ-
ence, through his writings and personal
contacts, on other intellectual developments,
in particular the movement known as critical
realism.
In spite of what might crudely be termed a
move from 'analytical' to 'Marxist' philoso-
pher, there is a strong element of continuity in
Edgley's thought throughout his career. This is
most obviously a continuity of intellectual
interests, the general nature of which is indi-
cated by the title of his book, Reason in Theory
and Practice (1969). The aim of that work is to
bring about a strategic shift of perspective on
the central concepts and concerns of reason.
The shift is one from thinking of reason as
essentially reasoning, that is argument and
inference, to a view in which the centre of the
stage is held by reasons, that is considerations
that tell for or against something or other, pri-
marily believing or doing something. The
ultimate motivation is the wish to exhibit
reason as 'a mental faculty whose essential
function is the normative one of directing or
guiding other human faculties' (Reason in
Theory and Practice, p. 154). In this sense
258
Edgley may be regarded as an adherent of the
doctrine of the primacy of practical reason. It
is a truth that was obscured, in his view, by the
orthodoxy of his time. The philosophical
ancestor of that orthodoxy is David Hume,
though it had come, rather naturally, to assume
a specifically linguistic form. The basic line of
thought is that since reason is essentially rea
soning, its central concerns are whatever can be
inferred, can be conclusions of arguments. It is
then standardly assumed, an assumption that in
itself Edgley accepts, that these are things that
can be said or otherwise put; into words, lin-
guistic items of various sorts. He acknowledges,
and is influenced by, the enlargement in R.M.
HARE'S logic of imperatives of this linguistic
conception of reason beyond an exclusive focus
on propositions or statements. What Edgley
proposes, however, is a more radical break,
though it is not yet fully carried through in
Reason in Theory and Practice.
The starting-point for Edgley's attempt to
displace the conception of reason as inference
is, so to speak, on its home ground, logical
relations between propositions. His crucial
claim is that such relations standardly have
normative implications for psychological states
of people, in particular for belief. Thus, for
instance, if '/?' implies 'g', it is, he points out,
inconsistent to think that p and at the same
time think that not-q (ibid., pp. 49-50). The
notion of inconsistency has, he argues, norma-
tive force here in that if p and not-q are incon-
sistent one at least must be false, 'so that anyone
who believes both must be believing something
that is false' (ibid., p. 84). If one asks what is
wrong about believing what is false, the answer
is that 'the following basic principle for apprais-
ing beliefs is analytic: ... if p, then it is right
(correct) to think that p, and wrong (mistaken)
to think that not-p' (ibid., pp. 85-6). This
analytic principle of appraisal is thus the
bedrock of the entire structure of argument.
That this is so illustrates what is perhaps the
most notable feature of Edgley's philosophical
procedure, his preference for elegance and
economy and constant efforts to derive sub-

stantive results from the most meagre resources.
In the case now in question these results
include a doctrine of great significance for
Edgley's later work. He accepts, in agreement,
as he sees it, with Hume and contrary to,
among others, Aristotle, Kant and
WITTGENSTEIN, that actions, not being linguis-
tic entities, cannot as such figure as conclu-
sions of arguments. Hence, in the conception of
reason as inference, they are in danger of falling
outside the scope of reason altogether, a possi-
bility well illustrated by Hume. With Edgley's
shift of perspective, however, the danger dis-
appears, for actions are paradigmatically things
for which there can be reasons. Moreover,
although they cannot themselves enter directly
into logical relations, they can, he maintains, do
so indirectly in virtue of descriptions under
which they fall. The descriptions to be favoured
for this purpose are those given in terms of
what the agent decided or intended. Under such
descriptions actions can be inconsistent with
rules, principles, practical judgements and, in
general, beliefs about what to do. In this
context too, logic retains its normative force.
For people who act inconsistently in the sense
just outlined can be criticized in that, just as a
matter of logical appraisal, 'either the action or
what it is inconsistent with is wrong, or both'
(ibid., p. 114).
The thesis of Reason in Theory and Practice
has an implication that is referred to there only
in passing but was to be taken up strongly in
Edgley's later work. It concerns the link he sees
between a conception of reason as essentially
reasoning and 'liberal views about toleration
and nonviolence' (ibid., pp. 35-6). Such a con-
ception encourages, he thinks, the assumption
that to be rational is to be endlessly willing to
be discursive, and that to resort to action, more
especially violent action, is to abandon the
rational approach to problems. His subverting
of the intellectual grounds of this assumption
led him to reject the assumption itself. That in
turn had the practical consequence of unwill-
ingness to enter into dialogue with, or offer a
platform to, an opponent such as Huntington.
259
EDGLEY
Moreover, the general line of thought under-
pins the intellectual defence he was to give of his
stance in the Huntington affair ('Freedom of
Speech'). It has to be noted, however, that criti-
cism of the liberal ideology of reason cannot
properly be said to form the core of his later
work. That consists rather in the development
of what is truly the central theme of his book,
its insistence on the normative significance of
logic.
The specific form the development takes is
that of an elaboration of the idea of a critical
social science, a science that would, in Edgley's
interpretation, depend entirely on 'rational
values' ('Philosophy', p. 296). He conceives of
this task as a reconstruction of Marx's practice
of social science. This conception is not without
its difficulties, not least in view of Marx's well-
known reluctance to acknowledge any norma-
tive dimension to his own work. The project
might perhaps be associated less contentiously
with the movement of thought known as
Western Marxism. For the idea of a critical
social science, or 'critical theory of society',
may indeed be said to be of defining signifi-
cance for that movement. In this perspective,
Edgley appears as attempting to provide a
precise formulation of, and theoretical foun-
dations for, a crucial element of a major tradi-
tion of Marxist thought.
In keeping with Edgley's Marxist turn, he
takes the central critical category of social
science to be 'contradiction in its dialectical
form' ('Philosophy', p. 299). The shift of ter-
minology from inconsistency to contradiction
is not in itself of much significance. For Edgley's
contradictions are, logically speaking, still
inconsistencies in that, to take the paradigm
case of propositions, all may be false. They are
not strict contradictories, where, in exhaust-
ing the relevant field of reference, one must be
true. Far more significant is the accompanying
enlargement of the scope of logic, a move made
possible by giving up the last elements of the lin-
guistic conception of reason. The underlying
assumption early and late in Edgley's work is
that logical relations hold in virtue of being
EDGLEY
relations of meaning. The earlier view that such
relations of meaning can obtain, in the sense
required for the argument, only between things
capable of being said is, however, now aban-
doned. Hence, actions do not have to enter
into logical relations only through the media-
tion of their corresponding descriptions. They
can do so directly in their own right 'by being
(capable of being) meant', as 'materialized
meanings'. Thus, there can be, as Edgley goes
on to suggest, in a phrase borrowed from J.M.
HlNTON, 'contradictions that are not dictions'
('Dialectic: The Contradiction of Colletti',
p. 52). In continuation of this line of thought,
activities and practices, conceived as extended
forms of action or complexes of action, also
enter the picture. Taking a still larger step,
social structure does so too on the grounds
that it is a structure of human practices, indeed,
that 'Society ... is a structure of practices'
('Philosophy', p. 269). Thus, the entire object
of investigation of social science is itself a field
of logical relations. In revealing the multifari-
ous contradictions that obtain in that field,
social science is social criticism. Moreover,
criticism is taken by Edgley to be, so to speak,
directly practical just in virtue of the, rather
large, assumption that To criticise something
is ... to call for it to be changed' ('Marx's
Revolutionary Science', p. 17). His belief tha
in the modern world the primary object of
social scientific criticism must be capitalism is
then the final strand in his conception of his
project as a rational reconstruction of Marx's
practice of social science.
This project gave rise to a critical response in
which the following main lines of objection
were put forward. First, it was argued that the
category of contradiction cannot be made to
bear the entire critical weight of socialist science
and needs to be supplemented by other values
(Keat, Norman). Second, it was argued that
the category does not have normative signifi-
cance in all contexts of use and that the scope
of its critical application needs to be refined
(Norman, McCarney). Third, it was argued
that the implied ideal of a society free of all con-
260
tradictions is wholly unrealistic and, indeed,
itself undialectical (Sayers). Edgley replied
directly to some of his critics and elsewhere
showed himself sensitive to the points they
made. Thus, he attempted to allay their scepti-
cism by demonstrating in detail how the key
Marxist concepts of alienation and exploitation
may be seen as fitting his contradiction model
('Philosophy', pp. 299-300). However persua-
sive these responses may be in themselves, the
overall situation remained somewhat unsatis-
factory for anyone sympathetic to Edgley's
position. Here one might also mention some
rather obvious gaps, or at least not fully justi-
fied transitions, in the thread of his argument,
such as the too easy assimilation of structure to
agency and the markedly dynamic view taken
of the practical significance of criticism. There
is perhaps also the need for some elucidation
and defence of the philosophically disputed
notion of 'meaning' on which so much else in
the edifice depends. The truth of the matter
may simply be that a series of papers, dealing
piecemeal with exposition arid criticism, cannot
be a substitute for the monograph we do not
have that would have allowed a systematic
treatment of the issues. What there is remains
of great interest and value. It gives a clear and
rigorous statement of important ideas that have
seldom received this quality of attention, a
statement, moreover, that itself rests on the
genuinely systematic foundations that had been
laid earlier in the form of a general theory of
practical reason. In view of this achievement,
Edgley's later work has a good claim to be the
most fertile and original contribution to
Marxist thought by a British philosopher in
the second half of the twentieth century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Practical Reason', Mind, vol. 74, no. 294
(April 1965), pp. 174-91; repr. in J Raz
(ed.), Practical Reasoning (Oxford, 1978),
pp. 18-32.
Reason in Theory and Practice (1969).
'Reason and Violence', Radical Philosophy,
no. 4 (Spring 1973), pp. 18-24; repr. in S.

Korner (ed.), Practical Reason (Oxford,
1974), pp. 113-35.
'Science, Social Science and Socialist Science:
Reason as Dialectic', Radical Philosophy',
no. 15 (Autumn 1976), pp. 2-7; repr. in R.
Edgley and P. Osborne (eds), Radical
Philosophy Reader (1985), pp. 158-73.
'Marx's Revolutionary Science', in J.
Mepham and D.-H. Ruben (eds), Issues in
Marxist Philosophy, vol. 3 (Brighton,
1979), pp. 5-26.
'Revolution, Reform and Dialectic', in
G.H.R. Parkinson (ed.), Marx and
Marxism (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 21-38.
'Philosophy', in D. McLellan (ed.), Marx:
The First Hundred Years (Oxford, 1983),
pp. 239-302.
'Science, Values and Marxism', Fundamenta
Scientiae, vol. 7, no. 3-4 (1987), pp.
457-68.
Other Relevant Works
'Rules and Morality', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 33 (1959),
pp. 173-94.
'Innate Ideas', in G.N.A. Vesey (ed.),
Knowledge and Necessity (1970), pp.
1-33.
'Hume's Law', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 44 (1970),
pp. 105-19.
'Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom',
Radical Philosophy, no. 10 (Spring 1975),
pp. 9-17.
'Dialectic: The Contradiction of Colletti',
Critique, no. 7 (Winter 1976-7), pp.
47-52.
'Dialectic: A Reply to Keat and Dews',
Radical Philosophy, no. 21 (Spring 1979),
pp. 29-34.
Further Reading
Anderson, P., Considerations on Western
Marxism (1976).
Collier, A., Critical Realism (1994).
Hare, R.M., The Language of Morals
(Oxford, 1952).
261
EDWARDS
Keat, R., 'Comment', Radical Philosophy,
no. 16 (Spring 1977), p. 48.
, 'Scientific Socialism: A Positive
Delusion?', Radical Philosophy, no. 23
(Winter 1979), pp. 21-33.
McCarney, J., Social Theory and the Crisis of
Marxism (1990).
Norman, R. and S. Sayers, Hegel, Marx and
Dialectic (Brighton, 1980).
Joseph McCarney
EDWARDS, David Miall (1873-1941)
D. Miall Edwards was born in Llanfyllin,
Merionethshire on 22 January 1873 and died
in Brecon on 29 January 1941. His parents
were admirers of the radical politician and dis-
senting minister Edward Miall, after whom
they named their son. Following a short period
as an apprentice gardener, Edwards won a
scholarship to the University College of North
Wales, Bangor, graduating with second class
honours in English in 1896. He then entered
Bala-Bangor, the Independents' seminary in the
city and proceeded to Mansfield College,
Oxford in the following year. He was awarded
a first class honours degree in theology in 1901,
his graduation having been delayed due to
illness. He was ordained at Blaenau Ffestinio
in 1900, moving in 1904 to the Plough Churc
Brecon. In 1909 he was appointed Professor of
Systematic Theology and the Philosophy of
Religion at the Independents' Memorial College
in the town. He remained there until his retire-
ment due to ill health in 1934.
Edwards was a prolific author. He regularly
contributed to English and Welsh-language
journals and several of his articles were later
published in two volumes, Crefydd a By ivy d
[Religion and Life] (1915) and Crist a
Gwareiddiad [Christ and Civilization] (1921).
His major works include Bannau'r Ffydd [The
EDWARDS
Pinnacles of the Faith] (1929), the only sys-
tematic theology to be published in Welsh
during the twentieth century; The Philosophy
of Religion (1924), which became an interna-
tional best-seller, was translated into Japanese
and earned him the PhD of the University of
London; and Christianity and Philosophy
(1932). He was awarded the DD (honoris
causa) of the University of Wales in 1925.
Edwards's thought was based on the funda-
mental unity of truth and the coterminous inter-
ests of philosophy and religion in discovering
and understanding that truth. As a result, he
tried to demonstrate a basic connection
between idealist philosophy and the Christian
God. He argued that all lower forms of exis-
tence and reality contained within them aspects
of the higher forms and thus all partook of the
one Ultimate Reality, which was perfect truth,
goodness and beauty. This Ultimate Reality
was known in Christian Religion as God and
had its most perfect revelation in the life of
Jesus of Nazareth, who, in Ritschlian terms, has
the value of God for us and was consequently
hailed as Christ. Following the trend which
could be traced back to Friedrich
Schleiermacher, Edwards maintained that
'experience' was the primary theological
category and that doctrine was meaningful only
as an expression of real experience or as an
attempt to safeguard values. This, for Edwards,
maintained the secondary nature of theological
discourse; the experience of God in Christ and
the commitment to follow Christ as Lord being
primary. From this background, Edwards
maintained a sense of the personality of the
Ultimate Reality rather than its conceptual exis-
tence, while he also upheld the importance of
the social and moral implications of the gospel,
commitment to which led him into active
involvement in the social movements of the
age. In this he was a moderate rather than a
radical, believing that change would come
about gradually, the result of evolution rather
than revolution. He was a Liberal in politics,
though much of his work is infused with a
patriotism which, expressed in Hegelian terms,
262
emphasized Wales's unique contribution on
the world stage. Throughout his life he
composed poetry, and while increasingly debil-
itated by illness in his later years he found
solace in composing strict-metre verse.
Of considerable intellect, Edwards's contri-
bution was significant but, due to his depen-
dence on forms which were even in his own
lifetime dropping out of fashion, his work has
tended to be ignored by subsequent genera-
tions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Crefydd a Eyivyd (Dolgellau, 1915).
Crist a Gwareiddiad (Dolgellau, 1921).
The Philosophy of Religion (1924).
Bannau'r Ffydd (Wrexham, 1929).
Christianity and Philosophy (Edinburgh,
1932).
Yr Antur Fawr: Pregethau (Wrexham, 1932).
Crefydd a Diwylliant (Wrexham, 1934).
Further Reading
Jones, R. Tudur, Hanes Annibynu/yr Cymru
(Swansea, 1965).
Pope, Robert, Seeking God's Kingdom: The
Nonconformist Social Gospel in Wales,
1906-1939 (Cardiff, 1999).
Sell, Alan P.P., The Philosophy of Religion
1875-1980 (1988; Bristol, 1998).
Robert Pope
ELLIOTT, Raymond Kenneth (1924-)
Ray Elliott was born in Plymouth on 6
February 1924. After working locally as a clerk
and then doing war service, he studied English
at Oxford, graduating in 1951. He then taught
English, first in Barnsley and later in London,
where he studied in the evenings for a degree in
philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of
London, gaining first class honours in 1961.

From 1962 until 1968 he lectured in philoso-
phy at Birkbeck, playing a key role in the
renaissance of philosophical aesthetics that
started around this time - in part, spurred on
by the need to respond to John Passmore's cel-
ebrated critique of the subject, The Dreariness
of Aesthetics' (in Aesthetics and Language, ed.
W. Elton, 1954). Through the originality,
thoughtfulness and enthusiasm of his teaching
and articles, Elliott breathed new life into the
subject, inspiring a generation of students.
Along with such philosophers as Frank SlBLEY
and Roger SCRUTON in Britain, and Arthur
Danto and George Dickie in the USA, he was
in the advanced guard of that gathering
movement dedicated to transforming what was
all too often perceived as a marginal and dilet-
tante activity into a rigorous, major branch of
mainstream philosophical thought. No one for-
tunate enough to have been studying aesthetics
at Birkbeck during that period will ever forget
the excitement of the joint seminars led by
Elliott and Ruby MEAGER (another important
figure in the 'new' aesthetics) - not least because
both disagreed so vigorously between them-
selves on nearly every issue!
Early in his philosophical career, Elliott had
been much impressed by Plato's thinking on the
essential ambivalence of aesthetic evaluative
perception - the 'beautiful-and-the-ugly' as a
character of a thing as a whole. This theme is
explored in his 1967 paper 'Socrates and Plato's
Cave' (see especially pp. 148-9 and pp. 154-5),
and related explicitly to art in 'The Critic and
the Lover of Art' (1972). This, together with his
deep knowledge of literature and a strong sense
of the inward drama of our personal responses
to artworks, led him to increasing scepticism of
the kind of aesthetic formalism that was
dominant in philosophical aesthetics at the time
among such philosophers as Margaret
MACDONALD, Arnold Isenberg and Harold
OSBORNE, who were still writing under the
shadow of Clive BELL. In part, this dissatisfac-
tion was directed against the formalist view
that artworks must be seen in every case as
autonomous worlds quite separate from the
263
ELLIOTT
real one - a view devastatingly critiqued in his
celebrated paper 'Poetry and Truth' (1967).
However, his main scepticism is directed at the
formalist account of aesthetic judgement. This
he saw as based on the one-sided idea of an
outward-turning gaze towards the object,
regarded as wholly distinct from the perceiving
subject. The consequent refusal of the formal-
ist to recognize that the artwork can also be
experienced 'from within' represents, for Elliott,
'a deprivation for which no exquisiteness of
taste can compensate' ('Aesthetic Theory and
the Experience of Art', p. 149). In his opinion,
no account of art can afford to ignore the
importance of such personal encounters. What
Elliott has in mind here is by no means arbi-
trary subjectivism but rather the idea that the
artwork is a constituted object, and as such
bears within itself indelible traces of the active
and spontaneous involvement of the constitut-
ing subject - a Husserlian view which, in the
individualist form adopted by Elliott, derives
ultimately from Kant's dynamic account of the
expression of 'aesthetic ideas' in paragraph 49
of the third Critique. Some of the flavour of
Elliott's approach here may be seen in his
description of how we may come to see cathe-
dral columns as a forest:
We experience a rush of associations, aston-
ishment, a sense of privilege and freedom,
and, since the world of the forest is a remem-
bered world, perhaps a feeling of nostalgia.
It is as if the spectator suddenly experienced
the meaning of some joyous idea which had
been gathering force in his unconscious.
('Imagination in the Experience of Art',
p. 93)
His interest in Husserl led on naturally to the
work of Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty,
Mikel Dufrenne and other philosophers of the
phenomenological school. At the time, such
reading was hardly typical for an analytic
philosopher and resulted in Elliott pioneering
an approach to philosophical aesthetics based
on harmonizing phenomenology's concern with
ELLIOTT
dasein (being-in-the-world) and the insistence of
analytic philosophy that such perspectives must
depend on public criteria for their intelligibility.
This synthesis was to be highly influential on
the next generation of philosophers of art such
as Paul Crowther and Colin Lyas. It also led
Elliott to defend a version of the then highly
unfashionable expression theory of art, in a
paper entitled 'Aesthetic Theory and the
Experience of Art' (1967-8), based on the
premise that 'the emotion that I feel in experi-
encing a work of art from within ... may be
present in me without being predicable of me'
(p. 147). All these concerns come together in an
exceptionally influential paper on 'The Unity of
Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" (1968),
in which Elliott shows how Kant's sensitivity to
the objective/subjective tension of the 'antinomy
of taste' not only 'keeps close contact with the
phenomenology of intense aesthetic experi-
ence', but also aims at the 'integration of the
aesthetic into the totality of human life' (p.
259).
In 1968 Elliott turned his attention to the
philosophy of education, moving to the
University of London Institute of Education
just down the road from Birkbeck and then on
to a Chair of Education at the University of
Birmingham in 1973. His inaugural lecture on
the nature of the imagination - 'Imagination: A
Kind of Magical Faculty' (1975) - has a clear
affinity with his aesthetic philosophy, being
grounded on the premise that 'philosophy of
education is trying to work without anything
like an adequate phenomenology, of learning,
inquiry and the mental life generally' (p. 15).
Just as philosophical aesthetics until the 1960s
had been dominated by formalist theory, so
was the philosophy of education at that time
dominated by a comparable kind of formalism
- namely Paul Hirst's analysis of knowledge
and understanding into seven discrete Forms of
Knowledge which were then taken as the basis
for the school curriculum (see Hirst and Peters,
chap. 4, and also Hirst). For Elliott, this was an
inadequate, fragmented view of human under-
standing that had lost touch with the synoptic
264
vision at which our human mental powers
instinctively aim. Furthermore, as with aes-
thetic formalism, Hirst's narrow focus on
objective processes minimalized the significance
of the understanding people have of the
relevant area of concern, drawn from their
experience outside the disciplines. He objected,
in particular, to the assumption that such
'common understanding' is superseded by
understanding through the academic disci-
plines, which are taken to represent the Forms
of Knowledge in their highest development.
These are the opening shots that are fired in his
paper 'Education and Human Being' (1975). In
marked contrast to the simplistic 'child-centred'
theories of education that were also current at
the time, this paper manages to make a philo-
sophically rigorous case for the educational
importance of such non-rigorous 'common
understanding' as a counterbalance to Hirst's
emphasis on knowledge within the disciplines.
Such understanding is of 'the kind possessed in
large measure by Shakespeare' ('Education and
Human Being', p. 63) and other great literary
figures such as Chaucer and Tolstoy, and may
make a subtle, extensive and original contri-
bution to our understanding of the relevant
area of concern, even though., in contrast to the
practitioners of the disciplines, 'the man of
common understanding tends comparatively
early to present his positions as unshakable
beliefs' (ibid., p. 62). Elliott further argues that
this kind of understanding is essential for the
estimation of the part a discipline is playing in
human life at any particular time, with regard
to the form it is presently taking, the manner in
which it is being practised and the conse-
quences, beneficial or harmful, it is having or
seems likely to have. Otherwise, he argues, the
only standard by which to judge the 'health' or
'rightness' of a discipline will be a merely
internal one, namely whatever satisfies its
current dominant practitioners. Elliott also
maintains that 'intellectual eros' must be a sine
qua non for the proper understanding of any
discipline, and this theme is developed in
another paper, written about the same time,

entitled 'Education, Love of one's Subject and
Love of Truth' (1974). This is a meditation,
deeply influenced by Plato's Seventh Letter, on
the experience of studying a subject in depth on
analogy with falling in love with another
human being. At the end Elliott conversely
explores the 'tyranny of the debunking and
reductionist spirit' ('Education, Love of one's
Subject and Love of Truth', p. 152) that is
founded on hatred for the subject studied and
for the objects with which it is concerned. In
'Objectivity and Education' (1982), his most
detailed discussion of Hirst's theory, Elliott
argues at length that aesthetic judgement does
not have to be objective, in Hirst's quasi-scien-
tific sense, for aesthetic discourse to be possible.
He maintains instead that the point of aesthetic
discourse is not the validation of the aesthetic
judgement but the communication of experi-
ence in the attempt to reach agreement.
In 1977 he returned to the University of
London Institute, where he became reader in
education, while also taking over the editorship
of the Journal of Philosophy of Education,
which he helped turn into a flagship for the
subject. In 1983 ill health compelled him to
take early retirement. He continued to write,
however, and in 1993, produced an important
paper on WITTGENSTEIN'S aesthetics -
'Wittgenstein's Speculative Aesthetics in its
Ethical Context' - which looks at the contrast
between the 'critical' aesthetics of
Wittgenstein's Lectures and Conversations in
Aesthetics and the 'speculative' aesthetics that
runs alongside it from the time of the Tractatus
to his final writings. For Elliott, this latter aspect
of Wittgenstein's thought takes art to be pre-
eminently the embodiment of metaphysical
'wonder at existence' - a belief that also clearly
informs Elliott's own work. Currently, he is
working on Wittgenstein's views concerning
the imaginative dimension of language brought
out in poetry, in the course of which he relates
Wittgenstein's later aesthetics to that of Paul
Valery and F.R. Leavis. A collection of his
papers, edited by Paul Crowther, is due to
appear in the near future.
265
ELLIOTT
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Clive Bell's Aesthetic Theory and his Critical
Practice', British Journal of Aesthetics
(April 1965), pp. 111-22.
'Poetry and Truth', Analysis, vol. 27 (1967),
pp. 77-85; repr. in F. Tillman and S. Cohn
(eds), Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics
from Plato to Wittgenstein (1969).
'Socrates and Plato's Cave', Kant Studien, no.
2 (1967), pp. 137-57.
'Aesthetic Theory and the Experience of Art,
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
68 (1967-8), pp. 111-26; repr. in J.
Margolis (ed.), Philosophy Looks at the
Arts (1977}.
'The Aesthetic and the Semantic', British
Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 8 (1968), pp.
35-47.
The Unity of Kant's Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment*, British Journal of Aesthetics,
vol. 8 (1968), pp. 260-68.
'The Concept of Creativity: A Reply to J.E.
Olford', Proceedings of the Philosophy of
Education Society of Great Britain, vol. 5
(1971), pp. 97-104.
'Versions of Creativity', Proceedings of the
Philosophy of Education Society of Great
Britain, vol. 5 (1971), pp. 139-52.
The Critic and the Lover of Art', in W. Mays
and S. Brown (eds), Linguistic Analysis and
Phenomenology (1972), pp. 117-27,
159-60.
'Imagination in the Experience of Art', in G.
Vesey (ed.), Philosophy and the Arts
(1973), pp. 85-105.
'Aesthetics and Sport', in H. Whiting and K.
Masterson (eds), Readings in the Aesthetics
of Sport (1974), pp. 107-16.
'Education, Love of one's Subject and Love
of Truth', Proceedings of the Philosophy of
Education Society of Great Britain, vol. 8
(1974), pp. 135-53.
The Concept of Development: A Reply to
D.W. Hamlyn', Proceedings of the
Philosophy of Education Society of Great
Britain, vol. 9 (1975), pp. 40-48.
'Education and Human Being', in S. Brown
ELLIOTT
(ed.), Philosophers Discuss Education
(1975), pp. 45-72.
'Postscript to Part II, 'Education and the
Development of Understanding", in S.
Brown (ed.), Philosophers Discuss
Education (1975), pp. 99-110.
'Imagination: A Kind of Magical Faculty'
[inaugural lecture, University of
Birmingham] (1975); repr. in P. Gordon
(ed.), The Study of Education, Inaugural
Lectures, vol. 2 (1980), pp. 248-64.
'Education and Justification', Proceedings of
the Philosophy of Education Society of
Great Britain, vol. 11 (1977), pp. 7-27.
'D.W. Hamlyn on Knowledge and the
Beginnings of Understanding', Journal of
Philosophy of Education, vol. 14 (1980),
pp. 109-16.
'Aestheticism, Imagination and Schooling',
Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol.
15 (1981), pp. 33-42.
'Objectivity and Education', Journal of
Philosophy of Education, vol. 16 (1982),
pp. 49-62.
'Metaphor, Imagination and Conceptions of
Education', in W. Taylor (ed.), Metaphors
of Education (1984), pp. 38-53.
'Richard Peters: A Philosopher in an Older
Style', in D. Cooper (ed.), Education,
Value and Mind: Essays for R.S. Peters
(1986), pp. 41-66.
'Self-Knowledge and Education', in P. White
(ed.), Personal and Social Education
(1989), pp. 34-53.
'Wittgenstein's Speculative Aesthetics in its
Ethical Context', in R. Barrow and P.
White (eds), Beyond Liberal Education:
Essays in Honour of Paul H. Hirst (1993),
pp. 150-68.
Further Reading
Hirst, P., 'Literature and the Fine Arts as a
Unique Form of Knowledge', Cambridge
Journal of Education, vol. 3 (1973), pp.
118-32
Hirst, P. and R.S. Peters, The Logic of
Education (1970).
266
Passmore, J., 'The Dreariness of Aesthetics',
in W. Elton (ed.), Aesthetics and Language
(New York, 1954), pp. 36-55.
Nick McAdoo
EMMET, Dorothy Mary (1904-2000)
Dorothy Mary Emmet was born in London
on 29 September 1904 and died in Cambridge
on 20 September 2000. She was educated by
her father, the Revd Cyril William Emmet, and
a governess until her teens, when she went to St
Mary's Hall, Brighton. In 1923 she went up to
Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford to read classics
and philosophy. After the general strike of 1926
she taught Plato's Republic to unemployed
Welsh miners. She won a Commonwealth
Fellowship at Radcliffe College in Cambridge,
Massachusetts that allowed her to study with
A.N. WHITEHEAD in 1928. Upon returning to
England, she was research fellow at Somerville
College, Oxford. She was then appointed
lecturer in philosophy at King's College,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1932, and then
moved to Manchester University in 1938,
where she became the Sir Samuel Hall Professor
of Philosophy and Head of the Department of
Philosophy. When she retired in 1966, she went
to live in Cambridge with a group called the
'Epiphany Philosophers' involved with the
creation of the journal, Theoria to Theory.
Emmet was fellow emeritus of Lucy Cavendish
College, Cambridge and honorary fellow of
Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and received
honorary degrees from the University of
Glasgow, the University of Leicester and the
Open University.
Emmet's influences from great philosophers
H.A. PRICHARD, R.G. COLLINGWOOD, A.D.
LINDSAY, A.N. Whitehead, Samuel ALEXANDER
and Richard BRAITHWATTE are recounted in her
memoir, Philosophers and Friends (1996). She

is best known as an expositor of A.N.
Whitehead's philosophy, having written the
first book-length commentary on him,
Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism (1932).
While she was a Commonwealth Fellow, she
attended Whitehead's seminars at Harvard
University. A few passages of Whitehead's
magnum opus, Process and Reality, were taken
directly from Emmet's lecture notes. Her
encounter with the likes of Whitehead,
Collingwood and Alexander deeply impressed
Emmet with the importance of central ques-
tions about the nature of things. She was thus
unpersuaded by the school of linguistic analysis
that had cast its spell on British philosophy for
most of the twentieth century. Her book The
Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (1945)
defends the project of metaphysics against the
grain of anti-metaphysical methods.
Metaphysics, she argues, is a legitimate form of
interpreting the world. It works with analo-
gies to provide a set of basic concepts that can
be extended and thereby illuminate our expe-
rience of the world. Whitehead, for example,
took the concept of organism from biology and
generalized it to apply to the whole universe.
Emmet's interest in moral, social and politi-
cal issues dominated the middle period of her
life. These works include: Function, Purpose
and Powers (1958), Rules, Roles and Relations
(1966), Sociological Theory and Philosophical
Analysis, edited with Alasdair Maclntyre
(1970), and The Moral Prism (1979). The first
three developed out of her view that philosophy
had much to contribute to the social sciences by
way of basic concepts political sociologists were
using in interpreting societies. In The Moral
Prism she focused her attention on the com-
plexity of individual moral decisions, and
addressed the question of how reliable moral
judgements could be made given the diversity
of moral theories. All of our moral theories
suffer from various defects and no one covers
the whole spectrum of moral experience.
Emmet used the analogy of a prism to argue her
case. We have no 'white light' of morality that
provides a satisfactory overall theory, but the
267
EMMET
partial theories 'light up' certain aspects of
morality just as the white light gets split up
into different colours through the prism.
Decision making in moral matters is a creative
activity brought to bear on a situation. The
more we wrestle with moral situations, the
move we develop our powers of moral judge-
ment.
In retirement, Emmet returned to meta-
physics in a spurt of amazing productivity. This
resulted in works such as The Effectiveness of
Causes (1986) and The Passage of Nature
(1992), mainly inspired by Whitehead's notion
of process. Unlike the followers of Whitehead's
thought in the United States, who treated his
work in a specialized manner, Emmet tried to
bring his ideas into the mainstream of contem-
porary analytic philosophy by discussing his
work in relation to Donald Davidson and W.V.
Quine. She developed her own system via a
critical evaluation of an exclusive ontology of
events arguing that agency requires substan-
tial participants. So, as she claims, the world is
a theatre of activities in which participants
enter into processes, some mutually supportive
and some mutually destructive. They will form,
dissolve, re-form and sometimes produce con-
ditions for new kinds of creative activity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism (1932).
The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking
(1945).
Function, Purpose and Powers (1958).
Rules, Roles and Relations (1966).
The Moral Prism (1979).
The Effectiveness of Causes (1986).
The Passage of Nature (1992).
The Role of the Unrealisable: A Study in
Regulative Ideals (1994).
Philosophers and Friends: Reminiscences of
Seventy Years in Philosophy (1996).
Outward Forms and Inner Springs: A Study
in Social and Religious Philosophy (1998).
Other Relevant Works
'On the Idea of Importance', Philosophy, vol.
EMMET
21 (1946), pp. 234-44.
'Alfred North Whitehead', Proceedings of the
British Academy, vol. 33 (1947), pp.
293-306.
'Alfred North Whitehead: The Last Phase',
Mind, vol. 57 (1948), pp. 265-74.
'Emphasis and Importance', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 51 (1950-51),
pp. 293-312.
'The Concept of Power', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 54 (1953-4), pp.
1-26.
'Universalisability and Moral Judgment',
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 13 (1963),
pp. 214-28.
'Whitehead, Alfred North', Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (1967), vol.
8, pp. 290-96.
'Justice', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 43 (1969), pp. 123-40.
(Ed. with Alistair Maclntyre), Sociological
Theory and Philosophical Analysis (1970).
'Language and Metaphysics: Introduction to
a Symposium', Theoria to Theory, vol. 11
(1977), pp. 49-56.
'Whitehead's View of Causal Efficacy', in H.
Holz and E. Wolf-Gazo (eds), Whitehead
und der Prozessbegriff (Freiburg, 1984),
pp. 161-78.
'Creativity and the Passage of Nature', in
Friedrich Rapp and Reiner Wiehl (eds),
Whiteheads Metaphysik der Kreativitdt
(Freiburg, 1986), pp. 71-80.
'Continuity and Discontinuity in Causation',
African Philosophical Inquiry, vol. 1
(1987), pp. 9-17.
(Ed. with an Intro.), 'The Pardshaw
Dialogues: Sense Awareness and the
Passage of Nature', Process Studies, vol. 16
(1987), pp. 83-145.
'How Near Can a Cause Get to its Effect?',
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 38 (1988),
pp. 455-70
'Whitehead and Alexander', Process Studies,
vol. 21 (1992), pp. 137-48.
'Whitehead', Philosophy, vol. 71 (1996), pp.
101-15.
268
'Alexander, Samuel (1859-1938)', in E.
Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (1998), vol. 1, pp. 168-9.
'Processes', in E. Craig (ed.), Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998), vol.
pp. 720-23.
Further Reading
Bradley, James, Stephen Gardner, Peter
Norman and Helmut MaaSen (eds),
'Dorothy Emmet's "Notes on Whitehead's
Harvard Lectures, 1928-29"', European
Studies in Process Thought, vol. 1 (2003),
pp. 1-25.
Szubka, Tadeusz, 'An Interview with
Dorothy Emmet', Cogito, vol. 8 (1994),
pp. 115-22.
Leemon McHenry
EVANS, Michael Gareth Justin (1946-80)
Gareth Evans was born in London on 12 May
1946 and died there on 10 August 1980. He
was educated at Dulwich College (1961-2) and
later at Oxford, where he was heavily influ-
enced by his teacher, P.P. STRAWSON. In 1963
Evans won the Gladstone Open Scholarship in
History at University College, Oxford. In 1965
he passed his PPE exam prelims with distinction
and in 1967 he was first in his class in the PPE
finals. He won a senior scholarship at Christ
Church, Oxford. He won a Kennedy
Scholarship in 1968, allowing him to spend
the academic year 1968-9 in the United States
at Harvard and the University of California,
Berkeley. Evans returned to Oxford, where he
would be a fellow from 1969 to 1979. In 197
he was elected to the Wilde Readership in
Mental Philosophy. On 2 June 1980 Evans
was diagnosed with cancer and on 11 June
1980 he was privately married to Antonia
Philips in the University College Hospital.

Evans's best-known work, the posthumously
published The Varieties of Reference (1982),
was an incomplete manuscript at the time of his
death and edited by John McDowell. The
primary significance of Varieties is for the phi-
losophy of language but it has had significance
for the philosophy of mind as well. The vari-
eties referred to in the title are varieties of refer-
ring expressions, that is expressions understood
as distinct from predicates and quantificational
phrases in virtue of their distinct contributions
to the semantic values of sentences. The
primary semantic value of a referring expres-
sion is its referent, the thing it refers to.
Following Frege, some philosophers have
argued that referring expressions have a sense
in addition to a referent, where a sense is con-
ceived of as the mode of presentation of the
referent. According to Evans, the two main
varieties of referring expressions are those
whose semantic values include Fregean senses
and those whose semantic values do not include
Fregean senses. Proper names, Evans argued,
are referring expressions that lack Fregean
senses, since they can be understood without
any description being associated with the
referent in the mind of the speaker or hearer.
Referring expressions that have Fregean senses,
according to Evans, include demonstratives
('that book') and indexicals (T, 'here').
Additional examples of referring expressions
with Fregean senses include expressions Evans
called 'descriptive names'. According to Evans,
descriptive names are names that, unlike proper
names, can be understood only if one knows
some associated description. Evans thought
that descriptive names were rare and that
examples included names that were stipulated,
as in his example 'Let us call whoever invented
the zip "Julius"' (Varieties, p. 31). Evans
thought the key feature that distinguished
demonstratives and indexicals on the one hand
from descriptive names on the other was that
demonstratives and indexicals are, in Evans's
phrase, Russelian. A Russelian expression is
an expression that, if it is empty (if it fails to
refer), is meaningless. However, in holding that
269
EVANS
demonstratives and indexicals have Fregean
senses, Evans incurs the obligation of saying
what those senses are. Evans holds, following
Perry, that no description can capture the
content of a demonstrative or an indexical.
However, whereas Perry saw this as an
argument against the positing of Fregean senses
for demonstratives and indexicals, Evans
supplies an account of non-descriptive senses.
Evans's quest for non-descriptive senses for
demonstratives and indexicals led him to one of
his most central and influential views, namely
that there exists such a thing as non-conceptual
content. Non-conceptual contents are mental
representational contents that can be grasped
by a subject even though that subject lacks the
concepts we would employ in attributing that
content. For example, the perceptual state of an
infant may represent the presence of an object
coloured with a certain shade of red, say ver-
million, even though the infant is insufficiently
sophisticated to have a concept of vermillion.
Only thirty-four as he was at the time of his
death, Evans's short life gave rise to remarkable
philosophical contributions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Varieties of Reference (Oxford, 1982).
The Collected Papers of Gareth Evans
(Oxford, 1985).
Other Relevant Works
(Ed. with John McDowell), Truth and
Meaning: Essays in Semantics (Oxford,
1976).
Pete Mandik
EVANS, John Llewelyn (1920-2001)
John Llewelyn (Lyn) Evans was born on 6
August 1920 and died in Cardiff on 2
December 2001. Growing up near Swansea, he
EVANS
went from Swansea Grammar School to
University College, Oxford (1939-45), where
he studied philosophy with E.F. CARRITT.
Proceeding to Magdalen College, where he was
senior demy (1945-8) and junior lecturer in
philosophy (1946-8), he completed his DPhil
under the supervision of H.H. PRICE. During
World War II he registered as a conscientious
objector. In 1948 he joined the Philosophy
Department at Cardiff as lecturer, becoming
senior lecturer in 1955 and professor and Head
of Department in 1963. On retirement in 1987
he was made professor emeritus. With D.Z.
PHILLIPS he founded the Welsh Philosophical
Society in 1964. He was a dedicated extra-
mural lecturer and served as Chairman of Coleg
Harlech, the adult education college for Wales.
Evans was a prime example of an Oxford
ordinary language philosopher. Thus in his first
paper, 'On Meaning and Verification' (1953),
he claimed that the task of philosophy is 'to
examine different classes of sentences and for-
mulate the rules for the correct employment of
the words which compose them. It cannot leg-
islate beforehand what types of sentences are
meaningful; it can only analyse the meaning' (p.
18). So Evans was entirely happy to adopt the
newly fashionable slogan 'To ask for the
meaning of a word is to ask for its use' (ibid.,
p. 15). He accepts that a meaningless sentence
cannot be verified, but the unverifiability is a
consequence and not a cause of its meaning-
lessness. 'On Meaning and Verification' is an
acute dissection of the weaknesses of logical
positivism. It was praised by POPPER as 'excel-
lent ... and unusually perceptive' (Conjectures
and Refutations, 1969, p. 41).
By the time he published his only book,
Knowledge and Infallibility (1978), Evans had
not deviated at all from the Oxford line.
Outlining his approach, he said that
philosophers frequently seek to replace the
concept of knowledge as understood and
used in everyday life by a technical, philo-
sophical concept which fits in with their
other theories. I do not myself think that it is
270
within the province of philosophy to alter or
seek to replace the concepts in common use:
its business is, rather, to increase our under-
standing of these concepts, particularly by
exhibiting their relationships with kindred
concepts.
(Knowledge and Infallibility', p. viii)
The book is a powerful criticism of the suppo-
sition that knowledge must: be infallible.
Epistemology would have taken a more fruitful
turn if it had traditionally contrasted knowl-
edge not with belief but with learning. Learning
is the process of getting to know: when the
process is successfully completed the result is
knowledge.
Evans acknowledged his debt to RYLE and
AUSTIN but his philosophy was one of the
purest - as well as one of the most skilful and
convincing - examples of ordinary language
philosophy. His writings are consistently lively
and argumentative, full of eye-catching expres-
sions and thought-provoking examples, com-
parisons and analogies, and always exception-
ally clear. They also do make genuine philo-
sophical advances. Evans was particularly
adept at making it appear that all confusion lies
in 'philosophical theories' and all clarity in
ordinary usage, a claim that would not stand up
to analysis. However, he did not develop his
philosophy further than the ideas he had learnt
in the 1940s. He published no more than six
papers in English together with some in Welsh,
an inaugural lecture and one book, no doubt
because he devoted the latter part of his career
to university administration.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'On Meaning and Verification', Mind, vol.
62 (1953), pp. 1-19.
Knowledge and Infallibility (1978).
Other Relevant Work
'Knowledge and Behaviour', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 54 (1953-4),
pp. 27-48.
'Choice', Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 5

(1955), pp. 303-15.
'Meaning and Use', Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, vol. 22
(1961), pp. 251-61.
'Grade Not', Philosophy, vol. 37 (1962), pp.
25-36.
'Error and the Will', Philosophy, vol. 38
(1963), pp. 136-48.
The Foundations of Empiricism: An
Inaugural Lecture Delivered at University
College, Cardiff, 11 May 1964 (Cardiff,
1965).
Andrew Belsey
EWING, Alfred Cyril (1899-1973)
A.C. Ewing was born in Leicester on 11 May
1899 and died in Manchester on 14 May 1973.
He was educated at Wyggeston Grammar
School in Leicester and at Oxford, where he
was a member of first University College and
then Oriel College. After temporary posts at
Michigan University and Armstrong College,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, he was from 1927
lecturer in philosophy at University College,
Swansea, until in 1931 he was appointed
University Lecturer in Moral Science at
Cambridge. With the exception of a number of
visits to the United States, he spent the rest of
his teaching career at Cambridge, where he
was made reader in 1954 and elected a fellow
of Jesus College in 1962. He retired in 1966. He
never married.
Ewing's main field of activity was moral phi-
losophy, where his contributions, though
unmarked by any striking originality, were
always perceptive and well argued. In his prin-
cipal work in that field, The Definition of Good
(1947), he argues against all forms of scepti-
cism, subjectivism and naturalism, attempting
to find a middle position between G.E. MOORE
and W.D. Ross. He agreed with his Cambridge
271
EWING
colleague that 'good' denotes a non-natural
property, but disagreed with Moore that it is a
simple property. More precisely, he argued that
'good', 'ought', etc., in their ethical senses, stand
for properties which are objective and fall
within our ken, but which cannot be defined in
non-ethical terms, natural or otherwise. But
bringing his thought more into line with the
duty-based thinking of Ross, he holds also that
all of these terms (including 'good') are defin-
able in terms of 'ought' (in the sense of fitting)
which stands for an absolutely indefinable 'cat-
egorial' relation. As regards moral epistemol-
ogy, he was an intuitionist.
In his later work, Second Thoughts in Moral
Philosophy (1959), taking account of new
developments (such as prescriptivism), he
withdrew somewhat from these positions.
Making concessions to both naturalists and
non-cognitivists, he now aimed to find a middle
way between objectivism and subjectivism, in
which moral concepts are understood as in
part practical and in part descriptive. He
dropped non-natural properties, but retained
non-natural concepts.
Ewing is also remembered for his 1934 book,
Idealism: A Critical Survey. Written in an era
and place which could hardly be less sympa-
thetic to idealism, it offers a careful and
thorough survey of the subject, with textually
grounded examinations of epistemological
idealism, Kantian idealism, the internality of
relations, the coherence theory of truth and the
idealist theory of perception. The standpoint is
realist, rejecting all of the main arguments for
the mind-dependent nature of reality, but it is
a standpoint at the same time 'in deep
sympathy' with idealism, believing that the
realist reaction associated with Cambridge, in
wholly rejecting idealism, had 'gone too far'.
For, as he says, 'it is most unlikely that the
school which dominated thought in this
country for so long and still numbers so many
adherents has nothing to give that its oppo-
nents have overlooked' (Idealism, p. 1). For
example, he argues that, although knowing is
more like discovering than making, the con-
EWING
structive activity of mind cannot simply be
ignored and a kind of 'methodological
idealism', in which we know only how things
are to a knowing mind, retains its force. Again,
after a careful analysis of various different
senses in which it has been put forward, he
rejects the internality of relations, but he
nonetheless argues for a view of causality as
logical entailment and for the dependence of an
object's qualitative character on its relations,
positions which together entail a view of the
world as something like an intelligible system.
For this reason he urges that coherence, while
it cannot constitute the nature of truth, can
function as a criterion for it.
In the sense of a disinclination to accept any
view of reality as merely a group of discon-
nected elements, Ewing's sympathy with the
idealistic worldview continued throughout his
life. He wrote two useful and well-respected
commentaries on Kant, edited a reader on the
subject of idealism in 1957, and in 1971
produced an article 'The Significance of
Idealism for the Present Day'.
Besides idealism, Ewing cited as influential on
his thought, the Cambridge school of RUSSELL,
Moore and BROAD. This is important, for to
this source may be traced not only his method
and style - his work is always clear and careful
- but also fundamental elements of his system,
such as his basic empiricism, or his rejection of
a priori statements of existence.
However, with more modern philosophical
trends he was profoundly out of sympathy. He
was committed to the legitimacy of a priori meta-
physics. Opposing logical positivists such as A.J.
AYER, he argued against the verificationist prin-
ciple and any attempt to explain away the a
priori as a genuine source of knowledge. And,
almost uniquely in Cambridge, he remained very
nearly wholly unaffected by Wittgenstein, reject-
ing any account of the a priori as merely the rules
of grammar. As a result his writing was unfash-
ionable and uninfluential. He wrote numerous
articles attacking modern thought, some of
which were collected together in 1968 under
the title Non-Linguistic philosophy.
272
Whatever the merits of these attacks, his own
positive contributions to philosophy were
slight. In 1951 he published a general work of
metaphysics and epistemology, The
Fundamental Questions of Philosophy. The
book runs judiciously through standard
material, although with little attention paid to
contemporary thinking, and while it says much
that is sensible, it has little else to recommend
it.
Ewing was a deeply religious and serious
figure, and the results of a career's reflection on
philosophical problems connected with theistic
belief were published in 1973 as Value and
Reality, Ewing's final and most satisfying book.
The book covers all main issues in philosophy
of religion. Objecting to, for example, such
accounts as Braithwaite's, he argues for a con-
ception of religious belief as one involving
objective metaphysical truth. He emphasizes
intuition as prima facie grounds for belief, but
since intuitions can be either true of false, the
criteria is 'explanatory efficacy'. He argues for
a pure ego theory and for the possibility of dis-
embodied minds. Rejecting metaphysical argu-
ments for the existence of God, such as the
ontological and the cosmological, Ewing does
find some value in moral ones, although he is
not prepared to regard them as proofs. His
solution to the problem of evil appeals to a
view of 'good organic unities'; some evil makes
possible goods which outweigh them and could
not otherwise be had. They are mitigated also
by the possibility of survival of death.
A skilful and patient writer of textbooks
rather than a bold originator of new ideas and
systems, Ewing could never have made a splash,
but holding the views he did at the time and
place he held them ensured a greater neglect of
his efforts than he deserved. Though he was a
figure ignored in his life and now wholly for-
gotten, his work was always careful, clear and
insightful, and anybody who reads it would
still profit from it today.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kant's Treatment of Causality (1924).
 EWING

The Morality of Punishment (1929). Other Relevant Works

Idealism: A Critical Survey (1934). The Significance of Idealism for the Present
A Short Commentary on Kant's Critique of Day', Idealistic Studies, vol. 1 (1971), pp.
Pure Reason (193S). 1 1-12.
The Definition of Good (1947). The Necessity of Metaphysics', in H.D.
The Individual, the State, and World Lewis (ed.), Contemporary British
Government (New York, 1947). Philosophy, 3rd ser. (1956), pp. 141-64.
The Fundamental Questions of Philosophy
(1951). W.J. Mander
Ethics (1953).
The Idealist Tradition: From Berkeley to
Blanshard (Glencoe, Illinois, 1957).
Second Thoughts in Moral Philosophy
(1959).
Non-Linguistic Philosophy (1968).
Value and Reality. The Philosophical Case
for Theism (1973).

273
 F
FARMER, Herbert Henry (1892-1981)
Herbert Henry Farmer was born in Highbury,
London on 27 November 1892 and died in
Birkenhead on 13 January 1981. In 1911 he
entered Peterhouse, Cambridge during a par-
ticularly stimulating period. Not only were
Bertrand RUSSELL and G.E. MOORE lecturing at
Cambridge, but also teaching there were the
Hegelian J.M.E. McTAGGART, James WARD
and the Kantian W.R. SORLEY. Whilst deeply
critical of Russell, Moore and McTaggart,
Farmer was clearly influenced by the philoso-
phies of Ward and Sorley, both of whom
argued that nature, history and moral experi-
ence demand a theistic interpretation.
Shaped by these influences, in 1914 Farmer
entered Westminster College, Cambridge, the
theological college of the Presbyterian Church
of England. Here he met his most significant
influence, John OMAN. That Farmer's 'radical
personalism', although his own, was indebted
to Oman is clearly evident in his most impor-
tant work, The World and God (1935), which
rigorously interprets all religious experience in
terms of divine-human personal encounter.
Indeed, whilst attention is often drawn to the
impact on Farmer's thought of Martin Buber's
book I and Thou (1937), the latter's influence
was limited and has been overstated. For
although Farmer often used 'I-Thou' terminol-
ogy, he used it to articulate a theology princi-
pally shaped by Oman's thought, not Buber's.
After some time as a farm labourer and
gardener (which work, as a pacifist, he did
274
instead of military service), in 1919 he began life
as a minister, first at Stafford and then, in 1922,
at New Barnet, London. He remained here until
1931, when he joined the staff of Hartford
Theological Seminary, Connecticut as Riley
Professor of Christian Doctrine and Ethics. In
1935 he returned to England to succeed Oman
at Westminster College. In the following years he
held various university lectureships and, in 1949,
succeeded C.H. Dodd as Norris-Hulse Professor
of Divinity at Cambridge, a post he held until his
retirement in 1960.
The Cambridge to which Farmer returned as
professor had been intellectually shaped by the
philosophizing of Russell, Moore, Ludwig
WITTGENSTEIN, C.D. BROAD and Arthur
WISDOM. This made his own thought, which
curiously never engaged with that of
Wittgenstein, seem out of step with current
thinking. Moreover, because much of Farmer's
work was carried out during the period when
Karl Barth's influence was at its height, and
because Farmer was the most significant British
thinker of that period to develop a theology
belonging to a line of thought seriously ques-
tioned by Barth, namely that which can be
traced back through W. Herrmann and A.
Ritschl to F.D.E. Schleiermacher, his work
always appeared a little dated. However, whilst
he was not concerned to follow current trends,
and whilst Barth is rarely mentioned, his
thought can be understood as an attempt
(which is, in many ways, typically English) to
steer a course between two poles: the
Schleiermachian emphasis on immanence and

the Barthian emphasis on transcendence. On
the one hand, he was influenced both by
Schleiermacher's understanding of divine reve-
lation in terms of religious experience and also
by the nineteenth-century development of
'natural religion'. On the other hand, like Barth,
he betrays the influence of S0ren Kierkegaard
and emphasizes the god-ness or otherness of
God: 'Kierkegaard's criticism of Hegel... holds,
namely, that living religion in general and
Christianity in particular requires that there
should be real dualisms and oppositions - God
and man, good and evil, time and eternity.'
For Farmer, the genius of the Christian revela-
tion and faith is that these dualisms are recon-
ciled^ rather than unified (as in Hegel's
thought).
Key to understanding Farmer is his insis-
tence that humans are persons living in a moral
universe, the source and ground of which is a
personal God, the ultimate reality, who is
rational intelligence, purposive will and wholly
good. As wholly good, God brings into exis-
tence good personal life (i.e. 'the world of
persons'), a personal life which is only fully
realized in fellowship with God. The convic-
tion that God is personal, and deals personally
with men and women, lies at the heart of
Christian experience and thought.' As personal
beings we are constituted by the nature of the
relationships we form with other persons, par-
ticularly the relationship we form with the
'Eternal Personal'. The self, fellow selves and
God constitute 'an ultimate and continuous
order of personal relationships'. That is to say,
persons are always in relation to the Eternal
Personal in and through their relationships with
one another, and in and through their rela-
tionship with God they are related to each
other: 'the self does not stand in two relations,
one to God and one to his neighbour, but in
one relation with as it were two poles; he is
related to his neighbour in God and to God in
his neighbour; it is a single and quite indis-
cerptible continuum of order'.
Concerning the experience of God, there are
two primary elements: 'absolute demand' and
275
FARMER
'final succour'. We become aware of God as
personal by becoming aware of, and respond-
ing to, an absolute, sacred and unconditional
'will' calling for obedience at any cost.
Inseparable from this awareness of absolute
demand, there is an awareness of ultimate
succour. God is not simply the holy creator
and sustainer of the moral universe, demanding
our obedience, but he is also absolute love
seeking our highest good, forgiving us and sup-
porting us when we fail.
From early in his theological career one of
Farmer's principal aims was to describe, criti-
cally interpret and defend the reasonableness of
theistic belief. In opposition to the critiques of
theism and the naturalistic interpretations of the
world popular at the time, in Towards Belief in
God (1943) he examines religious experience
and argues that there are three elements in
theistic conviction: (1) the coercive, (2) the
pragmatic and (3) the reflective. As with any
belief, if it
(1) shines in its own light with a certain
inherent compellingness, (2) 'works' in the
sense both of satisfying our nature and of
helping in the practical task of managing our
world, (3) reveals on examination both
internal consistencies and external harmony
with other experience and knowledge, then
we have in regard to it as full an assurance of
truth as it is possible for a human mind to
have and as it ought ever to ask.
With different questions in mind, a similar
apologetic task is carried out in his first series
of Gifford Lectures (1950-51), Revelation and
Religion (1954), in which he turns to
Christianity's relation to other faiths. Whilst
this interest is apparent in his early works, it
was increased by Oman's The Natural and the
Supernatural (1931). He argues that, whilst
Christianity is a religion continuous with other
religions, as the ideal form of religion it is also
discontinuous. This argument is elucidated with
reference to R.G. COLLlNGWOOD's discussion of
a philosophical 'scale of forms' in his An Essay
FARMER
on Philosophical Method (1933): once an ideal
form is discovered, its imperfect embodiments
can be ordered in relation to it. For Farmer,
God's revelation in Christ (which fully reveals
the ideal of the personal world) is the norma-
tive form of religion, with reference to which
one can survey the religions of the world and
construct a scale of religious types.
Although departing from Farmer's thought
to varying degrees, amongst those who studied
under him and show his influence at certain
points in their development are J.A.T
Robinson, I.T. RAMSEY and John HICK.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The World and God (1935).
Towards Belief in God (1943).
Revelation and Religion: Studies in the
Theological Interpretation of Religious
Types (1954; Lewiston, 1999).
Revelation and Reconciliation: Some Aspects
of the Uniqueness of Christianity as a
Reconciling Faith, ed. C.H. Partridge
(Lewiston, 1998).
Further Reading
Donovan, P., Thenomenology as
Apologetics', in Scottish Journal of
Theology, vol. 27 (1974), pp. 402-407.
Healey, F.G., 'Introduction', in F.G. Healey
(ed.), Prospect for Theology: Essays in
Honour ofH. H. Farmer (Welwyn, 1966),
pp. 7-33.
Langford, T.A., The Theological
Methodology of John Oman and H.H.
Farmer', in Religious Studies, vol. 1 (1966),
pp. 229-40.
Partridge, C.H., H. H. Farmer's Theological
Interpretation of Religion: Towards a
Personalist Theology of Religions
(Lewiston, 1998).
Christopher Partridge
276
FARRELL, Brian Anthony (1912-)
B.A. Farrell was born in Plumstead, South
Africa on 22 July 1912. He took a BA at the
University of Cape Town (1929-32), PPE at
Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar
(1932-5), and received an MA and BLitt from
Oxford in 1940. From 1938 to 1947 he was
lecturer in philosophy at the University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He was Wilde
Reader in Mental Philosophy at the University
of Oxford (1947-79) and then visiting profes-
sor at the University of Chicago. He published
widely on psychological topics, particularly
Freud and psychoanalytic theory, and in 1954
introduced a series of BBC television broadcasts
on experimental psychology. Farrell's reputa-
tion as a philosopher hinges almost entirely on
one seminal paper, 'Experience' (1950). He is
currently emeritus fellow of Corpus Christi
College, Oxford.
Farrell's 'Experience' introduced many of the
preoccupations and terminologies of contem-
porary philosophy of mind: it is about the
supposed 'gap' (p. 195) between the mental
and physical, and the idea that science 'leaves
out' (p. 171) the 'raw feels' (p. 174) of experi-
ence. It was Farrell who first asked: 'I wonder
what it would be like to be, or hear like, a bat'
(ibid., p. 183), the question Thomas Nagel
made famous. Farrell, like Nagel, sees this as a
request to know something only available from
'the role of the privileged observer' (ibid.), but
whereas Nagel thinks a better understanding of
physical reality might ultimately bridge the gap
between the subjective and objective (a view
Farrell mentions at one point: 'Raw feels may
be the way physical realities are intrinsically',
ibid., p. 174), Farrell raises the question only to
cast doubt on its legitimacy. The problem is
that experience is 'featureless' (ibid., p. 179), it
seeming that there are features only available to
describe from the first person because we
mistake features of things experienced, and of
our responses, for features of the experience
itself. Here we see a clear anticipation of
SMART'S 'topic-neutral' analysis of mental

concepts. Experience, construed as a 'raw feel'
is 'not an observable something' (ibid., p. 188),
and so we are mistaken in thinking of experi-
ence as something only a privileged observer
can know. To know what it is like is just to
'give myself the opportunity of making certain
observations for myself (ibid., p. 184).
Farrell argues that as science develops, it is
'quite possible that the notion of 'experience'
will be generally discarded as delusive' (ibid., p.
195). Here we see a strong parallel with elimi-
native materialism, the view that materialists
should not aim to reduce mental states, but
rather to discard the ontology of mind alto-
gether. One of the main arguments for this view
is that categories of mentalistic ontology are the
haphazard product of primitive belief systems
with which we should not strait-jacket scientific
understanding. A well-known analogy made by
Eliminative Materialists is with witchcraft: sci-
entific theories of mental dysfunction eliminated
witchcraft, they did not reduce it (Churchland,
p. 44). This analogy is in Farrell's paper:
the notion of 'experience' can be shown to
resemble an occult notion like 'witchcraft' in
a primitive community that is in the process
of being acculturated to the West.
Philosophical difficulties about 'witchcraft' in
such a community can be found and con-
structed that parallel in an uncanny way the
difficulties confronting us about 'experience'.
('Experience', p. 195)
B.A. Farrell's 'Experience' had an important
(and largely unacknowledged) influence on the
next fifty years of philosophy of mind. His
personal influence also changed the history of
the subject, for it was on Farrell's recommen-
dation that J.J.C. Smart appointed U.T. PLACE
at Adelaide in 1951, the event which initiated
'Australian materialism'.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Experience', Mind, vol. 59 (1950), pp.
170-98.
277
FARRER
Other Relevant Works
'On the Limits of Experimental Psychology',
British Journal of Psychology, vol. 46
(1955), pp. 165-77.
'The Criteria for a Psychoanalytic
Interpretation', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 36 (1962),
pp. 77-100; repr. in J. Glover (ed.), The
Philosophy of Mind (Oxford, 1976).
The Standing of Psychoanalysis (Oxford,
1981).
Further Reading
Churchland, Paul M., Matter and
Consciousness, rev. edn. (Cambridge,
Mass., 1988).
Nagel, Thomas, "What is it Like to be a
Bat?", Philosophical Review, vol. 83
(1974), pp. 435-50.
Smart, J.J.C., "Sensations and Brain
Processes", Philosophical Review, vol. 68
(1959), pp. 141-56.
James Tartaglia
FARRER, Austin Marsden (1904-68)
Austin Farrer was born in Hampstead on 1
October 1904, to Augustus and Evangeline
Farrer, and died on 29 December 1968. His
father had a long association with Regent's
Park College, a Baptist theological college in
London, subsequently at Oxford. After his
years at St Paul's (1917-23), Farrer came to
Oxford as a scholar of Balliol, and took firsts
in honour moderations in 1925, in literae
humaniores in 1927, and in theology at
Cuddesdon in 1928. He distinguished himself
further by receiving the Craven Scholarship in
1925 and the Liddon Studentship in 1927. At
Balliol he was taught by John MACMuRRAY,
whose communitarianism played an important
part in Farrer's moral philosophy. He 'con-
FARRER
verted' to Anglicanism at Oxford, and letters on
deposit in the Bodleian reveal the depth and sig-
nificance of this event for father and son. He
went abroad to study with Emil Brunner but
returned more impressed with Catholic
theology and its reliance on 'logic of analogy'
than neo-Orthodoxy and its 'crisis' methodol-
ogy. After a brief ministry in Dewsbury from
1928 to 1931, Farrer became Chaplain and
tutor of St Edmund Hall (1931-5); he was
appointed Speaker's Lecturer from 1937 to
1940. From 1935 to 1960 he was fellow and
Chaplain of Trinity. He spurned the Nolloth
Professorship, and after some extraordinary
'polities' with the incumbents at Christ Church,
whereupon the invitation of the regius profes-
sorship was withdrawn, from 1960 he was
appointed Warden of Keble, where he
remained until his death.
He wrote what is by now a 'modern' classic,
his magnum opus, Finite and Infinite, in 1943.
Deprived of military service by an English
'preservation-order', he completed this extra-
ordinary work in two years before the light of
culture was entirely extinguished by 'the
German armies ... after a campaign prodigal of
blood and human distress'. He delivered the
Bampton Lectures for 1948, The Glass of
Vision, a delicate treatise in which the study of
Scripture, metaphysics and poetry 'kindled' a
theory of language. Now that images have been
recaptured by philosophy, this is an extremely
fertile work. Delivered as a series of eight
lecture sermons, Farrer's skills with rhetoric
and the marriage of pedagogy and inspiration
are manifest therein. It is part of his argument,
liberal enough at the time, that the gift of rev-
elation is by images, not direct proposition. He
also wrote more conventional biblical books,
for example St Matthew and St Mark, the
Edward Cadbury Lectures for 1953-4. He gave
the Gifford Lectures for 1957 on The Freedom
of the Will, another book due for renaissance
now that consciousness studies have reappeared
in 'cognitive sciences'. He delivered the
Nathaniel Taylor Lectures in 1961 at Yale,
Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited, far different
278
from the bumptious rationalizing that now
appears as theodicy. Finally, he presented the
Deems Lectures at New York University which
were incorporated into Faith and Speculation,
his final work, during which important revi-
sions were made to the theistic metaphysics
originally charted in Finite and Infinite.
Regrettably, Farrer has been adopted as a
champion of conservative minds (not unlike
C.S. LEWIS was); but what is most notable
about him is that he had the courage to follow
thought wherever it led, prompted by the idea,
no doubt, that truth is one and belongs to the
'author' of all truth. He left a rich legacy of
sermons, biblical studies, popular doctrine and
philosophical theology, but his foremost con-
tribution is in philosophy, where he and
WHITEHEAD are the two last metaphysicians of
that ilk.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Finite and Infinite (1943; with revised
Preface, 1964).
The Freedom of the Will (1957; 1963,
includes a Summary of the Argument, pp.
316-20).
Faith and Speculation (1967).
Other Relevant Works
Conti, Charles, Metaphysical Personalism
(Oxford, 1995). For Farrer's published
writings 1933-93, and overall critique.
— (ed.), Reflective Faith: Essays in
Philosophical Theology (1972).
Representative selections.
— (ed.), Interpretation and Belief: Essays in
Christian Doctrine (1976). Representative
selections.
Charles Conti

FERGUSON, Alexander Stewart
(1883-1958)
A.S. Ferguson was born in Banffshire on 28
July 1883 and died in Aberdeen on 18 March
1958. After schooling in London he attended
the University of St Andrews, where he was a
pupil of John BURNET and graduated MA with
first class honours in Greek and Latin in 1904,
and University College, Oxford, where he
studied with E.F. CARROT and attained similar
distinction in literae humaniores in 1908. He
joined the Philosophy Department of Queen's
University, Kingston, Ontario in 1909 and
became Professor of Mental Philosophy in
1911. In 1924 he returned to Britain as
Professor of Philosophy at Armstrong College,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, transferring two years
later to the Regius Chair of Logic at Aberdeen,
from which he retired in 1953. He twice revis-
ited North America, as visiting professor at
Columbia (1931-2) and as Terry Lecturer at
Yale (1947). He was awarded the LL D of St
Andrews in 1949.
One of the foremost ancient philosophy
scholars of his day, Ferguson reacted against
the sympathy for Aristotelianism at Oxford,
and still more against what he considered the
lack of historical and linguistic awareness of the
new generation of 'Greats' philosophers headed
by H.A. PRICHARD. His first publication (1913)
was directed against A.E. TAYLOR'S account of
the religion of Socrates and his last (1950) con-
tinued his disagreement with Prichard's ana-
lytical ethics. He made his name in the 1920s
with two brilliant papers on the images of 'Sun,
Line and Cave' in Plato's Republic. Here he
demonstrated that Plato's Divided Line is
charting not a four-stage but a two-stage
process, employing an analogy of proportion-
ality to explain the otherwise inarticulable
stages in the higher reaches of the philosopher's
education by the familiar relationship between
visible objects and their shadows cast in the
sunlight. The Cave is a political, not an episte-
mological or ontological allegory. Its relation-
ship to the Line lies solely in the use that it
279
FERGUSON
makes of the Sun in illustrating the philoso-
pher's enlightenment.
At Aberdeen, Ferguson was a formidable
figure in faculty and senate, and worked tire-
lessly for the reform of the library. The princi-
pal publication of this period was his lengthy,
scholarly completion of Walter Scott's
Hermetica in 1936. His Terry Lectures on The
Platonic Revolution' carried his analysis of
Plato's metaphysics through to Hellenistic
thought and on into gnosticism and
Neoplatonism. Still unpublished at his death
and too recondite for the scholarly world of the
day, the drafts were deposited in Aberdeen
University Library along with papers relating to
the history of the medieval church and other
matters of regional historical and linguistic
interest. His knowledge extended widely across
European literature, the history of art, and
issues of social welfare and national and inter-
national politics.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'The Impiety of Socrates', Classical
Quarterly, vol. 7 (1913), pp. 157-75.
'Marriage Regulations in the Republic',
Classical Quarterly, vol. 10 (1916), pp.
177-89.
'Plato's Simile of Light', 2 pts, Classical
Quarterly, vol. 15 (1921), pp. 131-52; vol.
16 (1922), pp. 15-28.
'Plato and the Poet's eidola', in Philosophical
Essays Presented to John Watson
(Kingston, Ontario, 1922), pp. 115-57.
'Plato's Simile of Light Again', Classical
Quarterly, vol. 28 (1934), pp. 190-210.
(with Walter Scott), Hermetica, vol. 4
(Oxford, 1936).
'The Platonic Choice of Lives', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 1 (1950-51), pp. 5-24.
Further Reading
MacKinnon, D.M., 'Alexander Stewart
Ferguson: An Appreciation', Aberdeen
University Review, vol. 37 (1957-8), pp.
342-5.
Simpson, W. Douglas, 'The Re-Equipment of
FERGUSON
King's College Library', Aberdeen
University Review, vol. 20 (1932-3), pp.
143-6.
M.A. Stewart
FIELD, Guy Cromwell (1887-1955)
G.C. Field was born in Birmingham on 15
January 1887 and died in Bristol on 28 April
1955. He was educated at Marlborough and
Balliol College, Oxford, taking second classes
in both literae humaniores (1908) and history
(1909). His principal tutors were A.L. Smith
(historian), J.L. Strachan Davidson (Roman
history) and A.D. LINDSAY (philosophy) - all of
whom became Master in due course. In later
life he acknowledged an especial debt to his
tutor, the Aristotelian scholar J.A. SMITH. He
was appointed a lecturer at Balliol College in
1910, at Birmingham University in 1911,
earned a further BSc at Oxford, and joined
Manchester University in 1912. He served in
the Royal Warwickshire Regiment from 1914
and went to France as a captain in 1916. He
was soon captured, and held in Germany till
late in 1917, when he escaped to internment in
Switzerland. On returning to England in 1918,
he served in Intelligence at the War Office until
appointed to a lectureship under Alexander
Mair at Liverpool (1918-26), marrying in
1919. In this period he published Guild
Socialism (1920) and Moral Theory (1921).
He was also Dean of the Faculty and promoted
to associate professor. He was Professor of
Philosophy at Bristol (on the strong recom-
mendations of G.E. MOORE and A.D. Lindsay)
from 1926 till his retirement in 1952, also
serving as Dean (1929-32) and Pro-Vice-
Chancellor (1944-5, 1947-52). In the late
1930s he was President of the Association of
University Teachers. His main publications in
this period were Plato and his Contemporaries
280
(1930) and Studies in Philosophy (1935, being
his collected papers). During World War II he
was a member of the South-Western
Conscientious Objectors Tribunal, publishing
his reflections on this experience and what he
reckoned were the very bad arguments for
pacifism in Pacifism and Conscientious
Objection (1945). He was elected a fellow of
the British Academy in 1948. The Philosophy
of Plato (1949) followed, and his lectures on
Political Theory (1956), delivered over forty
years, were published posthumously.
Field is now remembered chiefly for his Plato
and his Contemporaries, an erudite and well-
balanced account of Plato's own life, and the
lives and ideas of his less famous friends and
rivals. The Philosophy of Plato is also a helpful
introduction to Platonism. But Field was not
only a scholar: his aim was to demonstrate that
Plato had made valuable contributions both to
moral and political theory, and to the devel-
opment of science. As he observed, the
founding fathers of modern science were open
in their Platonism, their conviction that it was
through the language of mathematics that
reality could be grasped. Essays included in his
Studies in Philosophy are still worth reading as
prolegomena to the philosophy of psychology,
science and morals, and for his courteous refu-
tation of error.
But philosophy was also therapy: the search
for justice in the self as well as in the nation.
According to D.G. James (Vice-Chancellor of
Southampton), he lived a philosophical life:
'the power of reason in the conduct of his life
was equalled only by the warmth and tender-
ness of his affection' (address by D.G. James at
the funeral service for G.C. Field, 4 May 1955).
And according to his sometime pupil R.L. Brett
(the Coleridge scholar), 'Field's teaching was
characterized throughout by qualities which
derived from the study of Plato which had
never ceased to occupy him. It was marked by
respect for his pupils and the refusal to impose
his own point of view upon them' (The Times,
3 May 1955). Speaking for himself, he said
that when he 'had made the effort to master

any of the great systems of the past' he felt that
he carried away a great deal of new light from
it (Studies in Philosophy, p. 31), so that any
fully satisfactory system must be constructed
out of, or at least contain, fragments of those
that went before. His Moral Theory was just
such a development of Kant and Aristotle,
arguing that it was states of mind that were
absolutely right or wrong, and that whatever
was incompatible with love (e.g., hatred or
cruelty) was wrong.
All his writings are marked by their lucidity,
uncommon sense and courtesy - though guild
socialists and pacifists had some reason to
doubt his willingness to entertain their systems
sympathetically. His work on moral and polit-
ical theory deserve to be remembered as well as
his work on Plato. His life should be remem-
bered too.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Guild Socialism (1920).
Moral Theory (1921).
Plato and his Contemporaries (1930).
Studies in Philosophy (Bristol, 1935).
Pacifism and Conscientious Objection
(Cambridge, 1945).
The Philosophy of Plato (Oxford, 1949).
Political Theory (1956).
My thanks to the archivists of Balliol College,
Liverpool and Bristol (John Jones, Adrian
Allan and Michael Richardson) for their
assistance.
Stephen R. L. Clark
FINDLAY, John Niemeyer (1903-87)
J.N. Findlay was born in Pretoria, South Africa
(then a British crown colony) on 25 November
1903 and died on 27 September 1987. He was
educated at Pretoria High School for Boys and
Transvaal University College. His first philo-
281
FINDLAY
sophical teaching was in the British idealist tra-
dition but, on the award of a Rhodes
Scholarship, from 1924 to 1926 he studied at
Balliol College, Oxford, where, exposed to
what he later described as the 'last breathings'
of that philosophical school, he moved away
from its doctrines. At Oxford he gained a first
in the school of literae humaniores. Over his
career as a philosophical teacher he held
various posts in different countries, beginning
in 1927 as lecturer in philosophy at Transvaal
University College. During this time, after two
extended research visits, he was awarded a doc-
torate by the University of Graz in Austria for
his work on Brentano. From 1934 to 1944 he
was Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Otago in New Zealand, then for a year at
Rhodes University College, Grahamstown, and
two years at Natal University College, both in
South Africa. In 1948 he came to England,
working first at King's College, Newcastle-
upon-Tyne, then moving in 1951 to the chair
at King's College London. In 1966 he retired to
the United States, whose teaching atmosphere
he found highly congenial. Working for a year
at the University of Texas, Austin, and then
from 1967 to 1972 as Clark Professor of Moral
Philosophy and Metaphysics at Yale University,
from 1972 he was University Professor at
Boston University, where he continued to teach
until his death.
There were many different facets to Findlay's
philosophical thought for, in a century most
notable for its efforts artificially to restrict the
scope and depth of philosophical inquiry,
Findlay was exceptional in the comprehen-
siveness of his approach. There is no major
current in Anglo-American or continental phi-
losophy which he failed to study and, in some
form, encompass within his own thought, and
he even made excursions into Indian, Chinese
and Japanese thought.
Of great interest was his relationship with
WITTGENSTEIN, which was complex and long-
standing. First meeting with the celebrated
Cambridge philosopher on a brief visit in 1930,
during a more extended Cambridge stay in
FINDLAY
1939 he had become part of the group that
met with Wittgenstein each Tuesday. (His own
account of these meetings is to be found in
Studies in the Philosophy ofJ.N.Findlay.) As a
consequence he published some of the very first
accounts of Wittgenstein's new philosophy,
including an analysis of time. (At this stage
Wittgenstein himself had not published his
ideas, nor were they publicly known.)
Applauding the linguistic turn which
Wittgenstein had taken, he later wrote that his
work served 'to furnish the fruitful errors that
have driven me towards the truth' (Values and
Intentions, p. 17). But for all his approval, he
remained also critical. He was unable to accept
Wittgenstein's view of philosophical problems.
Allowing that there was a linguistic aspect to
them, he was unable to accept that they were
merely the result of linguistic confusions.
Instead, they needed to be understood as arising
from deep stresses among the categories in
terms of which the world and our interpreta-
tion of the world are necessarily structured,
stresses with which only a reconstructive or
creative discipline can deal. He rejected too
both of Wittgenstein's theories of meaning.
Meaning is certainly not mere mirroring, but
neither is it simply use. Holding rather that it is
'an intelligible function that at times goes
beyond all showable data', Findlay concluded
that 'Wittgenstein suffered from a bad
hangover of empiricism in imagining that we
can only make plain to others what we can
exhibit to their senses' (Cohen et al., p. 68).
Moreover, his early reading of Meinong gave
him too much faith in the power of introspec-
tion to reveal important truths to ever allow
him to subscribe wholeheartedly to
Wittgenstein's philosophy of mind. Findlay's
views on Wittgenstein are of great interest and
offer a very different perspective from that
usually encountered, for unlike other of
Wittgenstein's immediate pupils, he was able to
see the value of his work without falling utterly
under his spell. His final book, Wittgenstein: A
Critique, published in 1984, attempts to sum
up his relationship.
282
Findlay's interests were always much wider
than those of his analytic contemporaries, but
it was not until he was in his fifties that they
really began to reveal themselves, beginning
with Hegel: A Re-Examination, which
appeared in 1958. Hegel was at this time a
figure so widely ignored, misunderstood and
reviled, that the book was to step right outside
conventional philosophical debate.
Nevertheless, believing that a great philoso-
pher has a side to show every age, Findlay
sought in his book to 'relate [Hegel's doc-
trines] to the ideas and language of our own
time' (Hegel, p. 17). Largely disregarding the
legacy of previous interpretations, the work
does a good job of challenging the then
current misapprehensions of Hegel. To
Findlay, Hegel is not a 'transcendent' meta-
physician who asserts an Absolute Experience
beyond all human experience, nor is he a sub-
jectivist who denies the existence of mind-
independent matter, and he is not a 'rational-
ist' who deduces facts from some a priori
scheme. Contra the previous idealists, Findlay
argued forcibly that Hegel was a realist - that
the material world was for him as real as it is
for any empiricist - and for this reason he
gave Hegel's philosophy of nature an
emphasis almost wholly lacking in earlier
interpretations. But the interpretation was not
wholly comfortable to analytic philosophers.
Downplaying the triadic movement of thesis,
antithesis, synthesis prominent in so many
commentaries, Findlay argues that Hegel's
transitions are only necessary in a loose
fashion: 'in the rather indefinite sense in which
there is necessity and inevitability in a work of
art' (ibid., p. 74). Hegel's dialectic of cate-
gories is not merely a study of the forms which
our thought about the world must take but, he
argues, a study of the basic causes and
essences in which that concrete world itself
must be realized. The interpretation is notable
too for its stress on the community between
Hegel and Wittgenstein. The book played no
small part in putting Hegel back on the philo-
sophical map.

His next book, Values and Intentions (1961),
Findlay always took to be his most important
and original work. Its aim, he later recalled, was
to show that there was a subtle logic of
affinity, not at all rigorous and deductive, but
all the more important for that reason, which
connected the Heads of Value - justice,
beauty, knowledge, etc. - with one another
and with the very nature of consciousness as
concerned with what is impersonal and
objective.
(Cohen et al., p. 41)
The book is in essentials an exercise in phe-
nomenology, both linguistic and mental, urging
that it is inevitable that conscious life, if suffi-
ciently enriched and prolonged, should develop
aspirations towards what one might call the
'impersonal'. As such it was a radical departure
from contemporary approaches. Indeed, the
book is often highly critical of 'modern philos-
ophy', differing from orthodox thought in
matters both general and stylistic (such as the
breadth of its sweep) as well as those more
specific (such as its hostility to the meta-ethical
examination of moral language, or to ques-
tions purely grammatical and the 'corrupting
influence of logic' (Values and Intentions,
p. 64).
It begins with a discussion of the forms of
consciousness, much influenced by Meinong,
Brentano and Husserl. Moving on to belief and
judgement, it charts the way in which our
thoughts naturally develop under their own
momentum towards forms of objectivity and
agreement. Belief, for example, 'cannot be char-
acterized except as at all times endeavouring to
do something in which it may either succeed or
fail, so laying itself open to approbation or dis-
approbation by standards not arbitrary and
escapable, but inescapable because intrinsic to
itself" (ibid., p. 114). But this, it turns out,
involves a certain 'openness' or 'looking
forward' towards its context - 'Belief is like
looking forward to the next stage of a story'
(ibid., p. 104) - an 'ampliative' aspect, that
283
FINDLAY
needs to be understood in terms of coherence
(at that time a discredited notion), so that
thought becomes over time more systematic.
Turning then to the forms of wanting and
willing, in which he finds the roots of value, he
charts a similar evolution towards ever-more
stable, less subjective forms of experience. As
we become serious and whole-minded about
our wanting we naturally remove from it
'extraneous, contextual or merely instrumental'
elements (ibid., p. 204), turning it into some-
thing which seeks both confirmation by, and
compatibility with, the wantings of others. He
describes his position as 'in a deep sense "nat-
uralistic," inasmuch as it depends on tendencies
demonstrably inherent in and constitutive of
mind', but not in the sense of being dependent
on or reduced to any peculiar details of our
contingent make up (ibid., p. 203). The idea of
an internal nissus or development of thought,
both broader and looser than that of merely
formal logical entailment (that is, without the
binding necessity or stationary thought of mere
tautology) is very Hegelian, though it lacks
anything like the explicitly dialectical structure
we find in Hegel. There are, argues Findlay,
many varied forms of intrinsic connection other
than that of strict formal entailment. But the
result is very akin to Hume's ethics. The dis-
tinction between 'warm' and more 'cool' forms
of desire (ibid., p. 179) and the resulting drift
'to free oneself from whatever is peculiar,
personal, merely contingent in one's first order
wishes' (p. 214) recalls Hume's notion of ethics
as a steady and general view, without refer-
ence to our peculiar circumstances and inter-
ests.
The remainder of the book deals with sub-
stantive questions and is perhaps rather less
original. One point of interest is his disagree-
ment with the contemporary orthodoxy of the
fact-value dichotomy. In the development of
thought, he argues, we find 'the normative
growing out of the actual, not descending unin-
telligibly from a machine' (ibid., p. 286). Also
notable is his prefiguring of a theme much to
the fore in contemporary philosophy, viz. the
FINDLAY
separateness of persons; the values and disval-
ues of justice and injustice are, he argues, fruits
of this basic notion (ibid., p. 293). The book
concludes with a chapter on religion.
Findlay's Gifford Lectures (1964-5 and
1965-6), published in a pair of volumes, The
Discipline of the Cave (1966) and The
Transcendence of the Cave (1967), take these
ideas further, moving from moral experience to
experience in general and adding, one might
say, a stronger dialectical element to the phe-
nomenological approach. Continuing in that
descriptive and exploratory approach, he
argues that our experience, be it of space, time,
body, mind, society, meaning or value, as it
develops begins to show incoherences and con-
tradictions. Since we cannot resolve them as
they stand, it is thereby revealed that these
elements are not ultimate, and constitute for us
but Plato's cave. To find the way out of the cave
we need to see how these concepts can develop
into higher points of view which solve their
problems without leaving their insights behind.
As in Plato, the antinomies foreshadow and
point to another higher world.
To give some examples from the host of
puzzles, large and small, that he notes: with
regard to space, he argues that phenomenologi-
cal analysis of matter suggests that bodies require
a 'pure space' which neither restricts nor modifies
their movement, but our space is not like this.
With regard to mind, he finds a clash between
Brentano's axiom that intentionality characterizes
mind only, and the apparent fact that brains
violate this axiom. Again he finds a dichotomy in
the fact that bodies seem both alien and anti-
thetical to minds, and yet essential to them.
The kind of world to which all these antino-
mies point is dealt with in the second volume.
Our transcendence from the cave occurs in two
stages. First of all Findlay attempts to present a
world in which human resources are fulfilled to
the limit.
Remaining within an ontology that is purely
phenomenological, that is to say which does
not describe any object otherwise than as it is
constituted in and for our experience, he begins
284
with a recap of the case for objective values,
which is then followed by a version of the onto-
logical argument for God, which Findlay finally
develops into something like Hegel's Absolute,
a life of 'rational self-conscious spirit'
(Transcendence of the Cave, p. 100). But in
the end this Hegelian ideal cannot suffice, and
in the second half of the book an even higher
transcendence is sketched, an 'Otherworldly
Geography' which aims to 'iron out the con-
ceptual wrinkles' (ibid., p. 120). In this higher
world we find a species of Platonic mysticism.
We find there a 'Platonic inversion' according
to which the universal, although it must have
instances, is regarded as more real than them,
and mind as such, more real than any actual
mind. Although he was sympathetic to mysti-
cism, Findlay saw his case as in no way resting
upon it. It is relevant only because it can
sharpen our insight into what remain purely
logical necessities and the presuppositions of all
discourse. His final position was a species of
'Absolute theory'. Findlay argues that if expla-
nation is ever to be complete, there must be
something in the universe which is not only
ultimate, but self-contained, self-explanatory
and necessary: an Absolute. This he conceives
in a Platonic or Hegelian fashion as a self-
instantiating idea or set of values, rather than
in the Spinozistic manner of an individual
super-substance. These ideas were more fully
developed in his Ascent to the Absolute (1970).
A highly creative and original thinker,
refusing to be swayed by or conform to philo-
sophical orthodoxy, Findlay spoke his mind
and his heart as have few other philosophers in
the twentieth century. He was an important
figure in reviving interest in Hegel and specu-
lative metaphysics in general, when both were
at a very low ebb. For many years, perhaps, this
cost him his place at the centre of the philo-
sophical establishment, and he often felt himself
something of an outsider, but by the end of his
career he was held in high esteem and he came
to feel that his 'philosophical efforts have cer-
tainly been understood and appreciated'
(Cohen et al., p. 468).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Meinong's Theory of Objects and Values
(1933).
Hegel: A Re-Examination (1958).
Values and Intentions (1961).
Language, Mind and Value (1963).
The Discipline of the Cave (1966).
The Transcendence of the Cave (1967).
Axiological Ethics (1970).
Ascent to the Absolute: Metaphysical Papers
and Lectures (1970).
Plato's Written and Unwritten Doctrines
(1974).
Plato and Platonism: An Introduction (New
York, 1978).
Kant and the Transcendental Object
(Oxford, 1981).
Wittgenstein: A Critique (1984).
Further Reading
Cohen, R.S., R.M. Martin and M. Westphal
(eds), Studies in the Philosophy of
J.N.Findlay (Albany, New York, 1985).
Contains an autobiography and an account
of his meetings with Wittgenstein.
W. J. Mander
FLEW, Antony Garrard Newton (1923-)
Antony Flew was born in Ealing on 11
February 1923. He was educated at Kingswood
School, Bath (1936-41), at the School of
Oriental and African Studies, London (where
he studied Japanese) and, after war service, St
John's College, Oxford. He graduated with
first class honours in Greats (philosophy and
classical history) in 1947, and was a John
Locke Scholar. Having held lectureships at
Christ Church, Oxford (1949-50) and
Aberdeen University (1950-54), he was
appointed Professor of Philosophy at what
became Keele University (1954-71), the
285
FLEW
University of Calgary (1972-3) and Reading
University (1973-82). Since 1983 he has been
emeritus professor at Reading. He was Gifford
Lecturer at St Andrews in 1986, and has held
numerous part-time or visiting appointments
since 1982. He was awarded the DLitt of Keele
University in 1974. During World War II, Flew
served in Air Force Intelligence and was subse-
quently attached to the Air Ministry; from
1976 to 1979 he was Chairman of the
Voluntary Euthanasia Society.
In one of his later volumes, on matters edu-
cational (Power to the Parents, pp. 4-5), Flew
writes about the essays contained in it. He says
they are 'for better or worse philosophical in a
perhaps rather broad instead of the narrowest
sense of the word "philosophy". They are, that
is, by no means purely theoretical and a priori.'
From the first, Flew's publications were some
of them rather broadly philosophical, such as
his New Essays in Philosophical Theology
(1954), others aimed to exemplify and
commend a distinctively exact 'narrow' sort of
philosophy such as his edited collections (Logic
and Language, 1951 and 1953, and Essays in
Conceptual Analysis, 1956), whose titles
convey a good deal about the philosophical
approach. The more applied philosophy, or
employed philosophy (by which latter is meant
discourse which employs philosophical skills,
for example in expository analysis, or evalua-
tion of arguments) deals with religion, political
economy, Darwinism, criminology and mental
illness, reasoning in the social sciences, politics,
Malthusian population theory, as well as psy-
chical research and education. In addition,
Flew's philosophical scholarship (which is not
classifiable on the scale from narrow to broad
as understood above) has been valued, most
notably his work on Hume, with whom Flew
critically concurs in many matters, and his
Introductions (1971 and 1979) to, and, with
others, his Dictionary (1984) of philosophy.
While philosophy is conceived of as concep-
tual, concerned in some ways with the use of
words and other symbols, and while Flew
promoted this conception in the edited volumes
FLEW
of 1951,1953,1955 (with A. MAC!NTYRE) and
1956, which contained widely discussed
examples of such philosophy, he firmly denied
at the same time that philosophical issues are
merely verbal or 'unreal'. The number of fields
in which he deploys philosophical expertise in
order to help deal with pressing problems,
whose resolutions will greatly affect both
understanding and practice, is consistent with
that denial. Granted that the outcomes of
Flew's discussions were frequently controver-
sial, in politics, religion and each of the other
fields to which he gives attention, the contro-
versy is seldom about whether such philo-
sophical considerations are appropriately
employable in dealing with the problems.
In order to pursue controversies fairly (and
Flew pursued questions, rather than taking up
issues and then leaving them), a great deal of
reading was required: the bibliographies of his
books listing works to which he has referred
serve, often, as comprehensive guides to the
subject of the book. What he says in the Preface
to God and Philosophy (1966, p. 7) holds good
for most: 'I have been trying, and I have wanted
to show that I have been trying, to come to
grips with arguments which are or have been
widely or respectably employed.'
The four edited volumes of essays in which
philosophy and theoretical-conceptual analysis,
as an a priori enquiry, as 'linguistic', to use the
rather journalistic slogan-word, is held forth for
our approval, not only promoted and sought to
prescribe that theory and practice of philoso-
phy; they also did a great deal to encourage the
pursuit of philosophical discussion and progress
and understanding by means of papers devoted
to particular points, as much as by book-length
treatments. Such papers would typically be
around four to eight thousand words long,
though in a volume of the period (MacDonald)
much shorter papers were to be found. In the
second half of the century, many many such
collected volumes of philosophical papers were
published, philosophical volumes of a kind pre-
viously much less common. How far Flew's
edited volumes contributed to this develop-
286
ment and change, and how far the change was
due to underlying changes in academic and
philosophical work which would in any case,
and without Flew, have resulted in the new
style of philosophy publication, it is hard to
determine. Clearly, though, Flew's volumes
were very prominent in the first phase of this
change.
The practice of philosophy advocated mostly
by example in these volumes sought to pay dis-
criminating attention to the ways in which
language is used. There was the intention not
to be tied to positivists' criteria for assertoric
meaningfulness, and indeed not to be inter-
ested only in truth-claiming, statement or asser-
tion making, uses of language. In some
accounts of these developments emphasis is
placed on a particular concern for non state-
ment-making uses of language (i.e. uses like
promise making, or naming, or pronouncing
sentence, where the point of the utterance is not
to describe or report what was, is or will be the
case, quite independently of any such utter-
ance); and there was brisk development of such
work, led mainly by J.L. AusiTN. But more phi-
losophizing of the sort which Flew's volumes
exemplified and which Flew's own subsequent
work exemplified was concerned to yield
understanding of truth, about the (extra-lin-
guistic) world. Austin was also in the thick of
this, in practice and precept. Approvingly, Flew
quoted him: the philosophizing he favours is,
'looking not merely at words ... but also at
the realities we use words to talk about. We are
using a sharpened awareness of words to
sharpen our perception of the phenomena'
(from Austin's Philosophical Papers, 2nd edn,
1970, p. 182, quoted in The Politics of
Procrustes, p. 37). And, in discussing in par-
ticular Hume's scepticism regarding the senses,
Flew indicates a fruitful application:
The acknowledged general foundation of his
scepticism with regard to the senses can be
undermined with tools drawn from the later
WITTGENSTEIN'S attack upon a self-centred
introspective view of language. The painstak-

ing examination - first inspired by Austin in
his classes and through his lectures on 'Sense
and Sensibilia' - of the actual use in real and
living languages of particular perceptual
expressions has begun to show in detail the
illegitimacy of skeptical arguments which
have so often appeared to embody 'the
obvious dictates of reason'. It would, for
instance, in any but the most extraordinary
of circumstances be just false to say in the
ordinary senses of the words involved: The
table which we see seems to diminish as we
move further from it.' This is a view which
has to many philosophers seemed irresistibly
compelling. It presupposes the entirely erro-
neous conception that our everyday vocab-
ulary of appearance has evolved for the
unguarded description of our private sense
data; rather than, as it surely has, for the
hesitating and qualified characterization of
the public world. So there can be no question
of drawing the sceptical conclusion: 'It was
therefore nothing but its image which was
present to the mind.'
(Hume's Philosophy of Belief, p. 268)
But it is true that the new style of philosophy
did differ from positivism in its practitioners'
typically not explicitly employing, and, perhaps
(though there has been and there is room for
controversy about this) not being committed to,
empiricist criteria for meaningfulness, or con-
ceptions of meaning as, for example, being or
as being given by the 'method of verification'.
The observing of how, in particular kinds of
context, we actually use the relevant language
(in talking of, for example, objects or persons,
distances, times, numbers ...) could lead us to
make more progress in philosophical under-
standing in many philosophical fields than the
mere wielding of a criterion of meaningfulness,
or a slogan about meaning.
It would be wrong to see Flew as exclusivis-
tically doctrinaire in having a precisely defined
method of philosophizing which discards tra-
ditional types of argument in favour of some
new and narrow way. In 'Locke and the
287
FLEW
Problem of Personal Identity' (1951) we see
Flew offering, as his objections to Locke's treat-
ment of personal identity, one argument drawn
from Bishop Butler's writings (early eighteenth
century) to the effect that memory presupposes
personal identity and so memory cannot, as
Locke maintained, constitute personal identity,
and then exposing an equivocation in the use of
'remember', while in his subsequent diagnosis
of the source of Locke's error Flew employs the
kind of appeals to language use prescribed by
the then current and new approach. So he says:
Locke defined 'person' as 'a thinking intelli-
gent being, that has reason and reflection,
and can consider itself as itself, the same
thinking thing, in different times and places.'
Ignoring the possible danger of circularity
which lurks in this talk of 'the same thinking
thing,' the more radical objection must be
made that this definition misses the ordinary
meaning and use of the term 'person.' We
learn the word 'people,' by being shown
people, by meeting them and shaking hands
with them. They may be intelligent or unin-
telligent, introspective or extraverted, black,
white, red, or brown, but what they cannot
be is disembodied or in the shape of ele-
phants. Locke's definition would make it a
contingent truth about people that some or
all of them are either embodied in, or are of,
human form. But in the ordinary use of the
word 'people,' we do actually meet people
and shake hands with them; we do not meet
the fleshy houses in which they are living or
the containers in which they are kept.
('Locke the and Problems of Personal
Identity', p. 59)
The two books about Hume (Hume's
Philosophy of Belief, 1961, and David Hume:
Philosopher of Moral Science, 1986) consti-
tute Flew's principal contribution to philo-
sophical scholarship. Flew does not at every
point agree with what he takes Hume to be
saying; nor, where he does agree, is his con-
currence uncritical. Interpretation, exposition
FLEW
and assessment are interrelated in these works.
The earlier book, notwithstanding its title,
should not be supposed only to concern belief
or epistemology narrowly defined; it is about
human cognitive competence and some impli-
cations thereof. The book expounds Hume's
first Enquiry. Much of what Flew contends
there has been referred to in subsequent dis-
cussions of Hume, and the clarity of the writing
has resulted in its being so widely used a treat-
ment of the first Enquiry that, at least, it seems
plain, none has been more used. The later
volume particularly brings out Hume's claim to
be treated as a pioneer of what we call the
social sciences.
Flew's views are never more Humean than in
his writings about religion. A distinctive feature
of his account of Hume's first Enquiry was the
according of a central place, in Hume's purposes
in that book, to the treatment of religious ques-
tions: accordingly the Flew chapters dealing
respectively with the credibility of reports of
miracles, and with the import and weight of
any natural theology that might possibly be
called in aid by an apologist for religion are
very substantial. And religious issues, as they
arise or lurk in other portions of Hume's work,
are given careful attention. Flew agrees with
Hume that on the latter's proper and pointful
definition of the miraculous no reasonable
person should believe a report or a case based
on any kind of evidence that a miracle has
happened. And any attempt to seek support
from natural theology is doubly unsatisfactory:
our behaviour should not be led by any con-
clusions of natural theology in ways into which
our mere awareness of nature would not have
led us anyhow, and the only form of natural
theology that holds out a prospect of having any
force is unsound. In the course of the reflec-
tions about liberty and necessity, Flew requires
theists to acknowledge that on their view, God
must be held to be the author of sin. Advocacy
of these positions was sustained in God and
Philosophy (1966, and its later editions of 1974
and 1984), The Presumption of Atheism (1976)
and Atheistic Humanism (1993).
288
In the collection of essays which he co-edited,
and which, for a decade and more, were much
debated where philosophy and theology inter-
acted, Flew included two pieces of his own
which became particularly well known. The
former reflects on the readiness of believers in
God apparently to continue affirming things
about God, as for example that God loves us as
a father, and yet to qualify this (in face of expe-
rience) when fatherly love seems to be denied
by what is happening, by saying that God's
love is not human love, or that it is inscrutable
love. Has the believer's affirmation not been
'killed by inches, the death of a thousand qual-
ifications'? (New Essays in Philosophical
Theology, pp. 96-9). If the believer cannot say
what would have to occur to constitute a
disproof of, say, God's love, does the affirma-
tion of God's love retain any meaning?
Subsequent symposiasts took up his challenge,
and others far beyond the covers of that col-
lection attempted to reckon with it. This even
though prospects for establishing falsification-
ist criteria of meaningfulness were already
unpromising (see Hempel). The second paper
exclusively addresses the problem of evil: apol-
ogists for theism have tried to account for the
world's evils as being consistent with the sov-
ereignty of a God of power and love by appeal-
ing to creaturely free will, which, while a good
gift of God's which makes possible other great
goods, can be, and has been, misused. Flew's
counter-claim is that a God could have created
creatures such that they will always act rightly,
and well, and do so freely. Since a God could
have done that and excluded the evils due to
freedom's abuse, any actual God must have
done less than the best possible, and cannot be
an all-good, all-powerful God. The crux of this
issue is whether God's guaranteeing creaturely
rectitude is compatible with creaturely freedom:
generally, is determinism compatible with
freedom? The view that it is is called 'compat-
ibilism'. The argument of Flew's paper is closely
paralleled by that of J.L. MACKIE'S Evil and
Omnipotence (1955) and was repeatedly dis-
cussed for the rest of the century. To bring out

the meaning of 'free', Flew appeals to a
'paradigm case':
A paradigm case of acting freely, of being free
to choose, would be the marriage of two
normal young people, when there was no
question of the parties 'having to get
married', and no social or parental pressure
on either of them: a case which happily is
scarcely rare. To say that Murdo was free to
ask whichever eligible girl of his acquain-
tance he wanted, and that he chose to ask,
was accepted by, and has now married Mairi
of his own free will, is not to say that his
actions and choices were uncaused or were in
principal unpredictable: but precisely and
only that, being of an age to know his own
mind, he did what he did and rejected
possible alternative courses of action without
being under any pressure to act in this way.
Indeed those who know Murdo and Mairi
may have known what was going to happen
long before the day of the wedding. And if it
is the case that one day a team of psycholo-
gists and physiologists will be able to predict
a person's behaviour far more completely
and successfully than even his best friends
now can, even up to one hundred per cent
completely and successfully: still this will not
show that he never acts freely, can never
choose between alternatives, deciding for
himself...
(New Essays in Philosophical Theology,
pp. 149-50)
It should be noticed that Flew's argument
requires only that he be a compatibilist. The
point is worth making because in subsequent
publications (e.g., Agency and Necessity, 1987)
Flew argues against determinism. He certainly
held the following:
Of course, from a statement that certain con-
ditions obtain, and that these conditions are
sufficient to guarantee that I will decide in
some particular sense, it must follow neces-
sarily that I will so decide. But it does not
289
FLEW
follow that I could not have decided other-
wise. To show that I could the most decisive
evidence is that which shows that, had
someone given me good reason, I would.
(Hume's Philosophy of Belief, p. 154)
Also with respect to psychological factors that
'desires never necessitate doing' (Agency and
Necessity, p. 62); the 'argument from Agatha
Christie' in support of this points out that the
detective is typically confronted by many
people (say, in a house party) who had a motive
to kill; however, all but one did not act upon
their desire.
Freedom for the individual in social and
political arrangements was, in Flew's publica-
tions, a principal concern in the last quarter of
the century. His liberalism is that of J.S. Mill,
and in Prophets of Freedom and Enterprise
(1975) he vigorously rebuts claims that Mill
was some kind of socialist. Mill formed groups
and communities, bringing people together to
engage in economic activity, to see experimen-
tally how well they and combinations like them
can make out; these combinations were not
state directed. In fact, Mill was opposed to
monolithic state control of everything because
individual freedom was too important. Any
description of him as a 'socialist' required to die
the death of several large qualifications.
Egalitarianism, which had found particularly
influential support in the writings of John
Rawls, will call for state implementation in
ways which will also reduce individual liberty,
imposed equality therefore is to be deplored (see
The Politics of Procrustes}.
His interest as a philosopher who was
engaged in social and political controversy led
Flew to a concern for the quality of discourse
in the social sciences. So emerged his Thinking
about Thinking (1975; later 1985 and 1991),
which is a particular kind of introduction to the
social sciences: it seeks to explain why so much
that was offered as social science was, as Flew
believes, so bad, by pointing out many sorts of
fallacies and misguided, slack thinking in the lit-
erature as contributing to a guide to thinking
FLEW
better, about anything. Flew cites, and often
quotes from, particular authors to make his
points (he attacks no straw man), and generates
a large bibliography.
The zeal for freedom informs Flew's work on
education where state control and direction
make it hard for people to receive or provide
the sort of education they would wish. The
link between personal freedom and the opera-
tion of a free market is evident when Flew urges
(Power to the Parents) that schools be separate
'education firms', however owned or managed,
subject to market incentives and disciplines.
Freedom of thought is also at risk where the
state prescribes an orthodoxy, for example about
the content of citizenship courses (Education for
Citizenship, 2000), too often exhibiting bad rea-
soning and commending politically partisan atti-
tudes. Flew's introductory writings, his
Philosophy: An Introduction, his elucidations
of Darwinism (Darwinian Evolution, 1984),
Evolutionary Ethics (1967), and his substantial
introductory writings in edited books such as
those on Body, Mind and Death (1964) distill-
ing his extensive work in this area, on Malthus's
Essay (1979) and several Hume volumes were
valued. They are lucid, thorough and indicate
how a reader may think well about his topic.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Ed.), Logic and Language, 1st ser. (Oxford,
1951).
'Locke and the Problem of Personal Identity',
Philosophy, vol. 24 (1951), pp. 53-68.
A New Approach to Psychical Research
(1953).
(Ed.), Logic and Language, 2nd ser. (Oxford,
1953).
(Ed. with A. Maclntyre), New Essays in
Philosophical Theology (1955).
(Ed.), Essays in Conceptual Analysis (Oxford,
1956).
Hume's Philosophy of Belief (1961).
(Ed. with intro.), Body, Mind and Death (New
York and London, 1964).
God and Philosophy (1966; later edns 1974,
1984).
290
Evolutionary Ethics (1967).
An Introduction to Western Philosophy
(1971).
Crime or Disease? (1973).
Prophets of Freedom and Enterprise (1975).
Thinking about Thinking (Oxford, 1975; later
edns 1985,1991).
The Presumption of Atheism (1976).
Philosophy: An Introduction (1979).
(Ed. consultant), A Dictionary of Philosophy
(1979; 2nd edn, 1984).
(Ed. with intro.), T.R. Malthus, An Essay on
the Principle of Population (1979).
The Politics of Procrustes (1981).
Darwinian Evolution (1984).
David Hume: Philosopher of Moral Science
(1986).
Power to the Parents (1987).
(with G. Vesey), Agency and Necessity
(Oxford, 1987).
The Logic of Mortality (Oxford, 1987).
Atheistic Humanism (New York, 1993).
Education for Citizenship (2000).
Other Relevant Works
Austin, J.L., Philosophical Papers, 2nd edn
(Oxford, 1970).
Hempel, C., 'Problems and Changes in the
Empiricist Criterion of Meaning', in L.
Linsky (ed.), Semantics and the Philosophy
of Language (Urbana, 1952).
MacDonald, M. (ed.), Philosophy and
Analysis (Oxford, 1954).
Mackie, J.L., 'Evil and Omnipotence', Mind,
vol. 64 (1955).
Joseph Houston
FOOT, Philippa Ruth (1920-)
Philippa Foot was born in Owston Ferry,
Lincolnshire, the granddaughter of Grover
Cleveland, President of the USA. She was
educated mainly at home before studying PPE at

Somerville College, Oxford (1939-42). After
receiving an MA in 1947, she became
Somerville's first philosophy tutorial fellow in
1949 and Vice-Principal in 1967. In 1969 she
resigned her tutorial fellowship and became a
senior research fellow of Somerville (and subse-
quently an honorary fellow), and spent most of
her time in the USA. She held positions at
Cornell, Berkeley, MIT, Princeton, New York
and Stanford. She settled at UCLA in 1976 and
was appointed the first holder of the Gloria and
Paul Griffin Chair in Philosophy in 1988, which
she held until her retirement in 1991, where-
upon she became an emeritus professor. She was
a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences and a founder of Oxfam. Her major
works are two collections of essays, Virtues and
Vices (2002; first published 1978) and Moral
Dilemmas (2002), and a book Natural
Goodness (2001). The year 1995 saw the pub-
lication of Virtues and Reasons, a Festschrift
discussing her work which included contribu-
tions from many of the leading Anglo-American
moral philosophers of the day.
Much of her philosophical worth derives from
her attempt to put the ideas of virtue and vice at
the centre of professional ethical thought, which,
for too long, was dominated by talk of conse-
quences and duties. Along the way she discussed
many practical issues, chiefly abortion and
euthanasia, as well as more theoretical concerns.
Her writing was dominated by two interwoven
themes. First, she consistently opposed non-cog-
nitivist positions in ethics. Second, she was con-
cerned with the relation between morality and
rationality. She put the chief issue well herself.
The problem is to see how for every person and
in every case it can be rational to follow moral
edicts - in particular the demands of justice and
charity - when these seem to clash with self-
interest or desire. We want to be able to say
that to act as justice or charity demands is to
act rationally in every case, even in the tight
corner. But how is this possible?.
(Virtues and Vices, p. ix)
291
FOOT
I concentrate here on these two themes, sketch-
ing the attack on non-cognitivism first.
Moral judgements such as 'Charity-giving is
good' have the grammatical form of descriptive
judgements. It appears that one is trying to
pick out some property of, in this case, an
action. (Of course, one's judgement can be
correct or incorrect.) Non-cognitivism claims
that this appearance is illusory and that moral
judgements should not be interpreted as
descriptions. Instead, such claims express atti-
tudes ('Hurrah! Charity-giving'), or commands
('Give to charity!'), for example. The point is
that there is little if any cognitive element to
one's judgement; people are not really trying to
pick out some feature of the world. Non-cog-
nitivists typically follow Hume and support
their position by thinking about motivation.
In normal cases moral judgements are accom-
panied by motivation of some strength. Yet
one can report a fact, such as a table's colour,
without feeling any motivation. (Saying, 'The
table would look nice if blue' is different. A
good way to construe this is as an approval of
the table's becoming blue, and a desire for its
being painted by someone will probably accom-
pany one's utterance.) So, it similarly seems
odd to construe moral judgements as attempts
to describe facts in the world.
Foot wondered whether non-cognitivism's
construal of moral judgements as combina-
tions of an attitude plus some non-evaluative
descriptive element was plausible (see, for
example, 'Moral Arguments' and 'Moral
Beliefs' in Virtues and Vices). Non-cognitivists
are committed to analysing fairness as, say,
'actions of a certain type that should be
approved of. But filling in the 'actions of a
certain type' is essential and has to be done
non-morally on pain of eschewing non-cogni-
tivism. Yet even accepting that there can be
odd cases, one cannot allow people to judge
any sort of action as fair, such as the mere
moving of a chair from here to there. There are
certain limits as to what can be counted as fair
or selfish. Contra non-cognitivism, Foot
thought that these limits could not be explained
FOOT
non-morally. This idea has remained powerful
to the present day.
We can now introduce the second main
theme. From this point, Foot often considered
what one should say about justice. In particular,
she was interested in what one might say to an
egoist who did not care for helping others. How
can one get him to see that there is reason for him
to approve of and perform just acts? In her
earlier work Foot tried to imagine what an unjust
life would be like and how deceitful one would
have to be to maintain it. She thought that one
could not pursue such a life and consistently
remain happy. However, she became dissatisfied
with this approach and, in 1977, published one
of her most famous papers, 'Morality as a
System of Hypothetical Imperatives' (Virtues
and Vices). As we shall see, in Natural Goodness
she returned to her earlier position, but her intel-
lectual journey is worth examination.
In 'Morality as a System of Hypothetical
Imperatives' she examined what Kantians and
others assume to be the centrally defining quality
of moral reasons, namely their binding nature.
Her aim was to cast doubt on the (natural)
thought that one is irrational if one does not
pursue an action deemed right or just, even if the
action does not match one's desires, aims and
projects.
To explain, consider the difference between
hypothetical and categorical imperatives. 'If you
want to visit Thoemmes Press, you should go to
Bristol' is a hypothetical imperative, whereas
'Go to Bristol' is a categorical imperative. The
former functions as advice. It is up to any indi-
vidual to decide what he should do in the end:
either to go to Bristol or to fail to go to
Thoemmes Press (perhaps because he does not
want to visit Bristol). Categorical imperatives, on
the other hand, do not give people this leeway
since their force does not depend on some further
end. There is something that one must do (go to
Bristol), and if one does not, for whatever reason
and assuming that one can, then one has gone
wrong.
Moral imperatives are normally assumed to
be the prime example of categorical imperatives
292
and, relatedly, the binding, categorical, nature
of moral imperatives is thought to be one of
their centrally defining features. Imagine that an
old lady needs help across a road. If we detailed
the case suitably, one might think that morality
dictates that one should help her. However, if
morality is to have this binding quality, then it
must be the case that one cannot absolve
oneself of responsibility by saying that one does
not care what happens to her. In fact, more fun-
damentally, if morality is to bind, then its
reasons do not disappear just because they do
not match our desires and projects. In this way,
moral imperatives are inescapable. In other
words, categorical imperatives do not depend
for their force at all on individuals' particular
ends. And that matches our intuitive conception
of morality. There are some things that one
must do, whether or not one wants to.
In 'Morality as a System of Hypothetical
Imperatives' Foot wondered whether morality
is as special and unique as it is thought to be.
After all, rules of etiquette involve words such
as 'should' and 'ought', and they seem to bind
in a way that the advice regarding one's trip to
Thoemmes Press does not. Foot gave this
example.
The club secretary who has told a member
that he should not bring ladies into the
smoking-room does not say, 'Sorry, I was
mistaken' when informed that this member
is resigning tomorrow and cares nothing
about his reputation in the club. Lacking a
connexion with the agent's desires or inter-
ests, this 'should' does not stand 'unsup-
ported and in need of support'; it requires
only the backing of the rule. The use of
'should' is therefore 'non-hypothetical' in the
sense defined.
(Virtues and Vices, p. 160)
Foot argued that someone who wishes to draw
a distinction between etiquette and morality in
order to preserve the latter's special status might
correctly point out that we normally think that
the rules of etiquette are not binding on people,

particularly in more trivial cases. We can rea-
sonably ask why anyone should bother with eti-
quette at all, and some might, again reasonably,
reject its imperatives. This takes us to the heart
of things. Foot asked why the same was not
true of morality. What is irrational with opting
out of it? Why think it so special? Of course,
one might feel that morality has a special
binding force, but this could be the result only
of how stringently its rules are enforced and
taught, which in turn might be hangovers from
our past, perhaps religious, ways.
The point of Foot's criticism in 'Morality as
a System of Hypothetical Imperatives' should
not be misunderstood. She was not advocating
moral relativism. She thought that people can
still be accused of villainy and that one can still
act justly towards others. Some just actions
might demand much of the individual, and we
should praise her and promote her as an
exemplar. But we should replace talk of cate-
gorical imperatives with talk of Volunteering
for the fight for justice', and describe people
more in terms of virtues, as the Greeks did.
Her key point was that the epithets 'rational'
and 'irrational' should not be ascribed, respec-
tively, to people who do good and bad things.
Searching for a 'fugitive thought' to underpin
morality's special, inescapable status is futile.
Before discussion of Natural Goodness, it is
important to distinguish various claims about
reasons. The first is just (1) reasons exist and
they demand something of people. This first
thought is consistent with (2) some people do
and some do not recognize moral dictates; and
(3) amongst those who recognize moral
dictates, some do and some do not follow them.
Additionally, (4) amongst those people who
follow them, some follow only because their
various desires and personality traits match the
dictates, whilst some follow through recogni-
tion of the dictates alone, irrespective of their
characters. In 'Morality as a System of
Hypothetical Imperatives' Foot attacked only
(1) and this was undoubtedly the focus of her
writing on rationality. But she sometimes
confused this with the other ideas, particularly
293
FOOT
with the claim that if categorical imperatives
exist then all who notice them are, by necessity,
compelled to follow them. For example, at the
end of 'Morality as a System of Hypothetical
Imperatives', in support of her position she
said,
[I]t is interesting that the people of Leningrad
were not struck by the thought that only the
contingent fact that other citizens shared
their loyalty and devotion to the city stood
between them and the Germans during the
terrible years of the siege. Perhaps we should
be less troubled than we are by fear of defec-
tion from the moral cause: perhaps we
should even have less reason to fear it if
people thought of themselves as volunteers
banded together to fight for liberty and
justice and against inhumanity and oppres-
sion.
(Virtues and Vices, p. 167)
In this example it could still be that morality's
demands are categorical, but whether people
decide to follow them is a contingent matter.
However, despite this and the other neat dis-
tinctions above, it is worth acknowledging that
the motivation for claiming that morality's
imperatives are categorical is surely weakened
if we find that people adopt moral reasons only
as a matter of contingency. Although concep-
tually possible, one would think that if there
were moral categorical imperatives, then in
some important cases all who acknowledged
them would for that reason alone follow them.
For a long time after the publication of
'Morality as a System of Hypothetical
Imperatives' the idea of morality having no less
binding force than etiquette was known as
'Foot's position'. However, she abandoned the
central idea soon after, during the early 1980s.
She began to worry whether it was acceptable
to think that moral dictates have no special
binding force. In subsequent work she wanted
to show how moral imperatives can be binding
and that non-volunteers to the moral cause
could be criticized legitimately, whilst showing
FOOT
that there was room for virtue that the
Kantianism taught in much Anglophone phi-
losophy of the time ignored.
Looking back, she often said that she was
seduced into the position of 'Morality as a
System of Hypothetical Imperatives' because
she accepted the neo-Humean account of prac-
tical reasons. Imagine we ask why one performs
action A. Perhaps one does it in order to do B.
But why does one do B? And so on. To have
'neat' justification, such reasoning would have
to end somewhere. The neo-Humean says, and
Hume himself said, roughly, that what grants
the final action in the chain as having value or
reason-giving force is only that the agent desires
it, or some such. Hence the neo-Humean sus-
picion of categorical reasons. Foot, in her
mature work, typically responded with the fol-
lowing idea. (For example, see Natural
Goodness, p. 22, and some papers in Moral
Dilemmas that predate it.) Why cannot some
chains, at least, be halted not because one likes
Z, say, but because one recognizes that Z gives
one a reason to act? Only someone in the grip
of neo-Humeanism could fail to see this as an
option. In relation to this idea she often used a
thought due to Warren Quinn. We think that
practical reasoning is a valuable thing in a
human life. But why would it be valuable if it
would be rational to pursue any desire, no
matter how despicable or trivial? Why are
desires and likes the only things that matter in
the end? In her later writing Foot aimed to
make good on these thoughts and show that
there is a plausible alternative to neo-
Humeanism. It is clear that here the two main
themes in her work come together. Why think
that the normative and the evaluative can be
reduced to talk of what humans desire?
She described her mature position in Natural
Goodness as a 'species-dependent account of
virtue'. Her general idea can be stated thus.
Contra 'Morality as a System of Hypothetical
Imperatives', there is something that grounds
the importance and special nature of moral
reasons, and that something is what is good for
us as a species. The word 'good' here is key. She
294
took from P.T. GEACH the idea that 'good' is an
adjective that is always context sensitive. That
is, one can talk of goodness only when one is
talking of something being good of its kind. So,
one might consider good something that fulfils
the ends that will allow a thing, such as a plant
or a knife, to flourish or to perform the function
for which it was designed. Although humans
are more complex entities, the same basic prin-
ciple applies. There are certain things that
humans need and desire and which allow them
to flourish. These are not just basic resources
such as food and shelter, but also things such
as human company and, further, a society
based on trust in which rules of conduct are
followed. What one has to find are 'patterns of
natural normativity', ways of living and acting
that are good for the species and which ground
reasons for action. In 'Rationality and Virtue'
she said,
As Elizabeth ANSCOMBE has said about one
aspect of justice - the keeping of promises -
a great deal of human good hangs on the
possibility that one man can bind the will of
another by getting him to promise to do
something. As she says, the institution of
promise-making and -keeping is 'an instru-
ment whose use is part and parcel of an
enormous amount of human activity and
hence of human good; of the supplying both
of human needs and of human wants so far
as the satisfaction of these are compossible ...
It is scarcely possible to live in a society
without encountering it and even being
involved in it.'
(Moral Dilemmas, p. 168)
This position raises a number of issues. I deal
with five here. First, one might be suspicious of
marking an explicit parallel between what is
good for plants and animals, and what is good
for humans. But it is clear that she was not
committed to thinking that they are exactly the
same. After all, she thought context to be
important, so the good for plants can be similar
to, but not identical with, the good for humans.

And it does not seem that strange to claim that
there are parallels regarding flourishing and
the like.
Second, how can one identify the 'good'
activities of the thing in question? How can
they be distinguished from the thing's harmful
activities, or from its merely statistically preva-
lent activities? After all, a tree's leaves often
rustle and people often comb their hair. Is it
important and key that they do and, crucially,
do such things form the basis of reasons for
action, especially in the human case? Foot
appealed here to common sense. We know gen-
erally what things to look for. We know that
pliability is good in a reed but a defect in an
oak. And we also know that activities that seem
innocuous and trivial at first sight reveal impor-
tant social facts, such as chimps' grooming
activities. From a detailed study of the species
in question one will be able to form a good
impression of what is important and be able to
distinguish 'mere' hair grooming from that
which plays an important social role.
The third worry is whether, in the human
case and no matter how detailed the account,
we have something on which one can build
categorical imperatives. Much of Foot's
response to this worry depended on thinking
that morality is concerned with life's funda-
mental aspects. (This can be seen as an elabo-
ration of her earlier position, pre 'Morality as
a System of Hypothetical Imperatives'.) If one
asks the question 'Why act justly?' then the
sort of thing one would say in response is 'What
if no one helped anyone; where would we be
then?' Justice is a form of rational behaviour
because it is interwoven with so many aspects
of our life. Asking this question leads us to
reflect on the many ways in which humans act
and think, what they typically feel for those
close to them, and how they wish to be treated
by strangers. In contrast, rules of etiquette are
not so important (apart from when they also
have moral aspects). It is harder to defend the
rationality of replying to letters in the third
person, if they are written in that form, because
there are simply fewer and less significant
295
FOOT
aspects which render such rules important.
The following, fourth, worry is the most sig-
nificant. Foot sought to derive categorical
reasons from what is good for a species. But
what about individuals? What reason do they
have to act morally rather than selfishly, and
what do we say to the, possibly egoistic, agent
in the 'tight corner'?
To begin, we should realize that we should
not condemn all who fail to help others.
Humans have many reasons for action and
what we seek are good reasons that excuse
their behaviour. Even for less complex crea-
tures, such as chimps, Foot did not claim that
all chimps should be grooming most of the
time. Similarly, to take an example where
justice is not involved, although it might be a
natural defect in a female human not to be able
to reproduce, for individual humans to choose
not to reproduce need not be bad, and can be
good, assuming that enough others are repro-
ducing (Natural Goodness, p. 42).
Foot's argument turns on an agent having to
justify his actions to us. Some situations are
straightforward. For example, someone might
be physically unable to help or have to choose
between helping X alone and helping Y alone.
The key case, as mentioned, is where someone
acts egoistically and fails to help because of his
own self-interest. When we confront him he
might say 'What reason have I to do this?' We
then move to show him that practices of trust
(if that is appropriate to the case) are good
things to uphold and good for people to enter
into. If he then accepts that his actions are bad
but asks why he should refrain from perform-
ing bad actions (that is, actions considered
under that description), Foot said we must
show him the conceptual connection between
acting rationally and acting well. If he contin-
ues to ask why acting rationally is good, then
it is unclear whether he is asking for anything
reasonable. He is asking for reasons where
reasons must a priori come to an end (Natural
Goodness, p. 65).
Responding to the egoist is thought to be a
key part of any theory of moral reasons. Does
FOOT
this manoeuvre succeed? It is not so clear that
it does. For a start it depends on the egoist
accepting that the actions he performs are bad.
He might well reject our view of what is good
for the species. Even if he accepts that it is bad
for others that he acts as he does, he can still
regard his actions as good for himself, laugh off
Foot's worries and free ride. Perhaps, though,
we are asking for too much. Foot is right in her
identification of the place where reasons end
and it seems too much to demand of a moral
theory that it convert all egoists. What we
might have the basis of is an account where one
can convince neutrals that one's criticism of
egoists is legitimate.
There is one last issue I have left hanging.
Foot criticized neo-Humeans and non-cogni-
tivists for making use of only desires when
explaining value and reasons. But she wished to
make use of desire in some sense also. For her,
reasons are based on what is good for us as a
species, what it can be said that we approve of
in a very broad sense. After all, we aren't going
to like certain diseases which debilitate many of
a species' individuals, nor social rules which
cause people to be undernourished or severely
depressed. One might wish to dismiss a neo-
Humean about reasons who thinks that reasons
exist for an individual only if they match what
that individual wants. Yet modern day non-
cognitivists (and anti-realists more generally)
have gone to great lengths to construct inter-
subjective notions of what it is right to do (inde-
pendent of any individual's preferences)
although still based on the notion of what many
of us approve and disapprove of. (Particularly
prominent here are Simon BLACKBURN and Allan
Gibbard.) How, then, does Foot's account differ
from this? In other words, we need a firmer
grasp on the notion of a 'desire' or 'want' in her
work and how it differs from modern types of
anti-realism. One could sketch the start of an
answer here. Foot's position is essentially realist
in that she takes our attitudes towards patterns
of life as themselves a natural part of what it is
to be human. One cannot choose such things.
Our evaluative practices are already shaped and
296
help make us the beings we are; they themselves
are patterns of natural normativity. However,
more detail is needed to make this thought con-
vincing and modern non-cognitivists have made
great strides in showing how their account can
accommodate this thought whilst working with
anti-realist resources.
Although this entry is partly critical, that is
only because Foot raised such interesting ques-
tions in a notably pointed fashion. She set many
good and central debates in motion. Her work
deserves to be read and reread in subsequent
generations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Virtues and Vices (Oxford, 1978; 2nd edn,
Oxford, 2002).
Natural Goodness (Oxford, 2001).
Moral Dilemmas (Oxford, 2002).
Other Relevant Works
(Ed. with intro.), Theories of Ethics (Oxford,
1967).
Further Reading
Blackburn, Simon, Ruling Passions (Oxford,
1998).
Hursthouse, Rosalind, Gavin Lawrence and
Warren Quinn (eds), Virtues and Reasons:
Philippa Foot and Moral Theory (Oxford,
1995).
Simon Kirchin
FORSYTH, Thomas Miller (1871-1958)
T.M. Forsyth was born in Edinburgh on 7
March 1871 and died there on 12 December
1958. He studied under Andrew Seth (PRINGLE-
PATTISON), Henry Calderwood and James SETH
at the University of Edinburgh (MA, 1899;
DPhil 1908), and attended lectures at the
University of Halle and the Sorbonne. After

graduation, he was 'private assistant' to Pringle-
Pattison in logic and metaphysics, and lectured
in education at Edinburgh; he was subsequently
assistant in logic and metaphysics at St
Andrews to G.F. STOUT (1905-11).
In 1911 Forsyth was selected for a profes-
sorship at Victoria College in Stellenbosch,
South Africa, but the decision was overruled by
the college (which preferred NJ. Briimmer).
Forsyth became Professor of Philosophy at
Grey University College [later, University
College of the Orange Free State] in
Bloemfontein (1911-33). Coming out of retire-
ment to teach at Rhodes University in
Grahamstown (1941-4), he continued to be
active in philosophical research, but left South
Africa in the mid 1950s.
Forsyth's first book, English Philosophy
(1910), was based on his doctoral thesis. Here,
Forsyth traced the development of English phi-
losophy starting with Bacon, focusing on the
nature of philosophical method (i.e. 'the
meaning and scope of knowledge') and partic-
ularly on the question whether reality is
knowable. Forsyth claimed that, in the empiri-
cist tradition, reality was ultimately unknow-
able; it was only with T.H. Green, F.H.
BRADLEY and Stout - culminating with
Shadworth Hodgson - that the relation
between reality and experience (i.e. knowledge
of reality) was properly understood. Here,
while reality may be unknown, it is not
unknowable. Forsyth went beyond Hodgson,
however, arguing that Hodgson's realist view is
not fully adequate to idealism, and that 'reality
is experience ... which can be realized' only in
consciousness.
God and the World (1952) is based on
articles written between 1929 and 1950. Here,
Forsyth presents various accounts of the
relation of God to the world, from Plato and
Aristotle to Spinoza and Bergson, focusing on
the themes of cause and creation. Forsyth opts
for 'creative evolution', but remains within a
broadly idealist - specifically 'holist' - tradition.
Though he does not explicitly discuss Pringle-
Pattison, Forsyth's understanding of God as
297
FOSTER
immanent and transcendent and 'one with the
ultimate reality of the universe', and of the
'reality' of finite individuals clearly reflects
Pringle-Pattison's view. Forsyth is also influ-
enced by J.M.E. McTAGGART's account of the
Absolute as 'love'.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
English Philosophy: A Study of its Method
and General Development (1910).
'The Significance of Holism', South African
Journal of Science, vol. 26 (1929), pp.
945-8.
God and the World (1952).
William Sweet
FOSTER, Michael Beresford (1903-59)
Michael Foster was born in Barnet,
Hertfordshire on 11 April 1903 and died in
Oxford on the night of 14/15 October 1959.
He attended the Merchant Taylors' School in
London from 1915 to 1921, and proceeded to
St John's College Oxford, where he earned first
class honours in Classical Moderations and
literae humaniores ('Greats'), taking his BA in
1925. He was a schoolmaster from 1925 to
1926 at Rossall School in Lancashire. Securing
a two-year studentship from Oxford, he went
to Germany, studying at Gottingen, the
Technische Hochschule in Dresden, and Kiel. A
dissertation on Hegel's political philosophy,
supervised by Richard Kroner, earned him the
DPhil from Kiel in 1928. He taught logic at
Aberdeen from 1928 to 1929. From 1929 to
1930 he was lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford,
and in 1930 he obtained the permanent
position of student (i.e. fellow) of Christ
Church. From then on he taught philosophy in
the Greats programme. At the start of World
War II he left to enlist in the army as a private.
By the end of the war he had attained a high
FOSTER
rank in military Intelligence. At some undeter-
mined point during the war, apparently partly
due to the influence of Buchmanism, he
adopted an idiosyncratic but rigorously moral
and introspective form of Protestantism. He
returned to Oxford in 1945, but, wishing to
help heal cultural relations with Germany, went
in 1948 to the University of Cologne to teach
political science as a guest lecturer. He came
back to Christ Church in 1950, continuing as
Greats teacher until his death. On the night of
14/15 October 1959, apparently having fallen
into one of the bouts of severe depression which
plagued his adulthood, he took his own life by
means of coal-gas poisoning in his rooms at
Christ Church. He died unmarried.
Foster's thought shows both continuity and
discontinuity. The continuity lies in his lifelong
preoccupation with the relationship of
Christian theology to modern Western philos-
ophy. The discontinuity, which is marked after
the war, lies in the way he approaches this rela-
tionship. Before the war he writes dispassion-
ately as a historian of philosophy, explaining
the genesis of modern philosophy out of certain
Christian ideas; after the war he writes from a
partisan Christian perspective as an analytic
philosopher, attempting to evoke the meaning
of Christian theological statements and
compare them with the statements of modern
humanism. In what follows we treat each phase
of Foster's thought separately, then discuss his
overall significance.
In his early phase, Foster contends that
almost everything in modern European philos-
ophy which is specifically modern (as opposed
to Greek) has its source in Christian revelation
(The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel,
pp. 166, 192). The contents of Christian
theology (by which Foster means doctrines such
as creation, law, incarnation, providence and
Trinity) have been taken up into Western phi-
losophy over a period of many centuries, with
the result that the contents of modern philoso-
phy are radically different from what they
would have been had Christianity never existed.
That Christian ideas had permeated medieval
298
philosophy was granted by all, but Foster
wishes to argue that the process of permeation
of philosophy by revelation continued 'with
incomparably greater intensity' after the
Reformation (The Opposition Between Hegel
and the Philosophy of Empiricism', p. 83, n. 1).
The driving post-Reformation influence was
the doctrine of creation. This doctrine, he
argues, provided the metaphysical assumptions
underlying the rise of modern natural science
and the rise of modern political theory. We
will discuss each of these connections in turn.
The argument concerning the rise of modern
science, presented very articulately in a series of
articles in Mind, is here given in only skeletal
form. For Foster, 'Rationalism in philosophy of
nature is the doctrine that the essence of nature
is intelligible ... It is the theory of nature pre-
supposed by the possibility of an a priori
(deductive or demonstrative) science of nature'
('Christian Theology and Modern Science of
Nature (II.)', p. 2). Plato and Aristotle are both
rationalists in the philosophy of nature because
they presume that the essences of natural things
are intelligible. This presumption, for Foster,
implicitly involves the following linked propo-
sitions: (1) the essences of natural things are
separable from their individual embodiments;
(2) the essences of things exist as thoughts in the
mind of God; (3) God being nothing but
reason, there is nothing in his thoughts imper-
vious to reason; (4) Human thought, being
rational insofar as it is pure, is divine in nature,
and humanity can therefore think God's
thoughts after him; (5) humanity can therefore
know the essences of all natural things by pure
reason. It follows from this that for Plato and
Aristotle a purely deductive science of nature,
one abstracting from all sense-experience (i.e.
which requires no sense-experience to demon-
strate anything), is possible. For Foster, this
analysis of Greek philosophy of nature applies
(albeit with qualifications) to medieval philos-
ophy, to seventeenth-centuiy rationalism and to
Hegel.
Against the rationalist account of nature
there is the empiricist account. In the empiricist

account the 'real essence' of things is unknow-
able, and hence no purely deductive natural
science based on knowledge of essences is
possible. However, in empiricism sense-experi-
ence (which for rationalism is the source of error
in knowledge of nature) yields genuine knowl-
edge. If sense-experience is trustworthy, then
natural science can rely upon empirical methods,
i.e. observation and experiment. This does not
mean that natural science must exclude all
rational procedures (e.g., the use of mathemati-
cal models), but it does mean that the empirical
element is inescapable. Modern natural science
could not begin until natural philosophers,
including even some of the rationalists (e.g.,
Descartes) admitted this requirement.
This new empirical science had no justifica-
tion outside the assumption that natural things
as we experience them are fully 'real', not defec-
tive copies of ideas corrupted by embodiment
in irrational matter. The question arises where
the early modern philosophers got their confi-
dence that natural objects were real. For Foster,
the source of this conviction was Christianity.
Christianity asserted that nature was created by
an omnipotent God. Foster understands God's
omnipotence to imply that God was unlimited
in creation by two crucial 'Greek' constraints,
i.e. imperfect, pre-existent matter (which could
frustrate his intentions) and an eternal set of
ideas (which would dictate his purposes).
Christianity, by giving God the power of
creating ex nibilo, denied that matter could
interfere in any way with the realization of his
creative intentions.
Nature, therefore, was the exact embodi-
ment of God's will. Further, since God's will
was not constrained by any necessity inherent
in the ideas, the human mind could not hope to
reason out what God must have created; it
could only try to discover what he did create.
Thus, the consequences of divine omnipotence
guarantee that natural things are real and hence
knowable, but knowable only through empir-
ical investigation.
For Foster, Greek political philosophy, like
Greek natural philosophy, was again rational-
299
FOSTER
ist. It assumed that there was one ideal form of
the good political order, and that this form
was graspable wholly by reason. There was
thus a trans-historical standard of judgement
for any society. Operating entirely in accord
with this standard, the rulers (in the Greek
view) were to impose the ideal form upon each
society, as far as circumstances would allow.
Such rulers did not, in the strict sense, make
law. They only applied the eternal law recog-
nized by means of reason. For the rulers to do
more than this, to invent laws suitable to their
own taste, would have been for them to admit
an irrational element into the state, and Greek
thought revolted at this.
The political philosophy of the empiricists
(e.g., Hobbes and Locke) is quite different.
They understand the rulers of a society
(whether monarchs or legislative assemblies)
to be sovereigns. A ruler who is sovereign is not
merely the enactor but the source of law. Law
in a society is what is posited by the sovereign,
not something derived from some alleged trans-
historical standard. The justification of any
law, the rightfulness of its claim to be true law,
depends not upon its correspondence with any
ideal pattern but upon its being posited by the
will of the sovereign. There is something essen-
tially inscrutable about law when understood in
this way. It is grounded in will, and will is not
essentially connected with a rational standard
of the good. Having absorbed this notion, the
modern state sees itself as radically self-deter-
mining and even self-creating, whereas the good
polls of Plato's Republic, lacking the notion of
sovereignty, could neither transgress the legis-
lation required by eternal reason, nor even
bring itself into existence. We cannot, then,
understand the modern state without grasping
a trans-rational reality, sovereign political will,
which cannot be accounted for on rationalist
principles (Plato and Hegel, pp. 117, 132ff.).
The concept of sovereignty can be traced
back to the Christian doctrine of creation. The
will of the sovereign is like the will of God as
seen in the book of Genesis. As God creates the
order of the world by his arbitrary fiat, so the
FOSTER
sovereign creates law by his word alone. As
God in creating nature is not answerable to
any set of ideas, so the sovereign in a state is not
answerable to any trans-historical definition of
the good state. The law-making activity of the
sovereign is rightly free, as God in creating the
world is free. The self-determination of the
modern state is then rightly understood as a
free act of creation. In this respect, Hobbes
understood the nature of the state better than
Hegel. Foster notes that Hobbes explicitly
makes a parallel between God as creator and
man as law-giver. Further, he shows that the
contrast between the Hobbesian sovereign
and the merely informing Platonic rulers is
exactly the same as the contrast between the
Creator of the Bible, and the merely inform-
ing Demiurge of Plato's Timaeus (Plato and
Hegel, pp. 26, 180-204). Thus, in a series of
inspired comparisons, Foster is able to make
the case that the doctrine of creation lies
beneath both modern natural science and
modern political theory.
After the war, Foster ceased writing in the
historical mode. Though he continued to regard
the development of modern philosophy (phi-
losophy up to about 1918) as essentially the
unfolding of Christian assumptions, he was
less concerned with Christianity's historical
influence upon past philosophy and more con-
cerned with Christianity's relationship to con-
temporary philosophy, which for him meant
the analytical philosophy of the 1950s. What
did Christianity and analytical philosophy have
to say about the world and about each other?
Were they compatible?
In Mystery and Philosophy (1957) Foster
distinguished between 'Hebraic' and 'Hellenic'
thought-models. 'Hebraic' (or 'biblical')
thinking centred on a God of mystery,
'Hellenic' (or 'Greek') thinking on a God
knowable by pure reason. Traditional philos-
ophy was essentially Hellenic, whereas
Christianity was (against Foster's earlier under-
standing of it as a synthesis of Greek and
biblical notions) essentially Hebraic. Analytical
philosophy, however, was ambiguous. On the
300
one hand, it seemed fundamentally opposed to
Christianity because it demanded 'clarity', and
clarity is something that the Hebraic view of
life, with its God of mystery who transcends
human reason, cannot in principle provide.
Also, while analytical philosophy allows that
Christian statements can be meaningful (as
commands, promises, etc.), it does not appear
to allow that they can be true. On the other
hand, Foster saw possibilities within analytical
philosophy for the exposition of Christian
truth, insofar as analytical philosophy, averse to
Hellenic rational ontology, seemed interested
only in the analysis of statements. Foster envi-
sioned a 'de-Hellenized' Christian theology,
which would consist not in ontological propo-
sitions but in 'the analysis of theological state-
ments'. (The phrase 'theological statements' is
not precisely delimited, but it appears to include
selected biblical and creedal affirmations.) A
Christian analytical philosopher would explain
the character of theological statements, and
work out their implications for human knowl-
edge and conduct.
Such philosophical activity would not be
'neutral', i.e. would not start from assumptions
shared by Christians and non-Christians alike.
Yet it would still be genuine philosophy, not
mere apologetics, because lack of neutrality is
inevitable in philosophy. Arguing in a
Collingwoodian fashion, Foster claims that no
philosophy can escape fideistic commitment to
certain 'presuppositions'. The 'humanist' phi-
losophy of, say, Mill, which understands 'man'
concretely and historically, cannot disprove the
'rationalist' philosophy of Descartes, which
posits an abstract and unchanging 'human
nature'; it can only 'confront' rationalism with
its own humanist presuppositions ('"We" in
Modern Philosophy', pp. 202-203, 214-16,
218-19). Christianity is no less entitled to its
own presuppositions, and may justly employ the
methods of analytical philosophy to articulate
itself, to criticize secular humanism, and to chal-
lenge secular humanists to look at the world
from its own perspective ('Contemporary British
Philosophy and Christian Belief, pp. 197-8).

Foster leaves the impression that the presup-
positions of Christianity cannot be philosoph-
ically, scientifically, historically or otherwise
validated, but only lived within and reflected
upon; how this fundamental uncertainty allows
for firmness of faith, Foster does not explain.
Foster had some influence for a time in a
postwar circle of British philosophers who were
interested in Christianity (e.g., MASCALL,
MITCHELL, HARE, CROMBIE, FARRER), but he
was never a leading figure in either analytical
philosophy or philosophy of religion. In polit-
ical philosophy, however, Foster was an excel-
lent scholar and teacher. His splendid
textbook Masters of Political Thought (1941)
was in print for over two decades. His
Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel, a
masterpiece of close, careful interpretation
and of the 'historical' approach to philosophy,
anticipates parts of COLLINGWOOD'S Essay on
Metaphysics, and may well have influenced it.
By far Foster's most influential work,
however, is his writing on the relation of
creation doctrine to the rise of modern science.
His Mind articles have been frequently cited,
praised and criticized by many historians of
science, theologians and philosophers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the
Rise of Modern Natural Science', Mind,
vol. 43 (1934), pp. 446-68.
The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel
(Oxford, 1935).
'Christian Theology and Modern Science of
Nature (I.)', Mind, vol. 44 (1935), pp.
439-66.
'Christian Theology and Modern Science of
Nature (II.)', Mind, vol. 45 (1936), pp.
1-27.
Masters of Political Thought: Plato to
Machiavelli (Boston, 1941).
Mystery and Philosophy (1957).
Other Relevant Works
'The Opposition Between Hegel and the
Philosophy of Empiricism', in B. Wigersma
301
FRY
(ed.), Verhandlungen des Dritten
Hegelkongresses vom 19. bis 23. April
1933 in Rom (Tubingen, 1934), pp.
79-96.
'Some Implications of a Passage in Plato's
Republic", Mind, vol. 46 (1937), pp.
386-93.
'"We" in Modern Philosophy', in Basil
Mitchell (ed.), Faith and Logic (1957), pp.
194-220.
'Contemporary British Philosophy and
Christian Belief [posthumous], The
Christian Scholar, vol. 43 (1960), pp.
185-98.
Further Reading
Ayer, A.J., Part of My Life (Oxford, 1977).
Mabbott, John, Oxford Memories (Oxford,
1986).
Peck, Robert David, The Apologetic
Philosophy of Michael Beresford Foster
(Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1964).
Wybrow, Cameron, Creation, Nature and
Political Order in the Philosophy of
Michael Foster (1903-1959): The Classic
Mind Articles and Others, with Modern
Critical Essays (Lewiston, New York,
1992).
Cameron Wybrow
FRY, Roger Eliot (1866-1934)
Roger Fry was born in Highgate on 14
December 1866 and died in London on 9
September 1934. The son of Quaker parents,
Mariabella (nee Hodgkin) and Edward Fry, a
judge, he was educated at Clifton College,
Bristol and then at the University of Cambridge.
His father had encouraged his interests towards
the sciences and he graduated from King's
College with firsts in natural sciences in 1887
and 1888.
FRY
While at Cambridge Fry was deeply
impressed by the lectures of the then Slade
Professor of Art, J.J. Middleton, and he began
to paint. In 1891 he dropped his scientific work
and travelled in Italy, and in 1892 studied
studio painting at the Academic Julian, Paris.
He returned to Italy in 1894 to make a serious
study of art history, rapidly establishing a rep-
utation as a scholar of the subject and lecturing
on Italian art for the Cambridge Extension
Movement. His first book, Giovanni Bellini,
was published in 1899. In 1900 he began
writing for the Athenaeum and soon became its
regular art critic. His edition of Sir Joshua
Reynolds's Discourses, published in 1905,
contains some of his finest critical and art his-
torical writing.
When he was passed by for the post of Slade
Professor at Oxford in 1904 Fry took up work
offered to him by the American millionaire J.
Pierpoint Morgan as Curator of European
painting at the Metropolitan Museum in New
York. As Morgan's 'European Adviser' he fre-
quently accompanied the millionaire on buying
trips to Europe and in 1906, in France, he
encountered for the first time the work of Paul
Cezanne. The encounter was a revelation for
him. Thereafter he devoted himself to modern
art and, in 1910, when a dispute with Morgan
led to his dismissal from the Metropolitan, he
returned to London to mount the exhibition
'Manet and the Post-Impressionists' at the
Grafton Galleries. The exhibition was sharply
criticized by the traditionalist journals and
newspapers, but Fry was undaunted and in
1912 mounted another show at the Grafton
Galleries. He began to give lectures on painting
at the Fabian Society, became closely associated
with the Blooms bury Group and founded the
Omega Workshops for craftworkers dedicated
to the production of finely made objects of
daily use. At the same time he was developing
his own style of painting in sympathy with
modernist ideas. His writing for the Burlington
Magazine (the publication he had helped to
found in 1903), his collected essays derived
from his Fabian Society lectures and, above all,
302
his 1920 book of his collected essays, Vision
and Design, soon established him not only as
an art critic of considerable note but also as
someone much concerned with philosophical
aesthetics. Two more substantial books,
Transformationss in 1926, and Cezanne in
1927, confirmed his standing as an art historian
as well as a critic. He was elected an honorary
fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 1927
and in 1929 the honorary degree of LL D was
conferred on him by Aberdeen University. In
1933 he became Slade Professor of Art at
Cambridge, having been again rejected for the
similar post at Oxford in 1927. He had deliv-
ered only the first of his inaugural lectures in
Cambridge when he suffered a fall that led to
his death. The inaugural lectures were pub-
lished as Last Lectures in 1939.
From the start of his interest in art, Fry was
fascinated by questions of aesthetics. He was
heir to the slogan 'Art for Art's sake', the essen-
tial declaration of a doctrine, fostered by Pater
and Whistler, that denied any representational
or moral function for art. His own aesthetic
theory was developed from several complex
elements: from his early, profound appreciation
of the formal and structural qualities of the
work of the European old masters, from his
passion for Cezanne's painting, and from his
own practice as a painter. Like Clive BELL,
though less emphatically than Bell, he main-
tained that aesthetic appreciation is of a work's
formal properties and not of its imitative skil-
fulness or verisimilitude to life.
Many of the elements of Fry's theory may be
gleaned from the essays in Vision and Design.
In 'An Essay in Aesthetics' he points out that an
imaginative rather than an actual perception of
something - a scene, an object, an incident -
releases the mind from practical considerations
about what is perceived and allows for a dif-
ferent kind of apprehension of it, one that is free
from any practical or moral necessity. This is
the kind of perception, he maintains, of which
the artist is readily capable. Moreover, it is a
perception in which 'every solid object is subject
to the play of light and shade, and becomes a

mosaic of visual patches, each of which, for the
artist, is related to other visual patches in the
surroundings ...' (Vision and Design, p. 43). He
also ponders the way in which attempts to
establish criteria of the beautiful, either in art or
in nature, so often seem to end in vague meta-
physical ideas or contradiction. Although he
emphatically rejects Tolstoy's moralistic con-
ception of art as the expression of moral feeling,
he finds a way through the confusion about the
criteria of beauty by means of certain of
Tolstoy's remarks. Tolstoy had distinguished
two uses of the word 'beauty', maintaining that
its use as a favourable aesthetic judgement was
quite different from, as Fry himself put it, 'our
praise of a woman, a sunset or a horse as beau-
tiful'. From these considerations Fry argues
that a work of art is not the record of an
already existing and well-defined beauty, but
the expression of a special and unique emotion,
the aesthetic emotion, which is conveyed only
by form. Form is the essential quality of the
work of art and it evokes, he claims, an
emotion that is distinct from the emotions of
life. The artist's vision is one in which the rela-
tionships between objects is quite different from
the relationships apparent in 'ordinary' per-
ception.
In 'The Artist's Vision' Fry passionately
declared that 'aesthetic vision, in terms of
ordinary perception, is a blasphemy against
nature' (Vision and Design, p. 49). He could
scarcely have spoken with more apparent con-
viction, but in fact he was often extremely
doubtful or ambivalent about the formalist
rejection of representation, as well as the
emotions of life, as aesthetically valuable.
Where Clive Bell confidently insisted not only
that representative and descriptive elements
were irrelevant but that they could even detract
from aesthetic value, Fry frequently wrestled
with the thought that a painting's representative
elements cannot be ignored. In 'An Essay in
Aesthetics' he points out that the aesthetic
emotion is aroused by rhythm, mass, space,
light and shade, and colour, all of which, apart
from colour, relate fundamentally to our
303
FRY
physical existence and so arouse emotions
through that close primary relationship. But
he then observes that 'when these emotional
elements are combined with the presentation of
natural appearance, above all with the appear-
ance of the human body, we find that this effect
is indefinitely heightened' (Vision and Design,
p. 38). Doubts emerge again in his essay,
'Retrospect', in which he deems the attempts
made in his own day to separate the pure aes-
thetic response from the compounds in which
it occurs 'the most important advance of
modern times in practical aesthetic'. For he
goes on to consider Giotto's 'Pieta', and in his
appreciation of it detects a sense of fusion
between the aesthetic emotions and the life
emotions it stirs, although he remains unsure as
to whether such a fusion is the ideal aesthetic
condition or merely an indication of a psycho-
logical inadequacy in his own responses. At
the end of the essay he describes the aesthetic
emotion as so distinct and separate that it seems
to be as remote from actual life as the most
useless mathematical theory. Yet at the same
time he remarks: 'One can only say that those
who experience it feel it to have a peculiar
quality of "reality" which makes it a matter of
infinite importance in their lives' (Vision and
Design, p. 244).
Fry's insight into the nature of painting and
his integrity in imparting his vision established
a new and purified aesthetic for his own and
subsequent generations. He was a prolific
writer and a gifted and charismatic teacher
who was not afraid to voice his personal doubts
and uncertainties. His championship of modern
art powerfully influenced public taste, even
though (and perhaps because) he was pro-
nounced by some to be a charlatan and a
maniac, and his fundamental contentions that
all art could and should be appreciated for the
aesthetic significance of its formal qualities,
and that the form of a work of art is its most
essential quality, led to a new attitude in the
appreciation of painting. His approach to art
generated a profoundly different critical vocab-
ulary in which representational and literary
FRY

concepts gave way to those of rhythm, balance, Further Reading

colour, mass and shape. Sir Kenneth Clark
remarked of him that 'Insofar as taste can be
changed by one man, it was changed by Roger
Fry'.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Giovanni Bellini (1899; repr. with an
Introduction by David Alan Brown, 1995).
Vision and Design (1920).
The Artist and Psychoanalysis (1924).
Selected Writings (Michigan, 1926).
Transformations: Critical and Speculative
Essays on Art (1926).
Cezanne: A Study of his Development
(1927).
Flemish Art: A Critical Survey (1927).
Characteristics of French Art (1932).
Reflections on British Painting (1934).
Last Lectures, ed. Kenneth Clark (1939).
Clark, Kenneth, Hoger Fry', Dictionary of
National Biography, 1931-1940, pp.
298-301.
Falkenheim, Jacqueline V., Roger Fry and the
Beginnings of Formalist Art Criticism (Ann
Arbor, Michigan, 1980).
Laing, Donald A., Roger Fry: An Annotated
Bibliography of the Published Writings
(New York, 1979).
Woolf, Virginia, Roger Fry: A Biography
(1940; Brighton, 1976),,
Diane Collinson

Other Relevant Works

Letters of Roger Fry, 2 vols (London and
New York, 1972).

304
 G
GALLIE, Walter Bryce (1912-98)
Bryce Gallic was born in Lenzie near Glasgow
on 5 October 1912 and died in Cardigan on 31
August 1998. He was educated at Sedbergh
School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he
was a classical exhibitioner before graduating
with a BA with first class honours in PPE in
1934 (MA, 1947). He received his BLitt from
Oxford in 1937 for research on 'The Part
Played by Symbols in the Achievement of
Knowledge'. He began his teaching career at
the University College of Swansea (assistant
lecturer in philosophy, 1935-8; lecturer,
1938-48; senior lecturer, 1948-50). His career
was interrupted by wartime service from 1940
to 1945, from which he emerged with the rank
of major and the Croix de Guerre. He left to
join the newly formed University College of
North Staffordshire (later University of Keele)
as Professor of Philosophy in 1950. After
thirteen years at Queen's University, Belfast
(Professor of Logic and Metaphysics,
1954-67), he became Professor of Political
Science at Cambridge (1967-78), where he was
also a fellow of Peterhouse College.
Gallie's first purely philosophical book,
Peirce and Pragmatism (1952), reflects the
strong influence of the pragmatic tradition on
his work. His most famous and still influential
paper, 'Essentially Contested Concepts' (1956),
formed the basis for perhaps his most impor-
tant book, Philosophy and the Historical
Understanding (1964). The latter is in part an
analysis of what it is to write history, in part an
305
analysis of the role of historical understanding
in other disciplines, particularly philosophy.
Throughout the book, he emphasizes the dif-
ference between historical understanding and
scientific understanding. Essentially contested
concepts are those concepts - such as democ-
racy or art - which cannot now be reduced to
one definition or essence, but which have
emerged from an original, common exemplar.
Nevertheless, the attempt to articulate a
common understanding of those concepts
should not be abandoned because 'the contin-
uous competition for acknowledgment as
between contestant users of the concept enables
the original exemplar's achievement to be sus-
tained or developed in optimum fashion'
(Philosophy and the Historical Understanding^
p. 168).
In his account of the foundation of the
University of Keele (A New University: A.D.
Lindsay and the Keele Experiment, 1960),
Gallic describes LINDSAY'S view of the philoso-
pher's task as being 'to question and to explain
the "ultimate worth-whileness" of our main
activities, and to articulate and defend the stan-
dards by which we judge the ultimate value of
work or conduct in any important field'
(p. 25), Such an account might also serve as a
description of Gallie's own approach. A lifelong
democratic socialist, his views on education as
a force for social development can be found in
the reflection on his schooldays, An English
School (1949), as well as his book on Keele (op.
cit.). His final works turned to a philosophical
analysis of war, initially by way of discussion
GALLIE
of Kant, Clausewitz, Marx and Engels, and
Tolstoy (Philosophers of Peace and War,
1978), and then in a more direct discussion of
the changing nature of war in the twentieth
century (Understanding War, 1990).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An English School (1949).
Pierce and Pragmatism (Harmondsworth,
1952).
'Essentially Contested Concepts', Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 56
(1955-6), pp. 167-98.
A New University: A.D. Lindsay and the
Keele Experiment (1960).
Philosophy and the Historical Understanding
(1964).
Philosophers of Peace and War (Cambridge,
1978).
Understanding War (1990).
Further Reading
Anon., The Times, 9 September 1998.
Hookway, C., The Guardian, 12 September
1998.
Sharpe, R.A., The Independent, 5 September
1998.
Stephen Watt
GALLOWAY, George (1861-1933)
George Galloway was born at Upper Stenton
Farm in the parish of Kinglassie, Fife on 11
November 1861 and died on 1 March 1933.
He was educated at Madras College and at St
Andrews, Edinburgh, Gottingen and Berlin uni-
versities. He graduated MA with first class
honours from St Andrews in 1884 and BD
from Edinburgh in 1887. He embarked on a
research degree while serving as assistant
minister at Corstorphine and continued after
his appointment in 1891 as Minister of Kelton
306
Parish. St Andrews awarded him a DPhil. In
1905 Edinburgh made him an honorary DD in
1911. In 1915 he was appointed Principal of St
Mary's College, St Andrews and Primarius
Professor of Theology. He was Baird Lecturer
in the year 1916 to 1917.
Galloway positioned himself in relation to
contemporary developments in the philosophy
of religion in an early paper on 'Hegel and the
Later Tendency of Religious Philosophy' with
which he began his Studies in the Philosophy of
Religion (1904). He saw himself as part of a
reaction against Hegel and as, to some extent,
a follower of Lotze and as a committed plural-
ist. He was inspired to an interest in the devel-
opment of religion by lectures he heard while in
Berlin from Otto Pfleiderer, an interest that
bore fruit in The Principles of Religious
Development (1909). In the Preface to his best-
known book, The Philosophy of Religion
(1914), he announced that his 'general
sympathy' in the matter of philosophical prin-
ciples lay with 'the movement called Personal
Idealism'.
The Idea of Immortality (1919), the text of
his Baird Lectures, shows Galloway to have
been unimpressed by the supposed metaphysi-
cal proofs of immortality. Neither did he believe
that the 'results' of psychical research provided
strong support. He was, however, attracted by
Kant's moral argument and tentatively
advanced a version of it according to which, as
he puts it, personal immortality is 'a demand
man makes on the universe in order that his
moral world may be consistent and harmo-
nious' (ibid., p. 168).
Galloway published widely in journals
ranging from Mind to the American Journal of
Theology. Some of these articles were re-pub-
lished in the three collections he made of his
minor writings.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Studies in the Philosophy of Religion
(Edinburgh, 1904).
The Principles of Religious Development: A
Psychological and Philosophical Study

(1909).
The Philosophy of Religion (Edinburgh,
1914).
The Idea of Immortality: Its Development
and Value (Edinburgh, 1919).
Other Relevant Works
Religion and Modern Thought (Edinburgh,
1922).
Faith and Reason in Religion (1927).
Religion and the Transcendent (1930).
Further Reading
Sell, Alan P.F., The Philosophy of Religion:
1875-1980 (1988), pp. 56-58.
Stuart Brown
GARDINER, Patrick Lancaster (1922-97)
Patrick Lancaster Gardiner was born in
London on 17 March 1922 and died in Oxford
on 24 June 1997. He was the son of A.C.
Gardiner, and educated at Westminster School
followed by Christ Church, Oxford (1940-47),
where he graduated BA in 1946. After war
service (1942-5), and an MA in 1949, Gardiner
became lecturer in philosophy at Wadham
College, Oxford (1949-52), then fellow and
tutor in philosophy, St Antony's, Oxford
(1953-8), and finally, fellow and tutor in phi-
losophy at Magdalen College, Oxford from
1958 until his retirement in 1989. Vice-
President of Magdalen (1977-8), Gardiner was
elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1985.
He married Kathleen Susan Booth in 1955 and
they had two daughters.
Gardiner edited two volumes of selections
and articles in the philosophy of history. The
first was Theories of History (1959), a selection
of readings from Vico until the present day. The
second was The Philosophy of History (1974),
which consisted of ten contemporary articles
307
GARDINER
concerned to describe and evaluate the attempts
of historians to understand the past. Gardiner
also edited an anthology of selections from
Fichte to BRADLEY entitled Nineteenth-Century
Philosophy (1969). Although these volumes
contain little of Gardiner's own writings, they
exhibit the major part of the fields in which his
publications are best known. Gardiner's own
full-scale work consists of his first book The
Nature of Historical Explanation (1942); his
study of the early nineteenth-century philoso-
pher Schopenhauer; and following that, his
book on the Danish writer of the same period,
Kierkegaard. He also published a number of
papers on the writings on historical interpreta-
tions of such earlier German philosophers as
Kant, Herder, Fichte, Hegel and Nietzsche. In
addition, various topics in ethics interested
Gardiner, and some of them are discussed in his
articles on evil and pain; on Bradley's views on
the scope of moral philosophy; and on the dif-
ficulties of characterizing self-deception.
In 'Error, Faith and Self-Deception' Gardiner
rejects a number of familiar accounts of self-
deception but throughout credits each with
some features useful in characterizing the
concept. Thus Bishop Butler took self-deceit
to be a term for people who appear to be
'perfect strangers' to their own characters, and
in Gardiner's words, as if 'they were ignorant
of their deepest purposings and preoccupa-
tions' (p. 221). They are people, Butler said,
who display marked 'partiality to themselves'.
Butler's shortcoming is that he restricted his
cases to moral self-deceit. However, people
deceive themselves about many other things: for
example, their abilities or prospects. Often they
do not deceive themselves about their own
character traits. To treat self-deception as like
deceiving other people reveals many differences
between the two, for in deceiving ourselves we
are ignorant of that fact. In deceiving others we
know that we are doing so. Nor is self-decep-
tion a 'conflict state' in which the person partly
believes and partly disbelieves the same thing.
The genuine self-deceiver is unaware that beliefs
are at variance with the facts, and so is unaware
GARDINER
of any conflict. He has a 'compelling interest'
in not taking full evidence into account; but this
is also true of wishful thinkers. Gardiner con-
cludes that any accurate description of self-
deception will have to take account of the
motives and intentions of the self-deceiver, and
explain why he has a 'compelling interest' in
not acknowledging the truth so apparent to
other people.
Gardiner's three books are measured and
judicious examinations of their subjects. The
Nature of Historical Explanation (1952) begins
by noting some of the questions often asked
about history, questions such as 'is history a
science?' and 'does historical explanation rely
on causal generalizations?' Gardiner discusses
possible answers to such questions by first
examining the differences between the form
and uses of scientific explanation and those of
common sense explanation. He then uses these
differences to criticize claims that the field of
history requires recognition of its distinctive
form of knowledge. This is supposedly
obtained by the historian 're-experiencing
somebody else's thought'. In historical work
there is, therefore, no role for law-like general-
izations or the everyday notion of causation.
But the fact that historical events are unique
and thus unrepeatable, says Gardiner, does not
show that they can be understood only by re-
experiencing them. The historian is certainly
interested in events that are unique in some
respect, such as occurring at a particular time
and place. Yet he is also interested in compar-
ing them to, and contrasting them with, similar
events. The fact that he is trying to reconstruct
the details of a particular event or situation
does not excuse him from recognizing the need
for the ordinary causal regularities of society
and nature. Otherwise he could not compare
his unique events with other events that are
similar in some respects. We can make use of
the regularities of human behaviour in our his-
torical explanations even when, as historians,
we are primarily interested in explaining an
agent's particular action by means of her inten-
tions and plans. For they also are subject to gen-
308
eralizations about how people with those sorts
of intentions behave in given circumstances.
Since the historian is interested in the details
of specific events, a challenge to his explanation
will not rely on attacking the background gen-
eralizations 'implied by it'. Nor will the chal-
lenger argue that those generalizations do not
follow 'from an accepted theory or hypothesis'
Nature of Historical Explanation, p. 96).
Rather, the challenger will instance different
facts, different degrees of their importance and
different connections with other, and perhaps
wider, events. The two historians will often
come to opposing interpretations because they
disagree about those connections, or on their
significance, or on how in general people tend
to behave under given conditions. Historians
offer assessments and judgements based on the
evidence available to them, and all of those
elements can be enlarged or made narrower
by the investigators as the nature and scope of
their historical interests change.
Because some questions about historical
events can be given many sorts of answers,
depending upon the purposes of the questions,
the 'true cause' or 'basic cause' of an event
changes accordingly. Thus the question 'why
did World War I occur?' can be answered in
terms of 'individual human purposes, desires,
weaknesses and abilities' (ibid., p. 105). It can
also be answered in terms of plans, national
policies, political alignments, political doctrine,
social organization or economic trends. In each
case, the 'true cause' will be selected by the his-
torian according to the specific question for
which he wants an answer. Such questions arise
within a specific context or specific point of
view. If that context is not made clear, there is
no way of knowing what kind of answer is
being requested.
Historical explanations that refer to people's
motives and intentions have often been thought
to need separate treatment from those which
make use of 'publicly observable' events, for
motives and intentions do not seem to be
observable by the investigator. How, then, can
the historian know what thoughts or feelings

caused someone's action? Not, Gardiner thinks,
by looking for a causal relation between the
motive or intention and the action. Rather, the
action is explained as an 'instance' of the
agent's patterns of normal behaviour. The
action is what is to be expected of a person with
that pattern, for example of dishonesty or gen-
erosity or short temper. Moreover, people can
tell us either directly, or in writing, or through
third parties, what they think and feel. They can
also tell us by various means what their desires,
plans, policies and programmes are at present
or were in the past. If they are lying or
confused, we have ways of discovering that
their actions and words are in conflict. We can
also rely on our own experience to give us some
guidance on what makes other people behave
as they do. Often we are mistaken, but then we
need to obtain more information about, and
from, people whose experience more closely
resembles that of the agent. In the case of the
dead we apply what we know of the rest of the
person's behaviour, 'or the time at which he
lived, of the situation in which he was placed'
(ibid., p. 136). The historian cannot do more
than to use criteria of this kind to deal with the
many different kinds of historical questions
that require many different sorts of answers.
Gardiner's book on Schopenhauer's thought
(1963) remains a large contribution to the study
of a philosopher whose name in the mid twen-
tieth century in English-speaking countries was
better known than his ideas. Deeply influenced
by Kant's criticism of metaphysical specula-
tion that attempted to reveal what human
beings had no real means of knowing,
Schopenhauer was interested in being clear as
to where the limits of human knowledge lay.
Religion and pre-Kantian philosophers had
long claimed, by different means, to have access
to a world beyond ordinary rational human
experience: to be able to show, for example,
that God exists and that the soul is immortal.
These and many other conclusions, said
Schopenhauer, are not literally true; they are
merely allegories of human social and moral
life. We must begin by accepting Kant's dis-
309
GARDINER
tinction between what we can actually perceive
(phenomena) and the world as it exists in itself
(noumena). What human beings perceive as
external objects in space and time are the result
of the order and structure contributed by their
minds to their sense impressions. The human
mind thus contributes its ability to form the
general concepts that allow us to clarify phe-
nomena and organize the resulting categories
into the structure of ideas by which we cope
with the perceived world.
Human beings also have self-consciousness.
They are aware of themselves as active agents
who can express their power to act - their will
- through their bodily actions. What they will
is what they do, and what they do shows us,
and is the same as, what they will to do. This
power has no goal or rational structure, but its
force makes it the controller of the mind and
gives it mastery over reason. The chief sources
of human conduct lie in the activity of the will
although we are unconscious of much of it,
and hence do not understand the significance or
origin of large areas of our own behaviour. Far
from being the rational and optimistic crea-
tures celebrated by the leaders of the European
Enlightenment, human beings are the pes-
simistic and anxiety-ridden victims of the prim-
itive drives that characterize the activity of the
will. People cannot change their characters
since they have too little freedom of choice.
Nevertheless, those individuals who understand
their predicament and the illusions under which
most people live can become morally worthy by
being compassionate towards other people
because all human beings share the same nature
and thus the same power of will. Immoral
actions are attacks upon other people's wills
and so a denial of what all people have in
common. There is, of course, no realm of objec-
tive values lying outside the world of phenom-
ena, and even if there were we could not know
anything of it. What we can know is that
human life, like that of the rest of nature, is one
of suffering, and disappointment that it has no
purpose or design that we can come to know
and use in guiding our activities.
GARDINER
Much as he is impressed with the originality
and force of some of Schopenhauer's views,
Gardiner also advances many objections. For
example, he asks whether 'the notion we have of
ourselves as separate individuals should
inescapably and inevitably issue in action of an
unrestrictedly egotistical kind' (Schopenhauer,
p. 276). Or whether a person cannot aid another
unless he or she believes that in some sense the
two of them are identical. Again, to claim as
Schopenhauer does, 'that what a man "truly"
wills he necessarily does, that... his will is what
he does, only sounds plausible until we set the
claim against the plain facts of common thought
and speech' (ibid., p. 160). For people often do
not carry out what they say they fully intended
to do. This certainly does not always show that
they never had any such intention. There are
many reasons why intentions are not carried
out: they range from unexpected obstacles to
changes of mind just before, or in the early
stages, of the action. 'Again, do we really want
to claim in every case that a man only knows
whether he has decided to do something when
he has in fact done it?' (ibid., p. 160).
Gardiner's last book, Kierkegaard (1988), is
an account of an author who was a theologian
and advocate of specific religious and moral
views rather than a philosopher in any 'tradi-
tional sense of the term' (p. 15). Against
common opinion of the time and place,
Kierkegaard believed that commitment to a
particular way of life, for example a Christian
one, 'was a matter of individual decision ...
without the possibility of objective justifica-
tion' (Kierkegaard, p. 113). So the moral judge-
ments that people make are also no more than
'personal decisions'. There is no 'discoverable
realm of objective values subsisting indepen-
dently of ourselves' (ibid., p. 114). If we adhere
to some 'accepted code of conduct', we run
the risk of 'inauthenticity' and 'bad faith' (ibid.).
The notion of 'truly believing in something'
plays an important role in Kierkegaard's
thought and Gardiner says that it has two
features: (1) 'what is believed corresponds to
what is actually the case', and (2) the belief
310
must be 'genuinely or deeply held'. But since the
latter feature does not guarantee the truth of the
former, the problem of 'truly believing' for
Kierkegaard amounts to discovering the nature
of genuine or truly held belief: how it is found,
recognized, adhered to and affects the believer's
life. Gardiner's interest in Kierkegaard's teach-
ings resembles in part his interest in
Schopenhauer's thought. For both men can be
described by what Gardiner writes of
Kierkegaard: 'Some critics think Kierkegaard
an anti-philosopher rather than a philosopher,
not merely out of sympathy with the aims of
dispassionate enquiry, but actively intent on
undermining the assumptions of those who
pursued it' (ibid., p. 16)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Nature of Historical Explanation
(Oxford, 1952).
Schopenhauer (1963).
Kierkegaard (New York, 1988).
Other Relevant Works
'On Assenting to a Moral Principle',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
55 (1954-5), pp. 23-44.
'Error, Faith and Self-Deception',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
70 (1969-70), pp. 187-200.
'German Philosophy and the Rise of
Relativism', The Monist, vol. 64 (1981),
pp. 138-54.
Further Reading
Alexander, I.W., 'Review of Schopenhauer,
Philosophical Books, vol. 5, no. 2 (1964),
pp. 14-16.
Copleston, F.C., 'Review of Schopenhauer,
Mind, vol. 73 (1964), pp. 456-7.
Dray, William, Laws and Explanation in
History (Oxford, 1957), pp. 142-53.
Flew, Antony, 'Review of The Nature of
Historical Explanation', Philosophy, vol.
29 (1954), pp. 86-7.
Robert Brown

GASKING, Douglas Aidan Trist (1911-94)
Douglas Gasking was born in Bangor, Canada
on 6 December 1911, while his parents were
temporarily resident in that country, and died
in Melbourne, Australia on 4 April 1994. His
family returned to the United Kingdom, first
briefly to Scotland and then to England, while
Douglas was still a very young child. His first
university degree was taken at Liverpool,
(1935). Here his honours thesis was on John
Locke's theory of meaning, an interest which
was to stay with him throughout his life.
Seeking to study under WITTGENSTEIN, he then
spent four years at Cambridge, completing the
Tripos in 1938. This was followed by another
year of work and attendance at Wittgenstein's
classes. An interesting account of his views on
the philosophical content of these studies is to
be found in his paper 'Wittgenstein as a
Teacher' (1951).
From 1939 Gasking taught for five years at
the University of Queensland and elsewhere
before taking a post at the University of
Melbourne in 1946, where he taught more or
less continuously until his retirement in 1976.
He was visiting professor for a semester at
Cornell University in 1961. In 1966 he suc-
ceeded A.B. GIBSON in the Boyce Gibson Chair
of Philosophy. He spent his first year of retire-
ment as part-time visiting professor in the
Philosophy Department of La Trobe University.
Throughout his years of retirement he contin-
ued to read and think intensively, to attend
seminars and have regular discussions with col-
leagues. As a person, he is remembered by those
who knew him as amiable, open-minded,
relaxed and unflappable in the philosophical
discussions that he enjoyed so much.
Gasking's main interests were philosophy of
logic (broadly construed) and philosophy of
language. He worked also in epistemology, the
philosophy of mind and the theory of causa-
tion. The nine philosophical papers which were
published during his lifetime are no measure of
the breadth and importance of his research
effort, nor of its impact on philosophy in
311
GASKING
Australia, much of which came about through
his teaching and delivery of conference papers.
A regret shared by those who knew him is that
he did not publish more and, in particular, that
he never provided a synthesis of his views in a
monograph. After his death, when a small
treasure trove of additional publishable
material came to light, a posthumous collection,
Language Logic and Causation (1996), has
made some more of his work available.
Gasking is probably most famous in the
international philosophical community for his
much discussed and anthologized early work,
'Mathematics and the World' (1940), in which
he developed and defended a clear and intelli-
gible sense in which mathematics could be
regarded as conventional. With a characteristic
open-mindedness he later abandoned the
theory in the face of what he took to be sub-
stantial counter-arguments, particularly those
mounted by Hector-Neri Castaneda. His
defence of a manipulability theory of causation,
in 'Causation and Recipes' (1955), also drew
much attention. Two further papers related to
this theme were published posthumously in the
collection Language,, Logic and Causation.
Gasking's 1960 paper 'Clusters' is held by
some to be his best work. In this highly abstract
paper, he locates clusters in a taxonomy of
classes, specified according to the logical rela-
tions involved. In a way typical of much of his
writing, the notion of a cluster is developed
with great clarity and the use of uncontrover-
sial examples before being deployed to throw
unexpected light on a variety of philosophical
topics, including sense and reference, reduc-
tionism and the objective-subjective distinc-
tion. The paper is an example of the positive
and constructive character of all Gasking's
work: the discovery of truth rather than the
exposure of error was his dominant goal.
The paper 'Criteria, Analyticity and the
Identity-Thesis', written in about 1967 and
published posthumously, illustrates both the
influence of Wittgenstein on Gasking's work
and the way in which he developed and clari-
fied Wittgensteinian material. Here he recog-
GASKING
nized both the fertility and the obscurity of
Wittgenstein's notion of a criterion and went on
to give an account of criteria which is both
plausible and completely lucid. This paper is
notable for its development of conceptions of
contingent analytic truths, and of arguments
falling outside the categories 'inductive' and
'deductive'. (In the latter connection, see also
'Inductive and Deductive Arguments'.)
Gasking maintained close connections with
other disciplines, notably history and philoso-
phy of science, education, Jaw and history. His
writings Examinations and the Aims of
Education (1968) and The Historian's Craft
and Scientific History' (1950) are among the
fruits of these dialogues. Reciprocally, the influ-
ences on Gasking's work were many and
various. While he was influenced by, and in
many respects admiring of, Wittgenstein, many
of Gasking's readers would scarcely count him
as a Wittgensteinian, so different are their
styles. Certainly his work with Wittgenstein at
Cambridge was a major determinant of his
interests in philosophy. He expounded to
decades of honours students a lucid and com-
prehensive interpretation of Wittgenstein's
teaching, kept fresh with unexpected applica-
tions and striking illustrations. Kripke's per-
spective on Wittgenstein on rule-following
(1982) came as no surprise to Gasking's
students. He played a major role in introducing
the Australasian philosophical world to the
teachings of Wittgenstein he had absorbed in
the 1930s, and he expounded and significantly
developed Wittgensteinian ideas in his own
philosophical enquiries.
Gasking was always open to learn from
others and to incorporate and develop their
ideas and methods. In 'Causation and Recipes',
for example, he recognized the value of an
approach to causation found in R.G.
COLLINGWOOD, a philosopher with whom
Gasking would otherwise have had little in
common. He admired the clarity and directness
of the logical positivists and he held Frank
RAMSEY and Charles Peirce in very high esteem.
In an unpublished paper, 'Wittgenstein's
312
Influence', written in the early 1960s, he offered
some interesting reflections that link these
philosophers, pointing out that a period in
which Ramsey and Wittgenstein were in intense
discussions was just subsequent to Ramsey's
being deeply impressed with Peirce's Chance,
Love and Logic, and that the ideas of that book
must surely have intruded into those discus-
sions. Noting some important common themes,
Gasking hypothesized that Peirce, via Ramsey,
may well have been a major influence in the
development of Wittgenstein's thought.
After his period at Cornell, the work of
Quine, especially his Word and Object, became
a major focus of Gasking's attention. His paper
'The Analytic-Synthetic Controversy' (1972) is
an outcome of attention given to Quine's work.
His interest in American philosophers strength-
ened as he kept abreast of the important devel-
opments in epistemology, semantics, meta-
physics and the philosophy of mind in the work
of Sellars, Chisholm, Davidson, Lewis, Putnam
and Kripke.
Gasking's papers include some of the finest
philosophical writing to emerge from Australia
in the 1960s and 1970s. While others have
developed some ideas in them further, and there
are some theses that few now find acceptable,
a great deal is startlingly fresh despite the
passage of years. His use of technical terms is
a model for other writers: such terms are intro-
duced clearly and explicitly, and always for a
definite classificatory or explanatory purpose.
The value of the conceptual equipment that he
developed in tackling various topics frequently
persists, even when his principal claim is no
longer accepted.
Gasking was a gifted teacher. In his three
decades at the University of Melbourne, he
established amongst his students a deep appre-
ciation both of the subjects he taught and of his
philosophical values and methods. While
deeply concerned with the general nature of
reasoning, he attended closely to its functioning
in specific, sometimes abstruse, areas. He
lectured on such diverse and specialist areas as
GodePs Theorem and the nature of statistical

inference. During his teaching tenure his
courses dealt with practically every major con-
temporary philosophical issue relating to
language and reasoning, from intuitionist logic
to the nature of historical explanation, from the
Whorfian hypothesis to entailment, from sci-
entific method to the nature of supervenience.
He dealt with all such topics by extracting the
philosophical issues in their most unencum-
bered form. The opportunity for major
advances in philosophical understanding in so
palatable a form drew colleagues as well as
students back to Gasking's courses year after
year.
Gasking's teaching and conference papers
did a great deal to entrench in Australian phi-
losophy an interest in such topics as the theory
of knowledge, the logic of conditionals and the
nature of probability, as the publications of
later Australian philosophers have borne out.
His work not only led to the fruitful develop-
ment of important ideas but helped establish
high standards of clarity and accessibility.
Professor Frank Jackson, in his Preface to
Language, Logic and Causation, wrote of 'the
directness, penetration and transparent intel-
lectual honesty of his lectures, writings and
contributions to discussion ...'. Gasking is
remembered in this way by everyone with
whom he came into philosophical contact.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Mathematics and the World', Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 18, no. 1 (May
1940), pp. 1-36. Included in Language
Logic and Causation.
'Anderson and the Tractatus logico-
philosophicus\ Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 27, no. 1 (May 1949), pp.
1-26.
(with A.C. Jackson), 'Wittgenstein as a
Teacher', Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 29, no. 2 (May 1951), pp.
1-26.
'I Could if I Chose', Analysis, vol. 12 no. 6
(June 1952), pp. 129-30.
The Philosophy of John Wisdom', pts I and
313
GASKING
II, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol.
32, nos 2, 3 (August and December 1954),
pp. 136-56,185-212.
'Causation and Recipes', Mind, vol. 64, no. 4
(October 1955), pp. 479-87. Included in
Language Logic and Causation.
'Clusters', Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 38, no. 1 (May 1960), pp.
1-36. Included in Language Logic and
Causation.
'The Analytic-Synthetic Controversy',
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol.
50, no. 2 (August 1972), pp. 107-23.
Language, Logic and Causation:
Philosophical Writings of Douglas
Gasking, ed I.T. Oakley and L.J. O'Neill
(Melbourne, 1996). This volume contains
the three papers indicated above together
with the following papers by Gasking not
previously published elsewhere: 'Tenable
Opinions'; 'Subjective Probability'; 'The
Logic of Deceit'; 'Inductive and Deductive
Arguments'; 'Criteria, Analyticity and the
Identity-Thesis'; 'Hypothetical, Recipes
and Causation'; and 'Causation and
Action'.
Other Relevant Works
Examinations and the Aims of Education
(Melbourne, 1945; 2nd edn, 1948; repr.
1968).
'The Historian's Craft and Scientific History',
Historical Studies, vol. 4, no. 14 (May
1950), pp. 112-20. Also contains a
bibliography of discussions of and replies
to Gasking's works.
Further Reading
Castaneda, Hector-Neri, 'Arithmetic and
Reality', Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 37, no. 2 (August 1959),
pp. 91-107.
Kripke, Saul A., Wittgenstein on Rules and
Private Language (Oxford, 1982).
Peirce, Charles S., Chance, Love and Logic:
Philosophical Essays by the late Charles S.
Peirce (1923; ed. Morris R. Cohen, New
GASKING
York, 1968).
Quine, W.V.O., Word and Object
(Cambridge, Mass., 1960).
Smart, J.J.C., 'Douglas Aidan Trist Gasking',
Proceedings of the Australian Academy of
the Humanities, vol. 19, (1994), pp. 57-9.
Tim Oakley and L. J. O'Neill
GEACH, Peter Thomas (1916-)
Peter Geach was born in Lower Chelsea on 29
March 1916. His father, George Hender
Geach, worked in the Indian Educational
Service and taught philosophy. His mother was
Eleanora Frederyka Adolfina Sgonina, the
daughter of Polish emigrants to England. He
was educated at Llandaff Cathedral School,
Clifton College, and Balliol College, Oxford,
where he held a domus scholarship. His philo-
sophical studies began well before he went to
university, through his reading of books in his
father's library while his father was abroad in
India. The elder Geach had had a brilliant
career in moral sciences at Trinity College,
Cambridge, and was taught by RUSSELL,
MOORE, MCTAGGART, W.E. JOHNSON and
Neville KEYNES. With his father (now returned
from India) the young Peter Geach studied
Neville Keynes's Formal Logic, the Principia
mathematica of Russell and WHITEHEAD,
Berkeley's Dialogues and Mill's Utilitarianism.
But his first serious philosophical reading had
been of McTaggart's Some Dogmas of
Religion, to be followed later by The Nature of
Existence, and he took McTaggartian beliefs
with him to Oxford (where his tutor was
Donald Allan). In 1938 Geach was received
into the Catholic Church, and this prompted
him to begin a lifetime's study of Aquinas. He
was awarded first class honours in literae
humaniores at Oxford in 1938, and upon grad-
uation took up a research scholarship tenable
314
at St Deiniol's Library, Hawarden, where he
chose as his topic McTaggart's philosophy.
(Forty years later Geach published his study of
McTaggart, Truth, Love and Immortality,
1979.) In 1941 he married Elizabeth
ANSCOMBE, who was like Geach a convert to
Catholicism. They were to become the best
known and the most distinguished British
philosophical couple of their time. During the
years of World War II Geach worked in timber
production, and learned Italian and Polish,
making contact also with Polish philosophers
and logicians who were among his fellow
workers. After the war the couple moved to
Cambridge, where they became close associates
of Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN. Geach was
appointed to an assistant lectureship in philos-
ophy at the University of Birmingham in 1951,
and was successively promoted to lecturer,
senior lecturer, and reader in logic. In 1966 he
was appointed to a newly created Chair of
Logic at the University of Leeds, where he
stayed until his retirement in 1981, when he
moved back to Cambridge, where Elizabeth
Anscombe was by now professor (having spent
the earlier part of her own career in Oxford as
fellow of Somerville College). He has lived in
Cambridge ever since, surviving Professor
Anscombe, who died in 2001. He was elected
to a fellowship of the British Academy in 1965,
and to an honorary fellowship of Balliol
College in 1979. He was awarded a Papal
Medal pro ecclesia etpontifice in 1999, and the
Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association in 2000.
Geach has published several substantial
monographs. Together with his voluminous
output of shorter articles and reviews, they
manifest the thinking of a vigorous controver-
sialist who went to battle many times against
what he saw as received or fashionable misun-
derstandings and doctrines that were either ill
thought through or lacked historical depth. He
has not hesitated to raise problems to which he
did not find a ready solution, and several of his
best-known writings have this character
(examples are 'Intentional Identity',

'Entailment' and 'Some Problems about Time',
all reprinted in Logic Matters).
Whereas his best-known proposal relates to
the nature of identity, all Geach's work reflects
secure foundations in philosophically informed
historical scholarship and logical insights, and
an acute critical sense. His knowledge of lan-
guages, not only classical Greek and Latin, but
also European languages including Polish, has
enabled him to discriminate quirks of idiom
from logically significant distinctions, and helps
to explain why he has gained respect among
scholars of linguistics. His deep knowledge of
Frege's writings and of Wittgenstein's Tractatus
logico-philosophicus furnished him with a firm
grasp of the model of language that is articu-
lated in the logical systems of Gottlob Frege and
that has, since Frege, become the standard
formal logical language. Geach contributed the
chapter on Frege to Three Philosophers, and
with Max BLACK translated and edited the
standard reference collection of Frege's writings
on the philosophy of language and logic. Many
of the issues that Geach addresses arise when
Frege's logic is tested as a model for everyday
language.
The building-blocks of Frege's logic are
names, predicate-expressions, connectives and
quantifiers ('all' and 'some' - the 'universal'
and 'existential' quantifiers). Geach has con-
tributed to the understanding of all these classes
of expression, and has brought into promi-
nence questions about constructions that resist
being fitted into one or another of them.
Against Frege and Russell, he has argued in
favour of shared names. ('"Horse" is the proper
name of one and the same kind of animal', he
argues in 'Names and Identity'.) In Geach's
view, names themselves are simple in import
even if they are made up of several words; their
import being precisely to name or refer to
whatever it is they are names of. On the other
hand, predicate-expressions can be complex
because they may have meaningful parts. Geach
adopted the term 'predicable' for the recipe
which builds a complete clause from a name or
names and other elements. His point here is not
315
GEACH
only that 'predicates' may be syntactically
complex, that is made up of several simpler
significant elements, but also that (as was
emphasized by Frege) a predicate-expression
is in itself 'incomplete'. It is not a thing that is
juxtaposed to another thing - a name - to make
a sentence, but rather a distinct phenomenon
that Geach, along with Frege, resists regarding
as a 'thing' in its own right, but rather as a
method for constructing a sentence.
Furthermore, several predicables may occur
embedded in a single sentence which by the
usual grammarians' convention would be
deemed to have only one predicate.
The view that sentences are built up out of
radically different elements was not, as Geach
observes, new in Frege, but can be found both
in Plato and in the early Aristotle. Aristotle's
later logic of terms, employed in the logical
theory he developed for the syllogism, was,
according to Geach, a lapse from grace - a
serious 'corruption of logic' (so he argued in his
Leeds inaugural lecture, 'A History of the
Corruptions of Logic', reprinted in Logic
Matters, and elsewhere). Geach objects to the
'two-term theory of predication' held by
Ockham and Hobbes among others, according
to which the standard form of proposition
involved two (grammatically and logically
similar) terms, possibly joined by a 'copula' (in
English 'is' or 'are'). This account of the struc-
ture of propositions was held to apply to sen-
tences or judgements in general, not just in the
confines of the study of valid argument in a
handful of special forms, but according to
Geach involved a systematic confusion between
the roles of name and predicable. (Geach also
follows Frege in asserting that the bare copula
has no special content: Reference and
Generality, p. 34.)
In his influential monograph, Reference and
Generality: An Examination of Some Medieval
and Modern Theories, Geach argued power-
fully against the 'doctrine of distribution',
which had become part of the post-Aristotelian
logical theory. In so doing he brings to bear his
distinctive blend of historical scholarship,
GEACH
logical acumen and inventiveness in produc-
ing illustrative examples. The accumulation of
theory and interpretation that he is attacking
had many centuries' currency in universities
and in seminaries, and it was only gradually
during the twentieth century that logical
systems based on the work of Frege were made
available to students in textbooks. (Geach lists
in Who's Who as one of his recreations 'col-
lecting and annotating bad old logic texts'.)
Seminaries continued to teach the 'Aristotelian'
logic longer than did secular universities, and
Geach has also addressed that audience. His
definitive critical demolition of the philosoph-
ical elements of the traditional teaching of logic
has helped to secure the fundamental role of
Frege's logic in the developments of the twen-
tieth century. He resists the suggestion that
modern post-Fregean formal logic is to be
confined to mathematical applications.
In a paper entitled 7/s and Ands* (reprinted
in Logic Matters) and in his work on entailment
Geach has pointed up some issues involving
the connectives. The other element in Frege's
logical system is the quantifiers. The sentence
'Every man loves some dog' was rendered in
Frege's notation in a way that paraphrases
roughly as: 'It is true of everything that, if it is
a man, then there is something that is a dog,
and he [the man] loves it [the dog].' The cum-
bersome back-references used here, 'he [the
man]', 'it [the dog]', are required only because
of the ambiguity of the English pronouns in this
context; the notation uses 'variables', typically
the (italicized) letters V, 'y', Y, to keep track
of such cross-reference (the list of variables is
extendable at need by various notational
devices). There is a close analogy between the
use of variables in Frege's logic and the use of
pronouns in English and other languages. This
analogy is discussed in Reference and
Generality', where Geach introduced the term
'pronoun of laziness' for those pronouns that
are replaceable by their antecedent term
without change of meaning. (It is the other
pronouns that work like the bound variables of
quantification.) The book contains extended
316
discussion of the different functions of
pronouns.
Frege invented a notation to express sen-
tences with the kind of complexity involved in
mingling relational predicates (such as '...
loves ' in the example above) and quantifiers.
He also recognized that quantifier-expressions
are different in kind from either names or 'pred-
icables'. Like predicables they are incomplete
expressions, or recipes for making whole sen-
tences from other elements. But unlike predi-
cables, they are not completed by names, but
rather by predicables. Frege's theory of number
and his philosophy of arithmetic are based on
the insight that number-expressions are like
quantifiers. So the sentence 'Three men entered
the room' is importantly different from 'Tired
men entered the room.' The second sentence
can be paraphrased 'Men entered the room,
and each of them was tired.' The first cannot be
paraphrased 'Men entered the room, and each
of them was three.' Frege and his successors
have defined number using quantifiers and
another key notion, that of identity. (To say
that exactly one man entered the room is to say
that a man entered the room, and any man
who entered the room was identical with him;
to say that two men entered the room is to say
that a man (x) entered the room, and a man (y)
entered the room, and x is not identical with y,
and any man who entered the room is identi-
cal with x or with y.)
Geach's best-known contribution to philo-
sophical logic is a theory about the other key
notion in this account of number: identity. He
points out that the notion of identity is perva-
sive in discourse, and is by no means confined
to explicit statements of the form 'a is identical
with b' (usually written 'a = b'). In the pair of
sentences: 'Jim wounded a lion and Bill shot it
dead,' 'Jim wounded a lion and Bill shot
another (lion) dead,' the link between the 'it' of
the first sentence and the antecedent 'a lion'
expresses identity; in the second, diversity (non-
identity) is expressed by the word 'another',
which in its way has an antecedent too (it can
be read 'another than the one Jim wounded').

These examples are Geach's: 'Replies' in Lewis
(p. 284). There are many philosophical puzzles
about identity, but the conventional wisdom
had been that there is such a thing as 'absolute'
identity, that given any two names 'a' and 'b',
the sentences 'a is identical with b' is true, or
false, once for all. This notwithstanding that
even explicit identity-statements in everyday
talk would usually bring in a predicable, for
example, 'a is the same man as b'. Geach has
proposed and vigorously defended the thesis
that identity is relative. What it is relative to is
the predicable that occurs as '... is a man'
occurs in the sentence form just mentioned. It
is now widely accepted that we use relative
identity statements, or implicitly relativize
identity, in much of our discourse. Geach has
had less success in persuading his critics that all
identity is relative. Examples that make Geach's
point involve pairs of true sentences with the
forms 'a is the same F as b' and 'a is not the
same G as b'. Here is one. In the name 'Peter'
there are five letters (in the crossword sense -
five occurrences of letters) but only four letters
of the alphabet (as the letter 'e' occurs twice).
So the claim that the first occurrence of 'e' in
this name is the same letter as the second occur-
rence of 'e' is ambiguous: true on one reading,
false on another. The first occurrence of 'e' is
the same letter of the alphabet as the second;
but it is not the same occurrence.
The theory of relative identity involves a
recognition of a form of incompleteness in
identity statements - 'a is the same as b' needs
completing by a predicable: 'a is the same F as
b'. In his influential paper 'Good and Evil'
Geach argued (in criticism of G.E. Moore) that
the adjective 'good' is also incomplete. It is
'attributive'. Here Geach is taking an already
current grammatical term and giving it a dis-
tinctive philosophical power. The main force of
this claim is that what grammarians would call
the 'predicative' use of 'good' is to be under-
stood as attributive: 'This is good' is properly
understood as This is a good F (e.g., 'this is a
good thought', 'this is a good action'). Anything
that is rightly said to be good is not good
317
GEACH
(period) but, rather, good of a kind. This
proposal has been influential in moral philos-
ophy.
Geach has pointed out the different logical
status of claims to existence, in particular the
difference between claims like 'Cerberus does
not exist' and 'dragons do not exist' ('Form
and Existence' in God and the Soul). He thus
shows that there is not a single recipe for
expressing such claims in Frege's logic, not least
because 'Cerberus' is a proper name, but
'dragons' is a general term expressible by the
predicable '... is a dragon', as in 'Nothing is a
dragon.'
Frege's logic is 'extensional' - sentences in the
notation that are true remain true when
elements in them are replaced by other elements
with the same extension or reference. In several
writings Geach has explored the problems and
challenges of wow-extensional discourse. In his
book Mental Acts (1957) he considers theories
of judgement and the limits of the use of direct
quotation (as in 'The fool hath said in his heart
"There is no God"') as accounts of judgement
in general. He gives a clear statement of the
view that quotations can be understood as
descriptive terms. In several articles Geach
explores puzzles of 'intentional identity' - the
tracking of things thought or spoken about
where there is no actual (or material) object. (In
the article that bears the title 'Intentional
Identity', reprinted in Logic Matters, he con-
siders a would-be report of an outbreak of
witch mania in a fictional Gotham village: 'Hob
thinks a witch has blighted Bob's mare, and
Nob wonders whether she (the same witch)
killed Cob's cow.' The puzzling issue is how to
make sense of 'she (the same witch)' in such a
report.) Linked with the extensionality of the
logic is the notion of validity as 'truth-preser-
vation' - an argument is valid provided that
every instance of its form that has true premises
has a true conclusion. The effect of this is to
admit as valid any arguments whose premises
are contradictory. Geach, in two classic articles,
'Entailment' and 'Entailment Again' (both
reprinted in Logic Matters), discussed some of
GEACH
the problems associated with finding a stronger
and more intuitive notion of validity.
When Geach was starting on his professional
career, 'ordinary language philosophy' was
flourishing among British philosophers. Geach
was never a follower of fashion, but he was not
aloof from it either, and engaged in vigorous
criticism of received doctrines whether of long
standing (as was the doctrine of distribution) or
recently minted. Such a newly minted doctrine
was the proposal that certain philosophically
puzzling locutions were best understood, not in
terms of what they claimed to be the case, but
rather through the acts that the speaker per-
formed by uttering them. An example was
provided by certain forms of non-cognitivism
or emotivism in ethics, which proposed that
when someone said 'such and such an action
was right' they were not ascribing a property to
the action, but rather commending it. Geach
recalled the thesis of Frege's that the sense of a
sentence or clause was unchanged whether it
occurred asserted or not. In an example of
Geach's, the sentence 'Gambling is bad' has
the same sense when it stands alone and when
it occurs in 'If gambling is bad, inviting people
to gamble is bad.' Someone who utters the first
might be held to condemn gambling; someone
who utters the second does not call either
gambling or invitations to gamble bad. But the
sense of the sentence in question is the same in
both occurrences; so it follows that the sense
cannot be explicated by saying that anyone
who utters the sentence is condemning
gambling. Geach refers to this as 'the Frege
point', and others, noting Geach's contribu-
tion in bringing it to bear on contemporary
work, have called it 'the Frege-Geach point' or
even 'the Geach point'.
This is but one example of Geach's skill in
introducing examples to test the theories he is
subjecting to critical analysis, and also his appli-
cation of logical principles to those theories.
Much of his work is expressed in technical
language, and he is unapologetic in bringing
both his scholarship and his logical expertise to
bear.
318
His learning extends to the Christian scrip-
tures and scholastic writings, and in some
lectures he has, in response to invitations,
addressed audiences of fellow believers and
considered topics in theology and ethics (as he
does in his Stanton Lectures, published as The
Virtues, 1977, and Providence and Evil, 1977).
He has offered glimpses into his thoughts about
the relation between his logical work and his
religion. He approves the view that logic is an
instrument of God (in God and the Soul, p. 85);
and identifies God with Truth, the same truth
to which all true thinking and speaking points
(Lewis, p. 214). And having noted (to an
audience of Catholic priests, as he warns the
reader of the reprinted version) that he takes
any heresy to be a falsehood, he propounds
the rule that if an argument has true premises
and a heretical conclusion then a logical rule
that would make it formally valid is simply a
bad bit of logic (Logic Matters, p. 299.)
In discussing divine omnipotence in
Providence and Evil, GeacJi notices a further
type of proposition that exhibits a problematic
variety of predication. In his (secular) example,
one and the same person, Jones, is Director of
a company and Mayor of the town; he gets a
salary as Director, an expense allowance as
Mayor; signs one letter as Director, another as
Mayor. Following Aristotle, Geach argues that
a correct understanding of such propositions
will assign the 'as' phrase to the (complex)
predicate-term. For Geach, this provides a
logical distinction between claims about what
God can do, and what God as God can do. But
(as Geach implies) the point is quite general,
and an account of the logic of such propositions
is hard to find. (They do riot yield to any
straightforward rendering in Frege's notation.)
The analogy we can note between this case, and
the others already discussed (of identity, and
goodness) is that in the complex predicable
expression, one component predicable condi-
tions the applicability of the other, and that
(as in the case of numerical expressions) one of
the components is 'second-order' in the sense
that it needs completing with a predicable

rather than with a name. Much of Geach's
work illuminates the logical forms of familiar
speech, whether those forms are expressible in
a Fregean notational style, or resist it.
Geach's writings on time and change have
been influential. He noted that what is true of
something can change without the thing
changing in itself. As the point was commonly
made by Cambridge philosophers such as
Russell and McTaggart, he dubbed such
changes 'Cambridge changes'. Here is one of
his examples: 'By this [Cambridge] account...
numbers would undergo change whenever, e.g.
five ceased to be the number of somebody's
children' (God and the Soul, p. 72). An early
review written by Geach was read by Arthur
PRIOR and this started Prior on a path that led
him to invent tense logic (Copeland). Geach
and Prior had a close association during Prior's
life, and after Prior's death Geach joined with
Anthony KENNY in editing three volumes of
Prior's work. Another close association was
with W.V. Quine, and a glimpse of it is given
in the extracts from their correspondence that
Quine contributed to the volume Peter Geach:
Philosophical Encounters.
Geach writes with a direct clarity. He is rec-
ognized not only for his discussions of major
topics in metaphysics, the philosophy of logic
and language, modal logic, moral philosophy
and the philosophy of religion, but also for his
varied and acute contributions to a wide range
of philosophical controversies. His interven-
tions are such that even where the philosophers
he is criticizing are not persuaded, they usually
find it necessary to take note of his remarks and
to modify their theories to make room for the
examples that Geach has presented. In discus-
sion he was always alert to nonsense mas-
querading as deep thinking, and counselled
attention to 'the still small voice that whispers:
"Bosh!"'. He has also contributed several useful
expressions to the philosophical vocabulary,
such as 'Cambridge change', 'pronoun of
laziness', 'the Socratic fallacy', 'Shakespearean
context' and 'predicable'.
319
GEACH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mental Acts, their Content and their Objects
(1957).
Reference and Generality: An Examination
of Some Medieval and Modern Theories
(Ithaca, New York, 1962; 3rd edn, 1980).
God and the Soul (1969).
Logic Matters (Oxford, 1972).
Reason and Argument (Oxford, 1976).
Providence and Evil: The Stanton Lectures
[1971-2] (1977).
The Virtues: The Stanton Lectures [1973-4]
(1977).
Truth, Love and Immortality: An
Introduction to McTaggarfs Philosophy
(Berkeley, California, 1979).
Truth and Hope: The Fiirst Franz Josef und
Fiirstin Gina Lectures Delivered at the
International Academy of Philosophy
[1998] (Notre Dame, Indiana, 2001).
Other Relevant Works
(with M. Black), Translations from the
Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege
(Oxford, 1952; 3rd edn, 1980). This col-
lection has been succeeded by M. Beaney
(ed.), The Frege Reader (Oxford, 1997),
which includes all the same papers together
with others.
(with G.E.M. Anscombe), Descartes:
Philosophical Writings (1954).
'Good and Evil', Analysis, vol. 17 (1956), pp.
33-^2; repr. with some amendments in P.
Foot (ed.), Theories of Ethics (Oxford,
1967).
(with G.E.M. Anscombe), Three
Philosophers (Ithaca, New York, 1961).
(with Christopher Coope, Timothy Potts and
Roger White), A Wittgenstein Workbook
(Oxford, 1970).
(Ed. with A.J.P. Kenny), Arthur Prior,
Objects of Thought (Oxford, 1971).
'Names and Identity', in S. Guttenplan (ed.),
Mind and Language: Wolfson College
Lectures 1974 (Oxford, 1975).
(Ed. with A.J.P. Kenny), Arthur Prior, The
Doctrine of Propositions and Terms
GEACH
(1976).
(Ed. with AJ.P. Kenny), Arthur Prior, Papers
in Logic and Ethics (1976).
(Ed.), Wittgenstein's Lectures on
Philosophical Psychology, 1946-47
(Chicago, 1988).
(Ed. with the ed. assistance of Jacek
Holowka), Logic and Ethics (Dordrecht,
1991).
Further Reading
Lewis, Harry A. (ed.), Peter Geach:
Philosophical Encounters (Dordrecht,
1991). Includes Geach's intellectual autobi-
ography, exchanges on his ideas and a bib-
liography of Geach's published works to
1989.
Copeland, B. Jack, 'Arthur Prior', in Edward
N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy (Winter 1999), <http://
plato.stanford.edu/archives/win 1999/entrie
s/prior/>, accessed November 2004.
Harry A. Lewis
GELLNER, Ernest (1925-95)
Ernest Gellner was born on 9 December 1925
and died in his apartment in Prague on 5
November 1995 of a heart attack. His parents
were secularized German-speaking Czech Jews.
He grew up in a world of vivid ethnic tensions
and diversity, attending Prague's English
Grammar School. On the Germans' invasion in
1939, the family fled to England, where he
completed his secondary schooling at St Albans
County Grammar School for Boys and won a
scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford to read
PPE, but after a year he joined the Czech
Brigade and saw active service besieging
Dunkirk. He returned with the Brigade to
Prague for a few months and attended the phi-
losophy course of Jan Patocka (by whom he
320
was unimpressed) but left, with foreboding of
a Communist takeover, to return to Oxford to
complete his studies and, on gaining a first class
degree, became assistant lecturer in philoso-
phy at Edinburgh University, moving after two
years to the London School of Economics (LSE)
to be assistant lecturer in sociology with special
reference to ethics. This already indicated his
unease with the current so-called 'linguistic'
philosophical style, prevailing above all at
Oxford, for what he came to see as its socio-
logically naive and unreflectively complacent
endorsement of conventional understandings,
which he attributed largely to the later
WITTGENSTEIN and his disciples. He went into
the attack in his brazenly polemical first book
Words and Things (1959), which offended the
philosophers but brought Bertrand RUSSELL to
its defence after Gilbert RYLE refused to review
it in Mind. Meanwhile, Gellner retrained
himself as an anthropologist at the LSE, studying
for a doctorate under the aegis of Paul Stirling
and Raymond Firth, doing fieldwork among the
Berbers of Morocco. Thus began an extraordi-
nary career of writing and teaching that ranged
across disciplines and issues, and also across
regions of the world. In 1979 he moved from the
LSE's Sociology Department to the Department
of Logic and Scientific Method (whose major
figure, Karl POPPER, was an important intellec-
tual influence upon him), with 'special reference
to Social Anthropology'. In 1984 he left for
Cambridge University as William Wyse
Professor of Social Anthropology. He spent the
year 1989-90 in Moscow, visiting Georgia,
Belarus and Estonia. He then decided, on return-
ing to Cambridge, to go back to Prague, first on
a part-time and then on a full-time basis, as a
central figure in the new Central European
University founded by George Soros, where he
was given his own Centre for the Study of
Nationalism to run, and where he gathered
around him a devoted group of students and
researchers and was beginning to make a mark
on social science in the region.
Gellner's perspective was increasingly dis-
tinctive and sharply defined, arid his voice and

style were unique and recognizable: witty,
sardonic, combative, ironic and intolerant of all
forms of soft-headed sentimentality and irra-
tionalism, and in particular of subjectivism,
idealism, communitarianism and, above all,
relativism (of the cognitive variety). He was a
sociologist-anthropologist-philosopher-politi-
cal theorist (in any order you care to choose).
He made significant contributions to all these
disciplines and was, moreover, a world-travel-
ling 'public intellectual' (a rarity in Britain),
with an extraordinary range of academic rela-
tionships and expertise that extended across
Europe, West and East, the former Soviet bloc
and the Islamic world, notably North Africa
and Turkey. Yet it is incontestable that he
remained throughout a philosopher in the
larger, European sense, though schooled in the
British empiricist and analytic tradition, which
he valued highly, viewing Kant as 'the greatest
of modern philosophers' and proclaiming
himself a 'humble adherent' of 'Enlightenment
Rationalist Fundamentalism'.
His earliest philosophical endeavours were in
the philosophy of social science. Here he con-
tributed acutely argued essays, which deployed
rich ethnographic examples and anthropolog-
ical theory (to which he also contributed) in
order to contest currently popular philosophi-
cal claims. So, for example, in his classic
'Concepts and Society' (1962) he attacked the
Wittgensteinian doctrine that identifies meaning
with use by arguing that sometimes we can
only make sense of a society by 'seeing how the
manipulation of concepts and the violation of
categorical boundaries helps it to work'. Thus
it was 'precisely the logical /^consistency of
[the Berber concept of] baraka which enables it
to be applied according to social need and to
endow what is a social need with the appear-
ance of external, given and indeed authoritative
reality'. In his contribution to the so-called
'rationality debate' he went further. In 'The
New Idealism' (1968) he attacked the
Wittgensteinian Peter WlNCH for what he took
to be a relativistic treatment of all 'forms of life'
as equal and insisted on the 'philosophical sig-
321
GELLNER
nificance of the scientific-industrial "form of
life", whose rapid global diffusion is the main
event of our time' and whose 'cognitive and
technical superiority ... simply cannot be ques-
tioned'. These essays culminated first in
Thought and Change (1964) and then, more
definitively, in his Legitimation of Belief'(1975),
which offers his version of Max Weber's
'Disenchantment thesis', magisterially tracing
what he called 'the transition to effective
knowledge' (criticizing Thomas Kuhn and
largely endorsing Popper's philosophy of
science), a theme developed further in Reason
and Culture (1992). They laid the basis for his
lifelong mission to expose and uproot succes-
sive forms of what he took to be relativistic
thinking in his various contributions to the
'culture wars' - for instance, his attacks on
Edward Said's account of 'Orientialism' and
cultural imperialism, and on the interpretative
anthropology of Clifford Geertz with its focus
on 'local knowledge' and in his fiery pamphlet
against postmodernism.
Gellner believed that under modern condi-
tions we cannot but be committed to the
'notion of culture-transcending truth'. 'Science
and its application' are governed by 'certain
loosely defined procedural prescriptions about
how the world may be investigated', entailing
that 'all ideas, data, inquirers are equal, cogni-
tive claims have to compete and confront data
on terms of equality and they are not allowed
to construct circular self-confirming visions'.
This meant that there could be no cognitive
hierarchies or authorities. This standpoint moti-
vated his brilliant, excoriating attack on psy-
choanalysis in The Psychoanalytic Movement
(1985). Freudianism, he wrote, fails to meet the
modern requirement of cognitive growth,
avoids falsification by systematically controlling
its own data base and, worse, claims privileged
and unique access to the Unconscious and,
worse still, claims to be able to use this access
therapeutically.
In Plough, Sword and Book (1988) Gellner
amplified and enriched his largely Weberian
account of the 'Great Transformation'. The
GELLNER
book is nothing less than a philosophy of
history, seeking to show how production,
coercion and legitimation interact under
changing forms of the division of labour across
three great ages or stages of human history:
hunter-gatherer, 'agro-literate' and modern
industrial. The argument has a bold sweep,
while distinguishing alternative development
paths - specifically those taken by Western plu-
ralistic societies, Marxist societies, those imple-
menting the 'Muslim model' and societies 'in
which paternalistic modernization-from-above
is combined with a toleration of the old folk
culture'. Under the latter conditions, he sug-
gested, 'the computer and the shrine may be
compatible'.
As for Muslim societies, Gellner's early study
Saints of the Atlas developed into a sociology
of Islam in general, which maintained that it is
'a traditional faith, which in its high culture
variant is highly compatible with the require-
ments of modernization, and whose genuinely
local roots, make it ideally suitable as an expres-
sion of a new national identity'. He argued that
the discipline and literacy stressed by the 'high
tradition' could enable it to become a substitute
Protestant ethic. He speculated that the current
revival of faith and orthodoxy might be transi-
tional, and claimed that Islam was especially
suited to a distinctive version of modernity that,
in contrast to Western societies, lacked the
capacity for civil society (see his Conditions of
Liberty, 1994) - that is, for countervailing insti-
tutions and associations, individualism and intel-
lectual pluralism. His sociology of Islam has
been very controversial and criticized for the
claim just cited, for its distinction between 'high'
and 'low' Islam and, not least, for its very claim
that there is a generally applicable model of
Muslim Society (see Zubaida).
Gellner was, in his later years, much preoc-
cupied with Soviet-type societies and, in parallel
with his view of Islam, with the role of
Marxism as an ideology that for a long time
'looked like the Calvinism of collective and
emulative industrialization'. He came to see
the failure of Soviet-style communism as the
322
inverse of Islam's success: articulated in a
modern secular and fully monistic idiom, it
sacralized 'all aspects of social life, notably
work and the economic sphere' and thereby
'deprived men of a profane bolthole into which
to escape during periods of lukewarmness and
diminished zeal'. Gellner was interested in the
survival of independent and critical thinking
within the Marxist framework (offering pro-
fessional support and friendship to such
thinkers) and was mildly optimistic about the
prospects of post-Soviet societies achieving
some new combination of political centraliza-
tion and cultural autonomy.
It was, however, his theory of nationalism,
first sketched in Thought and Change, which
made the most impact in the social scientific
world. Developed initially in response to Elie
Kedourie's intellectualist theory (in his
Nationalism), Gellner's theory focused on
structural conditions of uneven socio-economic
development and on the role of local intelli-
gentsias trained in the metropolitan centres
responding to blocked mobility at home. In its
later developments, in Nations and
Nationalism (1983) and Nationalism (1997),
the theory stressed the ways in which ethno-lin-
guistic homogenization was required to make
industrialism work. This general theory cer-
tainly worked better for some cases than for
others and several critics attacked it on this
ground. Others have criticized it for being inter-
nally contradictory (Roger), for its unmistak-
able functionalism and for its reliance on a
holistic notion of culture (Hann).
Gellner's last, posthumous work, Language
and Solitude (1998), can be read as a synthetic
statement of his own worldview via a compar-
ative study of those of Wittgenstein and
Malinowski, both born in the last days of the
Habsburg empire and offering contrasting
accounts of what he called 'socio-metaphysic,
or philosophical anthropology'. They faced a
polar opposition between an 'atomic-univer-
salist-individualist vision' and a 'communal-
cultural vision' and the confrontation between
these was inseparable from 'the alliances and

hatreds of daily and political life' and is,
moreover, a tension pervading and tormenting
'most societies disrupted by modernization'.
Wittgenstein, Gellner thought, was trapped
within this opposition, veering from one pole to
the other in his successive philosophies, express-
ing each in extreme form. Malinowski, by
contrast, recombined elements from both -
romantic and positivist, organic and liberal -
thereby prefiguring Gellner's own position. In
short, Malinowski (and Gellner) combined two
ideas: that 'shared culture can alone endow life
with order and meaning' and that 'the notion
of a culture-transcending truth is integral to
cognitive (notably scientific) and economic
growth'. Gellner was an unrelenting defender of
this second idea, which he called the 'ethic of
cognition', which, he thought, 'probably gives
us a correct answer to the question of how
valid and powerful knowledge really works,
and, in that sphere, deserves a kind of norma-
tive authority'. But that in turn raises two ques-
tions to which he offered no answer. First, what
is the scope of 'that sphere'? Why has science
had such limited success in the social and
human sphere and are these limits surmount-
able? And second, are there not 'values' - and
specifically moral values - that are 'culture-
transcending'? Gellner writes of them as
'instilled by contingent and variable cultures',
yet his intellectual heroes, notably Hume and
Kant and the thinkers of the Enlightenment,
were not relativists concerning morality. Is not
the notion of culture-transcending moral prin-
ciples also central to our culture, and do they
not also deserve a kind of normative authority,
and, if not, why not?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Words and Things (1959).
Thought and Change (1964).
Saints of'the Atlas (1969).
Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences
(1973).
Contemporary Thought and Politics (1974).
The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974).
Legitimation of Belief (1975).
323
GELLNER
Muslim Society (Cambridge, 1981).
Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983).
The Psychoanalytic Movement, or, The
Cunning of Unreason (1985).
Relativism in the Social Sciences (Cambridge,
1985).
The Concept of Kinship - and Other Essays
on Anthropological Method and
Explanation (Oxford, 1987).
Culture, Identity and Politics (Cambridge,
1987).
Plough, Sword and Book (1988).
State and Society in Soviet Thought
(Cambridge, 1988).
Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (1992).
Reason and Culture: The Historical Role of
Rationality and Reason (Oxford, 1992).
Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its
Rivals (1994).
Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford,
1994).
Anthropology and Politics: Revolutions in
the Sacred Grove (Oxford, 1995).
Nationalism (1997).
Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein,
Malinowski and the Habshurg Dilemma
(Cambridge, 1998).
Other Relevant Works
'Ideal Language and Kinship Structure',
Philosophy of Science, vol. 24 (1957), pp.
235-42.
'The Concept of Kinship', Philosophy of
Science, vol. 7 (1960), pp. 187-204.
'Concepts and Society', Transactions of the
Fifth World Congress of Sociology
(Washington, 1962), pp. 153-83; repr. in
Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences.
'Nature and Society in Social Anthropology',
Philosophy of Science, vol. 30 (1963), pp.
236-51
'Democracy and Industrialization', European
Journal of Sociology, vol. 8 (1967), pp.
47ff.
'The New Idealism', in I. Lakatos and A.
Musgrave (eds), Problems in the
Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht, 1968),
GELLNER
pp. 377-406; repr. in Cause and Meaning
in the Social Sciences.
The Re-Enchantment Industry, or, The
Californian Way of Subjectivity',
Philosophy of the Social Sciences, vol. 5
(1975), pp. 431-50.
'An Ethic of Cognition', in R.S. Cohen, P.K.
Feyerabend and M.M. Wartofsky (eds),
Essays in Memory oflmre Lakatos
(Dordrecht, 1976), pp. 161-77.
Tractatus Sociologico-Philosophicus', in S.C.
Brown (ed.), Objectivity and Cultural
Divergence (Cambridge, 1984), pp.
247-59.
Trust, Cohesion and the Social Order', in D.
Gambetta (ed.), Trust: Making and
Breaking Co-operative Relations (Oxford,
1988), pp. 142-57.
'Origins of Society', in A.C. Fabian (ed.),
Origins: The Darwin College Lectures
(Cambridge, 1988), pp. 129-40.
The Uniqueness of Truth [Sermon in King's
College Chapel, Cambridge] (1992); repr.
in Anthropology and Politics.
The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the
Double Standards of Inside-Out
Colonialism' [review of E. Said, Culture
and Imperialism], Times Literary
Supplement, vol. 19, no. 4690 (February
1993), pp. 3-4.
'Reply to Critics', in Hall and Jarvie
(Amsterdam, 1996).
Further Reading
Cambridge Anthropology, Ernest Gellner
Memorial Issue, vol. 19, no. 2 (1996/7).
Davis, J., 'An Interview with Ernest Gellner',
Current Anthroplogy, vol. 32 (1991), pp.
63-72.
Hall, J.A. (ed.), The State of the Nation:
Ernest Gellner and the Theory of
Nationalism (Cambridge, 1998).
Hall, J.A. and I.C. Jarvie (eds), The Social
Philosophy of Ernest Gellner (Amsterdam,
1996).
Hann, C, 'Gellner's Structural-Functional-
Culturalism', in Musil and Skalnik (2001),
324
pp. 173-81.
Lessnoff, M., Ernest Gellner and Modernity
(Cardiff, 2003).
Musil J., and P. Skalnik (eds), Czech
Sociological Review, thematic issue, The
Relevance of Ernest Gellner's Thought
Today', vol. 9, no. 2 (2001).
Roger, A., 'Expliquer le nationalisme: les
contradictions d'Ernest Gellner', European
Journal of Sociology, vol. 41 (2000), pp.
189-224.
Skalnik, P. (ed.), The Intellectual Legacy of
Ernest Gellner', Social Evolution and
History: Studies in the Evolution of
Human Societies, vol. 2, no. 2 (Moscow,
2003).
Zubaida, S., 'Is there a Muslim Society?
Ernest Gellner's Sociology of Islam',
Economy and Societ, vol. 24 (1995), pp.
151-88.
Steven Lukes
GIBSON, Alexander Boyce (1900-72)
Alexander Boyce Gibson was born in London
on 10 March 1900 and died in Melbourne on
2 October 1972. He graduated in classics from
Melbourne before studying philosophy at
Balliol College, Oxford under A.D. LINDSAY.
He received his MA in 1922. He followed
Lindsay to the University of Glasgow and
served as a temporary assistant to that profes-
sor from 1923 to 1925. From 1925 to 1927
Boyce Gibson was a staff tutor in Oxford. In
1927 he assumed a lectureship at the University
of Birmingham. He returned to Australia in
1934 to assume the appointment as Chair of
Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, a
position recently vacated by his father W.R.
Boyce GIBSON. He received an honorary DLitt
from Cambridge in 1948. He retired in 1966.
At that time, in honour of the father-son reign

of fifty-four years, the Chair of the Philosophy
Department at Melbourne was renamed the
Boyce Gibson Chair in Philosophy.
Boyce Gibson's work was concerned with
demarking the proper place for metaphysics in
epistemology and in ethics. In 1932 in The
Philosophy of Descartes, he aimed both to
situate Descartes's thought in its historical
context and to consider the position meta-
physics holds with respect to scientific and
mathematical truths. A similar concern is
reflected in his work on Plato, and in his efforts
to reconcile philosophy and religious experi-
ence. In 'Preface to a Future Metaphysic' (1947)
he defends metaphysics against logical posi-
tivism, though it is tempered by positivist crit-
icism. After his retirement, he published Muse
and Thinker (1969), a book on aesthetics, and
Theism and Empiricism (1970), in which he
defended an empirical philosophy of religion. A
third book, The Religion of Dostoevsky, was
published in 1973 after his death.
Under Boyce Gibson's tenure, the Melbourne
department became a hub of international and
contemporary philosophy, and a place where,
in part through the arrival at Melbourne of
refugee intellectuals from continental Europe
during World War II, logical positivism as well
as the thought of the later WITTGENSTEIN gained
a foothold in Australian philosophy. After the
war, in the 1950s, the department continued to
welcome distinguished long-term visitors from
abroad, and so created fertile ground for a new
generation of Australian philosophers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Philosophy of Descartes (1932).
Should Philosophers be Kings? A Study in the
Relation of the Philosophic to the
Democratic Way of Life (Melbourne and
London, 1939).
'Preface to a Future Metaphysic',
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 25
(December 1947), pp. 129-51.
Muse and Thinker (1969).
Theism and Empiricism (New York, 1970)
325
GIBSON
Other Relevant Works
'The Goodness of Producing and the Good
Produced', Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 18 (December 1940), pp.
232-45.
'Nature and Convention in the Democratic
State', Australasian Journal of Philosophy,
vol. 29 (May 1951), pp. 1-20.
'Modern Philosophers Consider Religion',
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 35
(December 1957), pp. 170-85.
'Change and Continuity in Plato's Thought',
Review of Metaphysics, vol. 11 (December
1957), pp. 237-55.
'Two Strands in Natural Theology', The
Monist, vol. 47 (Spring 1963), pp. 335-64.
Towards an Australian Philosophy of
Education (Sydney, 1963).
'Reason in Practice', Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 45 (May 1967), pp. 1-14.
The Religion ofDostoevsky (1973).
Lisa Shapiro
GIBSON, James (1864-1943)
James Gibson was born in London on 31
December 1864 and died at Bron Hwfa,
Bangor on 1 August 1943. He was educated at
Trinity College Dublin (1882-6), from which
he graduated with a BA in 1886. He was
admitted as a pensioner (unsubsidized fee-
paying student) to St John's College,
Cambridge in 1887, where he was elected
scholar in 1888, and obtained a BA first class
in the Moral Sciences Tripos Pt I in 1890, and
also a first class in Pt II in 1891. He was elected
a fellow of the college in 1893 and obtained an
MA (Cantab.) in 1894. Gibson was already
lecturer in moral philosophy at the University
of St Andrews at the time of his appointment as
Professor of Logic, Philosophy and Political
Economy at the University College of North
GIBSON
Wales in December 1895. He held this post
until 1932, when he became emeritus Professor
of Logic and Philosophy. In 1934 Gibson was
granted an Hon. DLitt (Wales).
Gibson's major work is Locke's Theory of
Knowledge and its Historical Relations (1917).
It has been justly said that Gibson 'rendered a
very timely service to the cause of sound his-
torical criticism' by the way in which he cleared
away 'all the misunderstandings created by the
assumption that Locke was merely an earlier
and less consistent Berkeley or Hume' (Taylor,
p. 354). This opinion was seconded in another
contemporary review, by Albert G.A. Balz,
who credits Gibson with having produced 'a
definitive commentary' on Locke qua episte-
mologist, and with having shown to be
mistaken the tradition 'which overemphasizes
what may be called the psychological empiri-
cism of Locke' (Balz, p. 191). Even in more
recent times, upon the appearance of the reprint
edition in 1960, Caroline Robbins acknowl-
edges the important role of Gibson's 'pene-
trating analysis of the Essay' in '[t]he process of
addition, amendment, and modification of
earlier interpretations' by pointing out that the
origin of ideas was only of incidental interest to
Locke (Robbins, p. 1018). The second part of
Gibson's book on the historical relations of the
Essay also constitutes a valuable contribution
to scholarship. Gibson convincingly shows,
among other things, that Locke's arguments
in Book I, on innate ideas, were primarily
directed against the Cambridge Platonists.
While Gibson's Locke's Theory of Knowledge
and its Historical Relations has been partially
superseded by more recent commentaries on
Locke's Essay, the book is still favourably cited by
Locke scholars in the late twentieth century (see,
e.g., J.R. Milton, p. 128). Gibson published a few
journal articles but, after publication of his book,
devoted his main efforts to academic and admin-
istrative duties at the University College of North
Wales. He enjoyed considerable standing in the
academic world of his day, evidenced by the fact
that he was invited to deliver the tercentenary
lecture on John Locke (see 'John Locke, Annual
326
Lecture on a Master Mind') to the British
Academy in 1932. As a lecturer he was known for
his 'penetrating clarity' and for teaching his
students to express themselves unambiguously.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Review of An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell
Fraser (1894), Mind, vol. 3 (1894), pp.
536-43.
'Locke's Theory of Mathematical Knowledge
and of a Possible Science of Ethics', Mind,
vol. 5 (1896), pp. 38-59.
Locke's Theory of Knowledge and its
Historical Relations (Cambridge, 1917;
repr. 1960).
'John Locke, Annual Lecture on a Master
Mind' [read 16 November 1932], in
Proceedings of the British Academy (1933;
Nendeln/Liechtenstein, 1977), pp. 29-51.
Other Relevant Works
Balz, Albert G.A., Review of Locke's Theory
of Knowledge and its Historical Relations,
The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology
and Scientific Methods, vol. 16 (1919), pp.
190-93.
Milton, John R., 'John Locke and the
Nominalist Tradition', in Reinhard Brandt
(ed.), John Locke Symposium
Wolfenbuttel 1979 (New York, 1981), pp.
128-45.
Robbins, Caroline, Review of Locke's
Theory of Knowledge and its Historical
Relations, Locke on War and Peace, An
Immortal Commonwealth: The Political
Thought of James Harrington, The
American Historical Review, vol. 66
(1961), pp. 1017-19.
Taylor, A.E., Review of Locke's Theory of
Knowledge and its Historical Relations,
Mind, vol. 27 (1918), pp. 354-60.
Williams, J. Gwynn, The University College
of North Wales: Foundations 1884-1927
(Cardiff, 1985).
Thomas Heyd

GIBSON, William Ralph Boyce (1869-1935)
William Ralph Boyce Gibson was born in Paris
on 15 March 1869 and died in Melbourne on
3 April 1935. His father was William Gibson,
a Methodist minister, and his mother Helena
Wilhelmina Boyce. From the age of thirteen,
when he left Paris, he was educated at
Kingswood School, Bath. He did his under-
graduate work at Queen's College, Oxford,
where he studied mathematics (BA, 1892). He
became fascinated with the theories of Herbert
Spencer, but took no formal course in philos-
ophy. He became a mathematics teacher at
Clifton College but became disillusioned with
the scientific way of conceiving the universe. In
1893 he went on to study philosophy in Jena
under Eucken and Liebmann, in Paris, under
Boutroux, and in Glasgow, under Henry JONES
and Adamson. Boyce Gibson received an
Oxford Research Doctorate of Science for his
published work in philosophy (1911). Between
1898 and 1909 he was a lecturer in logic, psy-
chology and ethics at the Hackney, Regents
Park, Westfield and New Colleges, London.
The following academic year he lectured in
philosophy at Liverpool University before
taking up the Chair of Mental and Moral
Philosophy at Melbourne University, which he
held from 1912 until 1934, the year before his
death. He was strongly supported in his candi-
dature for the chair by Gilbert Murray, Henry
Jones, Bernard BOSANQUET and F.C.S.
SCHILLER. Both Schiller and Bosanquet high-
light the importance of Boyce Gibson's essay in
Personal Idealism, edited by Henry STURT
(1902). Bosanquet contended that 'it is an
excellent piece of exposition, and full of sug-
gestiveness' (Boyce Gibson Papers, University of
Melbourne).
Boyce Gibson's own philosophical ideas were
presented in the course of close studies of a
wide range of philosophers and philosophies,
including idealism, pragmatism and phenome-
nology. He had hoped in retirement fully to
work out his own philosophy in book form,
but he died months after obtaining the leisure
327
GIBSON
to write. The chair in Melbourne put heavy
demands upon his time and it is significant that
all his authored books were published before he
left Great Britain. In Australia he performed the
invaluable service of introducing the
Anglophone world to new movements in con-
tinental philosophy, interpreted from the point
of view of personal idealism. He wrote on
Eucken, Husserl, Melchoir Palagyi, Bergson
and Nicolai Hartmann.
W.G. Boyce Gibson was among those
philosophers, led by Andrew Seth PRINGLE-
PATTCSON in Britain and Rudolph Eucken on the
continent, who wanted to rescue personality
from being consigned to oblivion. Personal
idealism defended the metaphysical autonomy
of personality against, on the one hand, natu-
ralism, which made personality the outcome of
nature, and, on the other, the form of idealism
that made personality an 'adjective' of the
Absolute. While idealism in Britain always
emphasized the view that there could be no
thought without a thinker, and no thinker
without thought, there was a good deal of dis-
cussion over the issue of the extent to which
denying the distinction between subject and
object put the self at risk of being subsumed
entirely under the Absolute. Boyce Gibson's
exposure to Eucken clarified for him the main
problems that needed to be addressed in phi-
losophy. Following Rudolph Eucken, Boyce
Gibson contended that the central idea of
absolute idealism, that the real is rational, is
upheld by personal idealism, but 'from the
point of view of the personal experient' ('A
Peace Policy for Idealists', p. 409). Gibson
examined the ethical theories of T.H. Green
and A.E. TAYLOR in his first book, A
Philosophical Introduction to Ethics (1904),
from the point of view of personal idealism.
The personal idealist, in taking man as the
starting-point defined itself in equal opposition
to naturalism with nature as its point of depar-
ture and absolute idealism with God as its foun-
dation (p. 161). In Eucken we find man's free
agency is the key to understanding the relation
of man both to nature and to God (Rudolf
GIBSON
Eucken's Philosophy of Life, 1907). The
personal idealists, including Gibson, reminded
absolute idealists of the importance of the self
in any account of the nature of experience. The
self exists only through the world, and the
world only through the self. Self and the world
are the same reality looked at from different
points of view, and the basic unity, or identity,
can only be grasped from the point of view of
the subject, or person. Gibson wanted to
emphasize the reality of the person and the
reality of the ideal, maintaining that the latter
could only be established by starting with the
former. He argued: The personal idealist is
unable to convince himself that in any intelli-
gible sense of the word he can take the absolute
as a datum, or discuss "the whole" as though
it were a given "fact" instead of a baffling
problem' (Philosophical Introduction to Ethics,
p. 219).
BRADLEY and Bosanquet, in the view of
personal idealists, constituted the greatest
danger to the integrity of the self. Indeed, they
criticized Bradley for casting doubt on the use-
fulness of the idea of a person for compre-
hending or understanding experience as a unity
in diversity, and for characterizing the Absolute
as unknowable, something beyond human
experience, which he refers to as 'mere' appear-
ance. Seth had the highest regard for Bradley in
freeing British idealism from a slavish imitation
of Hegel, but was extremely critical of Bradley's
vagueness and inability to go beyond the sug-
gestion that all contradictions are resolved in
the absolute, and all differences are fused and
overcome. The question of how the multiplic-
ity of selves and diversity of experience become
a unity is avoided in the admission that we
know not how, only that somehow they do. In
taking the self and the ideal seriously, Gibson
claimed to have bridged the gulf between man
and God. The ideal, for Gibson, is a universal
reality manifest in the personal life of every
individual. It is only with reference to the ideal
that we can understand either God or person-
ality. Personality is the result of individual ini-
tiative and ideal guidance, and both are essen-
328
tial to the conception of the self as a purposive
agent. The ideal does not have a separate exis-
tence apart from the personalities in which it is
manifest, and which constitutes the evidence of
God within us. Selfhood is affirmed as that of
an individual personality and no other in that
the ideal unifies experiences in and through
persons.
Subjective, or personal idealists, who
objected to the propensity of absolute idealism
to undervalue the individual, and to run the risk
of allowing the individual to become absorbed
into the Absolute, acknowledged that some
exponents of monism were closer to them than
others. Gibson recognized that absolute ideal-
ists, such as Caird and Jones, while agreeing
with the monistic unity of the whole, gave
much more emphasis than Bradley or
Bosanquet to the reality of the appearances.
In more recent times Boyce Gibson came to
prominence for the important role he played in
bringing to the attention of the Anglophone
world the work of the German phenomenolo-
gists Edmund Husserl and Nicolai Hartmann.
In 1971 Herbert Speilberg, the historian of the
phenomenologist movement, edited extracts
from Boyce Gibson's 1928 Freiburg diary.
Gibson points out in these diaries how
immensely important Husserl thought the
Hume of the Treatise was in engendering the
phenomenological spirit. Boyce Gibson gives
skilled character sketches of both Husserl and
Heidegger, much preferring the personality and
demeanour of the former to the much less
socially skilled author of Being and Time,
which Boyce Gibson once tentatively consid-
ered translating.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Problem of Freedom in its Relation to
Psychology', in Henry Sturt (ed.), Personal
Idealism (1902), pp. 134-92.
A Philosophical Introduction to Ethics
(1904).
Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy of Life (1906,
1907).
'A Peace Policy for Idealists', Hibbert

Journal, vol. 5 (1907), pp. 407-24.
The Problem of Logic (1908).
God With Us (1909).
The Foundations of Character', Mind, vol.
25 (1916), pp. 25-41.
'Does the Ideal Really Exist', The
Australasian Journal of Psychology and
Philosophy, vol. 3 (1925).
'From Husserl to Heidegger' [excepts from
Boyce Gibson's 1928 Freiburg diary, edited
by Herbert Speilberg], The Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 2
(1971), pp. 58-83.
W.R. Boyce Gibson Papers Melbourne
University Archives.
Further Reading
Anon., The Australasian Journal of
Psychology and Philosophy, vol. 13
(1935), pp. 85-92.
Grave, S.A., A History of Philosophy in
Australia (1978).
Seth, Andrew, 'A New Theory of the
Absolute', in Man's Place in the Cosmos
(Edinburgh, 1897), pp. 188-9.
David Boucher
GILBY, Norman Thomas (1902-75)
Thomas Gilby was born in Birmingham on 18
December 1902 and died in Cambridge on 29
November 1975. He attended St Philip's
Grammar School in Birmingham. In 1919 he
entered the novitiate of the English province of
the Order of Preachers (Dominicans). Ordained
priest in 1926, he rounded off his study of
Thomistic philosophy and theology, hitherto
entirely within the Order, with a PhD in 1929
at the Higher Institute of Philosophy in
Louvain, entitled The Fortunate Man: An
Enquiry into the Place of the Appetite in Real
Knowledge of the Concrete. No copy survives
329
GILBY
but it seems likely to have dealt with the role of
the will in Thomas Aquinas's account of the
moral life. He taught apologetics and then
moral theology in the English Dominican study
house (1929-36). He moved to London,
widening his teaching to include the Cavendish
Square teacher training college and London
University extension lectures. He frequented
the same circles as Evelyn Waugh and Graham
Greene. He sought to encourage Catholics to
take more part in English public life. In 1939 he
volunteered as a chaplain in the Royal Navy
and served throughout the war. The rest of life
was based at the Order's house in Cambridge,
including some years as Superior. In 1958 he
began planning a new translation of the Summa
theologiae of St Thomas Aquinas, published
eventually in sixty volumes (1964-81), of
which he himself translated and annotated
thirteen. He was made a Master of Sacred
Theology in 1965, the highest degree conferred
in the Dominican Order.
Gilby published a good deal, including a
novel (Up the Green River, 1955) and an
anthology of British naval and military history,
as well as many entries in the New Catholic
Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedic Dictionary
of Religion. From his first book on Thomistic
aesthetic theory (1934) to his studies of
Thomist epistemology (1950) and political
theory (1958) Gilby sought to convey and con-
solidate interest in Aquinas in the English-
speaking world. He published selections from
Aquinas: Theological Texts (1955) and
Philosophical Texts (1960), evidently aimed at
the general reader. He travelled a great deal,
particularly to the United States, lecturing on
Aquinas. He did not always like what some of
the scholars said, whom he assembled to trans-
late and annotate the Blackfriars edition of the
Summa theologiae, as supplementary notes and
on one notorious occasion even an editorial
disclaimer indicate. His own position is difficult
to make out: clearly owing nothing to either of
the Louvain 'schools' of neo-Thomism and
transcendental Thomism, he shows little
indebtedness to Cajetan and the other com-
GILBY
mentators either. Always the moralist, Gilby
was most at home in the secunda pars^ expli-
cating and commenting on what is now called
Virtue ethics'. For Gilby, Aquinas's Christian
humanism lay at the foundations of Catholic
culture and indeed of Western civilization. He
is best regarded as the most influential mediator
of Aquinas's thought in the English-speaking
world - determined to get Aquinas read, more
than to develop his own version of Thomism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Poetic Experience: An Introduction to
Thomist Aesthetic (1934).
Wayne, T.G. (pseud.), Morals and Marriage:
The Catholic Background to Sex (1936;
2nd edn, 1952).
Barbara Celarent: A Description of Scholastic
Dialectic (1949).
Phoenix and Turtle: The Unity of Knowing
and Being (1950).
Between Community and Society: A
Philosophy and Theology of the State
(1953).
Principality and Polity: Aquinas and the Rise
of State Theory in the West (1958).
(Latin text and English trans., Intros, notes,
appendices and glossaries), Thomas
Aquinas, Summa theologiae (1964—81).
Fergus Kerr
GINSBERG, Morris (1889-1970)
Morris Ginsberg was born in Lithuania, then a
part of the Russian empire, on 14 May 1889
and died in London on 31 August 1970. His
first language was Yiddish and, as a Talmudic
scholar, he was well-versed in classical Hebrew.
He came to Manchester and learned English in
preparation for his higher education, entering
University College London in 1910, where he
gained his BA and MA. He was a temporary
330
lecturer at the London School of Economics
(LSE) in the academic year 1915-16, and from
1916 to 1921 he lectured in philosophy at
University College. Subsequently he returned to
the LSE, where in 1929 he was appointed to the
post of Professor of Sociology, succeeding L.T.
HOBHOUSE. After retiring from his professorship
in 1954 he continued teaching at the LSE until
1968. He was President of the Aristotelian
Society from 1942 to 1943, and was awarded
an FBA in 1953. In the same year, he delivered
the Huxley Memorial Lecture, and in 1958 he
gave the Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford
University.
Throughout his career Ginsberg showed an
enduring interest in the methodology of soci-
ology. On his view, the problems with which
sociology has to deal are social structure, social
function and control, and social change. There
is no systematic body of knowledge which
incorporates all four of these areas, nor is there
any common methodology to deal with them.
The reason for this is that sociology has devel-
oped from several different disciplines: political
philosophy, the philosophy of history, biolog-
ical theories of evolution and the surveys of
social conditions which led to an attempt to
reform them. A more difficult problem is that
there are also several different methodologies
and approaches, including the psychological
approach to historical generalizations, and the
support of a sociological theory by empirical
evidence.
In The Idea of Progress: A Revaluation
(1953) Ginsberg first examines, but subse-
quently rejects, the various schools of thought
which have held that a general law of progress
can be formulated. In common with several of
his contemporaries, he reserves particular crit-
icism for totalitarianism, about which he says
The final end [some kind of Utopia] then tends
to be pushed farther and farther into the future,
whilst it is represented at the same time as just
around the corner, given sufficiently thorough
and drastic action' (Essays in Sociology and
Social Philosophy, 1968, p. 122). Instead, he
takes the view that there are patterns of social

progress, and he picks out two specific
examples: the law and ethics. He says that
progress in the law is marked by the transition
from the unsystematic application of common
law to its codification by experts on the crite-
rion of consistency. Similarly, progress in ethics
is detectable in the transition from the personal
morality of individuals in small social groupings
to the development of a consistent body of
social ethics. Behind both there is the assump-
tion of rationality.
During his long and distinguished career, in
which he influenced and inspired many gener-
ations of sociology students, Ginsberg was an
advocate of egalitarianism, toleration, social
justice and the rationality of humankind, which
he hoped would drive society in the direction of
a greater social good. He states that such a
good will not be brought about by the
workings of general laws, but by our own
choices.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Psychology of Society (1921).
Studies in Sociology (1932).
Moral Progress (1944).
The Idea of Progress: A Revaluation (1953).
Reason and Experience in Ethics (1956).
Essays in Sociology and Social Philosophy, 3
vols (1956, 1961; 1 vol., 1968).
Nationalism: A Reappraisal (1961).
On Justice and Society (1965).
Kathryn L. Plant
GODDARD, Leonard (1925-)
Len Goddard was born in Nottingham on 13
February 1925. He served in the RAF from
1943 to 1947, and was educated at the
University of St Andrews, where he graduated
in 1951, and at the University of Cambridge.
He was appointed as an assistant lecturer in
331
GODDARD
logic and metaphysics in St Andrews in 1952,
where he took the BPhil in 1955. In 1956 he
took up a lectureship at the University of New
England, Australia, proceeding to a senior lec-
tureship and subsequently to the Chair of
Philosophy in 1961, which he held until 1966.
He was Dean of Arts from 1964 to 1966. He
was appointed to the Chair of Logic and
Metaphysics at St Andrews in that year, which
he held until 1977, with two years as visiting
fellow at the Australian National University
from 1974 to 1976. He was Dean of Arts from
1972 to 1974. He was appointed to the Boyce
Gibson Chair of Philosophy at the University of
Melbourne in 1977. After he retired in 1990,
Melbourne made him emeritus professor.
Goddard is best known for his work on the
logic of significance, about which he published
a number of articles, culminating in the publi-
cation jointly with Richard Routley (aka
Sylvan) of the first volume of The Logic of
Significance and Context in 1973. A second
volume was projected, but never appeared. It
planned to examine criteria of significance,
non-significance as it arises from a clash of
meaning rather than lack of meaning of the
components. What unifies Goddard's work is
a fascination with the logical paradoxes and the
theory of types. How can we talk about
breaches of type-theoretical constraints without
running the risk of breaching them ourselves?
The aim of the logic of significance was to
develop a formal theory in which variables
ranged over both significant and non-significant
sentences. Significance is relative to a context,
significant in one context, not in another.
Indeed, it is token-sentences, not types, which
are significant or not, as used in a context, just
as it is token-sentences which are true or false.
Moreover, sentences can be incomplete in a
context, for reason of reference failure, for
example. Thus there are four possibilities for a
use of a sentence in a context: true, false, non-
significant or incomplete.
One consequence of this analysis is that the
Liar sentence is at best incomplete. For the Liar
sentence says of itself that it makes a false state-
GODDARD
ment. But the theory of context shows that no
sentence can make that statement of itself.
Hence the Liar either fails to make a statement,
and so it is incomplete by reference failure, or
succeeds by virtue of the context in referring to
some other statement, and then is true or false
depending on the value of that statement.
The logic of significance, however, concen-
trated on the first three possibilities, t, /and n.
An important question is whether t alone, or t
and n, should be designated - both possibilities
were developed in the S and C-logics respec-
tively. Another is whether non-significance of
any one component of a sentence renders the
whole non-significant.
Goddard returned to the analysis of the Liar
paradox and its ilk in work with Mark
Johnston, exploring the consequences of J.F.
THOMSON'S famous observation that nothing
can be related to something just when it is not
related to itself. The aim was a general formal
characterization of the reflexive paradoxes,
showing that they arise not from the specific
nature of sets, properties, ordinals, sentences or
whatever, but simply from the nature of unre-
stricted quantification.
A third collaboration was with Brenda Judge,
enquiring into the nature of the simple objects
of WITTGENSTEIN'S Tractatus. The book
contains a geometrical interpretation whereby
objects are rendered as points, atomic facts (or
states of affairs) as actual line segments, facts as
plane figures, and so on. This interpretation
was seen to reveal Wittgenstein's final rejection
of the Tractatus as nonsense as a rejection of a
metaphysical search for things in themselves
(the ideality of points) and a return to the world
of ordinary things (perceptible shapes).
Among Goddard's achievements was the
introduction of modern logic into philosophy in
Australia. He appointed logicians and worked
with logicians in the formal underpinnings of
philosophical ideas.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(with Richard Routley), The Logic of
Significance and Context, vol. 1
332
(Edinburgh, 1973).
Philosophical Problems (Edinburgh, 1977).
(with Brenda Judge), The Metaphysics of
Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Australasian
Journal of Philosophy monograph
(Melbourne, 1982).
(with Mark Johnston), The Nature of
Reflexive Paradoxes', pt 1, Notre Dame
Journal of Formal Logic, vol. 24 (1983),
pp. 491-508; pt 2, vol. 25 (1984), pp.
27-58.
Other Relevant Works
'A Personal View of the Dev elopment of
Deductive Logic in Australia since 1956',
in J. Srzednicki and D. Woods (eds),
Essays in Philosophy in Australia
(Dordrecht and Boston, 1992), pp.
169-85.
Stephen Read
GOMBRICH, Ernst Hans (1909-2001)
Ernst Gombrich was born in Vienna and died
in London on 3 November 2001, aged ninety-
two. He studied at the Theresianum and then
at the Second Institute of Art History in the
University of Vienna under Julius von Schlosser
(1928-33). After graduating he worked as a
research assistant for, and then collaborator
with, the museum curator and Freudian analyst
Ernst Kris. He emigrated to England and joined
the Warburg Institute in London as a research
assistant in 1936. During World War II he was
employed by the BBC as a radio monitor. After
the war he rejoined the Warburg Institute as
senior research fellow (1946-8), lecturer
(1948-54), reader (1954-6), special lecturer
(1956-9) and Director (1959-76). He was also
Slade Professor of Fine Art, University of
Oxford (1950-53); Durning-Lawrence
Professor of the History of Art, London

University (1956-9); Professor of the History of
the Classical Tradition (1959-76, emeritus);
Visiting Professor of Fine Art, Harvard
University (1959); FBA (1960); FSA (1961);
Slade Professor of Fine Art, University of
Cambridge (1961-3); Lethaby Professor, Royal
College of Art (1967-8); Andrew D. White
Professor-at-Large, Cornell University
(1970-77); and FRSL (1975). He was awarded
the CBE in!966, a knighthood in 1972 and the
Order of Merit in 1988. He received numerous
prizes and distinctions. His major publications
include The Story of Art (1950); Art and Illusion:
A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial
Representation (1960); Aby Warburg: An
Intellectual Biography (1970); and The Sense
of Order: A Study in the Psychology of
Decorative Art (1979). His book, The Preference
for the Primitive, which he completed before his
death, was published in July 2002.
Gombrich's most famous work in the
academic community was Art and Illusion. It
has been cited across the whole scholarly arena
from the humanities through the social sciences
across to the physical and biological sciences. It
is still the subject of heated controversy over
forty years after its original publication. Within
philosophy it has been cited to support a wide
variety of contradictory positions. Much to
Gombrich's chagrin, Nelson Goodman cited it
to support his conventionalist views on picto-
rial representation; others have taken it as an
extreme statement of an illusionist theory of art.
The title of the book misrepresents its contents,
which are better captured by the subtitle 'A
Study in the Psychology of Pictorial
Representation'; it is neither about art nor
about illusion.
The contradictory receptions of Art and
Illusion were largely caused by two factors: a
multidisciplinary and apparently eclectic
approach to its subject and a rhetorical mode
of address. Originally delivered as a series of
public lectures in Washington's National
Gallery, it was aimed at a cultivated public
rather than a specialist scientific audience. As a
consequenceGombrich used memorable for-
333
GOMBRICH
mulations, such as 'making comes before
matching', vivid illustrations, such as his use of
Jastrow's duck-rabbit to illustrate perceptual
ambiguity, and striking metaphors. By contrast
his later collection of essays, The Image and the
Eye (1982), largely resulted from presentations
to scientific audiences with a consequently more
rigorous use of examples and language.
Unsurprisingly, he has been accused of a
'change of heart', shifting from conventionalist
humanist to positivist scientist. In truth his
work has been completely consistent from his
earliest publications in the Viennese journal
Kritische Berichte to his posthumous publica-
tion The Preference for the Primitive.
Gombrich's interest in the application of the
psychology of perception to the study of the
history of art started in his student years in
Vienna. While he was studying with Schlosser,
Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pacht revived interest
in the work of Alois Riegl. Sedlmayr rejected
Riegl's psychological views as old-fashioned
and inadequate to the task, replacing them with
the newly fashionable gestalt psychology.
Gombrich pursued the psychological approach
through attending the seminars of Karl Buhler,
where he came into contact with Egon
Brunswick. Buhler held one of Vienna's chairs
of philosophy and was deeply interested in lin-
guistics, the psychology of perception and what
he called sematology. Both Brunswick and Karl
POPPER, whom Gombrich met after he arrived
in England, had the same doctoral advisers:
Buhler and Moritz Schlick. Biihler's approach
to problems was deeply philosophical, in the
best sense of the word, and left its indelible
mark on Gombrich's thought to the point
where he took some of his seminal notions for
granted. Although Biihler's ideas figure
throughout Art and Illusion, he was never
named once. On leaving university, Gombrich
worked with Ernst Kris on a project that moved
from an enquiry into expression into a histor-
ical and psychological investigation of carica-
ture. They published a shortened version of
their findings in the British Journal of Medical
Psychology in 1938.
GOMBRICH
During the war Gombrich's work, for the
BBC Monitoring Service, gave him an increased
interest in the problems of the psychology of
perception. His popular book The Story of Art
embedded an ecological approach to the study
of visual imagery, a developed sense of the role
of tradition in the generation of artistic styles,
and the theory that visual imagery produced in
the Western naturalist tradition moved from a
representation of what was known to what
was seen. On completing the manuscript in
1947 he sent a book proposal to Walter
Neurath, a fellow emigre from Vienna and
owner of Thames and Hudson. It was called
The Realm and Range of the Image' and laid
the ground for his later publications on natu-
ralistic imagery and symbolism.
After the war Gombrich re-established
contact with Ernst Kris and in the following
year became a frequent visitor to the United
States, where he engaged in conversation with
emigre psychologists and linguisticians. An
early product of his visits was his 1949 review of
Charles Morris's Signs, Language and Behaviour
for the American Art Bulletin, which displayed
his familiarity with the British and American
traditions of semiotics. In England he pursued his
research in the library of the British Psychological
Society at Senate House in the University of
London and in 1955 he presented 'Art History
and the Psychology of Perception' to its annual
conference. His lecture opened by establishing
the legitimacy of 'trespassing as a scientific tech-
nique'. A principle theme of the lecture was the
role that categorization played, both in language
and perception. Following Biihler's example, he
declared 'representation is from the outset a
symbolic process. It is representation through
or in a medium'. Riegl's approach was not
entirely wrong:
in a way Riegl was right when he rejected the
naive idea, that one can measure or discuss
the degree to which a work of art represents
reality. And he was right not only because the
medium, as we have seen, creates a Mental
Set in the terms of which Nature is perceived,
334
but also, one suspects, because what we call
'style' may do the same. At the same time we
have learned that it is much more difficult to
pin down these subtle matters than he knew.
Granted that 'Nature' or 'Reality' is unstable.
Does it make sense to say that the Egyptians
or Impressionists painted the world 'as they
saw it'? ... where do we go from here?
(Durham MS, p. 9a)
Art and Illusion was concerned to answer that
rhetorical question but Gombrich's character-
ization of his approach as a study in the 'lin-
guistics of the image' was a formulation that
was to bedevil reception of the book.
The theoretical roots of Art and Illusion can
be found in its footnotes, with the inexplicable
absence of Biihler's work. As it was the tradi-
tion in Anglo-American thought to treat the
psychology of perception as a distinct field from
linguistics and as the same tradition failed to
problematize the naturalistic image, critical
responses were effectively left groping in the
dark. Gombrich's apparently eclectic
approach to psychology was biased in the
direction of E.G. Tolman and E. Brunswick's
The Organism and the Causal Texture of
Environment' (Psychological Review, 1935).
His approach to linguistics was grounded in
Biihler's Organonmodell of linguistic com-
munication applied in his book Sprachtheorie:
Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache (1934)
to Symbolfelder r in nichtsprachlichen
Darstellungsgerdten [Symbolic: Fields in Non-
Linguistic Instruments of Representation].
The Anglo-American perceptual hypothesis
model was different from Brunswick's proba-
bilistic functionalism framed in the light of
Popper's conjectural model. Richard
WOLLHEIM failed to grasp the implications of
this strange concoction in his influential review.
If, as Wollheim argued, perception followed
the path of schema and correction, the image-
maker could have no exit to a real world inde-
pendent of the workings of the schema. But this
fails to recognize that the pictorial image is
structurally different from the real world: one

cannot perceptually move around in an image
but one can in the real world. In Gibsonian
terms, invariant structures are revealed by
movement. The static image can be corrected
by the practice of visual intervention in the real
world. The naturalistic artist is not the passive
recipient of sense-data but an interventionist
who tests two-dimensional variants against
invariant structures.
In his Durham Lecture, and since, Gombrich
was critical of the Whorf-Sapir theory that
one's experience of the world was constituted
by language. The Greeks did not have limited
colour perception as a consequence of their
limited range of colour words. Language can
become enormously inventive in relation to
colour variety, as paint catalogues have demon-
strated. Language responds to the need to dif-
ferentiate and so does naturalistic imagery,
which proceeds by re-articulating schemata:
The schemata themselves serve as standards of
comparison as classes of spatial relationships
and we know by now that it is on such models
of relationships that all representation is
grounded' (Durham MS, p. 11). Without
further instructions the process of mutual
induction will take place. Insist on a perfect
copy, however, and
the artist will concentrate not on the schema,
but on its successive corrections, he will not
look for forms which match but for forms
which are not yet matched and in this process
he will succeed to adjust the form to any
required degree of accuracy just by adopting
what has been called a stimulus concentra-
tion, and analytical attitude.
(Durham MS, p. 14)
But that was an analysis, for the benefit of his
audience of psychologists, which was based on
copying a Rorschach inkblot to demonstrate
that the idea of a perfect copy was not inco-
herent. By contrast, Art and Illusion, which
was aimed at an art-loving public, opens with
a demonstration that it is not possible to
produce a perfect copy of the subject of John
335
GOMBRICH
Constable's Wyvenhoe Park. Every picture of
Wyvenhoe Park would be a relational model
that would emphasize some features of the park
at the expense of others, depending upon the
possibilities open to the medium.
Many readers of Art and Illusion created
problems for themselves by insisting on a
dichotomy between nature and convention.
They were not helped by Gombrich's later
frequent references to that dichotomy, for
example in the introduction to his paper 'Image
and Code: Scope and Limits of Conventionalism
in Pictorial Representation' (reprinted in The
Image and the Eye). But as Gombrich himself
argued in that paper, 'the traditional opposition
between "nature" and "convention" turns out
to be misleading. What we observe is rather a
continuum between skills which come natu-
rally to us and skills which may be next to
impossible for anyone to acquire' (p. 283).
He also consistently argued that whilst the
adoption of one-point linear perspective was a
convention of the Western naturalist tradition, it
was nevertheless an objective scientific discovery
resting on the physical fact that it is impossible to
see, unaided, around corners. Its use was not so
much a matter of art as of image construction.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology
of Pictorial Representation (1960).
Meditations on a Hobby Horse (1963).
(Ed. with R.L. Gregory), Illusion in Nature
and Art (1973).
The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in
the Psychology of Pictorial Representation
(Oxford, 1982).
Other Relevant Works
The Essential Gombrich, ed. Richard
Woodfield (1996).
Gombrich on Art and Psychology, ed.
Richard Woodfield (Manchester, 1996).
E.H. Gombrich: A Bibliography, ed. J.B.
Trapp (2000).
Richard Woodfield
GOODSTEIN
GOODSTEIN, Reuben Louis (1912-85)
Reuben Louis Goodstein was born in London
on 15 December 1912 and died in Leicester on
28 March 1985. He was educated at St Paul's
School in London as a scholar and senior
scholar, and at Magdalene College, Cambridge
(1931-5), where he was a scholar and research
scholar. Goodstein took his BA in mathemat-
ics with first class honours in 1933 and was
awarded an MSc for research on transfinite
numbers in 1935. He was a lecturer in mathe-
matics at Reading University from 1935 to
1947 and undertook research which he sub-
mitted for a University of London doctorate in
1946. Goodstein was appointed as Professor of
Mathematics and Head of Department at
University College, Leicester from 1948 to
1977. He was the first mathematical logician to
take a British university chair and he had sig-
nificant effect on the development of this field
in Britain. Goodstein served as the Dean of the
Faculty of Science from 1954 to 1957 and as
Pro-Vice-Chancellor from 1966 to 1969. He
was honorary librarian of the Mathematical
Association from 1955 to 1977, and its
President from 1975 to 1976. Goodstein also
successfully edited the Mathematical Gazette
from 1956 to 1962. London University con-
ferred on him a DLitt and Cambridge an ScD.
After Goodstein retired in 1977, Leicester made
him an emeritus professor.
Goodstein's principal research interests were
in mathematical logic, especially ordinal
numbers, recursive arithmetic and analysis, and
the philosophy of mathematics. His work in the
latter area was greatly shaped by WITTGENSTEIN
(see, in particular, Constructive Formalism,
pp. 9-10). The majority of his philosophical
papers were published in Essays in the
Philosophy of Mathematics (1965) and his
essay 'Wittgenstein's Philosophy of
Mathematics' (1972) indicates that he was one
of the few philosophers of mathematics at that
time who had a good understanding of
Wittgenstein's remarks about this topic. One
aspect of Wittgenstein's influence was that
336
Goodstein rejected classical quantification
theory (Constructive Formalism, p. 9) and
(with encouragement from Paul Bernays) devel-
oped a detailed version of analysis predicated
on strongly finitist assumptions by employing
a free variable equation calculus based on prim-
itive recursion in a substantial series of mono-
graphs and papers (see especially 'Function
Theory in an Axiom-Free Equational Calculus',
1945, Recursive Number Theory, 1957, and
Recursive Analysis, 1961). Goodstein's strongly
finitist perspective was not widely appreciated
in Britain at the time and his work received
greater international attention, particularly
from the Leningrad School of constructive
mathematics The early 1980s saw a revival of
interest in his paper 'On the Restricted Ordinal
Theorem' (1944) because it gave a straightfor-
ward number theoretic first: order statement,
which was proved to be independent of Peano
arithmetic in 1982 by L. Kirby and J. Paris.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mathematical Analysis (Oxford, 1948).
Constructive Formalism: Essays on the
Foundations of Mathematics (Leicester,
1951; 2nd edn, 1965).
(with E.J.F. Primrose), Axiomatic Protective
Geometry (Leicester 1953: 2nd edn, 1962).
Mathematical Logic (Leicester, 1957; 2nd
edn, 1962).
Recursive Number Theory: A Development
of Recursive Arithmetic in a Logic-Free
Equation Calculus (Amsterdam, 1957).
Recursive Analysis (Amsterdam, 1961).
Fundamental Concepts of Mathematics
(Oxford, 1962; 2nd edn, 1979).
Boolean Algebra (Oxford, 1963).
Essays in the Philosophy of Mathematics
(Leicester, 1965).
Complex Functions (New York, 1965).
Development of Mathematical Logic (1971).
Other Relevant Works
'On the Restricted Ordinal Theorem',
Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol. 9 (1944),
pp. 33-41.

'Function Theory in an Axiom-Free
Equational Calculus', Proceedings of the
London Mathematical Society, 2nd ser.,
vol. 48 (1945), pp. 401-34.
The Foundations of Mathematics: An
Inaugural Lecture Delivered at the
University College of Leicester on
November 13th, 1951 (Leicester, 1951).
'Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Mathematics',
in Alice Ambrose and Morris Lazerowitz
(eds), Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy
and Language (1972), pp. 271-86.
Mark Addis
GORNALL, Thomas (1912-92)
Thomas Gornall was born in Preston,
Lancashire on 10 May 1912 and died at St
Beuno's College, Tremeirchion, North Wales
on 31 August 1992. He was educated at
Preston Catholic College and entered the
Society of Jesus in 1930. He studied philosophy
at Heythrop College, Oxfordshire from 1934 to
1937, literae humaniores at Campion Hall,
Oxford from 1937 to 1941, and theology at
Heythrop from 1942 to 1946. He taught
classics at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire from
1946 to 1949, and became Professor of Natural
Theology and the History of Philosophy at
Heythrop in 1950, where he remained until
the college moved to London University in
1970. Until his retirement in 1981 he worked
at the Birmingham Oratory with Stephen
Dessain and, latterly, Ian Ker, editing and pub-
lishing the diaries and correspondence of John
Henry Newman.
A Philosophy of God: The Elements of
Thomist Natural Theology (1962) has the
clarity and order characteristic of an experi-
enced teacher. It is particularly good at making
accessible the specialist terminology of
Thomism, and devotes many pages to the most
337
GORNALL
difficult questions: the compatibility of God's
omniscience with human free will; the problem
of evil; the finite and the infinite; contingency
and necessity. He argues that the cosmological
and teleological arguments for God's existence
are entirely valid. Gornall was convinced,
however, that created language is quite inapt
for speaking about God. Only the mystics, he
thought, were qualified to discuss the deity,
although even their language does not measure
up to the truth of experience.
GornalPs work on Newman's letters and
diaries was the other preoccupation of his
academic career. His admiration for Newman's
intellect was qualified by some reservations
about an intolerant and unforgiving strand in
his personality. In 'Newman's Lapses into
Subjectivity' (1982) he sums up the views
expressed in his three earlier Newman articles:
that Newman occasionally adopted self-justi-
fying positions at expense of others, and was
inclined to overestimate the extent to which he
was always right. He was a great man, but did
not always avoid the kind of self-deception
that Gornall calls 'subjectivity'.
In a frieze around his room at Heythrop,
Gornall constructed an analysis of Bach's
fugues in which the themes and counter-themes
and their developments were translated into
exquisitely shaped block graphs in red and
blue.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Philosophy of God: The Elements of
Thomist Natural Theology (1962).
(Ed. with others), Letters and Diaries of John
Henry Newman, 9 vols (Oxford 1978-99).
Other Relevant Works
'The Newman Problem', 2 pts, The Clergy
Review, vol. 62 (1977), pp. 137-42, pp.
410-13.
'Newman's "Failure in the Schools'", The
Clergy Review, vol. 63 (1978), pp. 65-8.
'Newman: the Tutorship Quarrel', The
Clergy Review, vol. 64 (1979), pp.
205-209.
GORNALL
'Newman's Lapses into Subjectivity', The
Heythrop Journal, vol. 23 (1982), pp.
46-50.
Peter Gallagher
GOSLING, Justin Cyril Bertrand (1930-)
J.C.B. Gosling was born in Wolverhampton
on 26 April 1930. He was educated at
Ampleforth College and Wadham College,
Oxford, where he gained a first class in literae
humaniores in 1953 and the BPhil in
Philosophy in 1955. Apart from visiting
appointments in Australia and the USA, his
entire academic career was spent in Oxford,
mainly at St Edmund Hall, where he was a
fellow and tutor in philosophy from 1960 to
1982 and Principal from 1982 to 1996. He
was awarded the Green Prize in Moral
Philosophy in 1968. He was Senior Proctor of
the University (1977-8).
Gosling was typical of the 'Oxford Greats'
philosopher, classically educated, trained in
philosophy via literae humaniores (and post-
1946 the BPhil), who worked both on ancient
authors, treated primarily analytically and crit-
ically, and on philosophical topics related to
ancient themes. In the ancient sphere his
primary interest was in Plato (though he also
wrote on Aristotle and on post-Aristotelian
philosophy); here he acknowledged the influ-
ence and inspiration of his undergraduate tutor
at Wadham, I.M. CROMBIE. His modern inter-
ests centred on moral psychology and philoso-
phy of mind, especially on topics such as desire
and pleasure, central to the thought of Plato,
Aristotle and other ancients, where modern
discussion had been stimulated on the one hand
by RYLE and on the other by philosophers influ-
enced by WITTGENSTEIN, notably by Anthony
KENNY, an Oxford associate of Gosling in the
1950s. One of the latter's earliest publications
338
(in Phronesis, 1959) was on Plato's account of
false pleasures in the Philebus, prompting an
exchange with Kenny in subsequent numbers.
This set the tone for much of the work which
followed. His first book, Pleasure and Desire
(1969), effectively applied Wittgensteinian
styles of argument to Platonic themes, such as
that of the complexity of pleasure. The discus-
sion of false pleasure was developed first in his
translation of and commentary on the Philebus
(1975), which did justice to the argumentative
intricacies of a fascinating and baffling dialogue,
and later (1982) in The Greeks on Pleasure
(written jointly with C.C.W. TAYLOR). This was
the first work in English to offer a comprehen-
sive account of ancient Greek theories of
pleasure, from the pre-Socratics to the Stoics
and epicureans, with particular concentration
on Plato and Aristotle. Though in some respects
superseded by subsequent scholarship, it remains
a substantial contribution to the literature on
the topic. Other major works are his compre-
hensive account of Plato (1973) in the influential
Arguments of the Philosophers series, and
Weakness of the Will (1990), in which, as in his
earlier work, ancient insights are put to work on
modern conceptual problems.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Pleasure and Desire (Oxford, 1969).
Plato (London and Boston, 1973).
(Trans, with notes and comm.), Plato:
Philebus (Oxford, 1975).
(with C.C.W. Taylor), The Greeks on
Pleasure (Oxford, 1982).
Weakness of the Will (1990).
Other Relevant Works
'Republic, Book V: Ta rcoUa Kcdcc etc.',
Phronesis, vol. 5 (1960), pp. 116-28.
'Mental Causes and Fear', Mind, vol. 71
(1962), pp. 289-306.
'Emotion and Object', Philosophical Review,
vol. 74 (1965), pp. 486-503.
'Ao^ot and A<)vccui<; in Plato's Republic',
Phronesis, vol. 13 (1968), pp. 119-30.
'More Aristotelian Pleasures', Proceedings of

the Aristotelian Society, vol. 74 (1973-4),
pp. 15-34.
The Stoics and "Akrasia"', Apeiron, vol. 20
(1987), pp. 179-202.
C.C.W. Taylor
GOUGH, John Wiedhofft (1900-76)
J.W. Gough was born in Cardiff on 23
February 1900 and died in Truro in early 1976.
The son of John Gough and Ann Wiedhofft, he
was an outstanding student at Oxford, achiev-
ing a 'first' both in classical 'Greats' (1922)
and in modern history (1923). Gough was a
fellow of Oriel College for his entire academic
career, and an emeritus fellow there after he
retired. Oxford appointed him a university
lecturer in modern history in 1947 and
awarded him a DLitt in 1965.
Although primarily a historian - he wrote
biographies of entrepreneurs and histories of
the Mendip mines - Gough had an interest in
political ideas that extended beyond their
history. His most important book, The Social
Contract: A Critical Study of its Development
(1936), is written from the standpoint of one
sympathetic to, though critical of, social
contract theories of government. In common
with many social contract theorists, Gough
held that 'in the last analysis, political obliga-
tion is a special kind of moral obligation'
(Social Contract, p. 255). He expressed a broad
agreement with and indebtedness to E.F.
CARROT'S Morals and Politics (1935) in his
political philosophy. De SELINCOURT, in his
review, complained that Cough's book had 'no
general thesis and little continuity of argument
beyond what is provided by the succession of
names' (p. 362). But he conceded that the Social
Contract enables its readers to see that 'the
great thinkers whose names they usually asso-
ciate with [the social contract] are only the
339
GOUGH
most eminent examples of a tendency of
thought that expressed itself in numerous pre-
decessors and successors' (ibid., p. 363). And
such readers will not make the mistake, it may
be added, of imagining that Locke derived it
somehow from Hobbes. Cough's book, though
it is primarily a contribution to the history of
political ideas, is still cited as the locus classicus
on the history of the social contract theory.
Gough is also noted for his work on Locke's
political philosophy, to which he wrote an
excellent introduction in his student edition,
first published in 1946, of The Second Treatise
of Civil Government, which had A Letter
Concerning Toleration as an appendix. After
World War II interest in Locke's philosophy
was boosted by the acquisition for the Bodleian
Library of the Lovelace Papers, making avail-
able to scholars a large number of unpublished
Locke manuscripts that had previously been
in private hands. Gough was one of those influ-
enced by this development. He wrote a number
of papers on various aspects of Locke's politi-
cal philosophy, eight of which he brought
together as a book in 1950. He claimed that
two of the papers (on 'The Law of Nature' and
'The Development of Locke's Belief in
Toleration') were the first on these topics to be
based on a study of some of this new material.
The other essays reflect his scepticism about
some previously common assumptions about
Locke: for instance, that he was an individual-
ist or that his political theory was closely con-
nected to the revolution of 1688.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Social Contract: A Critical Study of its
Development (1936; 2nd edn, 1957).
John Locke's Political Philosophy: Eight
Studies (1950; 2nd edn, 1973).
Other Relevant Works
The Second Treatise of Civil Government
(Oxford, 1946; 3rd edn, 1966).
Fundamental Law in English Constitutional
History (1955).
GOUGH
Further Reading
de Selincourt, O., Review of The Social
Contract, Philosophy, vol. 12 (1937), pp.
362-3.
Stuart Brown
GRANT, Colin King (1924-81)
C.K. Grant was born in Bournemouth on 22
March 1924 and died in Durham on 26
February 1981. He was educated at
Clayesmore School in Dorset and at Wadham
College, Oxford, where he obtained a first in
PPE in 1944. By the time he was awarded his
DPhil in 1950 he had already spent three years
(1946-9) in Glasgow as an assistant in moral
philosophy and been appointed to a lectureship
in philosophy at Nottingham. After visiting
appointments in Chicago, Maryland and
Bergen, he was appointed Professor of
Philosophy at Durham in 1959.
Grant's most important work was in ethics,
where he sought to illuminate our understand-
ing of a number of concepts central to practi-
cal principles. In 'Good at' (1960) he examined
this phrase to see whether it can legitimately be
used in moral evaluations, that is whether
moral conduct can be treated as an ability or
skill one can be judged to be 'good at'. He con-
cluded that it could not. In 'Promises' (1949) he
examined the linguistic function of promises by
comparing it with those of intentions and pre-
dictions. A promise, he argued, creates a rela-
tionship between the promiser and the
promisee, and announces an intention which
the promisee must desire. But the obligation to
keep the promise comes not from the relation-
ship created with the promisee but by the
creation of a situation in which moral rules are
brought into play and which themselves oblige
the promiser. The strength of obligation to
keep the promise, Grant concluded, 'makes it
340
easy to hold that here we have an immediate
intuition of duty, that ... fits a deontological
theory very easily'. The 'grounds for this oblig-
ation ... seem to be sui generis' ('Promises',
pp. 365-6).
In 'Akrasia and the Criteria of Assent to
Practical Principles' (1956) Grant took issue
with the assertion that one who believes in a
moral principle must act (in the appropriate cir-
cumstances) according to it. In other words, not
to act on that principle (when apposite) implies
that one does not assent to it. This is wrong,
Grant says, because it is based on the inade-
quate ethical theory found in Plato and Kant
that moral decision making rests entirely on a
conflict between moral principles and desire.
There are cases, he argues, where we do not act
on a principle because desire has overcome it
but because the principle is held subordinate to
some other principle. Hence we act according
to the superior principle, yet \vithout ceasing to
assent to the inferior one. In citing Kierkegaard
he notes that there are other cases where moral
principles are overridden, such as by aesthetic
or religious principles. He believes this to be a
genuine problem that needs attention.
Much of Grant's work in this field was
brought together in Belief and Action (1960).
He also had papers published on epistemology
and on the proofs for the existence of God.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Promises', Mind, vol. 58 (1949), pp. 359-66.
'Akrasia and the Criteria of Assent to
Practical Principles', Mind, vol. 65 (1956),
pp. 400-407.
'Good at', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 32 (1958), pp. 173-94.
Belief and Action (Durham, 1960).
Other Relevant Work
'Certainty, Necessity and Aristotle's Sea
Battle', Mind, vol. 66 (1957), pp. 522-31.
'The Ontological Disproof of the Devil',
Analysis, vol. 17 (1957), pp. 71-2.
'Pragmatic Implication', Philosophy, vol. 33
(1958), pp. 303-24.

'From World to God', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 41 (1967),
pp. 153-62.
'On a Definition of Knowledge', Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 73
(1972-3), pp. 157-66.
N. J. Fox
GRAYLING, Anthony Clifford (1949- )
Anthony Grayling was born in Luanshya,
Zambia on 3 April 1949. He grew up in the
English expatriate community of Central and
East Africa, which afforded him eclectic philo-
sophical reading as well as precipitating early
political commitments. He studied at Oxford
with A.J. Ayer and P.F. Strawson, receiving his
doctorate in 1981, and became a lecturer in
philosophy (later, supernumary Fellow) at St
Anne's College, Oxford and then Professor of
Philosophy at Birkbeck College, London.
With a focus on the theory of knowledge,
metaphysics, and philosophical logic,
Grayling's technical philosophy is character-
ized by a concern with the relations between
mind and world. His work, taken together,
can be seen as an attempt to understand in
what ways our empirical awareness constrains
our ability to think true thoughts about our
environment. It concentrates on the epistemo-
logical relations between our thought and the-
orizing about the world and the world being
thought about, and the truth and meaning con-
straints that govern this thinking. His distinc-
tive contributions are centred on the debates
about scepticism, and about realism and anti-
realism.
Grayling's anti-sceptical arguments are devel-
oped in The Refutation of Scepticism (1985),
Berkeley: The Central Arguments (1986),
Wittgenstein (1988), and Russell (1996).
Combining a common-sense empirical realism
341
GRAYLING
with a second-order theoretical anti-realism
('anti-transcendentism'), he confronts the scep-
tical challenge at one level by appealing to the
assumptions underlying our actual linguistic
conventions, and at the next level with ambi-
tious transcendental arguments in the tradition
of Kant and Strawson. The character on whom
Grayling concentrates - the sceptic about the
external world - challenges us to justify our
belief that the external world exists indepen-
dently of our perception of it, on the grounds
that our possession of the best evidence for any
empirical judgment is always consistent with
the falsity of that judgment. Grayling argues
against him first that certain basic empirical
beliefs are necessary for the assertions of our
empirical-world discourse to have sense. He
argues second that this discourse itself can be
transcendentally justified. While the first-order
realistic assumptions implied by our linguistic
conventions may ultimately be conceded by
the sceptic, it is - according to Grayling - the
ontological presuppositions of this discourse
(the literal truth of its assumptions) that con-
stitute his real target. The sceptical threat is
that these presuppositions are themselves unjus-
tified. Responding to this second-order worry,
Grayling holds that there are beliefs necessary
not only to the discourse in question, but also
more generally to the very possibility of
coherent experience or knowledge. Interestingly
coincident with Davidson, this amounts to a
denial of the very possibility of alternative con-
ceptual schemes. The second-order sceptic can
thus be seen as a cognitive relativist. With their
foundational role, and their transcendental jus-
tification, the beliefs to which Grayling appeals
are non-inferential and non-relative. If
accepted, and taken together, his arguments
resist scepticism both at the level of everyday
discourse and also - more profoundly - at the
level of our theorizing about it.
Engaging directly with this transcendental
defence against scepticism, Grayling's work in
philosophical logic clarifies traditional concep-
tions of the realism debate and develops asso-
ciated views of truth and meaning. His overall
GRAYLING
position is introduced in the later chapters of
An Introduction to Philosophical Logic (1982,
third edition 1997), and advanced in a series of
papers including 'Epistemology and Realism'
(PAS 1991-2, pp. 47-65), and Independence
and Transcendence: The Independence Thesis
and Realism' (Philosophical Studies [Todai]
XVI1998, pp. 1-17). The idea he proposes is
that we should conceive of realism as a pri-
marily epistemological, rather than metaphys-
ical or semantic, thesis about the relations
between mind and world. Much of his case is
devoted precisely to disambiguating prior ques-
tions about the epistemic relationship between
experience and its objects, from consequent
metaphysical questions about materialism and
idealism on the one hand, and - more perti-
nently - from currently popular Dummettian
questions about the nature of truth and
meaning on the other.
In the course of this project the realist/anti-
realist territory is set out rather differently from
how it is by either the traditional metaphysical
accounts or the contemporary semantic
approaches. Grayling takes the essence of the
anti-realist position to be that the mind-world
relations - those between thought and its
objects, perception and its targets, experience
and the realms over which it ranges - are
internal relations. He takes the essence of
realism by contrast to be an independence thesis
that denies this. Internal relations are defined by
him such that no complete description of either
relatum can leave out mention of the other;
and invoking Dummett as a foil, he argues
against conflating the issue of internal relations
with issues about the nature of truth or about
truth-conditional theories of meaning. Given
this disambiguation of debate, he then points
out that the realist's commitment to the inde-
pendence thesis is simply incoherent; that at
the level of theorizing about the relations
between mind and world, the anti-realist
position literally is the only one available. The
unintelligibility of the realist thesis is claimed by
him to be evident both in world-mind and
mind-world directions: in the former, because
342
any account of the content and individuation of
thoughts about things essentially involves ref-
erence to the things thought about (chiming
with the Putnam-inspired and widely accepted
thesis of semantic externalism); in the latter
direction, due to likewise appealing considera-
tions most conspicuously exemplified in the
Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory.
Epistemic constraints implicit in Grayling's
anti-realism not only are exploited in his
defence against the sceptic, but also motivate
and integrate with his anti-transcendent
accounts of truth and meaning. For the details
of the work on meaning, the reader is referred
to 'Perfect Speaker Theory' (Studies in
Reference and Meaning, Filosofia, 1995 pp.
43-60) and the early sections of 'Scepticism
and Justification' (Luper, S. The Skeptics:
Contemporary Essays 2003). The most broadly
significant feature of his view of meaning is,
however, inevitably the theory of truth that
informs it. This truth theory is developed in An
Introduction to Philosophical Logic (third edn,
1997). It is a non-univocal view that takes the
predicate '_is true' as a place-holder for a
number of more precise predicates which each
denote different anti-transcendent evaluatory
properties (examples might be: 'verifiability' in
science, 'constructability' in mathematics, 'uni-
versalizability' in ethics). While there is no pre-
sumption of a single property common to all
these relevant standards of evaluation, truth is
neither deflatable nor indefinable, but consists
in a family of cognitively significant notions.
This is a kind of verificatiortist approach to
truth and meaning, but one that does not
commit to the need for any single universally
applicable principle of evaluation.
Unlike his closest philosophical influences
(Kant, Ayer, Strawson), and notwithstanding
his belief that the philosopher should engage in
public debate, Grayling has eschewed elabo-
rating in his academic capacity the corollaries
or implications of his epistemology for the areas
of applied ethics or practical reason. However,
with its deep-rooted pragmatism and anti-tran-
scendentalism, it is impossible to see his tech-

nical work wholly independently from the
active cultural and political engagement, or the
outspoken secularism, of his other projects. In
a philosophical culture notably cut off from
the international intellectual community and
from the broader arts and the public, his career
is striking, if controversial, in its inclusiveness.
A contemporary exponent of the essay in news-
papers and magazines, a frequent commentator
on radio and television, and with a series of
popular books, he is also on the advisory com-
mittees of human rights-related initiatives and
has written on war crimes, drug legalization,
euthanasia, the role of high culture in society,
religion and the necessity of secularism, and
much besides. In line with his strong commit-
ment to the idea that philosophy has much of
importance to offer public life, his ideas are
marked throughout by a humanist dedication
to promote reason, experience and debate as a
route towards human flourishing.
Grayling was Honorary Secretary of the
Aristotelian Society from 1993 to 2001, he is a
fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a fellow of
the World Economic Forum, member of the
editorial boards of Reason in Practice and
Prospect, and editor and contributor to
numerous volumes on philosophy. He has held
visiting positions at the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences, he was Visiting Professor a the
University of Tokyo and Lublin University; Jan
Hus Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy at the
Czech Academy of Science, Gifford Lecturer
University of Glasgow, etc.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An Introduction to Philosophical Logic
(Harvester Press, 1982, 3rd edn 1997).
The Refutation of Scepticism (Duckworth,
1985).
Berkeley: The Central Arguments
(Duckworth, 1986).
Wittgenstein (Oxford Past Masters, 1988).
Russell (Oxford Past Masters, 1995).
[Ed.] Philosophy 1: A Guide Through the
Subject (Oxford, 1995).
[Ed.] Philosophy 2: Further Through the
343
GRICE
Subject (Oxford, 1998).
Moral Values (Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1998).
What is Good? (Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
2003).
Descartes (Simon and Schuster, 2005).
Naomi Goulding
GRICE, Geoffrey Russell (1926-)
G.R. or Russell Grice was born in Brecon on 21
February 1926. He studied at Cowbridge
Grammar School, Glamorgan and at Brasenose
College, Oxford, where he graduated BA with
honours in physics in 1947. After a number of
years teaching physics and mathematics and
subsequently working in industry, he went to
Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He transferred
to Churchill College as a research student in
moral philosophy, where he worked under
A.C. EwiNG, and completed his PhD there in
1965. He was appointed in that same year to
a lectureship in philosophy at the University of
East Anglia in Norwich and was subsequently
promoted senior lecturer (1968), reader (1970)
and professor (1971). He was Head of the
Philosophy Sector from 1970 till 1979 and
Dean of the School of Economic and Social
Studies from 1973 to 1976. He took early
retirement in 1983.
Grice's main publication is The Grounds of
Moral Judgement (1967), which was based on
his doctoral dissertation. PRICHARD had
famously argued that the traditional project of
moral philosophy, to establish a general basis
for moral judgements, was based upon a
mistake. But Prichard, according to Grice, had
not considered all the forms the project might
take. Grice claims that there are indeed two
distinct grounds of moral judgement: support-
ing, on the one hand, judgements of what he
terms 'basic obligation' and, on the other hand,
GRICE
terms of 'ultra obligation'. Much of his book is
devoted to elaborating this distinction and to
considering its implications.
Basic obligations comprise what might be
termed, according to Grice, the 'legalistic' part
of morality, whereas ultra obligations constitute
its 'ethical' part (ibid., p. 36). Basic obligations,
unlike ultra obligations, do not vary from
person to person and imply rights. 'Basic oblig-
ation and rights are opposite sides of the same
coin' (ibid., p. 41). Grice discusses the obliga-
tion to keep promises at some length, arguing
that it is misunderstood by utilitarians, who
ignore the rights of the promisee. Basic obliga-
tions arise, according to Grice, because of
common interests of members of a society and
the need to harmonize those interests. For this
reason they do not vary between individuals
within a society, though they may vary between
societies.
Grice's theory of moral obligation is a form
of contractualism. He does not suppose that
moral obligations are founded on actual con-
tracts. But it follows, according to his theory,
from the fact that it is in the interests of every-
body in a given society to make a contract with
everyone else to do A (or not do it), that each
has an abstract obligation to do A (or not do it).
This theory produced a discussion in
Philosophical Studies between Grice and a critic
of contractualism.
Grice gives much less attention to cases of
ultra obligation, where someone does what he
or she believes they ought to do even though no
one has a right to expect them to do it. The
basis for ultra obligations lies in each person's
character, for instance in what each needs for
his or her fulfilment. But ultra obligation is not
to be reduced to a form of prudential obliga-
tion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Grounds of Moral Judgement
(Cambridge, 1967).
'Hume's Law', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 44 (1970),
pp. 89-104.
344
'Moral Theories and Received Opinion',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 49 (1973), pp. 1-12.
'Are There Reasons for Acting?', Midwest
Studies in Philosophy, vol. 3 (1978), pp.
209-20.
Other Relevant Works
'Philosophy as an Investigation of Meanings'
[inaugural lecture University of East
Anglia] (1972).
'The Contract Ground: A Reply to Jesse
Kalin', Philosophical Studies, vol. 32
(1977), pp. 269-82.
Further Reading
Kalin, Jesse, 'Grice's Contract Ground and
Moral Obligation: The Inadequacy of
Contractualism', Philosophical Studies,
vol. 29 (1976), pp. 115-28.
Stuart Brown
GRICE, Herbert Paul (1913-88)
Herbert Paul Grice was born in Birmingham on
15 March 1913 and died in Richmond,
California on 28 August 1988. He began his
formal philosophical studies with W.F.R.
HARDIE at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
Later he held various positions at Oxford, and
served in the Royal Navy during World War II.
In 1967 he moved to California, taking a
position at the University of California,
Berkeley. He retired from Berkeley in 1979,
but continued to teach afterwards until 1986.
Grice is best known for his work on
meaning, in particular for his work on the prag-
matic dimensions of meaning. He gave an
analysis of what it is for a person to mean
something by his or her words and gestures,
where that might depart from what the words
literally or standardly mean, and offered a

theory of the phenomenon of conversational
implicature. He wrote on reasons and reason-
ing, perception, value, justice and happiness,
sometimes engaging with classical philosophers.
Grice can be characterized as a systematic
philosopher. He appealed to the notion of a
speaker's intentions in communication to
explain meaning, and further explored the role
of intentions in reasoning. His interest in the
pragmatic elements of meaning seems to have
been sparked by his reactions to some applica-
tions of ordinary language philosophy, a
movement in which he participated early in his
career.
Those works that have had the greatest
impact include his early article 'Meaning' pub-
lished in 1957 (drafted in 1948), and his
William James lecture series, 'Logic and
Conversation' given at Harvard University in
1967. One part of the lecture series was pub-
lished under the same title in 1975. Other parts
were published as 'Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-
Meaning, and Word-Meaning' in 1968, and
'Utterer's Meaning and Intentions' in 1969. In
1989 many of Grice's works, including a
revised version of the original William James
lecture series, and a seminal paper on percep-
tion, were published as Studies in the Way of
Words. Posthumous works include Aspects of
Reason (2001) and The Conception of Value
(1991). Grice published under two different
names: H.P. Grice in his early work, and Paul
Grice in his later work.
In his early article 'Meaning' Grice distin-
guishes between natural and non-natural signs.
He then turns to an analysis of speaker's
meaning (or utterer's meaning, as he called it).
An example of a natural sign is the smoke of an
accidental fire. Another example is the spots
that result from measles. What the spots mean
- viz. measles - is not the sort of thing that is
true or false and it would be unreasonable to
infer that some person means anything by pro-
ducing measles spots. Non-natural signs, on
the other hand, have the sort of meaning attrib-
uted to the ringing of some bells when someone
says 'those three rings mean the bus is full'.
345
GRICE
Upon hearing the bells it would be perfectly rea-
sonable to infer that someone (the bus driver)
means something by the three rings, and it is
perfectly possible for the ringing of the bells to
mean the bus is full while in fact the bus is
empty - the bus driver can in that way mislead
the public.
Grice's analysis of what it is for a person to
mean something by an utterance (ringing a bell,
making a hand gesture, giving voice to a
sentence) adverts to intentions and other psy-
chological states of the utterer. The thought
that intentions might be involved somehow in
determining what a person means is a natural
one. Speakers have many intentions when
speaking with another person. One of these
intentions determines which proposition the
speaker means. What Grice did was to show
how hearers are able to isolate this intention.
On Grice's analysis it is true to say that
someone meant something by uttering X just in
case it is true that this person had an intention
of a special kind to produce a certain effect in
the hearer. Crucially, the kind of intention in
question is an intention to produce an effect by
means of the audience's recognition of the
speaker's intention.
The kind of intended effect varies with the
kind of speech act the speaker is performing.
For example (on Grice's 1957 analysis), if a
speaker A is performing the act of making a
statement, the intended effect is for the audience
to believe what is stated. Later, Grice modified
this analysis: the intended effect is for the
audience to believe that the speaker believes
what is stated. By contrast, if the speaker is
issuing a command, the intended effect is not to
get the audience to believe anything, but to get
the audience to do something (Grice's 1957
analysis) or to get the audience mentally geared
up for action, so that he forms an intention to
do something (1969 analysis).
It is important to keep in mind that though
a speaker might intend all kinds of things in
producing an utterance, not all of what a
speaker intends is included in the specification
of what he has said or meant. Some of what he
GRICE
intends he may positively not want the speaker
to recognize. Only those effects that he wants
the audience to recognize as intended effects
enter into the specification of what the audience
means. As mentioned, part of the relevant
speaker's intention is that the effects come
about because of the audience's recognition of
the speaker's intention. The effects must come
about by a particular causal route, one involv-
ing the audience's ability to employ his recog-
nition of the speaker's intention as a reason
for entering into a change of psychological
state. The importance of this last point came to
the fore after Grice responded to a number of
putative counter-examples to his analysis of
speaker meaning. Cases can be contrived in
which a speaker intends to induce a belief in the
audience by way of the audience's recognition
of his intention, but still has not said some-
thing (or said that which, according to Grice's
analysis, he is supposed to have said). Often the
way the counter-examples work is by the inven-
tion of a quirky causal route to the intended
effect, so that the audience's recognition of the
speaker's intention does not enter in as a reason
in the right sort of way for the audience to
enter into the intended psychological state.
Besides speaker meaning, there is the
question of what it is for marks, gestures or
sounds themselves to mean something on an
occasion, and across occasions of use. Grice
held that speaker meaning was the fundamen-
tal notion, and the meaning of an utterance
type the derivative notion. Initially Grice
proposed that in the case of statement making,
an utterance X timelessly means that p if and
only if what people generally intend to effect by
X is the belief that p. Later Grice explicitly
acknowledged that an audience often can and
will exploit the standard meaning of the utter-
ance type in forming his beliefs about what the
speaker intends on a specific occasion (and that
this is something the speaker would take into
account in forming his communicative inten-
tions). He nevertheless continued to maintain
that speaker meaning is the fundamental
notion. One may wonder whether the fact that
346
an utterance has a standard meaning is ever
necessary for the reasonableness of the
speaker's belief that his utterance will produce
the intended effect on an occasion, and if so,
whether this does damage to Grice's claim con-
cerning the priority of speaker meaning.
Further worries arise for Grice's overall
explanatory strategy for the central case of
sentence meaning, where the utterance type is
a sentence type, rather than, say, a hand
gesture. The meanings of sentences are arguably
composed of, or determined by, the meanings
of their parts, and speakers can, in theory at
least, recover the meanings of sentences that
would never be uttered under any conditions.
Grice explores some of the issues in 'Utterer's
Meaning, Sentence-Meaning and Word-
Meaning'.
A speaker may exploit the standard or con-
ventional meaning of a sentence to say some-
thing using that sentence, and he may, in a dif-
ferent way, exploit other conventions, to impli-
cate something that is unsaid. In 'Logic and
Conversation' Grice distinguishes between con-
ventional implications of what is said, for
example its formal entailments, and conversa-
tional implicatures of the saying of what is said.
One of Grice's examples of implicature is that
of a man who is asked how some third person
is getting along in his new job, and who
responds: 'Quite well, I think; he likes his col-
leagues, and he hasn't been to prison yet', impli-
cating perhaps that the man is dishonest and
tends to get into trouble.
Conversational implicatures are possible
because there are certain general principles that
govern conversations. Grice proposes that a
'Cooperative Principle' governs conversations,
to wit 'Make your conversational contribution
such as is required at the stage at which it
occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of
the talk exchange in which you are engaged.'
From this general principle, more specific
maxims emerge, such as 'avoid ambiguity' or
'make your contribution as informative as
required' or 'be relevant'. Grice's idea is that
when the speaker openly flouts such maxims,

he is exploiting the maxim conversationally to
implicate something. What is implicated is
something that the audience could work out by
reference to the maxims that are flouted if he
assumes that the speaker is only flouting the
maxims because he is trying to implicate some-
thing. For the example given earlier, the maxim
'be relevant' is flouted, yielding the implica-
tion that dishonesty is a concern regarding the
person discussed.
Underlying conversational principles like
these are operative in all kinds of conversa-
tional contexts, including philosophical ones. In
the context of a discussion of sense data, in
'The Causal Theory of Perception', Grice points
to pragmatic implications of remarks like 'The
apples look red.' If uttered in a context in which
the lighting is poor, or other unusual condi-
tions, then such a remark would be informative
and relevant as a description of how the apples
look under those conditions. On the other
hand, if uttered in perfectly normal conditions,
normal-for-viewing-apples conditions, the
statement would need an explanation. 'Why is
the speaker stating the obvious?', the audience
might ask himself, searching for the implica-
ture. According to the view that Grice is here
disputing - a view put forward by some
ordinary language philosophers of Grice's time
- in the second sort of case the speaker would
be guilty of misusing words. His statement
would be neither true nor false, but meaning-
less. For Grice, the statement could be true,
though trivial, and not maximally informative.
The mistake of his interlocutor is to treat the
pragmatic presupposition - that the speaker
has some reason to be doubtful about the
apples - as part of the statement's meaning.
Grice says that this pragmatic presupposition is
not a part of the meaning of the expression
any more than 'the speaker believes it is raining'
is part of the meaning of the statement 'it is
raining'. The oddity of the statement shows
that something is being implicated, not that
the statement is meaningless.
Gr ice's work on conversational implicature
gave rise to a whole new sub-area of linguistics.
347
GRICE
He succeeded in putting the phenomenon of
speaker meaning into the foreground in philo-
sophical studies of meaning. His programme
for explaining the meanings of conventional
signs, and in particular the meanings of lin-
guistic items, in terms of intentions in the minds
of speakers, on the other hand, faces obsta-
cles. Even so, the idea of a two-stage reduction
of linguistic meaning to speaker's meaning, and
speaker's meaning to intentions and beliefs of
the participants in the exchange, informs the
work of many philosophers of mind and cog-
nitive scientists fifteen years after his death. If
speaker's meaning itself is to be analysed in
terms of a speaker's and an audience's inten-
tions and beliefs, that brings with it an onto-
logical commitment to intentions, and other
representational psychological states.
Philosophers today working within a Gricean
framework must face the question whether
such notions are empirically respectable. Grice
himself was liberal about these things; he was
concerned to discover the purely philosophical
grounds of rationality, not with the shape that
an empirically well-grounded theory of mind
must take. A second fundamental concern for
those working within Grice's framework is the
question whether language is indispensable to
thought in some way, perhaps as the very
medium of thought. If this is the case then it
looks like the intentions and beliefs in terms of
which linguistic meaning is supposed to be
explained are not after all more fundamental
than language. In any case, Grice's general take
on language, according to which it at root
involves people attempting to affect other
people in certain ways, is distinctive and rich in
its consequences.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Personal Identity', Mind, vol. 50, no. 200
(October 1941), pp. 330-50.
(with P.P. Strawson), 'In Defense of a
Dogma', Philosophical Review, vol. 65, no.
2 (April 1956), pp. 141-58.
'Meaning', Philosophical Review, vol. 66, no.
3 (July 1957), pp. 377-88.
GRICE
The Causal Theory of Perception',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 35 (1961), pp. 121-52.
'Some Remarks About the Senses', in RJ.
Butler (ed.), Analytical Philosophy
(Oxford, 1962), pp. 133-53.
'Logic and Conversation" [William James
Lectures, Harvard], typescript (1967).
'Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and
Word-Meaning', Foundations of
Language, vol. 4 (August 1968), pp.
225-42.
'Utterer's Meaning and Intentions',
Philosophical Review, vol. 78, no. 2 (April
1969), pp. 147-77.
'Vacuous Names', in Donald Davidson and
Jaakko Hintikka (eds), Words and
Objections: Essays of the Work ofW.V.
Quine (Dordrecht, 1969), pp. 118-45.
'Intention and Uncertainty', Proceedings of
the British Academy, vol. 57 (1971), pp.
263-79.
'Logic and Conversation', in Peter Cole and
Jerry Morgan (eds), Syntax and Semantics,
vol. 3, Speech Acts (New York, 1975), pp.
41-58; and in Donald Davidson and
Gilbert Harman (eds), The Logic of
Grammar (Encino, 1975), pp. 64-75.
'Method in Philosophical Psychology (from
the Banal to the Bizarre)', Proceedings and
Addresses of the American Philosophical
Association, vol. 48 (November 1975), pp.
23-53.
'Further Notes on Logic and Conversation',
in Peter Cole (ed.), Syntax and Semantics,
vol. 9, Pragmatics (New York, 1978), pp.
113-27.
'Presupposition and Conversational
Implicature', in Peter Cole (ed.), Radical
Pragmatics (New York, 1981), pp.
183-97.
'Meaning Revisited', in N.V. Smith (ed.),
Mutual Knowledge (New York and
London, 1982), pp. 223-43.
Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge,
Mass., 1989).
348
Other Relevant Works
'Reply to Richards', in Richard Grandy and
Richard Warner (eds), Philosophical
Grounds of Rationality (Oxford, 1986),
pp. 45-106.
The Conception of Value, with an
Introduction by Judith Baker (Oxford,
1991).
Aspects of Reason, ed. Richard Warner
(Oxford, 2001).
Further Reading
Gazdar, Gerald, Geoffrey K. Pullum and
Ewan Klein, 'A Bibliography of
Pragmatics', Pragmatics Microfiche, 2.5:
D11-G13.
Bach, Kent and Robert Harnish, Linguistic
Communication and Speech Acts
(Cambridge, Mass, 1979),.
Patton, I.E., and D.W. Stampe, The
Rudiments of Meaning: On Ziff on Grice',
Foundations of Language, vol. 5 (1969),
pp. 2-16.
Schiffer, Stephen, Meaning (Oxford, 1972).
Strawson, P.F., 'Intention and Convention in
Speech Acts', Philosophical Review, vol.
73, no. 4 (October 1964) pp. 439-60.
Ziff, Paul, 'On H.P. Grice's Account of
Meaning', Analysis, vol. 28, no. 1 (October
1967), pp. 178-89.
Melinda Hogan
GRIFFIN, James Patrick (1933-)
James Patrick Griffin was born in Wallingford,
Connecticut on 8 July 1933. He received a
Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Yale
University in 1955. In 1960 he received a DPhil
from Oxford. His dissertation was at first
supervised by Gilbert RYLE and then by B.F.
McGuiNNESS; both Iris MURDOCH and David
PEARS were among his teachers. From gradua-

tion until 1966 he was lecturer at Christ
Church, Oxford, at which point he was
awarded a tutorial fellowship in philosophy at
Keble College, and in 1990 he was appointed
to a readership in philosophy. After Bernard
WlLLlAMS's retirement in 1996, Griffin became
White's Professor of Moral Philosophy until
his own retirement in 2000, and he still lives
and remains active in Oxford. In 2002 he
became adjunct professor in the Centre for
Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics in
Canberra, and distinguished visiting professor
at Rutgers University.
Griffin began his career as a WITTGENSTEIN
scholar. His first book, Wittgenstein's Logical
Atomism, was published in 1964. It is an
extended treatment of the first three sections of
Wittgenstein's Tractatus, dealing with such
subjects as objects, substance and states of
affairs, elementary propositions, pictures and
thoughts. He argues that the Tractatus is con-
cerned with problems of sense not (pace
RUSSELL and others) problems of knowledge.
He did not stay long in this area of philoso-
phy, however. In 1965 he published his first
paper in the area of ethics, and it is in this
domain that he has made his greatest contri-
butions to philosophy. His primary focus has
been on the main issues in both axiology and
normative ethics, especially the nature and mea-
surement of well-being and the viability of
philosophical moral theories; more recently,
his attention has been directed to issues regard-
ing the nature, content and basis of human
rights.
With his first book, Well-Being: Its Meaning,
Measurement and Moral Importance, he rein-
vigorated interest in the content, measurement
and moral importance of well-being. His
account of the nature of well-being constitutes
to this day one of the leading contenders in the
field. For Griffin, well-being is a purely formal
notion. It provides an analysis of the prudential
value of one's life, or how well one's life is
going from one's own perspective. A theory of
well-being tells us what it is for a person's life
to be going well for that person from her point
349
GRIFFIN
of view. He rejects both hedonist and objective-
list accounts of well-being. The former are too
narrow while the latter fail to leave enough
room for an individual's desires and idiosyn-
crasies because it holds that certain things are
good for an individual whether or not she
desires them (though his theory remains close
in nature to objective-list views). He opts
instead for what he calls an informed-desire
account of well-being. On this view, one's life
goes well to the extent that one has one's
informed desires satisfied. To put it differently,
what makes one's life go well is the 'fulfilment
of desires that persons would have if they
appreciated the true nature of their objects'
(Well-Being, p. 11). To be 'informed' or appre-
ciate the true nature of the objects of desire, one
must be free from logical errors as well as
possess 'the facts' or information (though not
necessarily all the facts or 'full' information)
and 'insight and subtle, perspicuous concepts'
(Well-Being, p. 13). Such desires are fulfilled
when the states to which they are directed
obtain in fact, and they can differ in strength:
one desire is stronger than another when it
assumes a higher position in 'an ordering that
reflects appreciation of the nature of the objects
of desire' (ibid., p. 15).
The values that Griffin believes one would
desire once informed, in his special sense, and
which when possessed would enhance one's
well-being, include deep personal relationships,
understanding, 'the components of human exis-
tence' (autonomy, liberty and 'the basic capa-
bilities that enable one to act'), accomplish-
ment and enjoyment (ibid., pp. 67-8). He is
therefore a pluralist about prudential value
(ibid., p. 31). Although Griffin resists reducing
these values down to one master value or
common denominator or single scale, he denies
that these values are quantitatively incompa-
rable in a strong sense (ibid., pp. 75-92).
Rather, these values are incommensurable only
in some weak senses. Griffin allows that pru-
dential values show discontinuity. The idea
here is that prudential value is not measurable
on a single continuous additive scale. This is
GRIFFIN
because it often seems that 'enough of A
outranks any amount of B' (ibid., p. 89). It
might be that, provided a life has enough con-
templation of beauty and depth of under-
standing, it is such that no life (even a much
longer one) of watching reruns of Everybody
Loves Raymond and reading Hello! magazine
can outweigh it. There are also cases in which
it seems that options are neither better nor
worse than each other nor exactly equal; rather,
they are at best 'roughly equal'. These incom-
mensurabilities do not, he thinks, pose too
much difficulty to our aim of promoting well-
being or rational decision in general.
A deep current of scepticism about tradi-
tional philosophical dichotomies (e.g., between
internalism and externalism about reasons, sub-
jective and objective accounts of the good,
understanding and desire, and so on) runs
through many of Griffin's works. His third
book, Value Judgement: Improving our Ethical
Beliefs, gives expression to a deep scepticism
about the power of moral philosophy and the
viability of systematic moral theories, especially
utilitarianism and other forms of consequen-
tialism. He begins Value Judgement wondering
how, and how much, it is possible to improve
our ethical beliefs (p. 1). He is quite rightly
sceptical of the power of the ever-present jus-
tificatory model known as reflective equilib-
rium to improve the epistemic credibility of
our beliefs. As a form of coherentism, this view
has the problem of establishing which among
many possible coherent belief sets actually
reflects the way things are. One move is to pick
out some belief or set of beliefs that is warranted
independently of the relations they bear to other
beliefs and then achieve coherence with them
(Value Judgement, pp. 11-16). This is the path
that Griffin explores in Value Judgement, where
the search is for '[ethical] beliefs of high reliabil-
ity, beliefs of a credibility to some extent inde-
pendent of their relation to other beliefs' (ibid.,
p. 13). By taking this route, Griffin is not thereby
committing himself to a pure form of founda-
tionalism, the view that not all beliefs are deriv-
atively justified. He still wants to hang on to
350
what he calls holism: 'the thesis that justification
comes only from a whole set of beliefs' (ibid.,
p. 12). The view seems to be that warrant comes
from both beliefs of high reliability and coher-
ence with other beliefs.
Unfortunately, the account of how various
ethical beliefs acquire the desirable kind of reli-
ability is sketchy. The reliability of beliefs about
prudential values is due to the fact that they are:
'part of the framework only within which
language is possible' and 'deeply embedded in
human nature' (ibid., p. 52) and 'constitute
core interests' (ibid., p. 125). We are also told
that 'my seeing you as a person involves my
accepting that there are certain basic values at
stake in your life' (ibid., p. 81). These kind of
remark nearly exhaust the account of the
nature of what gives an ethical belief high epis-
temic reliability. Yet, since the notion of intel-
ligibility and human nature are as it stands
themselves in need of further elucidation, we
have very little reason to accept that they in fact
give us any indication of reliability. Indeed, we
are given no indication of why being imbedded
in just these ways leads to reliability, except to
think along with Griffin that it is 'hard not to
accept' (ibid., p. 125). But this is hardly enough.
A number of beliefs apparently have the
sought-after reliability. Among them Griffin
includes his profile of prudential values and some
closely related moral norms (ibid., pp. 52-67).
He also includes specific beliefs about the limits
of human motivation and human knowledge,
and facts about how and why certain social insti-
tutions, such as property and the family, have
emerged and entail obligations (ibid., pp. 85-97).
These beliefs constrain what we can be morally
obliged to do: 'prudential goods, to some degree,
determine the content of moral norms, but the
capacities of agents and facts about their social
life begin to play a central role here too' (ibid.,
p. 85). From these beliefs he mounts an attack on
consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics
(though consequentialism is in the main the
theory towards which he directs his fusillade)
(ibid., pp. 103-16). Consequentialism is flawed
because it asks for a degree of impartiality, moti-

vation and knowledge that agents are incapable
of achieving. Moreover, since deep personal rela-
tionships and life-structuring accomplishments
are required for a life to be rich in prudential
value, adopting and acting on the demands of
utilitarianism or consequentialism is undesirable
(ibid., pp. 103-107, 85-6). The list of reliable
beliefs is also the source from which Griffin
derives his own action-guides, for example
norms forbidding wanton cruelty and the delib-
erate killing of innocents, and norms enjoining
taking care to limit the damage (ibid., pp.
116-22, 79-82, 99-103). The norms endorsed
are admittedly vague and lacking in systematic-
ity (ibid., p. 97). Aiming for systematic theories
is something out of place in ethics and, accord-
ing to Griffin, something philosophers ought
not to attempt to do. Instead, he endorses an
account of moral reasoning resembling the
'modes of thought used to arrive at... positive
laws' (ibid., p. 118). This is a piecemeal form of
arriving at decisions that draws on a multitude
of factors, including, again, social facts, tradi-
tions, prudential values, the limits of what agents
can be moved to perform, and so on. What we
get is a very deflationary moral position, with
very little role for moral philosophy.
In Value Judgement Griffin again attempts to
defend an account of value. His focus is again on
prudential value (ibid., p. 19) and again the
claim is that it consists in the satisfaction of
desires 'formed in proper appreciation of the
nature of their object' (pp. 22-3) and the same
inventory of values is provided (pp. 29-30). But
Griffin seems no longer concerned with a formal
theory of well-being. Instead, the concern is with
how reason and desire function in the formation
of value. In Well-Being, Griffin claims that his
own account of value 'straddles - that is, does
not accept any strong form of - the divide
between reason and desire [in the formation of
value]' (Well-Being, p. 30). This follows from the
fact that both desire and reason function in
grounding value with no priority relation
between them (ibid., pp. 26-31, 33). (This last
statement may not be quite right, as sometimes
he states that just desire is required for formation
351
GRIFFIN
of value, ibid., p. 28.) This issue is the primary
focus of the discussion of prudential value in
Value Judgement. Griffin examines two models,
the taste model and the perception model (Value
Judgement, pp. 20-21). The former takes value
to be determined by what one would desire given
'logic and the facts'. The latter takes value to be
determined by perception or recognition 'quite
apart from ... desires and inclinations' (ibid.,
p. 20). Griffin argues that both models assume
too sharp a distinction between reason and desire
(ibid., p. 21). 'When it comes to prudential delib-
eration, reason and desire are not independent
enough for one to be the master and the other
slave ... it under-describes their relation to say
merely that we need both, without dominance of
either, to explain the status of some objects as
prudential values' (ibid., pp. 32,25). We cannot,
he says, 'distinguish the identification of an
object to be responded to and the response to it'
(ibid., pp. 25, 56, 57).
Most of the criticism of Griffin's view regard-
ing the role of reason and desire in value for-
mation targets its lack of clarity, especially as
regards the role played therein by desire. Desire
appears to enter the picture in two distinct
places: in the formation of value and in how the
values that end up on Griffin's list (e.g., accom-
plishments, deep personal relations, etc.) figure
into an individual life. In the first case, in order
for something to be recognizably valuable we
must appeal to 'certain natural human moti-
vations' or 'some general human interest' (ibid.,
pp. 25, 27). The presence of desire explains
'our perceiving things favourably' (Weil-Being,
p. 29), since 'some understanding is also a kind
of [desire-like] movement' (ibid., pp. 29,29-30
and Value Judgement, pp. 33-6). However, if
a 'general human interest' or 'motivation' con-
strains what counts as valuable, then Griffin
runs the risk of allotting reason a role in eluci-
dating whether a certain thing fits into these
categories rather than determining its value.
But if reason or the nature of objects is required
to determine what counts as an intelligible
human interest or motivation, then individual
desire may have little if any labour to perform
GRIFFIN
in grounding value (ibid., p. 25). The second
way desires function in the account is also prob-
lematic. The more we allow for individual
desire to modify the way in which values on
Griffin's list fit into a life, the greater the poten-
tial is for making the items on the list too vague
or broad to represent meaningful conditions
on desire. That is, the more the way a value
figures into a life relies on 'general causal
knowledge and information about particular
persons' (ibid., p. 31), the weaker the con-
straints represented by the profile become.
Striking the right balance between the contri-
butions of desire and reason is key to the
survival of this view.
Since the publication of Value Judgement
Griffin has turned his attention to philosophi-
cal matters concerning human rights. He has
examined the basis of human rights, the thorny
issue of what to do when rights conflict and
whether included in the category of what we
call human rights is right to welfare or a
minimum material provision. These and other
topics are to be the subject of a forthcoming
book.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Wittgenstein's Logical Atomism (Oxford,
1964).
Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measure and Moral
Importance (Oxford, 1986).
Value Judgement: Improving our Ethical
Beliefs (Oxford, 1996).
Other Relevant Works
'Welfare Rights', The Journal of Ethics, vol.
4 (2000), pp. 27-43.
'First Steps in an Account of Human Rights',
European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 9
(2001), pp. 306-27.
Further Reading
Crisp, Roger and Brad Hooker (eds), Well-
Being and Morality: Essays in Honour of
James Griffin (Oxford, 2000).
Anthony Skelton
352
GRIFFITHS, Allen Phillips, see Phillips
Griffiths
GRIMSLEY, Ronald (1915-2003)
Ronald Grimsley was born in Leicester on 19
October 1915 and died on 11 August 2003. He
attended school in his home city, and subse-
quently obtained a London University external
degree in French from University College,
Leicester. He then spent a year at the Sorbonne,
followed by study at Oxford University. At the
outbreak of World War II, he joined the Royal
Artillery and was later transferred to the
Intelligence Corps. After the war, he completed
his DPhil at Oxford and obtained a licence es
lettres from Lille University. He began his
career as a lecturer in the French Department at
the University College of North Wales, Bangor,
and in 1964 was appointed to the Chair of
French at Bristol University. He was visiting
lecturer at Yale and Harvard in the late 1960s,
but returned to Bristol until his retirement in
1981.
Grimsley did not develop an original philo-
sophical theory of his own, but in a steady
stream of publications he made a useful con-
tribution to two areas of research, both of
which reflected his intellectual background:
existentialism and eighteenth-century French
thought, particularly that of d'Alembert and
Rousseau. He modestly stated of his first pub-
lication, Existentialist Thought (1955), that it
was 'intended simply as a straightforward
exposition of the thought of some leading exis-
tentialist philosophers' which he hoped would
'provide a fuller account than has hitherto been
available in English of... certain aspects of the
philosophies concerned' (Foreword, n.p.). He
later traced the influence of French, as opposed
to German, literature on S0ren Kierkegaard,
beginning with an appraisal of Kierkegaard's
 GRIMSLEY

hostility to Moliere's treatment of the Don Juan BIBLIOGRAPHY

theme. Amongst his many studies of Rousseau, Existentialist Thought (1955).
he published a useful annotated version of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Study in Self-
Contrat Social, and he completed a major and Awareness (1961).
authoritative study of d'Alembert in 1962. Jean d'Alembert (1717-1783) (1963).
From his publications, Grimsley believed that Rousseau and the Religious Quest (1968).
a knowledge of the historical, social and psy- The Philosophy of Rousseau (1973).
chological factors of the thinker concerned was From Montesquieu to Laclos: Studies on the
vital, even when continental theory began to French Enlightenment (1974).
maintain that texts alone should be studied, Rousseau's Religious Writings (1970).
without regard to their authors. Both Rousseau's Du Contrat Social (1972).
Kierkegaard and Rousseau lend themselves to
such an approach, and it is no surprise to find Kathryn L. Plant
in Grimsley's many works on Rousseau a sub-
stantial treatment of Rousseau's psychological
development and autobiographical writings.
Similarly, incorporated into his study on
Kierkegaard, Grimsley gives a critical summary
of, and adds to theories about, what
Kierkegaard could have meant by the 'thorn in
the flesh'. Throughout his career, Grimsley
refused to change his approach to his research
and writings, resulting in a solid corpus of
meticulous scholarship.

353
 H
HALDANE, Elizabeth Sanderson
(1862-1937)
Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane was born in
Edinburgh on 27 May 1862 and died at St
Margaret's Hospital in Auchterarder,
Perthshire on 24 December 1937. She was
the only daughter of Robert Haldane, of
Cloanden (later called Cloan), Auchterarder
by his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Burdon
Sanderson, second daughter of Richard
Burdon-Sanderson, of West Jesmond and
Otterburn Dene, Northumberland. She was a
younger sister of the Hegelian idealist philoso-
pher, lawyer, and statesman Richard Burdon
HALDANE (from 1911,1st Viscount of Cloan)
and the physiologist and philosopher John
Scott HALDANE. Elizabeth Haldane was
educated in a strongly evangelical and highly
cultivated household, where she shared her
brothers' tutors as well as their intense interest
in philosophy. At about the age of fifteen she
attended private school in Edinburgh, where
she excelled in languages, literature and math-
ematics.
Haldane's early works reflect her keen
interest in the rational and objective idealism
extracted from Kant as developed by Hegel.
She collaborated in a translation of Hegel's
Lectures on the History of Philosophy
(1892-6) and wrote a book on Hegel entitled
The Wisdom and Religion of a German
Philosopher (1897).
Haldane was deeply interested in other
figures in the history of philosophy. Probably
354
motivated by her stay in Paris in the winter of
1877, she later wrote Descartes, his Life and
Times (1905), an English biography of
Descartes that closely follows that of his sev-
enteenth-century biographer Abbot Adrian
Baillet. Haldane was clearly wise to use him as
the fountainhead of her work, for Baillet
without question remains our principal source
of Descartes's life today (after Descartes's own
writings and correspondence), mainly because
Baillet reproduces, too often paraphrases,
texts that are no longer extant. However,
Haldane generally adopts Baillet's views
without critical assessment, and thus perpet-
uates his errors and inventions. Her book,
which was written before Charles Adam's
modern critical French work, remained until
recently the sole reasonably extensive English-
language life of Descartes. As a matter of fact,
a few seventeenth-century accounts were
actually translated into English in the seven-
teenth century but these translations were (and
still are) exceedingly rare.
Haldane is best known as the editor and
translator, in collaboration with G.T.T. Ross,
of The Philosophical Works of Descartes
(1911-12). This work remained the only rea-
sonably comprehensive selection of
Descartes's works in English up until 1985.
Re-editions of this translation continue to
multiply at a faster rate than ever. Although
some of the treatises included in this edition,
such as the Discourse, Meditations and
Principles, were available in English at the
time, certain other works, including the Rules,

Passions of the Soul and Objections and
Replies, were made available in English for the
first time in Haldane's translation. In fact, the
Passions was actually translated into English
in the seventeenth century, but this translation
was (and still is) extremely rare, and no other
edition appeared until Haldane's work.
In addition to her monographs, Haldane con-
tributed articles to various periodicals and works
of reference. A keen humanitarian and public
worker, she also organized reading circles,
founded the Auchterarder Institute and library,
and was the first woman to serve as trustee of the
Andrew Carnegie United Kingdom Trust
(1914-27). She was the first woman to be made
a Justice of the Peace in Scotland (1920), the first
to receive the honorary degree of LLD from St
Andrews University (1911), and the first to
become a member of the Scottish Savings
Committee (1909). She was appointed CH in
1918. She had numerous distinguished appoint-
ments in nursing. In politics, she was a liberal and
a supporter of suffrage and equal treatment for
women.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Trans, with F. Simpson), Hegel's Lectures on
the History of Philosophy, 3 vols (1892-6).
The Wisdom and Religion of a German
Philosopher (1897).
Descartes, his Life and Times (1905).
(Ed. and trans, with G.T.T. Ross), The
Philosophical Works of Descartes, 2 vols
(Cambridge, 1911-12).
Other Relevant Works
James Frederick Ferrier (1899).
The British Nurse in Peace and War (1923).
(Ed.), Mary Elizabeth Haldane (1925).
George Eliot and her Times (1927).
Mrs. Gaskell and her Friends (1930).
The Scotland of our Fathers (1933).
Scots Gardens in Old Times (1934).
From One Century to the Next (1937).
Further Reading
Anon., The Times 28 December 1937.
355
HALDANE
Peirce, Charles Sanders, Review of Descartes,
his Life and Times, The Nation, vol. 82,22
March 1906, pp. 242f.
Taylor, A.E., Review of The Philosophical
Works of Descartes, Mind, vol. 22 (1913).
Enrique Chavez-Arvizo
HALDANE, John Burden Sanderson
(1892-1964)
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was born in
Oxford on 5 November 1892 and died in
Bhubaneswar, India on 1 December 1964. He
was the son of Dr John Scott Haldane, the
eminent Scottish physiologist, and his wife
Louisa. Haldane's family was politically
diverse: his father was a Scottish liberal
agnostic, his mother a strong sympathizer of
Tory social imperialism, and his younger sister
would later become famous as the novelist
Naomi Mitchison. Haldane himself was
educated at Eton and New College, Oxford,
where he gained first class honours in both
mathematics and classics, and became a close
friend of Aldous and Julian HUXLEY. During
World War I he served as an officer in the
Black Watch and discovered to his horror that
he actually enjoyed killing the enemy. In the
trenches he came into contact for the first time
with working-class men and learned to appre-
ciate their values and understand their
problems. Haldane was wounded at Loos and
in Mesopotamia in 1917, and was released
from active service. After the war he returned
briefly to New College to resume his studies,
before moving to Cambridge as a lecturer in
biochemistry. In December 1925 he was
deprived of his readership by the university
after appearing as co-respondent in a very
public divorce case, but was reinstated the fol-
lowing year with help from the National Union
of Scientific Workers. In 1928 he visited the
HALDANE
Soviet Union and his exposure to communism
led him to begin to reflect on the relationship
between Marxist philosophy and the biological
sciences. In 1933 he moved to London to
become first the Head of the John Innes
Horticultural Garden, where he hoped to study
the genetic colouration of plants, and then the
Chair of Biometry at University College
London (which he held for the next quarter
century). Ostensibly disillusioned with Britain
because of the Suez affair, he arranged to take
up a post at the Statistical Institute in Calcutta
in 1957. He believed that under Jawaharlal
Nehru the conditions in India for the future of
scientific development were far better than else-
where. He later moved to the University of
Orissa at Bhubaneswar, where he headed the
Genetics and Biometry Laboratory. In 1960 he
took up Indian citizenship and devoted his
remaining years to helping to improve the study
of science in the developing nation.
As a child, he learned about genetics by
breeding guinea pigs, and in the 1920s he
became interested in the mathematics of pop-
ulation genetics. Mendel's laws had only
recently been rediscovered, and molecular
biology was in its infancy. Roland Fisher,
Sewell Wright and Haldane are considered to
be the founding fathers of what became known
as neo-Darwinism, or the modern synthesis.
They differed somewhat in their approaches
to the subject, although they all thought that
Darwin's theory of natural selection and
Mendelian genetics could be unified in a single
mathematical theory that would demonstrate
how evolution actually happened. Of the three,
Haldane was by far the better writer, and
starting in 1924 he published a series of papers
on the mathematics of evolution, culminating
in his book The Causes of Evolution (1932).
He was mostly concerned with the selection of
single genes that had large effects, and was crit-
icized by the biologist Ernst Mayr for not
taking into account the non-linear effects of
combinations of genes. Possibly his most
important paper of the time dealt with the
speed of evolutionary change due to natural
356
selection, using as an example the peppered
moth, Biston betularia. In it he showed math-
ematically how much more powerful selection
was than had previously been supposed. In
1956 he updated his paper, reinforcing his
earlier conclusions. However, the following
year he also published calculations that
appeared to show that there was insufficient
time for macro-evolution to occur.
Haldane's thoughts on evolution and selec-
tion led him to think seriously about eugenics.
In his fictional work Daedalus (1923) he
pictured a world that had been peopled by
'test-tube babies' bred to be superior. It was a
popular book and fitted well with the then
widely held eugenic approach. He was himself
a member of the Eugenics Education Society,
whose President was Charles Darwin's son
Leonard, yet in later years he campaigned
against eugenics as he felt that genetic theory
was being used for unacceptable political ends.
Daedalus was the inspiration for the novel
Brave New World (1932), written by his friend
Aldous Huxley, who had earlier portrayed
Haldane as Shearwater, the biologist in Antic
Hay (1923).
He also wrote for the wider public, trying to
explain the benefits and the problems of science
and the strangeness of the universe. He believed
that the world was increasingly coming under
the control of science and that eventually sci-
entists would have to take control directly. He
himself did not aspire to take part in politics,
but felt it his duty to campaign for a scientific
attitude in politics. In Daedalus he forecast that
the thinkers - the future Voltaires and Marxes
- would be increasingly drawn to scientific
work; 'Reason ... can produce as great effects
on the world through science as through
politics, philosophy or literature' (p. 79).
In the 1930s there were many scientists,
especially in Cambridge, who became not just
politically socialist but positively communist.
For the younger ones this created a dilemma,
as politics was not considered a rational topic
to occupy one's time and was tolerated only if
it did not conflict with scientific work. To be

actively political could put one's future career
in jeopardy. Haldane was by then already
established as a professor and fellow of the
Royal Society, so he had little to lose.
In his earlier books, such as Daedalus, he
stated that mechanistic materialism had been
the most appropriate philosophy for the
Newtonian period and that Kantian idealism
was best for post-Einstein science. His research
into the origin of life gave rise to his theory that
living organisms had evolved from inorganic
reactions, and it has been claimed by some that
his work was ultimately triggered by the influ-
ence of Marxist philosophy. Haldane himself
said that he was unaware of Marxism as a phi-
losophy of science before his visit to Russia in
1928, but that it had made a deep impression
on him. He claimed in his 1940 essay 'Why I
am a Materialist' to have been a materialist in
his laboratory practice before 1928, but in
theory to have been vaguely idealist, and to
have felt that matter was part of the nature of
mind. As a result of his reading of Engels and
Lenin, he came to realize that dialectical mate-
rialism could resolve his problems. He gradu-
ally came to believe that Marxism was the best
available philosophy and that dialectical mate-
rialism was of especially great value in the
planning of biological research. In January
1938, during a lecture in Birmingham, he said
that he had been studying the works of Marx,
Engels and Lenin in depth since 1933, and
publicly declared himself to be a Marxist and
supporter of the Communist Party of Great
Britain. Later that year he published his con-
clusions in a book entitled The Marxist
Philosophy and the Sciences. However he did
not yet feel sufficiently knowledgeable to
become a full party member until 1942, after
which time he was soon appointed to the exec-
utive committee. His interest in journalism and
popular science led him to write extensively
for the party's newspaper, the Daily Worker,
and for most of the 1940s he was Chairman of
the editorial board.
During the late 1930s he began to feel that
the British government was not interested in the
357
HALDANE
importance of science to socialism and was
also not prepared adequately to protect the
British public from the coming war. Although
with other British communists he was at first
opposed to the war with Germany, he was not
so rigid that he ignored the danger to his own
country. With Guernica in mind he agitated
for adequate protection against air raids and set
out his views in a book called A.R.P., pub-
lished around the time of the Munich Crisis.
Once Russia became involved in the conflict,
Haldane's views changed, and during World
War II he was deeply involved as scientific
adviser to the Royal Navy and as an expert on
civil defence.
Haldane broke with official Soviet commu-
nism in 1956. Although he never actually
acknowledged it as the cause, Julian Huxley's
wife Juliette stated explicitly in her autobiog-
raphy Leaves of the Tulip Tree (p. 193) that it
resulted from the persecution of orthodox biol-
ogists and geneticists inspired by Lysenko in
1948. Haldane had at first convinced himself
that Lysenko was purely mistaken in his attacks
on the importance of chromosomes in heredity
and orthodox genetics. Although most Western
geneticists considered Lysenko's views as totally
false, and many tried to get Haldane to commit
himself to agree, it was some time before he
could bring himself to accept that Lysenko had
used the totalitarian state machine for his own
ends and to achieve a degree of power. Until the
end of his life, although continuing to defend
his original position on genetics, Haldane
insisted that some of Lysenko's ideas were
correct. The final rift with the party came with
Krushchev's denouncement of Stalin and the
'cult of the individual' in 1956, shortly followed
by the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Science's
acceptance of Lysenko's resignation and repub-
lication of the work of the orthodox geneticist
Vavilov. Haldane felt no longer at ease with the
party to which he had given so much of his life,
and he decided to leave Britain for India.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1923).
HALDANE
'A Mathematical Theory of Natural and
Artificial Selection', Transactions of the
Cambridge Philosophical Society', vol. 23
(1924), p. 26.
The Causes of Evolution (1932).
The Inequality of Man, and Other Essays
(Harmondsworth, 1938).
A.R.P. (1938).
The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences
(1938).
Keeping Cool and Other Essays (1940).
Science in Peace and War (1940).
The Lysenko Controversy', The Listener, 9
December 1948.
'The Theory of Selection for Melanism in the
Lepidoptera', Proceedings of the Royal
Society of Britain, vol. 144 (1956), pp.
217-20.
The Cost of Natural Selection', Journal of
Genetics, vol. 55 (1957), pp. 511-24.
Further Reading
Dronamraja, K.R., Selected Papers ofJ.B.S.
Haldane (Garland, 1991).
Huxley, Julian, Memories (1970).
Huxley, Juliette, Leaves of the Tulip Tree
(1986).
Wersky, G., The Visible College (1988).
Alan Cohen
HALDANE, John Scott (1860-1936)
John Scott Haldane was born in Edinburgh on
3 May 1860 and died in Oxford at midnight on
14 March 1936. He was younger brother of the
statesman-philosopher Richard Burdon
HALDANE, and elder brother of the philosophi-
cal writer Elizabeth Sanderson HALDANE.
Educated at the University of Edinburgh, from
which he graduated in medicine in 1884, he
was appointed as demonstrator in physiology
first at University College Dundee and then, in
358
1887, at Oxford University. He was made a
fellow of New College, Oxford in 1901, and
reader in physiology in 1907, resigning in 1913.
He married in 1891 and had a daughter and a
son, John Burdon Sanderson HALDANE, who
himself went on to become a notable biologist
and popularizer of science.
Haldane's career was as a working physiol-
ogist. His particular specialism was respira-
tion, and his 1922 book Respiration gives an
account of his achievements in the field.
However, throughout his life he was also
deeply interested in philosophy, on which he
wrote several important works. Nor were these
twin paths unconnected; his philosophy both
guided and was inspired by his science, as he
attempted to clarify the philosophical basis of
biology. His first philosophical work, The
Relation of Philosophy to Science', co-written
with his brother, was a contribution to the
seminal volume Essays in Philosophical
Criticism (1883). Accepting Kant's thesis that
it is our categories which structure experience,
they argued that those of physics were not in
every case prior, and that in particular biology
could not be understood in terms of the
physical and chemical sciences alone. He went
on to defend and augment this general position
in a series of works, culminating in his 1927-8
Gifford Lectures, published in 1928 as The
Sciences and Philosophy.
For Haldane there existed a hierarchy of
non-reducible sciences differentiated by the
degree to which they abstract from concrete
experience. Biology is higher than physical
science, because with organic life a new factor
comes into being. This is not a matter of some
additional 'vital force', but of the fact that
biology studies living organisms as wholes
which cannot be analysed just into the sum of
their separate components; of the fact that
what makes anything the organism it is is a
matter not just of its parts and their interrela-
tions but of the relations between it and its sur-
rounding environment; and of the fact that
biological behaviour is ineliminably purpo-
sive. But as biology stands above physical

science, so, he held, does psychology stand
above biology. The unity of experience char-
acteristic of conscious life can no more be
explained in biological terms than mechanis-
tically or by the postulation of a 'soul'. Here
Haldane argues that personality is the key
concept which, like life, he understands not as
self-contained and complete but as something
extending over its environment. At the highest,
least abstracted level, we arrive at an all-inclu-
sive personality, which is both the only true
reality and the realization of our highest values.
This we may call 'God'. Though he admits his
deep debt to post-Kantianism, opposes mate-
rialism and asserts the reality of value, Haldane
rejects the notion that we can construct the
world out of mere ideas, which for him are just
further abstractions from concrete experience,
and he thus prefers, in the end, to describe his
position as realistic rather than idealistic.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'The Relation of Philosophy to Science', in
R.B. Haldane and A. Seth (eds), Essays in
Philosophical Criticism (1883).
Mechanism Life and Personality (1913).
The Sciences and Philosophy (1928).
The Philosophical Basis of Biology (1931).
The Philosophy of a Biologist (Oxford,
1935).
W. J. Mander
HALDANE, Richard Burdon, 1st Viscount
Cloan (1856-1928)
Richard Burdon Haldane, the son of an
Edinburgh lawyer, was born in that city on 30
July 1856 but spent much of his childhood (and
indeed his later life) at Cloan, Perthshire, the
family's country residence, where he died on
19 August 1928. The family upbringing was
intellectually encouraging and in the end, not
359
HALDANE
only he, but both his brother, John Scott
HALDANE, and his sister, Elizabeth Sanderson
HALDANE, went on to make their mark in philo-
sophical terms. He went to Edinburgh
University in 1872, where he studied under
Campbell Eraser and, devoting himself to phi-
losophy, formed what were to be lifelong friend-
ships with Andrew Seth PRINGLE-PATIISON and
W.R. SORLEY, both of whom went on to become
leading lights in the British idealist movement.
Troubled by questions of faith, he was sent in
1874 to study with Lotze in Gottigen. As was the
case with many others at that time, Lotze had a
profound influence on him, and he returned later
that year with a conviction that idealism was the
one true metaphysical system. On his return to
Edinburgh, he continued his studies in German
philosophy, leaving the university with the highest
honours in 1876.
Destined from the first for the English bar, he
began to study law and, after his father's death
in 1877, went to live in London. He was called
to the English bar in 1879, establishing a suc-
cessful practice, and being made a Queen's
Councillor in 1890. In 1885 he was elected to
Parliament and thus began a parallel political
career. He was a strong believer in education as
engine for social progress, and much of his par-
liamentary work concerned the universities. He
was influential in getting the various colleges in
London together as the University of London,
and in the granting of university status to several
of the provincial colleges also, as well as the
establishment of Imperial College in Kensington.
He was also active in promoting university extra-
mural work. In 1905 he became Minister for the
War Office, in 1911 he was elevated to the
peerage, and in 1912 he was made Lord
Chancellor. This post he held until 1915, when,
attacked in the press as too 'pro-Germany', he
was forced to resign. Afterwards, this time in the
House of Lords, he again devoted himself to
university questions, focusing on the organiza-
tion and encouragement of adult education, and
helping to establish the British Institute of Adult
Education. He was briefly Lord Chancellor again
in Ramsay MacDonald's 1924 government.
HALDANE
A man of prodigious energy, throughout
this legal and political career, he remained
active in high-level philosophical work. In
1883, together with his old student friend,
Andrew Seth, he published a collection of
papers: Essays in Philosophical Criticism.
Complete with a Preface by Edward Caird,
this highly influential book was something of
a philosophical manifesto for the new idealist
school of thought. His own contribution to
the volume was a paper he co-authored with
his younger brother, John, entitled 'The
Relation of Philosophy to Science'. Accepting
Kant's thesis that the synthetic activity of
thought enters into our experience of objects,
it objected to his treating of the higher cate-
gories - the organic, teleological, moral or aes-
thetic categories - as subjective, and only the
lower ones - those of maths and physics, which
yield a wholly mechanistic world - as objec-
tive. The physicist, they argued, has no right to
see his or her view as ultimate to which all
others should be reduced, rather it is itself an
abstraction from the concrete whole of expe-
rience made for the purposes of his or her own
science. Urging particularly the inadequacy of
mechanical categories to explain the phenom-
ena of life, they urged that 'from the relations
of pure mathematics up to those of self-con-
sciousness [there exists] a chain of aspects of
nature not one of which is reducible to
another, but which are yet inseparably united
together in thought' (Essays in Philosophical
Criticism, p. 52).
Haldane's chief philosophical work was his
Gifford Lectures delivered at St Andrews in
1902-1903 and published in 1903 as The
Pathway to Reality. In the lectures he dis-
claimed all originality, holding that anything of
value which he had to say came first from
Hegel, and in this respect he was the most
loyally Hegelian of all the British idealists, to
some extent going back on the modifications
of F.H. BRADLEY and BOSANQUET, alarmed by
the sceptical note he found in them. Yet his
exposition of Hegel tended to avoid the latter's
dialectical detail and was often put forward
360
with more enthusiasm than clarity. He also
makes much use of Aristotle whom he thinks
that 'Hegel first taught the world to read'
(Pathway to Reality, p. 169), and his work is
marked too by the firm conviction that poetry,
especially that of Goethe, can often express
the highest truths.
In defending the basic idealistic position -
that it is meaningless to speak of the existence
or nature of things except as they are objects
for some knowing subject or mind - he takes
on board the objections of such figures as
Bradley and Pringle-Pattison., and will have no
talk of thought 'making' nature, but maintains
the role of thought, rather than feeling, in
fixing what we call reality. Central to
Haldane's position is that previous philoso-
phers have taken too narrow a view of mind.
What is real is individual as found in experi-
ence, but this is a union of thought and feeling,
of subject and object, and to take either of
these abstractions as the essence of mind is to
distort the true situation. Our experience is
interpreted through a stairway of categories by
which we mount from lower to higher aspects
of the world - levels of knowledge which, in so
far as they are ranked, are also levels of truth
and reality. But Haldane insists that each of
these are adequate to themselves, and that in
another sense the role of philosophy is to vin-
dicate the option that things are as they appear.
'If philosophy gives us back what science
threatens to take away, and restores to plain
people their faith in the reality of each of these
phases of the world as it seems, then philoso-
phy will have gone a long way to justify her
existence' (Pathway to Reality, p. 119). In
dealing with the categories by which we inter-
pret experience, Haldane's writing is notable
among idealists for its detailed scientific knowl-
edge. The second half of the book deals with
infinite and finite being respectively. The
universe in its ultimate reality must be con-
ceived as mind, freed from those features of
our experience which are due to limitation.
And since by God we mean nothing less than
ultimate reality, it must follow that God is uni-

versal and all-inclusive subject; mind that com-
prehends itself completely. This coming to self-
consciousness and self-realization is possible only
as the end of a completed system.
In 1918 Haldane took part, together with
Pringle-Pattison, Bosanquet and G.F. STOUT, in
an important Aristotelian Society symposium
entitled 'Do Finite Individuals have a Substantial
or Adjectival Mode of Being?' Attempting to
mediate between Pringle-Pattison and
Bosanquet's positions, Haldane argued that the
relation between finite minds and the infinite
Mind varies according to the level at which they
are regarded - as mere physical objects, as living
organisms or as conscious intelligences in social
wholes. At lower levels, exclusion and differ-
ence dominate, but as we ascend to the highest
levels of art, religion and thought, the distinctness
becomes subordinate, though it is not quite lost
because the higher not only supersedes but pre-
serves as logical moments the lower which it
transcends.
The relativity of being to knowledge had long
been a theme of Haldane's thought and, seeing
in Einstein's theory a confirmation of this, in
1921 he published The Reign of Relativity,
which elaborated the theme and looked in more
detail at the philosophical consequences of
Einstein's position. As ever he took pains to
learn the science in question, even discussing the
theory with Einstein himself, and, given the con-
temporary interest in the subject, the book was
immediately and immensely successful. (A third
edition was called for within the space of a year.)
It carries over Haldane's earlier idealist stance
that reality is a unified whole and that to be
known in some form is the only way of being
real, but goes on to urge that knowledge of this
unity can be approached only from various
limited points of view, such as those of the physi-
cist, the biologist or the philosopher. These dif-
ferent levels of thought are distinct and irre-
ducible (morality can no more be resolved into
mathematics than life into mechanism), and each
together with the categories it employs, consid-
ered in the light of the whole, represents a partial
and only relative view of the truth, which should
361
HALDANE
not be absolutized. Einstein's work, he thought,
illustrated for physics this essentially general
truth. While he gives a clear account of the
theory, though avoiding the crude subjectivism
of some philosophies of relativity, he does tend
to read too much into it, both scientifically and
philosophically. Like Hegel, he places categories
in order, but where Hegel sees smooth transition
he stresses their discontinuity.
A popular summary of his mature views was
given in the small volume Human Experience
(1926). Haldane's contribution to philosophy,
though now much neglected, is noteworthy. It
allied itself squarely with Hegel, but in its engage-
ment with contemporary critics and science it
carried the movement forward as well.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Ed. with A. Seth), Essays in Philosophical
Criticism (1883).
The Pathway to Reality (1903-1904).
(with A.S. Pringle-Pattison, B. Bosanquet
and G.F. Stout), 'Do Finite Individuals
have a Substantial or Adjectival Mode of
Being?', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. (1918).
The Reign of Relativity (1921).
Human Experience (1926).
Other Relevant Works
Life of Adam Smith (1887).
Education and Empire (1902).
Universities and National Life (1910).
The Conduct of Life (1915).
The Philosophy of Humanism and Other
Subjects (1922).
Afirmation (1928).
Selected Essays and Addresses (1928).
An Autobiography (1929).
Further Reading
Maurice, Fredrick, Lord Haldane (1937-9).
Sommer, Dudley, Haldane of Cloan (1960).
W. J. Mander
HALL
HALL, Roland (1930-)
Roland Hall was born in Hounslow on 11 July
1930. He was educated at Christ's Hospital,
Horsham (1942-9). After eighteen months
(1949-50) in the British Army he attended Keble
College, Oxford, where in 1954 he received a
first in literae bumaniores and in 1956 obtained
the BPhil under the supervision of J.L. AUSTIN
and, briefly, Gilbert RYLE. He was assistant in
logic at St Andrews (1956-7). From 1957 to
1966 Hall was a lecturer in philosophy at
Queen's College, Dundee and was made senior
lecturer in 1966. From 1967 until retirement in
1994 he was reader in philosophy at the
University of York, and served as Head of
Department there from 1979 to 1985. From
1961 to 1967 he was assistant editor of the
Philosophical Quarterly. In 1970 he founded
The Locke Newsletter (now Locke Studies)
which he has edited since then. Since 1957 he has
worked for the Oxford English Dictionary, first
on its outside editorial staff, reading for new
words and writing definitions, and then as a
consultant on entries. Hall married Daphne
Blenkiron in 1954 (divorced 1991), with whom
he had three daughters. He married Roma
Hutchinson in 1995.
Hall's early writings show the influence of
Austin and Ryle. In his analysis of 'positing
words' as well as of what he calls 'excluders', he
presents subtle case studies of the informal logic
of these philosophically significant terms of
ordinary discourse. Important contributions are
his 'Excluders' (1959) and 'Assuming' (1958), in
the latter of which his dissection of the ways we
employ 'assume' has as its specific target
Meinong's view that positing acts bespeak
mental states or operations. For Hall, by
contrast, these words describe no special activity,
and 'we cannot say what [they] refer to, because
they do not refer to anything' ('Assuming', p. 55)
- a position in keeping with linguistic philoso-
phy's attempts to dissolve rather than solve
problems pertaining to the reification of mind.
Hall has written widely on diverse subjects in
philosophy and its history but is best known for
362
his comprehensive bibliographical works on
Locke and Hume: A Hume Bibliography, from
1930 (1971), Fifty Years of Hume Scholarship:
A Bibliographical Guide (1978) and (with
Roger Woolhouse) Eighty Years of Locke
Scholarship: A Bibliographical Guide (1983).
He has supplemented these exhaustive, now
standard resources with yearly lists and essays
(particularly in Hume Studies and the Locke
Newsletter), as well as with detailed lexico-
graphical analyses of Locke, Berkeley and
Hume. This latter work has served Hall in clar-
ifying much about the historico-philosophical
relations between these thinkers. Among his
most significant theses is his reinterpretation of
Locke's compositionalism, the theory that
complex ideas in knowledge are formed from
simpler ones. Particularly for reasons of empiri-
cist principle, Hall's reconstruction of this
theory relinquishes the orthodox claims that we
originally perceive simple ideas and that all
complex ideas result from combining simple
ideas. This novel view requires some re-evalu-
ation, which Hall supplies, of the role in
Locke's epistemology played by such key terms
as 'sensation', 'imagination', 'reason', 'idea'
and - of course - 'experience'.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Assuming: One Set of Positing Words',
Philosophical Review, vol. 67 (1958), pp.
52-75.
'Excluders', Analysis, vol. 20 (1959), pp. 1-7.
Fifty Years of Hume Scholarship: A
Bibliographical Guide (Edinburgh, 1978).
(Ed. with Roger Woolhouse), Eighty Years of
Locke Scholarship: A Bibliographical
Guide (Edinburgh, 1983).
Other Relevant Works
'The Special Vocabulary of the Eudemian
Ethics', Classical Quarterly, vol. 9 (1959),
pp. 197-206.
'Hume's Use of Locke on Identity', Locke
Newsletter, vol. 5 (1974), pp. 56-75.
'Locke and Sensory Experience - Another
Look at Simple Ideas of Sensation', Locke

Newsletter, vol. 18 (1987), pp. 47-62.
The Nature of the Will and its Place in
Schopenhauer's Philosophy', Schopenhauer
Jahrbuch, vol. 76 (1995), pp. 73-90.
The Role of Experience in Locke', Locke
Studies, vol. 1 (2001), pp. 15-30.
Further Reading
Nidditch, P.H., Review of Fifty Years of
Hume Scholarship: A Bibliographical
Guide, Hume Studies, vol. 5 (1979), pp.
112-13.
Stewart, M.A., Review of Eighty Years of
Locke Scholarship: A Bibliographical
Guide, Locke Newsletter, vol. 15 (1984),
p. 107.
David Scott
HALLETT, Harold Foster (1886-1966)
Harold F. Hallett was born in Steyning, Sussex
and died in St Agnes on 24 April 1966. After
receiving his early education in Brighton,
Hallett trained as an engineer, earning a BSc
(engineering) from the University of London in
1906. Despite a successful start in the profes-
sion, Hallett abandoned engineering to study
philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He
earned an MA in mental philosophy in 1912
and a DLitt in 1930. Hallett was appointed
lecturer in logic and assistant in logic and meta-
physics at the University of Edinburgh in 1912.
In 1919 he was named assistant lecturer in phi-
losophy at the University of Leeds, and was
promoted to lecturer there in 1922. Hallett was
elected Chair in Philosophy at King's College
London in 1931. He held that chair until his
retirement in 1951, when he was named pro-
fessor emeritus.
Hallett is known primarily as a Spinoza
scholar. He claimed that 'no philosopher of
repute has been worse served by his exposi-
363
HALLETT
tors and commentators than Spinoza' (Benedict
de Spinoza: The Elements of his Philosophy,
p. vii), and he spent his career battling what he
saw as misinterpretations of the Dutch ratio-
nalist. Though he also published a number of
articles, Hallett is best remembered as the
author of three books. Aeternitas, published
in 1930, sought to clarify the relation between
time and eternity in Spinoza's thought - a task
made especially pressing by the renewed interest
in time among early twentieth-century philoso-
phers such as Bergson and WHITEHEAD.
According to Hallett, eternity has wrongly been
identified with sempiternity or endless time. In
fact, eternity (understood as 'the very essence of
God', Aeternitas, p. 322) is the more funda-
mental notion, and time is merely a partial rep-
resentation of it by finite creatures. Benedict de
Spinoza sought to correct other persistent mis-
readings of Spinoza, particularly the view that
he was a mechanist whose doctrine of libera-
tion is artificially imposed on to his meta-
physics. Hallett's last book, Creation,
Emanation and Salvation (1962), paid careful
attention to the nature of space and to
Spinoza's moral and political views. Hallett
saw his books as a series of 'Spinozistic studies'
rather than mere expositions. Not content to
determine Spinoza's views, Hallett looked to
him for 'clues to the solution of some ultimate
problems' (Aeternitas, p. viii). Solving these
problems, he argued, requires traditional spec-
ulative metaphysics, since both phenomenology
and logical empiricism are unequal to the task.
His faith in metaphysics was 'naked and
unashamed' (ibid., p. v).
Hallett's commitment to metaphysics left
him out of step with much postwar British phi-
losophy. He was unable to find a publisher for
several of his major works, including a book in
moral and political theory and a translation of
Descartes's Principles by Spinoza. Moreover,
Hallett's dissatisfaction with the state of
Spinoza scholarship gave his work a polemical
air that even some fellow Spinozists found off-
putting. (George Kline called his work 'clumsy
and inept'.) Since his death, however, Hallett
HALLETT
has gradually come to be seen as one of the
premier interpreters of Spinoza and a meta-
physician of the first order. The editors of the
most recent English edition of Spinoza's corre-
spondence commend Hallett for discrediting
nineteenth-century 'idealistic' readings of
Spinoza. Even Jonathan BENNETT, whose
approach to Spinoza differs greatly from
Hallett's, usually cites him favourably.
Recognition came late for Hallett, but few
today question his rigour or his importance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aeternitas: A Spinozistic Study (Oxford,
1930).
Benedict de Spinoza: The Elements of his
Philosophy (1957).
Creation, Emanation and Salvation: A
Spinozistic Study (The Hague, 1962).
Robert Piercey
HAMLYN, David Walter (1924-)
D.W. Hamlyn was born in Plymouth on 1
October 1924. He was schooled at Plymouth
College before attending Exeter College,
Oxford in 1942, where he earned first class
honours in Classical Moderations (1943) and,
after a hiatus due to the war, literae humaniores
(1948). In 1949 Hamlyn was awarded the
degree of MA and received the prestigious John
Locke Scholarship, and in 1950 he went on to
complete a further degree in psychology and
philosophy (again, with first class honours). In
that year Hamlyn was also appointed to his
first academic post - a junior research fellow-
ship at Corpus Christi College. In 1953 he
moved to Jesus College to take up the post of
lecturer and tutor, and after only a year in this
post, Hamlyn moved to Birkbeck College at the
University of London - the institution at which
he would remain for the rest of his career. He
364
held a lectureship at Birkbeck from 1954 to
1963, then had a brief spell as a reader, before
being promoted to Professor and Chair of
Philosophy in 1964, a position which he held
until his retirement (and progression to
emeritus professor) in 1988. During this period,
he was also Head of the Department of Classics
at Birkbeck between 1981 and 1986, and Vice-
Master of the college from 1983 to 1988.
Hamlyn had a twelve-year spell as editor of
Mind between 1972 and 1984, and has been a
member of the Council of the Royal Institute of
Philosophy since 1968, an institution for which
he also sat on the Executive Committee and
held the post of Vice-Chairman.
Hamlyn is probably best known for his work
on a number of issues which lie on or around
the intersection of the philosophy of psychol-
ogy, the philosophy of perception, epistemol-
ogy and the philosophy of education. In his
first book - a philosophical treatise entitled
The Psychology of Perception - Hamlyn turns
a critical philosophical eye to a number of psy-
chological theories of perception. He criticizes
the Gestalt theory and its successors for failing
to take account of the fact that the concept of
'perception' is used in a number of intrinsically
different ways, and in consequence for employ-
ing inappropriate forms of explanation. He
also criticizes the conceptual model for per-
ception these theories adopt - 'a model in
which perception is merely the experience
which is the end-product of a process of stim-
ulation and neural excitation' (Psychology of
Perception, p. 112). In outlining this criticism,
Hamlyn makes some positive philosophical
claims about perception which form a compo-
nent of much of his later work in these areas.
When theorizing about perception, Hamlyn
follows Reid in drawing a strict distinction
between sensation and perception according
to which '[sjensations ... do not provide us
with information about other things ... whilst
perception is always concerned with informa-
tion about other things' (ibid., p. 41). So
according to this distinction, 'sensations' are
inherently non-representational - they do not

provide us with information about anything
beyond themselves - whereas perception-
proper also involves, in Reid's words, a 'con-
ception or notion of the object perceived'. In
clarifying this, Hamlyn often makes use of an
example from the case of touch. For instance,
in In and Out of the Black Box he tells us that
when 'we pass our hand over a textured surface
we may receive certain sensations in our finger-
tips, which will depend on the nature of the
texture' (p. 85). When we undergo such an
experience, although it is possible to attend to
the sensations as such - to the feelings in our
fingertips - we can also attend to the texture of
the surface of the object and thereby, in a
tactual sense, perceive the surface. But in order
to do this, Hamlyn claims, we must think about
the surface in a certain way - as fluffy, or
rough, or rippled and so on - and this requires
us to bring it under a concept.
It is a key feature of Hamlyn's account that
this conceptual awareness is not a matter of
drawing inferences about the surface from our
awareness of the sensations it causes. On the
contrary, he claims that when we attend to the
texture of the surface, we actually cease to be
aware of the sensations as such. But even in
those cases where we are unaware of the sen-
sations, Hamlyn denies that they cease to exist,
claiming instead that they remain in play,
affecting the quality or character of our expe-
rience of the texture. So being aware of the
texture of the surface does require 'the having
of... sensations as its causal condition,... [but
it also] goes beyond these in involving ... con-
sciousness of an independent object and con-
sciousness of it as such and such' (Experience
and the Growth of Under standing, p. 71).
Where visual perception is concerned,
Hamlyn insists that the case is analogous, and
that visual perceptual experiences also have a
sensational aspect. However, he tempers this
with the claim that being aware of visual sen-
sations as such requires 'an unusual degree of
introspectiveness' - a degree which many
people may never reach (In and Out of the
Black Box, pp. 99-100). Nevertheless, Hamlyn
365
HAMLYN
insists that visual sensations do exist, and
indeed that visual perception necessarily
involves the occurrence of sensations. But
although the occurrence of sensations is neces-
sary for perception, Hamlyn denies that it is suf-
ficient too. For Hamlyn, all perceiving is per-
ceiving-as - all perceiving requires the subject
to bring an object under a concept, or see an
object as something or other (Experience and
the Growth of Understanding, p. 65). Hence
the claim that 'a creature which could not come
to have beliefs in the course of perception
would be a purely sensory creature, one which
might have sensations but not perception at all
properly speaking' (ibid., p. 63). So perception
(properly speaking) necessarily involves both
sensations and concepts.
This dependence of perception on concepts
leads Hamlyn to consider epistemological ques-
tions, including the question of what is involved
in concept possession and acquisition.
According to Hamlyn, to have a concept of X
is to believe something about what is involved
in something's being X. To the extent that this
can be right or wrong, we can also talk about
having the concept of X - having true beliefs or
knowledge of what it is for something to be X
(ibid., p. 74; In and Out of the Black Box,
p. 92). But on Hamlyn's account, knowing
what it is for something to be X is inherently
indeterminate - it involves knowing an inde-
terminate number of members of an indeter-
minate list of things about X. This has two
consequences. First, that there can be no
straightforward set of necessary and sufficient
conditions for having the concept of X; second,
that having the concept of X will not be an all
or nothing matter - it will be possible to have
the concept of X to a greater or lesser degree.
What is more, what you have to know in
order to have the concept of X is not necessar-
ily factual. In Experience and the Growth of
Understanding (pp. 78-9) Hamlyn illustrates
all of this with the example of a clutch. He
contends that if a person is a proficient car
driver, then there is a sense in which they can
be said to know what a clutch is, even if they
HAMLYN
have no idea what role a clutch plays in the
workings of a car or how it plays that role. The
very fact that they can drive a car using the
clutch in the process is enough to make it the
case that, in a limited sense at least, the driver
knows what a clutch is. And Hamlyn contends
that this in turn entails that the driver has the
concept of a clutch in a correspondingly limited
sense.
As we can see, Hamlyn's account of concept
possession looks to be quite liberal, but it does
require that if you are to have the concept of X,
you have to have some knowledge about X
(although, as we have seen, this knowledge
need not necessarily be propositional). So just
as perception presupposes concept possession,
Hamlyn claims that concept possession pre-
supposes knowledge. However, he also takes
pains to point out that these are logical pre-
suppositions and not temporal ones. So the
claim is not that a creature must first come to
know something, and then acquire concepts,
and then become a perceiver. Instead, the claim
is the strictly logical one that if a creature is a
perceiver, then it must also be a concept-pos-
sessor and a knower. Whilst this does rule out
one temporal story - in which perception
occurs before knowledge acquisition - it does
not rule out a temporal story in which 'the dif-
ferent aspects of the process take their course
together' (Experience and the Growth of
Understanding, pp. 92-3).
We can see how this might be the case with
the aid of an example (cf. Experience and the
Growth of Understanding^ pp. 93-4). Suppose
a child learns to distinguish between two things,
X and Y. If the child is to distinguish between
X and Y, it must, in some sense, pick up on or
be aware of a difference between them.
According to Hamlyn, this simple act of dis-
crimination does not require the child to know
in what respect X and Y are different, but nev-
ertheless he claims that, if the child sees a dif-
ference between X and Y - which it must if it
can distinguish between them - then the child
can be said to know something (albeit some-
thing minimal) about what it is for something
366
to be X and what it is for something to be Y.
And of course, on Hamlyn's view of concepts,
this entails that the child has some kind of
limited concepts of X and Y. So we can see how
these three aspects - perception, knowledge
and concepts - are related: to distinguish
between X and Y just is to have some minimal
knowledge about X and Y, and this in turn just
is to possess minimal concepts of X and Y.
In addition to these epistemological claims
about the conditions under which an individual
can be said to perceive something, to have a
concept, or to know something, Hamlyn is also
interested in addressing questions in the field of
what he calls, following Piaget, 'genetic episte-
mology'. Whereas episternology proper
concerns the conditions under which an indi-
vidual can be said to have a certain form of
understanding, genetic episternology concerns
the question of how these forms of under-
standing develop in the individual: How does
a newborn baby develop into a fully-fledged
'knower'?
It is in answering this question that Hamlyn
is led to make some of his most distinctive
claims - claims which have a strongly
Wittgensteinianflavour- about the importance
of social existence to a creature's being a
knower. In 'What Exactly is Social about the
Origins of Understanding?' he illustrates this
with an argument schema which proceeds as
follows (cf. Perception, Learning and the Self,
pp. 163-5). In order to know something, a
creature must know it as true. In order to know
something as true, the creature would have to
know what it is for something to be true - the
creature must possess 'the concept of truth or
something like it to some degree or other'. This
strong-sounding contention is then tempered by
the claim that, in order to possess an adequate
concept of truth, the creature is not required to
be able to say what truth is (otherwise many
philosophers would be in trouble), but rather to
exhibit some kind of normative sensitivity - a
capacity to appreciate 'the force of a norm'.
This is where the social context comes in.
Hamlyn contends that the development of this

kind of normative sensitivity is linked to the
notion of correction - that a creature is sensi-
tive to truth and falsity if it can be corrected.
But in order to be accurately described as being
corrected, Hamlyn claims that the creature
must take the correction as correction. And he
contends that this is only possible if the creature
sees the source of the correction as a corrector,
and this in turn requires seeing that thing as 'a
being with certain intentions, and thus
normally with desires, interests, etc - in other
words as a person or as something person-like'
(Perception, Learning and the Self, p. 164).
And Hamlyn says that this will only be the
case if the creature stands in personal relations
to the corrector - relations which are not
merely cognitive, but involve feeling and
emotion. In particular, for the creature to stand
in these kinds of relations is for it to be treated
as a person by a person.
If we now step back and take all of this
together, we can see just how distinctive
Hamlyn's overall account is. In order to be a
perceiver, you need to be a knower; and in
order to be a knower, you need to engage, or
at least have engaged, in personal interrela-
tionships. Once more, these are all logical
requirements rather than temporal ones. So the
claim is not that a child must first enjoy
personal relationships with persons, and then
come to accept correction as correction, and so
on, but rather that if a child is to acquire knowl-
edge, then it must enter, or have entered, into
personal relationships. One consequence of
these logical relationships is that the possibility
of innate knowledge is ruled out - as a newborn
baby has not yet stood in any relationships
with persons, it does not have one of the pre-
requisites for knowledge and hence cannot be
a knower. Indeed, he even goes so far as to say
that, for this reason, a baby abandoned on a
desert island could never become a knower (In
and Out of the Black Box, p. 124).
It is interesting to consider why Hamlyn
thinks that personal relationships are so crucial
- necessary indeed - for a child to become a
knower. According to Hamlyn, personal rela-
367
HAMLYN
tionships are essential because it is only in virtue
of standing in such relationships that the child's
attention can be directed or channelled in ways
which enable it to make the kinds of discrimi-
nations it needs to make - discriminations which
Hamlyn claims would be impossible if it were
limited to only the contingent deliveries of expe-
rience. So the role of the adult in this process is
to ensure not only that the child makes discrim-
inations, but also that the discriminations the
child makes are the right ones - 'this is part of the
process through which there emerges the concept
of truth, which is vital if the child is to have
knowledge as such' (Experience and the Growth
of Understanding, p. 101). So whatever dis-
criminations an infant might be able to make,
they 'will not count as knowledge ... unless the
child is more than a discriminator, unless he is a
human child capable of response to and getting
responses from adult human beings, such
responses being themselves of a specific human
kind' (ibid., p. 93).
In addition to the necessity of social rela-
tionships to a creature's becoming a knower,
Hamlyn also stresses the centrality of agency to
a creature's becoming a perceiver. In In and out
of the Black Box he defends this in part by
claiming that a key ingredient of grasping the
concept of bodily identity is grasping what it is
for something to be impenetrable - as part of
what it is to understand that two bodies are
distinct is to understand that they could not
share the same space at the same time. He then
argues that we could only acquire a concept of
impenetrability through manipulating objects,
where 'manipulation' has to be understood in
a way that implies active agency - mere contact
between the object and the creature's body
would not be enough. If this is the case, then
perception of particular physical objects,
inasmuch as that presupposes some kind of
concept of bodily identity, will in turn presup-
pose the concept of impenetrability, which can
only be acquired if the creature is an agent (In
and Out of the Black Box, p. 103).
If correct, these claims - concerning the
necessity of social existence and agency for
HAMLYN
various aspects of mindedness - will have
important ramifications for the scope and limits
of certain psychological enterprises. As Hamlyn
makes clear with regard to Marr's computa-
tional theory of vision, if the perception of
objects presupposes that the perceiving creature
is an agent, 'Marr's attempt to show how it is
possible to compute edges and boundaries in a
way which leads to the setting up of the 3-D
model representation is not nearly enough to
show what makes perception of objects as such
possible' (ibid., pp. 103-104). This attack is just
one component of a thoroughgoing critique of
information processing based theories of cog-
nitive psychology which Hamlyn develops at
length in In and Out of the Black Box. The
general thrust of Hamlyn's critique locates the
problem with cognitive psychology in the
reaction of its proponents to the problems with
their historical precursor - behaviourism.
According to Hamlyn, the problems with
behaviourism were not limited to the fact that it
treats the psychological system as a so-called
'black box', thereby purposefully ignoring the
processes that take place inside the organism as
irrelevant to psychology. In addition to this, he
contends that the behaviourist conceptions of
stimulus and response - the inputs to and
outputs from the black box - are themselves
inadequate. He argues that if we construe input
and output in purely physical or physiological
terms - say as applications of energy to nerve
endings for example - then our inputs and
outputs will not be relevant to the system under-
stood as a psychological entity. For example,
inasmuch as we are concerned with behaviour
understood as the output from a human
organism, 'we are not concerned simply with
... patterns of movement; we are concerned with
what people ... do' (ibid., p. 19).
So when the cognitive psychologists reacted to
behaviourism by starting to look at what was
going on inside the black box, they made what
Hamlyn contends to be a critical mistake - they
neglected to also discard the behaviourist's prob-
lematically narrow conceptions of what serves as
input and output for the system. According to
368
Hamlyn, this has the consequence that, whatever
else they might be, many of the theories
produced by cognitive psychologists fail to be
psychologically relevant. In light of this view
that there is a flaw at the heart of cognitive psy-
chology, Hamlyn goes on to attack many of the
familiar pillars of the discipline, including the
representational theory of mind (RTM) and the
associated notion of (mental) 'representations',
and contends that the reductive aspirations of
many psychologists and philosophers of mind
are misguided.
In addition to his work in these areas, Hamlyn
is also a well-respected historian of philosophy,
having written a general history of philosophy (A
History of Western Philosophy, 1987), a dedi-
cated history of the philosophy of perception
(Sensation and Perception, 1961), an intriguing
history of philosophy as a practice entitled Being
A Philosopher (1992) and translations of
Aristotle's De anima. In addition to these books,
Hamlyn has published textbooks on metaphysics
and epistemology, a study of Schopenhauer and
a large number of journal articles.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Psychology of Perception (1957).
Sensation and Perception (1961).
Aristotle's De anima, II & HI (Oxford,
1968).
The Theory of Knowledge (1970).
Experience and the Growth of
Understanding (1978).
Schopenhauer (1980).
Perception, Learning and the Self: Essays in
the Philosophy of Psychology (1983).
Metaphysics (Cambridge, 1984).
A History of Western Philosophy (New
York, 1987).
In and Out of the Black Box: On the
Philosophy of Cognition (Oxford, 1990).
Being a Philosopher (London and New York,
1992).
Further Reading.
Elliot, R.K., 'D.W. Hamlyn on Knowledge
and the Beginnings of Understanding',

Journal of the Philosophy of Education
vol. 14 (1980), pp. 109-16.
Gallagher, K.T., 'Recent Anglo-American
Views on Perception', International
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 4 (1964), pp.
122-41.
Goldman, A.I., The Relation between
Epistemology and Psychology', Synthese,
vol. 64 (1985), pp. 29-68.
Jones, M., 'Innate Powers, Concepts and
Knowledge: A Critique of D.W. Hamlyn's
Account of Concept Possession', Journal of
the Philosophy of Education, vol. 15
(1981), pp. 139-45.
Marr, D., Vision: A Computational
Investigation into the Human
Representation and Processing of Visual
Information (1982).
William Fish
HAMPSHIRE, Stuart Newton (1914-)
Stuart Hampshire was born in Healing,
Lincolnshire on 1 October 1914. He was
educated at Repton School and Balliol College,
Oxford. From 1936 to 1940 he was a fellow of
All Souls College, Oxford and a university
lecturer in philosophy. During World War II he
served in the British Army as an intelligence
officer, and after the war worked for two years
in the Foreign Office in London. In 1947 he
returned to academic life as a lecturer in phi-
losophy at University College London, and in
1950 moved to Oxford, where he was, first,
fellow and tutor in philosophy at New College
and, from 1955, Domestic Bursar and a
research fellow at All Souls. From 1960 to
1963 he was Grote Professor of the Philosophy
of Mind and Logic at the University of London,
and in 1963 he became a Professor of
Philosophy at Princeton University. In 1970 he
succeeded Sir Maurice Bowra as Warden of
369
HAMPSHIRE
Wadham College, Oxford. On his retirement
from this post in 1984, he became Bonsell
Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University,
a position which he relinquished in 1991. He
was elected a fellow of the British Academy in
1960 and was knighted in 1979. In 1961 he
married Renee Ayer, who died in 1980, and in
1985 he married Nancy Cartwright.
Hampshire's philosophical education at
Oxford in the 1930s, though giving a special
place to the study of Plato and Aristotle, was
largely within the Hegelian tradition, and
Hampshire initially welcomed the iconoclastic
views of the logical positivists then being intro-
duced to Oxford. However, his first published
papers, more than a decade later, apply the
techniques characteristic of the analytic
movement, with its emphasis on clarity and
the detailed investigation of small-scale
problems, to challenge, in various ways, the
fundamental principle of logical positivism, the
Verification Principle. For example,
'Subjunctive Conditionals' (1949) argues that
some singular counterfactual statements (such
as 'If Hitler had invaded Britain in 1940, he
would have captured London') are not equiv-
alent to a set of falsifiable general statements
together with statements of initial conditions,
but are judgements or interpretations of the
facts and do not have precisely defined condi-
tions of falsification.
Hampshire's distance from logical positivism
at this period is also apparent in his willingness
to write the volume on Spinoza for the Pelican
Philosophy Series edited by A.J. AYER.
Although far from being a committed Spinozist,
Hampshire clearly found Spinoza in some
respects a congenial subject, and the influence
of Spinoza can be seen in much of his later
work. Spinoza (1951) is a lucid and fair-minded
introduction to the whole of Spinoza's philos-
ophy. It was reissued in a second edition in
1987, and still remains one of the best intro-
ductions to Spinoza in English. Hampshire
defends the development of metaphysical
systems such as Spinoza's as being, amongst
other things, a necessary prerequisite for natural
HAMPSHIRE
science - the metaphysician can supply the sci-
entist with the concepts in terms of which to
frame the hypotheses which can then be tested
empirically. He also warns against summary
dismissal of Spinoza's system by uncritical
appeal to the Verification Principle, and
suggests, in a manner more characteristic of
the later WITTGENSTEIN than of logical posi-
tivism, that if there is a fundamental mistake in
Spinoza's approach, it lies in the way in which
he speaks of 'nature' as a single system, thereby
divorcing the word from any of the contexts in
which we normally use it and to that extent
leaving its meaning unclear.
The influence of Spinoza can be traced in
Hampshire's best-known book, Thought and
Action (1959), not least in its synoptic treat-
ment of a wide range of issues. The book
focuses on the situation of persons as agents in
the world, one of its themes being that philoso-
phers will be unable to deal satisfactorily with
a variety of issues if they do not recognize, and
properly appreciate, that we are 'active exper-
imenters' (Thought and Action, p. 53) in the
world rather than merely passive observers.
The failure of the empiricists' project to recon-
struct our knowledge of the world on the basis
of sense-data is attributed to its neglect of this
basic feature of the human situation, which is
also argued to be crucial to our understanding
of some of the most fundamental concepts in
our thought, such as our sense of time (ibid.,
pp. 70-74), personal identity (ibid., p. 126),
and 'our idea of the unity of mind and body'
(ibid., pp. 74-85).
Inasmuch as we are essentially agents in the
world, intention is a pervasive feature of our
consciousness; and it is the nature of intention
which receives the bulk of Hampshire's attention
and from which many of the book's most dis-
tinctive theses are derived. Thus since we
normally know what our intentions are, i.e.
know what we are doing now and what we are
going to do next, our intentions give us a knowl-
edge of our (immediate) environment and of the
(immediate) future - a kind of 'non-proposi-
tional knowledge' (ibid., p. 103) very different
370
from the kind that is based on evidence. The
concept of intention also figures in Hampshire's
compatibilist response to the issue of free will: a
person is a free agent if he knows what he is
doing, i.e. 'acts with a definite and clearly formed
intention' (ibid., p. 177) and has available to
him 'a comparatively wide range [of alternative
courses of action] in which he would succeed if
he tried' (ibid., p. 181). It is a consequence of this
account of human freedom that knowledge is a
prerequisite for free action - not only knowledge
of the details of one's situation and of the ways
in which one's actions will impact on it, but also
knowledge of oneself and of alternative frame-
works of belief and value (so that one does not
use unselfconsciously and uncritically the cate-
gories of an inherited moral outlook).
Moreover, and rather differently, that the cat-
egories with which one approaches and reflects
on a situation are inadequate - that one's
thought is hidebound, simplistic or insensitive -
not only counts against one's being a free agent,
but can also constitute grounds for moral criti-
cism. Hampshire particularly emphasizes this
point, believing it to have been ignored by the
neo-Kantian approach then prevalent among
British moral philosophers, with its focus on the
moral assessment of action to the exclusion of
the thought which accompanies action. This
hostility to neo-Kantianism is complemented by
a tentative endorsement of a broadly Aristotelian
approach to moral philosophy. As agents in the
world, we inevitably use language which classi-
fies objects in terms of our interests. Hence,
'"being a standard specimen of its kind" ... gen-
erally [has] the implication of "serving its typical
purpose well'" (ibid., p. 227), arid the criteria for
membership of a particular class of items supply
criteria for the evaluation of items as members
of that class. Hampshire is sympathetic to
Aristotle's assumption that our moral assess-
ment of human beings in terms of their possess-
ing, or lacking, the virtues draws on this con-
ceptual framework, the virtues being conceived
of as a form of distinctively human goodness,
and our assessment of someone as a good or
virtuous person indicating that he or she exem-

plifies to a high degree certain distinctively
human qualities - though what qualities are dis-
tinctively human is, Hampshire emphasizes,
'essentially subject to question and revision'
(ibid., p. 230).
Virtually all Hampshire's subsequent work is
a development of themes to be found in
Thought and Action. In freedom of the
Individual (1965) and in a number of papers
written in the 1960s (and reprinted in freedom
of Mind and Other Essays, 1972) he appeals to
certain peculiarities of our mental states and
particularly of our knowledge of our own
mental states to argue that there are limits on
the extent to which human thought and action
can be explained by appeal to causal laws in the
way in which the physical sciences can explain
the behaviour of inanimate objects. In Freedom
of the Individual^ for example, he objects to
determinism on the ground that the notion of
desire, which plays an ineliminable part in the
explanation of human action, contains an eval-
uative element - typically what I want or desire
to do is seen by me as in some way desirable -
whereas the truth of determinism would seem
to imply that our everyday framework of expla-
nation for human behaviour can be replaced by
'a neutral, non-normative vocabulary of natural
law' (freedom of the Individual, p. 111).
Hampshire never abandons the Aristotelian
conception of morality, outlined in Thought
and Action, which would justify the cultivation
and exercise of the virtues by appeal to the
part they play within the ideal form of human
existence. But in a number of influential papers
(collected in Morality and Conflict, 1983) he
insists, in opposition to Aristotle, first, that the
ideal life for human beings may assume a great
variety of radically different forms; and, second,
that the more specific values, ends and virtues
which figure in any particular, defensible
account of the ideal life are 'irreducibly plural'
(Two Theories of Morality, p. 17) and need not
necessarily be in harmony with one another.
This opposition to Aristotle has its grounds in
Hampshire's divergent view of human nature:
influenced by Vico's Scienza Nuova and Kant's
371
HAMPSHIRE
Critique of Judgement, he takes the imagination
no less than the intellect to be a distinctive
mark of human beings. Since our imaginations
are developed and shaped by the particular
culture of the community into which we are
born and by the vicissitudes of our own lives,
it is inevitable that when we exercise our imag-
inations, there will be divergence, not conver-
gence as with the exercise of reason. Thus,
according to Hampshire, any morality has two
very different parts - one part concerned to
address the basic and perennial evils which
may afflict human beings (e.g., poverty), the
other part reflecting the distinctive way of life
of the group whose morality it is and embody-
ing its idiosyncratic ideals. Against this back-
ground Hampshire argues that, even within a
single morality, conflict is to be expected - not
only between its two parts, but within each
part itself.
On Hampshire's view, then, conflict within
a single individual's or a single society's con-
ception of the ideal life is inevitable. Conflicts
between the conceptions of different individu-
als or different societies is, of course, an indis-
putable fact. Nor, Hampshire believes, is con-
vergence on a single, species-wide conception to
be hoped for or encouraged, for 'the glory of
humanity is in the diversity and originality of its
positive aspirations and different ways of life'
(Innocence and Experience, pp. 67-8).
Nonetheless, the inevitability of conflict
between different ways of life, and in particu-
lar between the ways of life of different cultural
groups living in close proximity to one another,
throws into particular prominence the issue of
conflict resolution, and partly serves to explain
Hampshire's interest (in Innocence and
Experience and justice is Conflict] in proce-
dural justice. Procedural justice, as an element
in the first, relatively invariant part of all moral-
ities, is to be distinguished from 'substantial
justice' (justice is Conflict, p. 19), i.e. those
parts of justice which are concerned with issues
of distribution and rectification and draw on
the more idiosyncratic, culturally dependent
elements in a society's morality. Procedural
HAMPSHIRE
justice, although a fundamental kind of justice,
is therefore minimal in the sense of embracing
only those principles and procedures which
any reasonable person could be required to
accept irrespective of his or her particular
culture and conception of the ideal human life.
Reflecting 'the structure of practical reason
itself (ibid., p. 46), insofar as it mirrors an
individual's rehearsing and weighing in his or
her own mind the considerations in favour of
and against a particular course of action in the
context of practical decision making, proce-
dural justice has as its fundamental principle the
quasi-legal principle audi alterant partem, i.e. it
embodies the purely formal requirement that
no decision or verdict can be just unless all
sides have had the opportunity to present their
side of the case. Hampshire recognizes that this
formal principle can be embodied in different
specific procedures according to the cultural
backgrounds of the disputants and the nature
of the issue which is in dispute, but argues that
whatever specific procedure is followed, it
should be one which the parties to the dispute
expect to be followed, and which has won, or
is likely to win, their respect or allegiance
because of past or expected future success in
resolving similar conflicts. The value of proce-
dural justice lies, in large part, in its indispens-
ability as the only alternative to violence and
the threat of violence when two ways of life, or
two strongly held moral views, come into
conflict. But, Hampshire argues, it also coheres
well with a plausible and attractive picture of
human beings, as having, individually, 'a
narrowly limited range of experience and a
narrowly limited range of feeling, together with
some knowledge of the world, a knowledge
that [is recognised] to be ... incomplete and
full of gaps' (ibid., p. 70).
Hampshire has been a prolific reviewer of
books on a wide variety of subjects, literary as
well as philosophical. Many of his reviews
appeared in the New Statesman or the New
York Review of Books, and a selection of them,
mostly on nineteenth and twentieth-century
authors, was published as Modern Writers and
372
Other Essays (1969). A lifelong socialist, he
contributed to and, with Leszek KOLAKOWSKI,
edited, The Socialist Idea: A Reappraisal.
Thought and Action, with its breadth of
scope and avowed aim of underlining the con-
nections between moral philosophy and the
philosophy of mind, played a part in loosening
the hold of the analytic movement on British
philosophy, encouraging a move away from a
concern with small-scale problems towards a
re-engagement with the larger issues which
have been the traditional concern of philoso-
phers. Hampshire's treatment of the problem of
free will in Thought and Action and in Freedom
of the Individual has been reflected in many
subsequent discussions of the issue. Hampshire
also deserves recognition as one of the fore-
runners and promoters of the current neo-
Aristotelian revival in moral philosophy; and
within this field his emphasis on the inevitabil-
ity of conflict between the virtues and between
different goods has attracted some interest.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Spinoza (1951; repr. with new Introduction
and revisions, 1987).
Thought and Action (1959).
Freedom of the Individual (1965; repr. with
Postscript, 1975).
Freedom of Mind and Other Essays (Oxford,
1972).
Two Theories of Morality (Oxford, 1977;
repr. with changes as chap. 2 of Morality
and Conflict).
Morality and Conflict (Oxford, 1983).
Innocence and Experience (Boston, 1989).
Justice is Conflict (Princeton, 1999).
Other Relevant Works
(Sel. with Intro, and comm.), The Age of
Reason: The Seventeenth Century
Philosophers (New York, 1956).
(Ed.), Philosophy of Mind (New York,
1966).
The Morality of Scholarship (Ithaca, 1967).
Modern Writers and Other Essays (New
York, 1969).

(Ed. with Leszek Kolakowski), The Socialist
Idea: A Reappraisal (1974).
'Subjunctive Conditionals', Analysis, vol. 9
(1949), pp. 9-14; repr. in Freedom of
Mind and Other Essays.
A.D.M. Walker
HANDYSIDE, John (1883-1916)
John Handyside was born in South Leith on 25
January 1883 and died on the Somme on 18
October 1916. He was educated at the Royal
High School and the University of Edinburgh,
where he graduated MA in 1903. He went to
Balliol College, Oxford, where he achieved a first
class honours BA in 1907 and was elected to a
prize fellowship at St John's. His former teacher
PRINGLE-PATTISON had, however, kept a junior
assistantship in logic and metaphysics open for
him and Handyside returned to Edinburgh in
1907. His teaching duties included advanced
logic and Spinoza for the honours class. In 1911
he was appointed to a lectureship in philosophy
at the University of Liverpool, where he turned
his attention to ethics and political philosophy. In
1915 he joined up and received a commission in
the 16th King's Liverpool Regiment. He died at
the front the following year.
Handyside published nothing in his lifetime
but some of his work was published posthu-
mously. KEMP SMITH saw to the publication of
his translation of Kant's Inaugural Dissertation
and Early Writings on Space (1928), which
included selections from Kant's early book
Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living
Forces'. Pringle-Pattison, for his part, edited a
collection of his writings, The Historical Method
in Ethics, and Other Essays (1920), which he
prefaced with a biographical note. The two
shorter essays probably belong to Handyside's
time in Oxford or Edinburgh. The Absolute
and "Intellect"' seeks to defend a version of
373
HANDYSIDE
absolute idealism. 'System and Mechanism' is a
defence of free will. The main essay, however,
which probably belongs to the Liverpool period,
marks a new direction in his philosophical
thinking. Entitled The Historical Method in
Ethics', it is a programmatic piece and seems to
have been the first draft of a book Handyside
proposed but did not live to complete.
The Historical Method in Ethics' is critical
of those philosophers such as Kant and Mill
who attempted to build systems of ethics that
are based on universal reason or timeless facts
of human nature. It is especially critical of Leslie
Stephen's so-called Science of Ethics because its
conclusions do not depend on 'a single empir-
ical fact as to the development of morality'
(Historical Method in Ethics, p. 6). An empir-
ical ethics, Handyside argues, must take
account of the fact that there are, from time to
time, changes in moral codes. The historical
method in ethics pays attention to the evolution
of morals, though it does not suppose that this
is an evolution from a pre-moral state of
society. Handyside claims that his method is
essentially that of Dewey and it was probably
influenced by Dewey's 1902 articles on The
Evolutionary Method as Applied to Morality'.
Hegel seems to have remained an influence.
But the ethics proposed is firmly naturalistic.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Historical Method in Ethics, and Other
Essays, with a Biographical Note by A.S.
Pringle-Pattison (Liverpool, 1920).
Other Relevant Works
Kant's Inaugural Dissertation and Early
Writings on Space (1928).
Further Reading
Dewey, John, The Evolutionary Method as
Applied to Morality', Philosophical
Review, vol. 11 (1902), pp. 107-24,
353-71.
Stuart Brown
HANFLING
HANFLING, Oswald (1927-)
'Ossie' Hanfling was born in Berlin on 21
December 1927 and came to England in 1939.
After a variety of office jobs, including running
his own business, he entered London University
in 1964, completing his BA in philosophy at
Birkbeck College in 1967 and his PhD (on
'Pleasure, Pain and Emotion', under David
HAMLYN) in 1971. In 1970 he was appointed
lecturer in philosophy at the Open University,
promoted to senior lecturer in 1978, reader in
1985 and professor in 1993. He retired from
full-time employment in 1993, though he sub-
sequently took on occasional tutoring at
Oxford and visiting professorships at the uni-
versities of Wales and Salzburg. At the Open
University, with Godfrey VESEY and Stuart
Brown, Hanfling helped pioneer the teaching of
philosophy to higher-education standards
through the medium of radio and television as
well as written course books. He contributed to
a wide range of courses in the history of phi-
losophy, moral philosophy and epistemology.
Some of the written material became more
widely available in book form, such as the
examination of questions about the meaning of
life in The Quest for Meaning (1987), and the
three essays on the nature of art and aesthetic
qualities in Philosophical Aesthetics (1991,
which he also edited).
If many of Hanfling's contributions to
courses suffered the familiar fate of teaching
materials, his work as a teacher nonetheless
nourished his research publications. This is
nowhere more evident than in his writing on
WITTGENSTEIN. Hanfling's Open University
booklets on meaning and use in The Blue and
Brown Books and on language and mind in the
Philosophical Investigations enabled him to
articulate a distinctive interpretation of
Wittgenstein's later philosophy as well as of
the nature of philosophy, and to develop his
characteristically lucid and meticulous style of
presentation and argument. These achieve
mature expression in his book, Wittgensteins
Later Philosophy (1989), and in numerous
374
articles, many of which are reprinted in his col-
lection Wittgenstein and the Human Form of
Life (2002).
Hanfling is convinced of 'the correctness and
importance' of Wittgenstein's later philosophy.
And at the heart of his understanding of that
philosophy is Wittgenstein's idea that the
meaning of a word is its use in practice.
Hanfling sees this idea not as the manifestation
of an abstruse theory of meaning but rather as
a reminder of a familiar, though neglected, fact,
the recognition of which has profound impli-
cations for philosophical method. This under-
standing leads him to reject interpretations of
Wittgenstein's later work as the beginning of
new theories about language and mind and
knowledge. Thus, for example, whereas some
have taken Wittgenstein's talk of criteria to
signify a special logical relationship which is
neither deductive nor inductive, Hanfling
shows that Wittgenstein uses the word 'crite-
rion' in accordance with its everyday sense
rather than as a technical term of art. The
example is illustrative of Hanfling's approach
to philosophical topics more generally: patient,
sensitive attention to detail of examples in
which words are actually used. Many of the
topics he has addressed in nearly fifty articles
are to be found in the empiricist tradition, with
special emphasis on the philosophy of David
Hume and his twentieth-century positivist suc-
cessors such as Schlick and AYER: topics such as
scepticism and the nature of knowledge, mind
and language, the is/ought question, promising,
and, latterly, topics in aesthetics including emo-
tional responses to music and drama.
Hanfling is happy to admit to being an
'ordinary language philosopher'. In his recent
book, Philosophy and Ordinary Language
(2000), he clarifies what ordinary language
philosophy does and does not involve, defends
this way of philosophizing against fashionable
and fallacious refutations, and puts it into
practice by taking up contemporary discus-
sions of scientific realism and folk psychology.
His painstaking persistence with arguments
that others are quick to dismiss is a manifesta-

tion of his commitment to philosophy as a
rational endeavour, a commitment which is
displayed as much in his enlivening conversa-
tion as in his scholarly writing. In recent years
Hanfling's thinking about Wittgenstein and
ordinary language philosophy has been
enriched through his contact with philosophers
at Oxford such as STRAWSON, Hacker and
KENNY.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Logical Positivism (Oxford, 1981).
The Quest for Meaning (Oxford, 1987).
Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy (1989).
(Ed.), Philosophical Aesthetics: An
Introduction (Oxford, 1991).
Philosophy and Ordinary Language: The
Bent and Genius of Our Tongue (2000).
Wittgenstein and the Human Form of Life
(2002).
Other Relevant Works
'Promises, Games and Institutions',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
75 (1974-5), pp. 13-31.
'Hume's Idea of Necessary Connexion',
Philosophy, vol. 54 (1979), pp. 501-14.
(Ed.), Essential Readings in Logical
Positivism (1981).
'Real Life, Art and the Grammar of Feelings',
Philosophy, vol. 58 (1983), pp. 237-43.
'A Situational Account of Knowledge', The
Monist, vol. 68 (1985), pp. 50-56.
'Criteria, Conventions and Other Minds', in
Stuart Shanker (ed.), Critical Essays on
Wittgenstein (1986), pp. 226-38.
(Ed.), Life and Meaning (Oxford, 1987).
'How is Scepticism Possible?', Philosophy,
vol. 62 (1987), pp. 433-51.
'Machines as Persons?', in David Cockburn
(ed.), Human Beings (Cambridge, 1991),
pp. 25-34.
'Loving My Neighbour, Loving Myself,
Philosophy, vol. 68 (1993), pp. 91-4.
Ayer: Analysing what we Mean (1997).
'"Is", "Ought" and the Fallacy of
Voluntarism', Philosophy, vol. 72 (1997),
375
HARDIE
pp. 537-48.
'The Reality of Dreams', Philosophical
Investigations, vol. 21 (1998), pp. 338-44.
'What is Wrong with Sorites Arguments?',
Analysis, vol. 61 (2001), pp. 29-35.
'Consciousness: "The Last Mystery"', in S.
Schroeder (ed.), Wittgenstein and
Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (2001),
pp. 36-59.
'Wittgenstein on Music and Language', in
Peter B. Lewis (ed.), Wittgenstein,
Aesthetics and Philosophy (Aldershot,
2004), pp. 151-62.
Peter B. Lewis
HARDIE, William Francis Ross (1902-90)
Frank Hardie was born in Edinburgh on 25
April 1902 and died in Oxford on 30
September 1990. His father, W.R. Hardie, was
Professor of Humanity (Latin) at the University.
Frank Hardie was educated at Edinburgh
Academy and at Balliol College, Oxford, where
he was awarded first class honours in literae
humaniores in 1924. He was briefly a fellow by
examination of Magdalen College, Oxford,
before moving to Corpus Christi College,
where he was fellow and tutor in philosophy
from 1926 to 1950. He was actively involved
in university life, as President of Corpus Christi
(1950-69) and as head of a working party to
liberalize Oxford's admissions policies. He was
also a keen golfer, and the Hardie Trophy is still
eagerly competed for by members of his college.
Hardie enjoyed a high reputation as a clas-
sical scholar and his books on Plato and
Aristotle were well-received. (This aspect of his
work is discussed in the entry on Hardie in the
Dictionary of British Classicists.) But he also
wrote on general philosophical topics that exer-
cised him, such as perception and the will, and
influenced a generation of students who were
HARDIE
being introduced to philosophy at a time of
exceptional change. Some of these, such as
W.H.F. BARNES, followed him in seeking a
middle way between reverting to a traditional
style of philosophy and endorsing the radical
alternatives being proposed by some of his
Oxford contemporaries. His philosophical tem-
perament was sceptical and critical. He had no
inclination towards the idealism to which he
had been exposed as a student in Balliol. But he
was not tempted either by the panaceas for dis-
solving traditional philosophical problems that
were canvassed by some of the younger lin-
guistic philosophers. He was critical, for
instance, of FLEW'S use of the paradigm case
argument in relation to the free will problem,
to which he devoted a lengthy footnote in a
paper otherwise concerned with ordinary
language dissolutions of problems of perception
('Ordinary Language and Perception', pp.
102f.). At the same time he had a considerable
respect for what he took to be the more
cautious approach of J.L. AUSTIN, of whom he
roundly declared that he 'would never have
wished to formulate any sweeping general
thesis, negative or positive, about the nature of
philosophy' ('Austin on Perception', p. 263).
Hardie's most substantive contribution to
contemporary philosophy was his British
Academy Lecture delivered in 1947 on
Naturalistic Ethics. In it he is careful in his
statement of a naturalistic position which he
believed could be defended against the criti-
cisms offered by those who claimed to take the
ordinary 'facts' of moral experience as their
starting-point.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Study in Plato (Oxford, 1936; repr. Bristol,
1993).
'The Paradox of Phenomenalism',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
46 (1945-6), pp. 127-54.
Naturalistic Ethics (1947).
'Ordinary Language and Perception',
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 5 (1955), pp.
97-108.
376
'My Own Freewill', Philosophy, vol. 32
(1957), pp. 21-38.
'Austin on Perception', Philosophy, vol. 38
(1963), pp. 253-63.
Aristotle's Ethical Theory (Oxford, 1968;
2nd edn, 1980).
'Willing and Acting', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 21 (1971), pp. 193-206.
further Reading
Sparshott, Francis, 'Hardie, William Francis
Ross', in Dictionary of British Classicists
(Bristol, 1994).
Urmson, J.O., 'W.F.R. Hardie', Pelican
Record, vol. 38 (1991), pp. 50-53.
Stuart Brown
HARDY, Godfrey Harold (1877-1947)
G.H. Hardy was born in Cranleigh in Surrey on
7 February 1877 and died on 1 December
1947. He was the son of two school teachers,
Isaac and Sophia Hardy. After attending
Cranleigh and Winchester Schools, he entered
Trinity College, Cambridge in 1896, graduat-
ing as fourth Wrangler in 1898. He was elected
to a fellowship of Trinity in 1900, followed by
a college lectureship six years later, which he
held until 1919.
A steady stream of research papers on many
areas of real and complex analysis gained him
a solid mathematical reputation and secured his
election as a fellow of the Royal Society in
1910. By the end of World War I, Hardy had
produced ground-breaking work in both
analysis and number theory, particularly
through his world-famous collaborations with
J. E. Littlewood and his Indian protege
Srinivasa Ramanujan.
In 1919 Hardy was elected Savilian Professor
of Geometry, moving to Oxford for twelve
years. But in 1931 he returned to Cambridge as

the Sadleirian Professor of Mathematics, from
which he finally retired in 1942. He won
numerous honours and awards throughout his
career, the last of which, the Royal Society's
Copley Medal, was due to have been presented
to him on the day he died.
Writing in 1911, Hardy lamented the
'strange and discouraging fact that mathe-
maticians as a class are utterly impatient of
inquiries into the foundations of their own
subject' (Collected Papers, p. 859). But he later
admitted that philosophical questions are ones
'which a professional mathematician like
myself is apt to neglect' (ibid., p. 581). His own
philosophical leanings tended to favour the
logicist programme pursued by Bertrand
RUSSELL, Alfred North WHITEHEAD and others
from the early 1900s.
By the 1920s other competing views of math-
ematics had emerged. In a paper published in
Mind in 1929 Hardy compared logicism with
the two other contemporary theories (Collected
Papers, pp. 581-606). Rejecting the intuition-
ism of L.E.J. Brouwer and the formalist phi-
losophy of David Hilbert, he was nonetheless
very taken with the latter's 'metamathematics',
in which the consistency and completeness of
mathematics are analysed. The incompleteness
theorems of Kurt Godel in 1931 dealt a major
blow both to logicism and metamathematics,
but since Hardy wrote no more on the subject,
his views on this development remain
unknown.
In 1940, in his popular exposition A
Mathematician's Apology, Hardy attempted
to argue that 'real' mathematics is inherently
useless in that it contributes nothing to the
'material well-being and comfort' of
humankind. Since he was 'interested in math-
ematics only as a creative art' (ibid., p. 115), his
argument hinged on the value of real mathe-
matics lying in its aesthetic beauty. But since his
principal examples of beautiful (but otherwise
useless) mathematics came from number
theory, it is somewhat ironic that this subject is
now indispensable in the very useful area of
cryptography.
377
HARE
Like many practising mathematicians, Hardy
tended to take a pragmatic view of the subject.
He often evinced a rather patronizing opinion
of philosophy as a discipline, believing that 'it
is madness for anyone but a real mathematician
to write at length about the philosophy of
mathematics' (Collected Papers, p. 864), while
claiming that 'philosophy proper is a subject,
on the one hand so hopelessly obscure, on the
other so astonishingly elementary, that there
knowledge hardly counts' (ibid., p. 582). But
then Hardy was always a pure mathematician
at heart, and, as he wrote, 'to mix philosophy
and mathematics may be good for philosophy,
but it works havoc with mathematics' (ibid., p.
856).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Mathematician's Apology (Cambridge,
1940; repr., with a Foreword by C.P.
Snow, Cambridge, 1967).
Collected Papers ofG. H. Hardy (Oxford,
1979), vol. 7.
Other Relevant Works
Titchmarsh, E.C., 'Godfrey Harold Hardy
1877-1947', Obituary Notices of the
Royal Society of London, vol. 6 (1949),
pp. 447-58.
Grattan-Guinness, I., 'The interest of G. H.
Hardy, F.R.S., in the Philosophy and the
History of Mathematics', Notes and
Records of the Royal Society of London,
vol. 55 (2001), pp. 411-24.
Adrian Rice
HARE, Richard Mervyn (1919-2002)
R.M. Hare was born in Backwell, Somerset on
21 March 1919 and died in Ewelme,
Oxfordshire on 29 January 2002. He married
Catherine Verney in 1947, and they had four
HARE
children, three daughters and a son. He was
educated at Rugby School, where he was a
scholar, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where
he was also a scholar. He was awarded a first
class degree in Classical Honour Moderations
in 1939. After a break caused by his service in
the war, he received a first class degree in literae
humaniores, graduating BA and MA in 1947.
During the war he served as a lieutenant in the
Royal Artillery and Indian Mountain Artillery
from 1939 to 1942. From 1942 to 1945 he was
a prisoner of war in Singapore and on the
Burma-Thailand Railway.
He was fellow and tutor in philosophy at
Balliol College, Oxford from 1947 to 1966,
being appointed honorary fellow in 1974. In
1966 he became White's Professor of Moral
Philosophy and fellow of Corpus Christi
College, Oxford, holding these appointments
until 1983, when he became honorary fellow of
Corpus Christi. He was Wilde Lecturer in
Natural Religion at Oxford from 1963 to
1966. For many years he served as a member
of Church of England Working Parties on
Ethical Questions (1960-74), and he was also
a member of the National Road Safety
Advisory Council from 1966 to 1968.
Over the years he served as a visiting fellow or
visiting professor all over the world: at Princeton
in 1957; at the Australian National University at
Canberra in 1966; at the University of Delaware
in 1974; at the Center for Advanced Study in
Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 1980; at Unisa
and other South African Universities in 1985; at
the Center for Human Bioethics at Monash
University in 1987 and again in 1993; in Japan
at the universities of Kyoto, Osaka, Nagoya and
Tokyo in 1988; and at Florida State University
at Tallahassee from 1990 to 1994. In 1991 he
was Axel Hagerstrom Lecturer at Uppsala. The
lectures were published in Sorting out Ethics
(1997). He was appointed fellow of the British
Academy in 1964. In 1973 he received the
Tanner Award, and in 1974 was appointed
foreign honorary member of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences; he was awarded
an Honorary PhD at Lund in 1991.
378
Hare's major contribution to twentieth-
century moral philosophy lies in his develop-
ment of the theory of universal prescriptivism.
Though modern meta-ethics seems to be done
rather differently, there is still a central dispute
to which Hare's contributions over some fifty
years are of great importance. His primary aim
was to show the possibility of rational moral
discussion, and he argued that descriptivist
attempts to rescue moral objectivity were
bound to fail. Emotivism captures something
about moral discourse, but cannot deal ade-
quately with the meaning of moral terms, and
of course cannot explain how rationally to
resolve moral disagreements.
The ethical descriptivist argues that the
meaning of moral terms is to be understood as
descriptive or factual meaning, tied to the truth-
conditions of statements containing them: if
the truth-conditions change, the meaning
changes, and vice versa. If the meaning of moral
statements is determined by their truth-condi-
tions, the question then arises how we are to
determine their truth. Naturalism answers this
by suggesting that since moral words are to be
understood in terms of non-moral words, then
once we have established the non-moral facts,
we can apply the definition and thus establish
the moral facts. Intuitionism, on the other hand,
takes moral judgements to be statements of
special moral facts, such that by recognizing the
moral facts we can know the truth of the
relevant moral judgements.
Both these forms of descriptivism run into
problems. Hare argues that in each case a
theory whose initial attraction lies in its appear-
ing to secure objectivity will actually collapse
into relativism. In the case of naturalism, the
account given of moral language makes the
language itself relative to the opinions of the
person using it, or those of their society. For
instance, in a dispute between a conservative
and a revolutionary, 'right' for the conservative
means 'likely to maintain the status quo', and
'right' for the revolutionary means 'likely to
overthrow the regime'. But then it becomes
impossible for them even to communicate their

disagreement, let alone resolve it, since 'right'
means something different to the sides in the
dispute. Intuitionism also leads to relativism.
Since people's intuitions are the result of their
moral education, which varies from one society
to another, our knowledge of morality becomes
the product of society's mores. And this is not
of course the objective view of morality that
intuitionism set out to capture.
But even supposing that some form of
descriptivism succeeded in establishing the
moral facts, and so eliminating doubt, there
would still be a serious problem. If moral judge-
ments are purely descriptive, then they cannot
serve as guides to action (not, at least, on their
own, without reference at least tacitly to what
the agent wants - in the broadest meaning of
that term). So, if I am trying to decide whether
a proposed action is right or wrong, it would be
possible for me to reach the conclusion that it
would be wrong, yet then ask, so what? Hence,
descriptivism leaves moral language unable to
perform its function.
Prescriptivism can, most obviously, deal with
the second problem, for in allowing for pre-
scriptive meaning it allows moral statements to
have action-guiding force. It can also solve the
problem of the collapse into relativism.
Descriptivists are right to try to preserve objec-
tivity, but they have set about it in the wrong
way. We need, not a set of objective facts in the
world, but a method of moral reasoning which
will enable rational thinkers to agree. Moral
terms have, on top of any descriptive meaning
they may have, a prescriptive element which
cannot be reduced to a descriptive equivalent,
and which serves to guide actions. In some
respects moral statements are similar to imper-
atives, but they are not imperatives. Moral
statements also have the feature of universaliz-
ability. A moral judgement applied to one case
must also apply to any case similar in all its uni-
versal properties, i.e. with individual references
removed. I cannot judge, for instance, that it is
right for me to do this, but not for anyone else
to, merely on the grounds that I am doing it,
not you. These two features, prescriptivity and
379
HARE
universalizability, provide us with what we
need for moral discussion, argument and ratio-
nality within moral discourse. When I judge
that an action is wrong, there is a connection
between the judgement and my behaviour such
that, if I proceed to perform that action, I lay
myself open to the charge of insincerity. In sin-
cerely judging that this action would be wrong,
I commit myself to not doing it. If I regularly
made judgements of this sort, but my action did
not put the judgements into practice, I would
lay myself open to the charge that I do not
know what the word 'wrong' means. Moral
judgements prescribe and proscribe actions,
and my sincere assent to those judgements
requires me to accept these proscriptions and
prescriptions for myself.
Additionally, my moral judgements will be
made on the basis of reason, and in accordance
with criteria. I might judge that the action
would be wrong because it would involve
telling a lie or breaking a promise. These
reasons draw attention to the principles I apply
in making my judgements, and these princi-
ples are the criteria for my judgements. (It is
from these criteria that the descriptive meaning
of moral terms derives.) If I believe that it would
be wrong for me to say this because it is
untruthful, consistency requires me to accept
that it would be wrong for others similarly
placed to say this, and if I believe that it would
be right for me to do something else because it
would help a friend, I likewise must believe
that it would be right for others similarly placed
to do this. If I am unwilling to accept that it
would be right for others to behave in this way,
I need to look again at my belief that it would
be right for me.
If, in making a moral judgement, I am pre-
scribing for all similar situations, then I am
committed to saying not only that I should
treat someone in this way, but that they should
treat me in that way, if our situations are
reversed. So I am looking for a set of moral pre-
scriptions which I am prepared to see followed
whether I am agent or patient. This will then
provide a set of constraints on my moral
HARE
willing, but also a set of constraint on the moral
willing of all rational agents. Hare sees this
constraint on moral willing as being both
Kantian and utilitarian. Since Kant sees the
moral law as the product of the autonomous
activity of the will, and so binding on all moral
agents while preserving their freedom, we can
see how universal prescriptivism seems to
emerge as a version of this. Its utilitarian nature
comes from the requirement that we place our-
selves in the position of all others, with their
preferences, to see whether the principles in
accordance with which we judge are rational.
Hare himself recognizes that this claim is con-
tentious, since many Kantians would deny the
possibility that Kant was a utilitarian. Possibly
he does not allow adequately for the difficulty
of combining the contingency of preferences
with the possibility of autonomy as understood
by Kant. However, the strategy of moral dis-
cussion is clear, whether or not the strategy is
strictly a Kantian one.
There will be times when the conclusions we
reach as a result of this kind of moral thinking
seem counter-intuitive. Standard objections to
utilitarianism come to mind here, such as the
apparent justifications of punishing the
innocent in extreme cases. This is why in his
later work Hare elaborates an account of the
levels of moral thinking.
The argument combining Kantian and utili-
tarian features may be seen as the Golden Rule
argument. It is in accordance with this
argument that critical thinking takes place. For
we judge the morality of actions by reference to
specific universal principles, which may be
complex. A society of 'archangels' would be
willing and able to act on principles worked out
to the appropriate level of specificity, and
members of such a society would accept and act
on the same principles. However, error is
possible, since all possible preferences are
involved, and so is self-deception. Critical
thinking is not possible for all of us all of the
time, and it may not be desirable that we aim
at it. The second level, that of intuitive thinking
- the thinking of 'proles' - operates with prin-
380
ciples that are both simpler and more general.
What matters is that these principles can be
justified at the critical level. Hare is not saying,
as his terminology of 'archangels' and 'proles'
may suggest, that some specialized group are
archangels and the rest proles. Rather, we all,
as moral agents, need to alternate between the
two roles. Our attachment to values such as
honesty, loyalty and so on can be helpful in a
moral life. But unthinking loyalty can be
morally dangerous, and if the standards to
which we remain loyal require us to engage in,
for example, unacceptable racial discrimina-
tion, we will then need to engage in critical
thinking. And this, as we have seen, must be
done in accordance with the logic of moral
statements, and by reference to their formal
features. Otherwise, the standards of one
society would define morality in one way, those
of another in another way, and so there
follows, as we saw, a collapse into relativism.
If moral statements had descriptive meaning
alone, critical thinking would not be possible
for us. If we are to be able to engage in rational
discussion of the morality of racism, we have to
allow both racist and anti-racist to use the term
'wrong' to mean the same thing. Universal pre-
scriptivism makes this possible.
It is worth referring briefly to one difficulty,
concerning the success of the theory in dealing
with fanatics. If it is theoretically possible that
a fanatical racist might engage in critical
thinking yet still believe that members of the
hated race should be destroyed, this would
seem to show a weakness in the system. Hare
does offer solutions to this problem, and his
account of fanaticism in Moral Thinking
(1981) is subtle, but this is where a gap might
be thought to open up between his utilitarian-
ism and his Kantianism. For it does seem to be
a contingent matter that fortunately not enough
people have racist preferences. The racist may
have to concede that she is in the minority, and
so be forced to concede too that given existing
preferences ethnic cleansing is not morally right.
But this might not lay our doubts to rest, since
it leaves it open as a possibility that if enough

people were recruited to the fanatical cause we
might have to judge differently. To put it in the
terms earlier used to criticize descriptivism, this
would relativize tightness to human prefer-
ences. In so far as our concern here is with the
descriptive, rather than the prescriptive element
of meaning, this is not entirely surprising. It is,
however, not Kantian. Kant does indeed use a
criterion of universalizability. The way to test
whether a maxim is rational and hence moral,
is to ask whether it can rationally be willed as
universal law, such that all rational beings
could act upon it. If it cannot be universalized,
this is because it is not rational. This has
nothing to do with human preferences. Hare
understandably objects to characterizations of
his position as either subjectivist or non-cogni-
tivist, and has good reason to reject both labels,
but the degree of objectivity and moral knowl-
edge for which he can allow does not have the
force of Kant's objective validity.
Nevertheless, Hare gives us a rich and
detailed argument. The account begun in The
Language of Morals in 1952 is developed and
elaborated right through to Moral Thinking in
1981. And many of his essays are devoted to
refining the theory, and replying to critics, with
both clarity and patience. His comprehensive
explanation of the nature of moral thinking is
important. In some respects, it can be seen as
resembling both in scope and in critical impor-
tance the theory of justice developed by John
Rawls. It does not leave moral philosophy the
way it was before. Though it is universal pre-
scriptivism for which Hare will be chiefly
remembered, he also wrote numerous papers
and reviews covering a wide range of subjects.
His essays on topics in ethical theory, political
philosophy, legal philosophy and religion are
models of tight argument and clarity. Inevitably
much of his work is technical, as when it deals
with deontic logic, and he is never less than
rigorous. But he did not write only for profes-
sional philosophers, and his essays on medical
ethics, torture and so on are clearly and ele-
gantly argued. He should probably not be seen
as interested in applied ethics as a subject in
381
HARE
itself, but rather as a philosopher who never lost
sight of the connections between meta-ethical
theory and the subjects with which we must
engage in life.
He was serious about philosophy. He saw
that philosophy matters and that morality
matters. If moral philosophy is done well, and
communicated well it can make a difference.
Hare has made a difference to what we can and
must think about moral thinking. He should be
remembered as a philosopher whose work has
real significance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Language of Morals (Oxford, 1952).
Freedom and Reason (Oxford, 1963).
Essays on Philosophical Method (1971).
Practical Inferences (1971).
Applications of Moral Philosophy (1972).
Essays on the Moral Concepts (1972).
Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and
Pom* (Oxford 1981).
Plato (Oxford, 1982).
Essays in Ethical Theory (Oxford, 1988).
Essays on Political Morality (Oxford, 1989).
Essays on Religion and Education (Oxford,
1992).
Essays on Bioethics (Oxford, 1993).
Sorting out Ethics (Oxford, 1997). Includes
bibliography of Hare's writings from 1949
to 1998.
Objective Prescriptions and Other Essays
(Oxford, 1999).
Further Reading
Seanor, D. and N. Potion (eds), Hare and
Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking
(Oxford, 1988). Includes Hare's own
comments.
Elizabeth Pybus
HARRE
HARRE, Horace Romano (192 7-)
Rom Harre was born in New Zealand on 18
December 1927. He obtained a BSc in engi-
neering and mathematics, and an MA in phi-
losophy and anthropology from the University
of Auckland. He was a lecturer of physics and
mathematics at King's College, Auckland from
1948 to 1953. He came to Oxford to pursue
postgraduate studies in philosophy in 1956,
being the student of J.L. AUSTIN, the founder of
speech act philosophy, who in turn was a pupil
of WITTGENSTEIN. After a series of appoint-
ments teaching maths and science at schools in
Pakistan and England, he joined the
Department of the Philosophy of Science at
Oxford University in 1960. In 1963 he became
fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. From this
time he started to publish widely in the area of
philosophy of science, was the thesis supervisor
of Roy Bhaskar, and effectively altered the
foundations of social psychology through the
publication of The Explanation of Social
Behaviour (1972) with Paul F. Secord. In 1973
he became Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at
the State University of New York in
Binghamton. He became Chair of the Sub-
Department of Philosophy at the University of
Oxford, and fellow emeritus of Linacre College,
Oxford, while also maintaining the position of
Professor of Psychology at Georgetown
University, Washington, DC. He continues to
maintain these positions to this day.
Harre's long and impressive career started
with work on philosophy of science, and his
contributions became distributed between two
aspects of this: the philosophy of natural
science, and the philosophy of social science.
Running through both of these is a rejection of
simple-minded notions of cause and effect, and
similarly rejection of the Humean account of
causation as the concomitance of events. Thus
in both the natural and social worlds, Harre
rejects the presumed symmetry between pre-
diction and explanation, preferring instead to
invoke a 'modest realism' (Varieties of Realism)
which contests normal positivist models of both
382
the natural and social sciences. The whole
notion of the 'controlled' experiment is deeply
flawed, he argues, and this is certainly the case
with social psychology where it alters the inter-
actions between participants, and hence alters
the social context and its constructions of
meaning. In social psychology it is flawed
because, firstly, it constrains participants from
using their normal resources; secondly, it treats
each participant as a passive, unrealistic
'subject'; and thirdly, it ignores the experiment
itself as a situated, social episode.
His alternative to this positivistic approach in
social psychology has been developed through
'ethogeny', a programme of theory and
research in the social world that values not dis-
tanced, objective observation but the utterances
and meanings as perceived by participants in
that social world, as encapsulated through dis-
course. The purpose of The Journal for the
Theory of Social Behaviour, founded in 1971
with Paul Secord, and their subsequent book
The Explanation of Social Behaviour (1972)
was to disseminate and advance this pro-
gramme. Not simply acknowledging social con-
structionism, this programme instead empha-
sizes the study of social interaction through the
analysis of discourse. There is no intrinsic
meaning to actions, then, as the meaning of
actions is only that as perceived by those inter-
acting in that social context. Meaning and
status are attributed only by the participating
subjects, and this is crucial for the scientific
understanding of these actions. These ideas
instantiated what he later called the 'discursive
turn' in social psychology. This 'philosophical
restructuring of psychology' (The Discursive
Mind) has impacted the whole range of psy-
chological disciplines, and entails a hermeneu-
tic approach to social research.
Examples of objects of analysis in this respect
are those actions that occur within specifiable,
culturally meaningful contexts, such as the use
of nicknames or the emergence of aggressive
behaviour in the classroom. The meaning and
status of objects and persons in that particular
context might have very different constructions

of meaning and status than in other contexts,
but the method of determining these in each
case is through the analysis of discourse. This
can be extracted from the accounts of the par-
ticipants, which are not held to be objectively
valid in themselves, but reveal the reputational
concerns, meaning attributions and belief
systems of participants, determining the set of
social relationships present in that particular
context. First explicated in The Explanation
of Social Behaviour, it was developed further in
terms of theory and method in his 'Ways of
Being' trilogy: Social Being (1979), Personal
Being (1984) and Physical Being (1991). The
first of these identified two social orders, prac-
tical and expressive, the latter being dominant.
The second divided up the social world into
physical reality and 'conversation'. In the third
Harre looked at the experiences and semantics
of embodiment, and argued that social psy-
chology should be 'a collection of accounts of
... discursive practices in which the fact of the
recognition of other persons in joint action is
central' (Physical Being, pp. 5-6).
From the development of his personal, social
and corporeal psychologies in the 'Ways of
Being' trilogy, more recently he has been con-
cerned with two areas that connect up discur-
sive practices to social research. Firstly, the role
of the emotions in social psychology, as exem-
plified in The Social Construction of Emotions
(1986). This is part of a larger concern in the
humanities and social sciences in recent years to
consider the emotions as a legitimate area of
research and investigation. Secondly, and devel-
oping from the centrality of the role of partic-
ipants' accounts in discursive analysis, an
interest in the role of biography and autobiog-
raphy as a suitable method in social research.
The way that narratives can string together
experiences of selfhood to do with perception,
reflection and social action can be a useful
resource. This is the tenet of the field of narra-
tive psychology, that is how human beings deal
with experience by constructing stories and lis-
tening to the stories of others, and Harre has
written articles and book chapters in this area,
383
HARRE
for example 'Positioning: The Discursive
Production of Selves' (1990) and 'Narrative:
Problems and Promises of an Alternative
Paradigm' (2001). These recent contributions
show that Harre continues to be at the fore-
front of the rethinking of the discipline of social
psychology through the whole span of his long
and illustrious career.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(with P.P. Secord), The Explanation of Social
Behaviour (Oxford, 1972).
Social Being (Oxford, 1979; 2nd edn, 1993).
Personal Being: A Theory for Individual
Psychology (Oxford, 1984).
Physical Being: A Theory for a Corporal
Psychology (Oxford, 1991).
(Ed.), The Social Construction of Emotions
(1986).
Varieties of Realism (Oxford, 1986).
(with B. Davies), 'Positioning: The Discursive
Production of Selves' (1990), in Journal for
the Theory of Social Behavior, vol. 20, no.
1 (March 2000), pp. 43-63.
(with G. Gillett), The Discursive Mind
(1994).
(Ed. with W.G. Parrott), The Emotions:
Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions
(1996).
One Thousand Years of Philosophy: From
Ramanuja to Wittgenstein (Oxford, 2000).
(with J. Brockmeier), 'Narrative: Problems
and Promises of an Alternative Paradigm',
in Narrative and Identity: Studies in
Autobiography, Self and Culture
(Philadelphia, 2001).
Other Relevant Works
Harre and his Critics: Essays in Honour of
Rom Harre and his Commentary on them,
ed. R. Bhaskar (Oxford, 1990).
Mark W. O. Paterson
HARRISON
HARRISON, Bernard Joseph (1933-)
Bernard Harrison was born in Bristol on 29
May 1933. He took a BSc in botany at
Birmingham University in 1954, and a BA in
philosophy in 1956, winning the principal uni-
versity prize twice (once in each subject). He
took an MA in philosophy at Birmingham in
1957, before moving to the University of
Michigan for the PhD, which he was awarded
in 1961. He was assistant professor at the
University of Toronto from 1960 to 1962,
before returning to the UK as assistant lecturer
in philosophy at Birmingham from 1962 to
1963. In 1963 he was appointed to a lecture-
ship at the University of Sussex, where he was
made Professor of Philosophy in 1985, and
honorary professor from 1992. In 1991 he was
appointed E.E. Eriksen Professor of Philosophy
at the University of Utah (emeritus from 2000).
While at Birmingham, Harrison was taught
by Peter GEACH, who gave him a special interest
in and understanding of WITTGENSTEIN. This
has shaped one major strand of his work,
which is concerned with the philosophy of
language. His first book, Meaning and
Structure (1972), attempted to develop a sys-
tematic and general theory of the nature of the
conventions governing the semantics of a
natural language. In it his interest in
Wittgenstein is matched by an interest in and
knowledge of recent work in theoretical lin-
guistics. His second book, form and Content
(1973), was perhaps more obviously
Wittgensteinian: it offers an account of the
meaning of colour words which is then used to
undermine certain kinds of scepticism about
our understanding of other people's description
of their immediate sensory experience. He later
produced a widely admired introductory book,
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language
(1979), which is distinctive for the breadth of
its range. A new book on the philosophy of
language, Word and World (2004), written
with Patricia Hanna at Utah, was published in
2004. Harrison's work on language is distinc-
tive for the way in which it generates an original
384
view by synthesizing work and styles which in
other people's work have been seen as simply
opposed: the early and the late Wittgenstein, for
example, or the later Wittgenstein and
Chomsky.
The other principal strand of Harrison's
philosophical work arose out of the congenial
interdisciplinarity which flourished in the early
days at Sussex. He has written on literature
and philosophy, and the philosophy of litera-
ture. His first major work in this field was
Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1975), which can
be said to be both philosophy and literary crit-
icism. This work shows well Harrison's sensi-
tivity to and pleasure in great writing, and his
own writing in this environment has a distinc-
tive wit and buoyancy. Several detailed studies
of literature and literary theory were reworked
in his Inconvenient Fictions (1991), where they
have a role in a single philosophical argument.
What Harrison wants principally to show is
evident in the title of the first chapter, which
displays the gift for originality through synthe-
sis which is characteristic of so much of his
work: 'How to Reconcile Humanism and
Deconstruction'. A more particular target,
which Harrison thinks needs to be dealt with in
order to achieve the reconciliation, is the
dominant paradigm of knowledge, which treats
all knowledge as being of impersonal fact, and
as being available from a single perspective or
standpoint. Harrison thinks literature provides
knowledge in whose acquisition the reader risks
being changed as a person.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Meaning and Structure: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Language (New York,
1972).
Form and Content (Oxford, 1973).
Henry Fielding's Tom Jones: The Novelist as
Moral Philosopher (1975).
An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Language (1979).
Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the
Limits of'Theory (1991).
(with Patricia Hanna), Word and World:

Practice and the Foundations of Language
(Cambridge, 2004)
Michael Morris
HARRISON, Jonathan (1924-)
Jonathan Harrison was born in West Derby,
Liverpool on 22 September 1924. He was
educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford,
where he took first class honours in PPE in 1945.
From 1945 to 1947 he was a senior scholar at
the college, and he took his BLitt in 1947. In
1947 he became lecturer in philosophy at the
University of Durham, a post he held until 1960,
when he became lecturer, and subsequently
senior lecturer, at the University of Edinburgh. In
1964 he became Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Nottingham, and in 1988 was
made professor emeritus. In 1968 he was a
visiting professor at Evanston University.
A considerable part of Harrison's volumi-
nous publications has been concerned, in
various ways, with ethics. Morality is, in his
view, the result of evolutionary forces working
on societies; though societies certainly need
morality, its importance has often been exag-
gerated by moral philosophers, and Harrison
holds that it is sometimes justified to sacrifice
moral concerns for other, non-moral virtues. As
the supreme principle of morality he has
proposed a version of utilitarianism according
to which an act is right if and only if it is such
that the greatest good would be achieved by
sufficiently many others also performing acts of
that sort. In meta-ethics, he has defended the
view that ethical judgements are intended to
express statements rather than emotions or
imperatives. Though he has evinced some pes-
simism about the rationality of moral judge-
ments, he has suggested that some can be indi-
rectly justified by producing reasons for the
action judged.
385
HARRISON
Though a substantial part of Harrison's
work has been on ethics, he has also published
a considerable amount in other areas of phi-
losophy. In the philosophy of mind, for
instance, he has defended disembodiment by
suggesting that 'Ludwig', a person without a
trunk, might not even have a brain. In episte-
mology he has defended the notion of sense-
data, partly by attributing to them unusual
spatial characteristics. He also published what
is perhaps the definitive discussion of J.L.
AUSTIN'S view that to say that one knows some-
thing is not to make any sort of statement about
oneself. In the area of metaphysics he has
defended the idea of time travel. He has also
defended a basically Humean view of causa-
tion, and indeed the influence of Hume can be
seen in much of his work. (Two of his major
contributions have been commentaries on the
moral philosophy of Hume.) In philosophical
logic he has pointed out mistakes - in possible
world theory, for example - which arise from
the thoughtless use of technical vocabulary. In
the philosophy of religion he has combined
atheism with a leaning towards mysticism.
Harrison has also published a number of
science fiction stories. This medium is valuable,
he believes, because, without making specific
philosophical arguments, it can free us from the
hold of the familiar, and enable us to see where
there are, and are not, conceptual connections.
Perhaps as a result of the influence of the lin-
guistic philosophy prevalent at Oxford when
Harrison was a student, his work has always
been characterized by a careful attention to
language and occasional wit.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (1971;
repr. 1993).
Hume's Moral Epistemology (Oxford, 1976).
Hume's Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1981).
A Philosopher's Nightmare and Other Stories
(Nottingham, 1985).
Time-Travel for Beginners and Other Stories
(Nottingham, 1990).
(Ed. with intro. and notes), Challenges to
HARRISON
Morality (1993; 1994).
Ethical Essays, vols 1-2 (Ashford, 1993).
Ethical Essays, vol. 3 (Ashford, 1995).
Essays in Metaphysics and the Theory of
Knowledge, vols 1-2 (Ashford, 1995,
1996).
God, Freedom and Immortality (Ashford,
1999).
Anthony Ellis
HARROD, Roy Forbes (1900-78)
Roy Forbes Harrod was born in Norwich on
13 February 1900 and died in Holt, Norfolk on
8 March 1978. He was the only son of Henry
Dawes Harrod and Frances Harrod, a writer
and painter, sister of the Shakespearean actor
Johnston Forbes-Robertson. Harrod was first
educated at home, then attended St Paul's
School for one year and Westminster School in
London. At New College in Oxford Harrod
gained first class honours in 'Greats' (classical
studies) in 1921 and in modern history a year
later, and was invited to take up economics in
view of a studentship (fellowship) at Christ
Church, where he spent the rest of his academic
life. He was knighted in 1959.
Although he is best remembered for his con-
tributions to economics (in the fields of imper-
fect competition theory, economic dynamics,
international economics and monetary theory:
see anon, bibliography in Eltis et al.) and for his
biography of John Maynard KEYNES (1951), his
deep interests were in philosophy and politics.
He was a member of a number of philosophi-
cal societies and he had continuous exchanges
with philosophers. He was a close friend of
Frank RAMSEY, was instrumental in finding a
position for Alfred AYER at Christ Church, in
the 1920s was a regular visitor at the house of
A.N. WHITEHEAD, and, in spite of a conflictual
relationship with his mentor H.W.B. JOSEPH,
386
they frequently exchanged views on philo-
sophical subjects. (The interwar correspon-
dence between these characters is in the
Collected Interwar Papers.} He was the only
economist of his generation with whom Keynes
discussed methodological issues. His philo-
sophical bent left traces in his economic work:
the axiomatic basis of his deductive dynamics
was partly inferred by an inductive process
(Besomi, 1999, pp. 117-26), while the method-
ology of the Oxford inquiry into prices and
interest he directed in the mid 1930s reflected
his views on empirical research (Besomi, 1998).
Harrod defined himself an ''amateur' in phi-
losophy (letter to G.E. MOORE, in Collected
Interwar papers, vol. 1, p. 454), but nonethe-
less contributed a book and a handful of articles
of some relevance to philosophical issues.
In 1936 he propounded a generalization of
simple utilitarianism. He maintained that oblig-
ations require a revision along Kantian lines of
the 'crude' utilitarian principle according to
which one should 'always choose that action
which will contribute to the greater happiness'.
Harrod argued that the outcome of individual
utilitarian actions could, if repeated, conflict
with the common interest. A lie, for instance,
may be justified on crude utilitarian grounds if
the speaker's loss of credit, and possibly also
the general loss of confidence, involves a greater
happiness than would be implied by telling the
truth. But it may happen that the loss of confi-
dence involved by n lies is larger than n times the
loss of confidence implied by one lie: the rela-
tionship between individual and group utilities
may be non-linear. In such a case, utilitarianism,
in its revised form, should rule in favour of the
obligation of telling the truth even if in each
individual instance this would be disadvanta-
geous. A second refining process is required by
the fact that, on crude utilitarian grounds, the
direct loss of fulfilling the obligation may be too
severe, or that the temptation to do the opposite
is too great. In such a case, the obligatoriness
depends on the degree to which it is observed by
others, which in turn depends (partly at least) on
the moral sanctions.

Harrod's contribution generated some cor-
respondence upon publication, especially with
H.W.B. Joseph but also H.H. PRICE and G.
RYLE (Collected Interwar Papers, vol. 2, pp.
546-52), and raised considerable interest from
the 1950s, originating a vast body of litera-
ture. To his approach, generalized utilitarianism
(Lyons, p. 24) and rule utilitarianism (for
instance, Monro, p. 448) are ascribed, to which
corresponded debates as to the actual diver-
gence between different extensions of utilitari-
anism. Cooperative utilitarianism was also
inspired by Harrod's piece (Regan).
The second area in which Harrod made a
philosophical contribution was induction. In
the Preface of his Foundations of Inductive
Logic (1956), which he considered the best of
his writings ('Roy F. Harrod'), Harrod stated
that his interest in the topic was two decades
old, and indeed we find traces of it in his cor-
respondence in the mid 1930s, in a method-
ological address as sectional President of the
British Association (1938), and in a book
(which remained unpublished) on The Known
and the Unknown (1941-2; see, for a descrip-
tion, the General Introduction to the Collected
Interwar Papers, p. Ixxxii). His first publication
on the topic was an essay on 'Memory' (1942),
in which he propounded that the reliability of
memory is taken as a hypothesis the conse-
quences of which should be empirically verified
(the argument was later developed by Furlong).
This was followed by a first statement of a
probabilistic view of induction (1951), and
eventually by the above-mentioned book and
by a short reply to POPPER'S criticism of it
(Popper; 'New Argument for Induction: Reply
to Professor Popper'). Finally, Harrod edited a
new translation of Nicod's Geometry in the
Sensible World and The Logical Problem of
Induction (1970) (with a Preface and an Annex
summarizing his own Foundations).
Harrod was aware that in order to defend
inductive inference against Hume's criticism, he
had to avoid attributing special features to
nature, such as Mill's postulates of the
Uniformity of Nature and the Law of Universal
387
HARROD
Causation. Harrod's solution is based on a
'principle of experience', that asserts that the
probability of a statement regarding the future
concomitance of a proposition X with property
A given a number of past observations of the
same concomitance is high (probability is
defined in terms of logical frequency, that is as
the 'proportion of times that the conclusion
from evidence of a certain character is true',
Foundations of Inductive Logic, p. 241). The
argument runs by means of an analogy of a
traveller walking on a continuous extent of
unknown length (a desert, for instance): the
traveller's hypothesis that the extent continues
for at least 1/xth of the time he has already been
on his path has probability of being correct
equal at least to x/(x + 1). Without any other
knowledge than the time already spent walking,
the traveller is able to make correct inference
about the future, provided that he does not
seek to extrapolate too long. Harrod stressed
that although this probability is known to be
high, it is by its nature imprecise and cannot be
assigned a numerical value. The next step in
Harrod's argument is that the validity of the
conclusion does not depend on the fairness of
the sample, for if the sample was biased for
some time, it is likely (in the probabilistic sense
specified above) to be biased for some time in
the future.
Most reviewers and later commentators
found Harrod's analogy to be ingenious, yet
incorrect. Most critics pointed out that
Harrod's argument surreptitiously smuggled
in the very premises he claimed he had left out,
in particular the principle of indifference (Ayer,
p. 34; Alexander, p. 110) or the uniformity of
nature (Bronowski, p. 331), or that he assumed
what his argument was designed to establish
(Braithwaite). It was also remarked that
Harrod's continuous extent introduces a
specific metrics of space and time, on which the
result depends (Bronowski; Levi). In his assess-
ment of Harrod's lack of success in answering
Hume, Ayer stressed that Harrod's argument
assumes the reliability of memory, which in
turn leans upon the continuity on which the
HARROD
principle of experience operates. But the notion
of probability on which this is based relies on
our knowing the ratio of the occurrences of
certain samples, which in turn depends on our
memory: Harrod's argument, which justifies
memory in terms of an estimate of the proba-
bility on which the principle of experience is
based (see also on this point Furlong, p. 27), is
therefore (unavoidably, in Ayer's view) circular.
Other reviewers stressed that being able to
say that Harrod's traveller is, generally
speaking, more likely than not to predict he has
not yet reached the edge of the desert, is of no
practical use for any specific circumstance in
which the traveller finds himself (Alexander;
Midgley). Finally, one reviewer remarked that
Harrod's postulate of continuity makes his
argument inadequate for the discrete nature of
a number of natural phenomena (Bronowski, p.
332). Most reviewers commented that the flaws
in Harrod's attempt to justify induction proved,
precisely because of its ingeniousness, the
futility of this line of attack.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Utilitarianism Revised', Mind, vol. 45 (April
1936), pp. 137-56.
'Memory', Mind, vol. 51 (January 1942), pp.
47-58.
'Induction and Probability', Philosophy, vol.
26 (January 1951), pp. 37-52.
Foundations of Inductive Logic (1956).
The Collected Interwar Papers and
Correspondence of Roy Harrod, ed. D.
Besomi, 3 vols (Cheltenham, 2003).
Other Relevant Works
'Scope and Method of Economies', Economic
Journal, vol. 48 (September 1938), pp.
383-412.
The Known and the Unknown, unpublished
MS and TS, 1941-2, in the Harrod Papers,
Chiba University of Commerce, Ichikawa,
Japan, files V-70 and V-71.
The Life of John Maynard Keynes (1951).
'New Argument for Induction: Reply to
Professor Popper', British Journal for the
388
Philosophy of Science, vol. 10 (February
1960), pp. 309-12.
'Roy F. Harrod', in J. Wakeman (ed.), World
Authors 1950-1970 (New York, 1980),
pp. 616-19.
Further Reading
Anon., 'Bibliography of the Works of Sir Roy
Harrod', in W.A. Eltis, M.F. Scott and J.N.
Wolfe, Induction, Growth and Trade.
Essays in Honour of Sir Roy Harrod
(Oxford, 1970).
Alexander, Peter, Review of Foundations of
Inductive Logic, Mind, vol. 68 (January
1959), pp. 108-11.
Ayer, Alfred J., 'Has Harrod Answered
Hume?', in W.A. Eltis, M.F. Scott and J.N.
Wolfe, Induction, Growth and Trade.
Essays in Honour of Sir Roy Harrod
(Oxford, 1970), pp. 20-37.
Besomi, Daniele, 'Harrod and the Oxford
Economists' Research Group's Inquiry on
Prices and Interest, 1936-1939', Oxford
Economic Papers, vol. 50 ns (October
1998), pp. 534-62.
, The Making of Harrod's Dynamics
(1999).
Braithwaite, Richard B., Review of
Foundations of Inductive Logic, Economic
Journal, vol. 68 (March 1958), pp. 146-9.
Bronowski, J., The Scandal of Philosophy',
British Journal for the Philosophy of
Science, vol. 8 (February 1958), pp.
329-34.
Furlong, E.J., 'Memory', Mind, vol. 57
(January 1948), pp. 16-44.
Levi, Isaac, Review of Foundations of
Inductive Logic, Journal of Philosophy,
vol. 55 (February 1958), pp. 209-12.
Lyons, David, Forms and Limits of
Utilitarianism (Oxford, 1965).
Midgley, G.C.J., Review of Foundations of
Inductive Logic, Philosophical Quarterly,
vol. 9 (January 1959), pp. 87-8.
Monro, D.H., 'Utilitarianism', in P.P. Wiener
(ed.), Dictionary of the History of Ideas),
vol. 4 (New York, 1974), pp. 445-50.

Nicod, Jean, Geometry and Induction
(1970).
Popper, Karl, 'On Mr. Roy Harrod's New
Argument for Induction', British journal
for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 9
(November 1958), pp. 221-4.
Regan, Donald Harris, Utilitarianism and
Co-operation (Oxford, 1980).
Daniele Besomi
HART, Herbert Lionel Adolphus (1907-92)
Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart was born in
Harrogate on 8 July 1907, the son of a Jewish
tailor, and died in Oxford on 19 December
1992. He attended Bradford Grammar School,
later studying classical Greats (obtaining a first
class) at New College, Oxford. In 1932 Hart
practised law at the Chancery Bar although he
did not have a degree in law. He continued
practising, however, until 1940, when he tem-
porarily worked with MIS during World War
II, being found unfit for active military service.
Hart returned to New College, Oxford in
1945 as a college tutor and was elected as the
University of Oxford's Professor of
Jurisprudence in 1952, succeeding Arthur
Goodhart. Encouraged to stand for election by
J.L. AUSTIN, Hart held this post until 1969,
when he was succeeded by his most famous
critic, Ronald DwORKlN.
In 1956-7 Hart visited Harvard's Law
School to give his Holmes Lecture on the topic
of 'Positivism and the Separation of Law and
Morals' leading to a famous debate with
Harvard's Lon L. Fuller in the pages of the
Harvard Law Review. In this debate Fuller
argued that not all laws held equal authority.
That is, the degree to which laws exist fully as
'law' admits of different degrees, most partic-
ularly the degree to which a law satisfies certain
criteria of morality which he calls 'the inner
389
HART
morality of law'. In responding to Fuller, Hart
remained true to his endorsement of positivism,
although he later conceded that law was
beholden to a 'minimum content of natural
law'. This is not to say that Hart claimed a
necessary link between law and morality: he did
not and, following Bentham, he rejected the
notion that there exists some higher standard
for law lying outside law itself.
Hart's interest in this relationship between
law and morality continued further through
his equally well known debate with Lord
(Patrick) Devlin. Here Devlin and Hart clashed
on the question of criminal law in enforcing
certain moral norms, in particular those relating
to sexual conduct. Defending himself from
Devlin's arguments, Hart was inspired to write
both Law, Liberty, and Morality in 1963 and
The Morality of the Criminal Law in 1965.
Some of Hart's most important work was
first developed from his undergraduate lectures
at Oxford before being turned into manu-
scripts. One example was his Causation in
Law, written with his Oxford colleague Tony
Honore in 1959 (its second edition appeared in
1985). This work instantly became a classic
treatise on responsibility and fault.
Hart's greatest contribution to legal philos-
ophy is without doubt his celebrated The
Concept of Law, first published in 1961 with
a posthumous second edition and added post-
script in 1994. This work, like Causation in
Law, was developed from his undergraduate
lectures. In The Concept of Law Hart employs
developments in the philosophy of language,
most notably the work of J.L. Austin, in order
to clarify better the concepts we use in thinking
about law. The Concept of Law stands as the
first major work in what has been called
'analytic jurisprudence'.
Hart begins by challenging John Austin's
(not to be confused with J.L. Austin) claim that
law consists of orders backed up by a series of
threats. Instead, Hart argues that the legal
system is itself a system of social rules. For
Hart, the concept of law itself is based upon the
union of primary and secondary rules. Primary
HART
rules impose obligations and duties, while sec-
ondary rules provide us with rules by which we
might introduce new primary rules or modify
and even extinguish existing primary rules.
Controversially, Hart includes within his set
of secondary rules what he calls a 'rule of recog-
nition' that states the conditions any rule must
satisfy in order for that rule to impose obliga-
tions as a valid law. As a result, the validity of
law is not determined with reference to law's
commensurability with dictates of morality.
Instead, law's validity rests only upon its proper
dissemination. Thus, he says: 'Wherever such a
rule of recognition is accepted, both private
persons and officials are provided with author-
itative criteria for identifying primary rules of
obligation' (The Concept of Law, 1961, p.
100). The controversy over the rule of recog-
nition in large part results from questions over
how much recognition is necessary from a plu-
ralistic society for a rule of recognition to be
recognized.
In addition to his criticisms of Austin and his
view of law as the unity of primary and sec-
ondary rules, the third major idea in The
Concept of Law concerns what Hart calls 'the
minimum content of natural law' referred to
above. The validity of this minimum content is
grounded on prudential, rather than moral,
considerations. Hart says:
In the absence of this content men, as they
are, would have no reason for obeying vol-
untarily any rules; and without a minimum
of co-operation given voluntarily by those
who find that it is in their interest to submit
to and maintain the rules, coercion of others
who would not voluntarily conform would
be impossible.
(The Concept of Law, 1961, p. 193)
Hart claims this content consists of features
such as 'human vulnerability', 'approximate
equality', 'limited altruism', 'limited resources'
and 'limited understanding and strength of will'
(ibid., pp. 194-9). Again, the presence of these
features in any legal system only best ensures
390
the stability and maintenance of that legal
system. Hart does not claim that this minimal
content of natural law need be a necessary
feature of any legal system, thus sharply dis-
tinguishing his positivist and analytic brand of
jurisprudence from natural law theories.
Hart also held an interest in criminal law,
publishing a collection of his essays in
Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the
Philosophy of Law (1968). As with much of his
previous work, this too was widely influential
from the start. Most notably, Hart argues that
retributivist and deterrent justifications of pun-
ishment need not be incommensurate. He says:
'What is needed is the realization that different
principles (each of which may in a sense be
called a "justification") are relevant at different
points in any morally acceptable account of
punishment' (Punishment and Responsibility,
p. 3). He claimed that retributivism and deter-
rence can come together into one compelling
theory of punishment as either the justifying
aim or the distribution of punishment. This
view of punishment developed much further a
not entirely dissimilar position held by John
Rawls in his well-known 'Two Concepts of
Rules' published in 1955.
In 1969 Hart resigned his chair and was suc-
ceeded by Ronald Dworkin. Hart spent the
better part of the following years in the study of
Jeremy Bentham's work, whom he admired
greatly. This eventually led to the publication of
his Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence
and Political Theory in 1982. Here he claims that
'Bentham's analysis of these basic concepts [i.e.
of duties, obligations, rights, and legal powers],
though simple in structure, is rich in detail,
most of which is untidily scattered through his
vast works' (Essays on Bentham, p. 17). Hart's
goal is not to reproduce a scholarly report of
Bentham's stated views on these concepts
(although he was very much a scholar of
Bentham's work), but rather to draw our atten-
tion to valuable insights into law that Bentham
'untidily scattered' across his writings, and
demonstrate how these insights might best
inform contemporary thinking about law.

Hart was Principal of Brasenose College,
Oxford from 1973 to 1978. In addition, he
was a vice-president of the British Academy
from 1976 to 1978. From this time and after-
wards he endeavoured to produce a defence of
his legal theory from Dworkin's many criti-
cisms in his Taking Rights Seriously (1977). In
that work Dworkin looks to so-called 'hard
cases' where our legal rules do not clearly pull
in any one direction, offering a new model of
constructive interpretivism in place of Hart's
model. Hart's defence of his theory is pub-
lished in a postscript, edited in part by Joseph
Raz, to the second edition of The Concept of
Law on pp. 238-76.
Herbert Hart revitalized (and revolution-
ized) the philosophy of law and was certainly
the most important British legal theorist since
Bentham. Today he continues to exert a
towering influence on the study of law and the
ever-growing popularity of the subject.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Positivism and the Separation of Law and
Morals', Harvard Law Review, vol. 71
(1958), pp. 593-629.
(with Tony Honore), Causation in Law,
Oxford (1959; 2nd edn, 1985).
The Concept of Law (Oxford, 1961; 2nd
edn, 1994).
Law, Liberty, and Morality (Oxford, 1963).
The Morality of the Criminal Law (Oxford,
1965).
Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in
the Philosophy of Law (Oxford, 1968).
Essays on Bentham: Studies in
Jurisprudence and Political Theory
(Oxford, 1982).
Other Relevant Works
Dworkin, Ronald, Taking Rights Seriously
(Cambridge, MA, 1977).
Fuller, Lon L., 'Positivism and Fidelity to
Law: A Reply to Professor Hart', Harvard
Law Review, vol. 71 (1958), pp. 630-72.
, The Morality of Law (New Haven,
1964; rev. 1969).
391
HARTLAND-SWANN
MacCormick, Neil, Legal Reasoning and
Legal Theory (Oxford, 1978).
further Reading
Bayles, Michael D., Hart's Legal Philosophy:
An Examination (Dordrecht, 1992).
MacCormick, Neil, H. L. A. Hart (Stanford,
1981).
(ed.), Law, Morality, and Society:
Essays in Honour ofH. L. A. Hart
(Oxford, 1996).
Thorn Brooks
HARTLAND-SWANN, Joseph John
(1908-61)
John Hartland-Swann was born in London.
His father was Louis Herbert Hartland-Swann,
a director of public companies. Nothing is
known of John's early education, and at the
time of his marriage in 1933 he was an adver-
tising manager. He seems to have come to phi-
losophy as a mature student. In 1946 he was
awarded an external PhD by the University of
London for a thesis on 'The Influence of
Religious Dogma on Metaphysical Speculation
in the Philosophy of Descartes'. In the late
1940s he was at Lincoln College, Oxford and
in the early 1950s he held a teaching post at the
University of Birmingham, where his col-
leagues included A.E. DUNCAN-JONES and L.J.
RUSSELL. Thereafter he was Head of
Philosophy at the University of Malaysia at
Singapore, where he remained until his
untimely death.
Hartland-Swann briefly continued with the
historical interests of his PhD thesis. But he was
later to be much influenced and personally
encouraged by Gilbert RYLE, and he developed
as an analytical philosopher during his time at
Oxford and Birmingham. His first and most
original book, An Analysis of Knowing (1958),
HARTLAND-SWANN
was advertised as an attempt to elucidate the
'logical behaviour' of the word 'know' and to
develop the implication of this analysis for
certain philosophical disputes. Hartland-
Swann claimed that 'all cases of knowing that
can ultimately be reduced to cases of knowing
how' (ibid., p. 60). He also wanted to say that
'When you say you know that S is, or will be
P, you are in effect announcing that you have
made or accepted some decision' (ibid., p. 19).
The decision that S is P, in a case of knowing,
is one that is not open to revision. Hartland-
Swann thought that these two points were
connected, in that someone who uses the
expression 'I know that ...'is 'merely stating
emphatically "I am able to state correctly
that," where "correctly" implies ... "in accor-
dance with some decision, personal or
dominant"' (ibid., p. 61). Both aspects of these
analyses have been disputed by E.M. Adams
and others.
Hartland-Swann's second book, An Analysis
of Morals (1960), consists of a study of 'the
logic of moral discourse' and was intended to
serve as a textbook for university study as well
as an introduction to analytical ethics for the
general reader. Hartland-Swann repudiates
general theories of ethics such as utilitarianism
and intuitionism, claiming that 'all so-called
objective theories of ethics are entirely unten-
able' (ibid., p. 160). Moral philosophers
cannot, he claims, set themselves up as author-
ities on how people should conduct their lives.
But they can help people to understand better
the nature of morality. His own account is rel-
ativistic. Every society, he claims, has a number
of customs that range in perceived importance
from very important, which are framed in law,
to rather minor, such as etiquette. What is
regarded as socially important and therefore a
matter of morality may vary from one society
to another. Thus bigamy is a moral issue for
Christians but not for Muslims. Hartland-
Swann's Analysis of Morals is clearer than his
first book and continues to receive some
critical attention as well as featuring on bibli-
ographies of analytical philosophy.
392
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An Analysis of Knowing (1958).
An Analysis of Morals (1960).
Other Relevant Works
'Descartes' "Simple Natures'", Philosophy,
vol. 22 (1947), pp. 139-52,
'Plato as Poet', Philosophy, vol. 26 (1951),
pp. 3-18,131-41.
'On the State of Modern Philosophy',
Philosophy, vol. 27 (1952), pp. 76-9.
The Concept of Time', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 5 (1955), pp. 1-20.
'On Describing the World', Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 34 (1956), pp.
106-17.
The Logic of "Knowing Jones'",
Philosophical Studies, vol. 8 (1957), pp.
1-6.
further Reading
Adams, E.M., The Theoretical and the
Practical', Review of Metaphysics, vol. 13
(1960), pp. 642-62.
Freeman, Fred, Introductory Ethics (New
York, 1978), pp. 1-11.
Roland, Jane, 'On "Knowing How" and
"Knowing That"', Philosophical Review,
vol. 67 (1958), pp. 379-88.
Stuart Brown
HAWKINS, Denis John Bernard (1906-64)
Denis John Bernard Hawkins was born in
Thornton Heath on 17 July 1906 and died in
Godalming, Surrey on 16 January 1964. He
was educated at Whitgift School in Croydon,
and at the English College and the Gregorian
University in Rome, where he received doctor-
ates in philosophy (1927) and theology (1931).
He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1930 for
the diocese of Southwark and dedicated the

rest of his life to both pastoral and academic
pursuits, although he never held a formal
academic post. After initially serving as an
English curate in Bermondsey, Eastbourne,
Leatherhead and Hove, he became a parish
priest in Claygate (Esher) in 1940 and in
Godalming in 1950. In 1956 Hawkins was
made an honorary canon of the diocese of
Southwark.
While best known for the history of philos-
ophy, especially his A Sketch of Medieval
Philosophy (1947), Hawkins also made
original contributions to philosophy in episte-
mology, metaphysics, ethics and the philosophy
of religion.
Hawkins was a neo-Thomist who took up
the task of renewing Thomism by engaging it
with modern and contemporary thought.
Indeed so much is this the case that it is fair to
label Hawkins a precursor to analytic Thomism
in light of his incorporating the views of
Descartes, Locke, Hamilton, REID, MOORE,
RUSSELL and Ross into Thomism. Agreeing
with Descartes that philosophy should begin
with epistemology and not metaphysics, unlike
other neo-Thomists, Hawkins began his
original philosophical writings with works of
epistemology. In his Approach to Philosophy
(1938) and The Criticism of Experience (1945),
Hawkins defends the realism of Aquinas and
asserts that the human mind can know external
reality. Yet under the influence of Hamilton
and Reid he goes beyond Aquinas in defending
a direct realism and an intuitive theory of per-
ception in regard to numerous truths.
According to Hawkins, the human mind has a
direct self-evident intuition of itself, the external
world, space, other minds, free will, mental
cause/effect relationships and even past events
through its memory.
In his well-known works Being and
Becoming (1954) and The Essentials of Theism
(1950) Hawkins defended the Aristotelian
theory of substance, the essence/existence dis-
tinction of Aquinas, the entailment view of
causality and the argument from contingency
for God (although he did modify the view of
393
HAWKINS
Aquinas slightly in accepting the primary/sec-
ondary quality distinction of Locke, and the
view of Moore and Russell that existence is
not a predicate). Later in his life Hawkins wrote
ethical works defending the moral intuition-
ism of Aquinas and Ross, asserting that humans
have a rational intuition of right and wrong (as
does even God), and also the retributive theory
of punishment.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Causality and Implication (1937).
Approach to Philosophy (1938).
The Criticism of Experience (1945).
A Sketch of Medieval Philosophy (New
York, 1947).
The Essentials of Theism (New York, 1950).
Being and Becoming: An Essay Towards a
Critical Metaphysics (New York, 1954).
Crucial Problems of Modern Philosophy
(New York, 1957).
Man and Morals (New York, 1960).
Christian Morality (1963); also published as
Christian Ethics (New York, 1963).
further Reading
Hardwicke, Owen, 'Dr. Hawkins and the
Essentials of Theism', Downside Review,
vol. 68 (January 1950), pp. 46-54.
Heinemann, F.H. and E.L. Allen, 'Survey of
Recent Philosophical and Theological
Literature', Hibbert Journal, vol. 50
(1951), pp. 287-93; vol. 53 (1954), pp.
184-91.
Sillem, Edward, 'Canon D.J.B. Hawkins: A
Critical Metaphysician', The Tablet, vol.
218, no. 6453 (25 January 1964), p. 113.
, 'Hawkins, Denis John Bernard', New
Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd edn
(Washington, DC, 2003), vol. 6, p. 672.
Alan Vincelette
von HAYEK
von HAYEK, Friedrich August (1899-1992)
Friedrich August von Hayek was born in
Vienna on 8 May 1899 and died in Freiburg on
23 March 1992. His family had a well-estab-
lished tradition in the study of the natural
sciences and provided a very stimulating intel-
lectual environment for the young Hayek.
Hayek served in a field artillery regiment at
the Italian front during the final stages of World
War I. He enrolled at the University of Vienna
in November 1918, where he studied under
Friedrich von Wieser and received two doctor-
ates: one in jurisprudence (1921) and another
one in political science (1923). His first job
was as a legal consultant in the Office of
Accounts in Vienna (1921-6). Hayek spent a
year (1923-4) in the USA doing a research
assistantship at New York University; he reg-
istered for a PhD there under J.D. Magee, and
attended the lectures and seminars of W.C.
Mitchell and J.B. Clark at Columbia University.
He was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship to
pursue his PhD studies at New York University;
however, by the time he received the notifica-
tion he was already on his way to Vienna and
decided to stay in his home town. Upon his
return from the USA Hayek joined the discus-
sions at the famous Private Seminar conducted
by Ludwig von Mises - 'the most important
centre of economic discussion at Vienna'
(Hayek on Hayek, p. 69) at the time - and
subsequently co-founded with Mises the
Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research.
Hayek became the Institute's first Director
(1927-31) and in 1929 published his first
important work in economic theory -
Geldtheorie und Konjunkturtheorie (translated
into English in 1933 as Monetary Theory and
the Trade Cycle). Between 1929 and 1931 he
was lecturing in economics as a Privatdozent at
the University of Vienna.
In 1931 he was invited by Lionel Robbins to
the London School of Economics and Political
Science (LSE) as a visiting professor and in the
following year was offered the LSE's Tooke
Professorship of Economic Science (1932^-9).
394
Hayek's lectures at the LSE appeared in a
volume called Prices and Production (1931)
and together with his first book (Monetary
Theory and the Trade Cycle) represent his main
treatises on monetary cycle theory. Ten years
later, in 1942, Hayek published his other major
contribution to the field of economics, The
Pure Theory of Capital. This work, however,
failed to receive due attention eclipsed by the
ever spreading popularity of the macro-
economic paradigm proposed and developed
by Hayek's main rival in economic theory, John
Maynard KEYNES.
In 1944 Hayek became a fellow at the British
Academy. A few months upon receipt of that
honour he published The Road to Serfdom,
which was to bring him an unexpected popu-
larity outside the world of academia, especially
in the USA, and gained him the respect and
friendship of politicians of the new right in
both England and the USA. In academic circles,
however, the book met with a mixed reception
mainly because of its departure from rigorous
academic standards of argumentation and its
espousal of a more 'popular' style.
In 1947 Hayek became the main initiator
and organizer of a meeting of thirty-six inter-
nationally renowned scholars that led to the
founding of the Mont Pelerin Society as a
forum for the free exchange of ideas and the
promotion of research on the classical liberal
values of individual freedom and the rule of
law. Hayek was the President of the Society
until 1960 (and remained Honorary President
thereafter). He lived in England for eighteen
years (he took British citizenship in 1938) and
only left London in 1950, when he was offered
the Chair of Moral and Social Science at the
Committee for Social Thought at the University
of Chicago (1950-62). In 1952 he published
two books, The Counter-Revolution of Science
and The Sensory Order, which stated his
insights into theoretical psychology and his
subsequent enquiries into epistemology and
methodology. In 1960 he published The
Constitution of Liberty which analysed the
journey of the idea of individual freedom

throughout the history of Western civilization
and fleshed out a conception of freedom under
the rule of law in the context of a liberal society.
Hayek returned to Europe in 1962, when he
accepted an appointment as a Professor of
Economic Policy at the University of Freiburg.
When he retired in 1967 he accepted an
honorary professorship at the University of
Salzburg in his homeland, Austria. Four years
later, in 1971, the University of Vienna made
him an honorary senator. He was awarded
many other honours for his contributions to
economics, political and legal theory, and phi-
losophy from universities all around the world.
During those years Hayek continued work on
the project - started by The Constitution of
Liberty - of recasting the principles of classical
liberalism and defending their potential to
address the most pressing problems of his day.
In 1973 he published Rules and Order, the
first volume of a trilogy entitled Law,
Legislationand liberty. The subsequent
volumes, The Mirage of Social Justice and The
Political Order of a Free People appeared in
1976 and 1979 respectively.
In 1974 Hayek received the Nobel Prize in
Economics (awarded jointly with Gunnar
Myrdal). His last book, The Fatal Conceit, was
published in 1988 just a few months before
the changes in the countries of the Eastern bloc
provided a remarkable illustration of the
accuracy of his analysis of the deficiencies and
dangers of socialist planning, and brought
Hayek's name and ideas to prominence once
again.
Hayek was a prolific writer of particularly
wide-ranging research interests: as he admitted
during an interview once, his intellectual drive
and curiosity to go beyond the confines of
strictly one academic discipline had been
fostered during his years as a student at the
University of Vienna, where 'the decisive point
was simply that you were not expected to
confine yourself to your own subject' (Hayek
on Hayek, p. 51). His contributions to
monetary theory and business cycle theory
made him one of the most eminent economists
395
von HAYEK
of the Austrian School in the twentieth century.
His Pure Theory of Capital was an ambitious
project of elaborating on von Mises's business
cycle theory as well as on Bohm-Bawerk's
capital theory in an attempt to offer an alter-
native model to the macro-economic paradigm
introduced and developed by John Maynard
Keynes and his General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money (1936). This
work was largely neglected and failed to gain
many adherents mainly because by 1941 the
Keynesian theoretical framework was already
very popular and almost firmly established.
The receipt of the Nobel Prize in Economics in
1974, however, rekindled interest in Hayek's
economic writings and ideas.
Even if Hayek is often regarded primarily as
an economist, the key to understanding his
contributions to both economics and social and
political theory is to be found in his philo-
sophical commitment to a specific epistemo-
logical position. Viewed from such a perspec-
tive, the continuity between Hayek's inquiries
into economics and his contributions to polit-
ical and legal philosophy and social theory
starts to emerge. As John Gray observed,
Hayek's economic, political and social ideas
do constitute a system 'in virtue of their being
informed and governed throughout by a dis-
tinctive philosophical outlook' (Gray, 1986,
pp. 2-3). The distinctive epistemological
position that informs all of Hayek's writings
draws heavily on his insights into theoretical
psychology presented in the book The Sensory
Order. Hayek developed its main argument
during his years as a student in the early 1920s
though the book itself was not published until
1952. In it Hayek set out to explore the trans-
formation of sensations into perceptions: he
described
the central nervous system as an apparatus of
multiple classification ... as a process of con-
tinuous and simultaneous classification and
constant reclassification on many levels (of
the legion of impulses proceeding in it at any
moment), applied in the first instance to all
von HAYEK
sensory perception but in principle to all the
kinds of mental entities, such as emotions,
concepts, images, drives.
(The Sensory Order after 25 Years, p. 289)
Hayek argued against the empiricist belief that
experience starts with the reception of sensory
data by claiming that the process of classifica-
tion performed by the mind relied crucially on
prior experience: 'every sensation, even "the
purest" must therefore be regarded as an inter-
pretation of an event in the light of the past
experience of the individual or the species'
(Hayek on Hayek, p. 26). Hayek viewed the
mind as the product of evolution and continu-
ous 'development of the species and the indi-
vidual by a kind of "experience" or "learning"'
(The Sensory Order, p. 53).
Furthermore, he drew a distinction between
the physical order of external events (or 'the
macrocosm') and the sensory order of the mind
(or 'the microcosm') and asserted, first, the
impossibility of acquiring direct knowledge of
the former (since in the process of cognition the
mind, using its classificatory apparatus, would
always proceed by constructing theoretical
models of the external world: thus all knowl-
edge of the external world would always be
theory-laden), and second, the necessarily
imperfect and limited character of any knowl-
edge obtained through such a process of theo-
retical model construction. The Sensory Order
did not enjoy large readership and its argument
remained neglected for a considerable time. In
his review of the book Edwin G. Boring
disputed the originality of Hayek's ideas by
pointing out that his 'views have antecedents'
(Scientific Monthly, March 1953). Hayek's
friend Karl POPPER was sceptical of the causal
theory of the mind which he thought the book's
argument was advancing.
Hayek used the insights into theoretical psy-
chology presented in The Sensory Order as the
basis for elaborating his distinctive epistemo-
logical stance on the limited capacity of human
reason to account for all the factors at work in
the physical world, and especially for the
396
various factors operating in the social world.
Hayek's fundamental episternological insight
naturally led him to consider its implications for
the problems of methodology in the social
sciences. His interest in methodological issues
was triggered during his work on the editing of
the collected works of Carl Menger and was
further influenced by Karl Popper's book on
The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934).
Hayek addressed the specific methodological
problems faced by the social sciences in The
Counter-Revolution of Science and in
Individualism and Economic Order (1949),
among other works. He insisted on recognizing
the unsuitability of the methods of the natural
sciences to the study of social phenomena (he
called 'scientism' the outlook promoting the
above view) and argued for the disentangling of
the methodology of the social sciences from
the grip of logical positivism in particular.
Hayek claimed that scientism was the defining
feature of an approach to the study of social
phenomena which he termed 'constructivism'
or 'rational constructivism' and which he
described as the belief purporting that since
social phenomena were similar to physical ones
inasmuch as they were governed by discover-
able general laws, they were subject to rational
prediction and, therefore, to rational design
and conscious control. Hayek identified Saint-
Simon, Comte, Hegel and Marx as some of
the major forerunners of such an approach,
and provided his most ardent critique of the
episternological assumptions of rational con-
structivism and its implications for large-scale
social engineering in The Road to Serfdom,
The Counter-Revolution of Science and in The
Fatal Conceit. Against constructivism Hayek
promoted methodological individualism as the
method most attuned to the subjective nature
of social facts and the primacy of the individ-
ual as a social actor, especially in economics.
The downside of adopting methodological indi-
vidualism was in its inherent reductionism as
well as in Hayek's failure to provide a satisfac-
tory account of the formation of individual
preferences.

Hayek's involvement with problems of
methodology in economics increased his
interest in social theory and in the nature of
social processes and social order. He set out to
explore what type of a social theory could ade-
quately address what he called 'the three cir-
cumstances of modern life': the fragmentation
of knowledge in society, the widespread attrac-
tion of the idea of social justice, and, finally, the
diversity of human ends. Building on his evo-
lutionary epistemology as well as on his early
work on prices as a system of abstract signals
for coordinating the dispersed knowledge of
economic agents, Hayek claimed that social
life (i.e. morals, language, law, the market,
religion, etc.) was a spontaneous social order
since its emergence was unplanned but rather
happened as 'the result of human action ... not
of human design' (Studies in Philosophy,
Politics and Economics, pp. 96-7), i.e. out of
independently made individual decisions each
driven by different and often conflicting goals.
Moreover, he insisted that spontaneous orders
could be observed in the physical and the social
worlds alike.
By 'order' Hayek understood
a state of affairs in which a multiplicity of
elements of various kinds are so related to
each other that we may learn from our
acquaintance with some spatial or temporal
part of the whole to form correct expecta-
tions concerning the rest, or at least expec-
tations which have a good chance of proving
correct.
(Rules and Order, p. 36)
As applied to his social theory, the notion of
spontaneous order was used as a classificatory
term to distinguish between orders emerging as
the result of human design (which he called
organizations) and orders emerging as the result
of 'the unintended or undesigned results of the
actions of many men' (The Counter-Revolution
of Science, p. 25), i.e. spontaneous orders.
A second distinctive trait of spontaneous
orders was that they were orders of rules of
397
von HAYEK
conduct that emerged out of individual rule
following and adjustment to changes in the
external environment. The market was the par-
adigmatic example of a spontaneous order.
Other examples included morals, religion,
language, laws, albeit the process of rule-fol-
lowing there was of a different nature than in
the case of the market. In the case of the latter,
spontaneous economic order arose out of 'the
operation of the market system' through
'people acting within the rules of the law of
property, tort and contract' (The Mirage of
Social Justice, p. 109). The spontaneous orders
of morals, religion, language, Hayek claimed,
arose from a process of cultural evolution by
natural selection.
The theory of 'spontaneous orders' has been
regarded as the most innovative element in
Hayek's thought. Charles Larmore, Norman
Barry, James S. Coleman and Walter B.
Weimer, among others, had recognized the
importance of this idea and praised its poten-
tial as an analytical tool in political theory.
Kukathas singled out some affinities between
Hayek's theory of spontaneous order and
Hume's account of the emergence of social
institutions. He also traced some influences by
Smith, Ferguson and especially Vico on
Hayek's ideas in that respect (Hayek and
Modern Liberalism, p. 91). A thorough critical
examination of Hayek's idea of spontaneous
order could be found in Roland Kley, who
identified some problematic areas and ambi-
guities in Hayek's argument and concluded
that despite the innovative character of that
notion, 'on close inspection the general idea of
a spontaneous social order ... is unable to
furnish the focal point of a social theory' (Kley,
p. 23). Gray, too, expressed concerns about
potential tensions between the idea of sponta-
neous order and Hayek's argument for indi-
vidual liberty (Gray, 1986, p. 119).
Even if the account of spontaneous order
given by Hayek did not feature any normative
content, it was of crucial importance for his
legal and political philosophy, especially for
his project of defending a recast theory of the
von HAYEK
principles of classical liberalism. Hayek's con-
tention was that the essence of those principles
(of individual autonomy, limited government
and free markets) captured better than any
other doctrine the nature of social processes
and the growth of human knowledge, and thus
provided the most propitious environment for
human flourishing. Hayek took up the chal-
lenge of elaborating a normative political phi-
losophy capable of providing a moral justifi-
cation of the liberal order in his writings on The
Constitution of Liberty and in the trilogy of
Law, Legislationand liberty.
Hayek defended a negative conception of
liberty as freedom from coercion and 'inde-
pendence of the arbitrary will of another'
(Constitution of Liberty, p. 12). Whilst
acknowledging the importance of individual
freedom as 'an indisputable ethical presuppo-
sition' (ibid., p. 6), he did point out the instru-
mental value of freedom as 'the source and
condition of most values' (ibid.). His defini-
tion of coercion was very similar to the Kantian
one: coercion 'eliminates an individual as a
thinking and valuing person and makes him a
bare tool in the achievement of the ends of
another' (Constitution of Liberty, p. 21). The
limits of individual freedom were stipulated by
rules of just conduct through the specifying of
property rights; private property, in Hayek's
view, was 'an essential condition for the pre-
vention of coercion' (ibid., p. 140). Freedom,
thus defined, was not inconsistent with order
and law. On the contrary, law and freedom
were mutually constitutive in Hayek's account
- true freedom could only be freedom under the
rule of law for 'when we obey laws, in the
sense of general abstract rules laid down irre-
spective of their general application to us, we
are not subject to another man's will and are
therefore free' (ibid., p. 153). Three distinctive
features characterized the rule of law: its rules
were abstract and general, they were publicly
known and foreseeable; they were applied
equally to all individuals. Hayek dismissed the
legal positivist conception of law and defended
instead a conception of law as a spontaneous
398
order manifested in the general rules governing
citizens' actions, as different from the specific
commands intended to guide governmental
action, and as predating the state and the
creation of government. He did not base his
account of individual freedom, rights and
justice on the idea of a natural law either.
Instead he adopted a procedural conception of
justice that claimed that as long as the rule of
law was being observed the just character of the
outcomes of individual actions would be
secured. Nevertheless, Hayek included guar-
antees for the protection of the domain of indi-
vidual freedom by resorting to the Kantian test
of the 'universalizability' of a rule.
Hayek famously dismissed the notion of
social justice as inconsistent. In his opinion
ethical pluralism as exemplified by the diversity
of human ends and conceptions of the good
seriously undermined any possibility of
reaching an agreement on a shared conception
of social justice. Hayek termed the ideal of
social justice 'a mirage' which could be achieved
only at the expense of coercion gradually
leading to totalitarian control. He believed that
the best approach to accommodating the diver-
sity of human ends and making use of the dis-
persed knowledge of individuals was a proce-
dural one, and that the best procedural mech-
anism available was that of the spontaneous
order of the free market.
Hayek's political philosophy has elicited
numerous interpretations. His ambition of
reworking the principles of classical liberalism
was at first met with scepticism by most of his
contemporaries, who regarded Hayek's project
as an outdated and doomed enterprise at
reviving nineteenth-century laissez-faire liber-
alism and thus failed to submit to serious eval-
uation the analytical side of his argument. For
example, in his review of The Constitution of
Liberty in Twentieth Century (August 1960)
George Lichteim called the book 'an impressive
monument to a myth'. More recent interpreta-
tions of Hayek's thought, however, make up
for this oversight. Brian Crowley gave an inter-
pretation of Hayek as a Kantian deontological

liberal. Kukathas's study traced back the influ-
ence of Hume and Kant on Hayek's thought as
well as the extent of affinity between his ideas
and utilitarianism and conservatism. Kukathas
argued that Hayek built his defence of the
liberal social order on mutually incompatible
arguments and concluded that he had not suc-
ceeded in providing an account of liberty that
identified the scope of individual freedom and
hence the proper scope of government action.
Gray, too, acknowledged the internal incon-
sistencies in Hayek's system of ideas and
compared his work to that of J.S. Mill, Spencer
and Popper. Kley pointed out the limitations in
Hayek's understanding of liberalism and social-
ism as seen primarily in terms of political
methodologies opposed to each other only on
the grounds of their different solutions to the
problem of social and economic coordination.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Economics and Knowledge', Economica,
vol. 4ns (1937), pp. 33-54.
Freedom and the Economic System (Chicago,
1939).
The Road to Serfdom (1944).
'The Use of Knowledge in Society', American
Economic Review, vol. 35 (September
1945), pp. 519-30.
Individualism and Economic Order (1949).
The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies
on the Abuse of Reason (Glencoe, Illinois,
1952).
The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the
Foundations of Theoretical Psychology
(1952).
The Political Ideal of the Rule of Law (Cairo,
1955).
The Constitution of Liberty (1960).
Studies in Philosophy, Politics and
Economics (1967).
Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New
Statement of the Liberal Principles of
justice and Political Economy, vol. 1,
Rules and Order (1973).
Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New
Statement of the Liberal Principles of
399
von HAYEK
justice and Political Economy', vol. 2, The
Mirage of Social Justice (1976).
New Studies in Philosophy, Politics,
Economics and the History of Ideas
(1978).
Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New
Statement of the Liberal Principles of
Justice and Political Economy', vol. 3, The
Political Order of a Free People (1979).
Knowledge, Evolution and Society (1983).
'Individual and Collective Aims', in Susan
Mendus and David Edwards (eds), On
Toleration (Oxford, 1987).
'The Rules of Morality are not the
Conclusions of our Reason', in Gerard
Radnitzky (ed.), Centripetal Forces in the
Sciences (New York, 1987).
Collected Works, vol. 1, The Fatal Conceit:
The Errors of Socialism (1988).
Collected Works, vol. 4, The Fortunes of
Liberalism (1992).
Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical
Dialogue, ed. S. Kresge and L. Wenar
(1994).
Other Relevant Works
Prices and Production (1931).
Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle
(1933).
The Pure Theory of Capital (1941).
John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their
Friendship and Subsequent Marriage
(1951).
Collected Works, vol. 3, The Trend of
Economic Thinking: Essays on Political
Economists and Economic History (1991).
Further Reading
Barry, Norman, Hayek's Social and
Economic Philosophy, (1979).
, 'The Tradition of Spontaneous
Order', Literature of Liberty, vol. 5, no. 2,
pp. 7-58.
, On Classical Liberalism and
Libertarianism (1986).
Butler, Eamonn, Hayek (1983).
Crowley, Brian L., The Self, the Individual,
von HAYEK
and the Community: Liberalism in the
Political Thought ofF. A. Hayek and
Sidney and Beatrice Webb (Oxford, 1987).
Forsyth, Murray, 'Hayek's Bizarre
Liberalism: A Critique', Political Studies,
vol. 36, no. 2, (June 1988), pp. 235-50.
Gamble, Andrew, The Iron Cage of Liberty
(Cambridge, 1996).
Gissurarson, Hannes, Hayek's Conservative
Liberalism (New York, 1987).
Gray, John, Hayek on Liberty (Oxford
1986).
, The Undoing of Conservatism
(1994).
Greenleaf, William Howard, The British
Political Tradition, vol. 1, The Rise of
Collectivism (1983).
Hamowy, Ronald, 'Hayek's Concept of
Freedom: A Critique', New Individualist
Review, vol. 1 (1961), pp. 28-31
Kley, Roland, Hayek's Social and Political
Thought (Oxford, 1994).
Kukathas, Chandran, Hayek and Modern
Liberalism (Oxford, 1989).
Larmore, Charles, Patterns of Moral
Complexity (Cambridge, 1987).
Machlup, Fritz (ed.), Essays on Hayek (New
York, 1976).
Oakeshott, Michael, Rationalism in Politics
(1962).
Robbins, Lionel, The Great Depression
(1932).
, Autobiography (1971).
Scruton, Roger, The Meaning of
Conservatism (Harmondsworth, 1980).
, A Dictionary of Political Thought
(1982).
Streissler, Erich et al. (eds), Roads to
freedom: Essays in Honour ofF.A. Hayek
(1969).
Tomlinson, Jim, Hayek and the Market
(1990).
Mihaela Georgieva
400
HEATH, Peter Lauchlan (1920-2002)
Peter Heath was born in Milan and died in
Edinburgh on 4 August 2002. He attended
Shrewsbury School and i:hen Magdalen
College, Oxford, where he took a first in
Modern Greats. He served with the Royal
Armoured Corps during World War II, and at
the end of the war helped interrogate senior
German officers, including Admiral Karl
Donitz and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, eager
to flee the advancing Russians.
As a philosopher he was sui generis, catholic
in not espousing a particular doctrine or school;
and although he had studied at Oxford during
the heyday of analytic philosophy, he was no
ordinary language philosopher. Peter had an
extremely sceptical mind leavened with a
generous admixture of wit. He taught philoso-
phy for several years at the universities of
Edinburgh and St Andrews before being
summoned to Mr Jefferson's university in
Charlottesville in the early 1960s, where he
remained for the rest of his life except for a brief
interlude in Australia. At the University of
Virginia over a period of three decades he
introduced more than 10,000 students to phi-
losophy through his Introduction to Philosophy
and Basic Logic classes. He also served as
Chairman of the Corcoran Department of
Philosophy at the University of Virginia and as
President of the Virginia Philosophical
Association.
His publications fall into three categories:
original articles, translations and Lewis Carroll,
though with Peter there was some inevitable
overlap. He wrote important articles on Hume,
REID and AYER. He translated numerous
classics of German philosophy, including works
by Kant, Schelling and Max Scheler's book
The Nature of Sympathy, and he edited
Augustus De Morgan's logical works, but it is
for his Carrollian writings that Peter is remem-
bered by most people. His The Philosopher's
Alice, subtitled The Thinking Man's Guide to
a Misunderstood Nursery Classic, which was
first published in 1974 and reprinted in 1983,

received enthusiastic reviews from Carroll
scholars and philosophers. He made a clear
distinction between 'nonsense' and 'absurdity',
putting Edward Lear in the former category
and Carroll solidly in the latter. Likewise in
his Jabberwocky (vol. 13, no. 3) article on
Carroll parodies he offers a clear distinction
between 'parody' and 'burlesque'. Peter wrote
wonderful reviews of the important works of
Carroll scholarship of the past decades. To cite
just two examples, see his 'Carroll Through
the Pillar-Box' (Virginia Quarterly, Summer
1980) on Morton Cohen's edition of the letters
of Lewis Carroll and 'The Carrollian Paper
Chase' (English Language Notes, December
1982), which was also published in Soaring
with the Dodo. But if The Philosopher's Alice
is his best remembered book, his article on
'Nothing' published in the Encyclopedia of
Philosophy is a classic which has no equal, as
may be seen from the following brief excerpts:
Nothing is an awe-inspiring yet essentially
undigested concept, highly esteemed by
writers of a mystical or existentialist
tendency, but by most others regarded with
anxiety, nausea, or panic. Nobody seems to
know how to deal with it (he would, of
course), and plain persons generally are
reported to have little difficulty in saying,
seeing, hearing, and doing nothing.
Philosophers, however, have never felt easy
on the matter.
The friends of nothing may be divided into
two distinct though not exclusive classes: the
know-nothings, who claim a phenomeno-
logical acquaintance with nothing in partic-
ular, and the fear-nothings, who, believing,
with Macbeth, that 'nothing is but what is
not', are thereby launched into dialectical
encounter with nullity in general.
('Nothing', Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
vol. 5, p. 524)
He categorically avoided labels, even a Kantian
one.
401
HEATH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'The Appeal to Ordinary Language',
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 2 (1952), pp.
1-12.
'Intentions', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 29 (1955), pp. 147-64.
'Wittgenstein Investigated', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 6 (1956), pp. 66-71.
'Balfour, Arthur James'; 'Boole, George';
'Carroll, Lewis'; 'Concept'; 'De Morgan,
Augustus'; 'Experience'; 'Jevons, William
Stanley'; 'Logic, History of [the Boolean
Period of modern logic]'; 'Nothing'; 'Venn,
John', in Paul Edwards (ed.), The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York,
Macmillan, 1967).
'Trying and Attempting', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 45 (1971),
pp. 193-208.
'Professor Ayer's Gifford Lectures (AJ. Ayer,
The Central Questions of Philosophy)'
Inquiry, vol. 18 (1975), pp. 225ff.
'The Idea of a Phenomenological Ethics', in
Edo Pivsevic (ed.), Phenomenology and
Philosophical Understanding (1975), pp.
169-72.
'Incredulous Hume', American Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 2 (April 1976), pp.
159-63.
'Reid on Conceiving and Imaging', The
Monist, vol. 61, no. 2 (April 1978), pp.
220-28.
'How Many Angels Can Dance on the End of
a Pin?', in Bruce Marshall (ed.), Vindex
Humanitatis: Essays in Honour of John
Huntley Bishop (Armidale, New South
Wales, 1980), pp. 199-207.
The Philosopher's Alice: Alice's Adventures
in Wonderland & Through the Looking-
Glass by Lewis Carroll with Illustrations
by John Tenniel, Introduction and Notes
by Peter Heath (New York and London,
1974; repr. 1983).
Other Relevant Works
(Trans.), Max Scheler, On the Nature of
Sympathy (New Haven, 1954).
HEATH
(Trans.), Friedrich WJ. von Schelling, Ideas
for a Philosophy of Nature (New York,
1988).
(Ed. and trans, with J.B. Schneewind),
Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics (New
York, 1997).
August A. Imholtz, Jr
HENDERSON, George Patrick
(1925-2004)
Pat Henderson (as he was commonly known)
was born in Alves, Moray, a son of the manse,
and died in Newtyle, Angus in May 2004. He
went from Elgin Academy to St Andrews
University as a Harkness Scholar in 1932, grad-
uating with first class honours in philosophy in
1936, and proceeded to classical Greats in
Oxford (Balliol), graduating in 1938. He then
served as an assistant in logic and metaphysics
at St Andrews until war service called him away
in 1940. He was commissioned and served
with distinction in Italy and Greece; from this
period grew his later interest in modern Greece.
In 1945 he returned to St Andrews as lecturer
(later senior lecturer) in logic and metaphysics.
In 1959 he was appointed Professor of
Philosophy at Queen's College, Dundee (then
part of St Andrews University, but in 1967 to
become the University of Dundee), in its new
and rapidly growing Faculty of Arts and Social
Sciences. In his time in Dundee, the Philosophy
Department grew from three to, at its largest,
ten members of staff. He served as Dean of the
Faculty from 1973 to 1976, and subsequently
served on the university's governing body, the
Court. He retired in 1980.
He served as editor of the Philosophical
Quarterly from 1962 (when it was only twelve
years old) till 1972; during his tenure - a time
when editors single-handedly assessed all
article-length submissions - it became firmly
402
established on the philosophical map as one of
the internationally recognized journals in phi-
losophy. He brought to his dealings with
authors the same self-effacing courtesy and old-
fashioned gentlemanliness which characterized
his dealings with everyone, whether a porter, a
student or a colleague.
His philosophical interests up till 1959 lay in
the areas of philosophical logic and ontology,
with excursions into philosophical method.
Thereafter he gave his attention primarily to
aesthetics and moral philosophy, focusing more
on particular aspects of aesthetic and moral
thinking which he found interesting or impor-
tant than on the then current topics of debate.
A major interest latterly in modern Greece
and its intellectual reawakening issued in two
historical books, The Revival of Greek
Thought, 1620-1830 (1970), and The Ionian
Academy (1980) (a history of the establish-
ment in Corfu in the mid nineteenth century,
under British rule, of a college of higher edu-
cation). Both were translated into Greek.
Recognition in Greece itself carne in election as
a corresponding member of the Academy of
Athens in 1973, and of the Ionian Academy in
1975. He was elected a fellow of the Royal
Society of Edinburgh in 1980.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Philosophical Surveys, IF, Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 1 (1951), pp., 254-68.
'Metaphorical Thinking', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 3 (1953), pp. 1-13.
'Causal Implication', Mind, vol. 63 (1954),
pp. 504-18.
'On Questions', Philosophy, vol. 30 (1955),
pp. 304-17.
'Fact, Fiction, and Forecast', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 6 (1956), pp. 266-72.
'On a Certain Use of Quotation Marks',
Philosophical Studies, vol. 7 (1956), pp.
24-.9.
'Intensional Entities, and Ontology',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
58 (1957-8), pp. 269-88.
'Is There Only One Correct System of Modal

Logic? Part IF, Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 33 (1959),
pp. 41-56.
'An "Orthodox" Use of the Term
"Beautiful"', Philosophy, vol. 35 (1960),
pp. 114-21.
The Idea of Literature', British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 1 (1961), pp. 217-30.
'Moral Finality', Philosophical Quarterly,
vol. 12 (1962), pp. 109-19.
'"Ought" Implies "Can"', Philosophy, vol 41
(1966), pp. 101-12.
'The Concept of Ugliness', British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 6 (1966), pp. 219-29.
'Moral Nihilism', in N. Rescher (ed.), Studies
in Moral Philosophy, American
Philosophical Quarterly Monograph series
no. 1 (1968).
'Moral Pragmatism', Philosophy, vol. 44
(1969), pp. 1-11.
'Habit and Reflection in Morality', Dialogue,
vol. 9 (1970), pp. 20-34.
The Revival of Greek Thought 1620-1830
(Albany, New York, 1970).
'Politics, Morals, Nature and Convention',
Philosophia [Yearbook of the Research
Centre for Greek Philosophy at the
Academy of Athens] (1972), pp. 85-97.
'Censure under Control', Ratio, vol. 15
(1973), pp. 44-56.
The Ionian Academy, in Greek translation in
Corfu (1980; rev. edn, in English,
Edinburgh, 1988).
Robin Cameron and Neil Cooper
HENRY, Desmond Paul (1921-2004)
Desmond Henry was born in Huddersfield on
5 July 1921 and died on 28 October 2004.
Unable to afford a university education in the
1930s, he served in the Territorial Army from
1939 to 1946, rising to the rank of staff
403
HENRY
sergeant. He studied at Leeds University from
1946, and on graduation in 1949 was
appointed lecturer in philosophy at the
University of Manchester. He received the PhD
in 1960 for a thesis on the logic of St Anselm.
He subsequently became senior lecturer and
reader, before retiring in 1982. He held visiting
professorships at Brown University, the
University of Pennsylvania and the University
of Bologna.
Two recurrent themes in Henry's work are
first, the logical work of St Anselm of
Canterbury (1033-1109) as a source of inspi-
ration and study, and, second, ontology, the
system of predicate logic of the early twentieth
century Polish logician, Lesniewski, as a tool of
analysis and formalization. But not exclusively,
and he goes beyond these themes: back to
Anselm's basis in Aristotle, Boethius and others,
and forward into the heyday of medieval logic
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and
beyond the logic of terms to Lesniewski's mere-
ology and its forerunners in medieval thought.
A good part of Henry's discussion of
Anselm's logic focuses on the treatise 'De gram-
matico' which Anselm probably composed in
the 1060s while a young monk at Bee, before
becoming its abbot and long before leaving for
the see of Canterbury. This dialogue effectively
presents a sophism: is 'grammaticus' ('literate'),
the name of a substance or a quality?
Arguments pro and contra are presented by
the student, and the master resolves the dispute
by showing how paronyms such as 'literate'
signify a quality directly and a substance (in this
case, man) indirectly - it appellates (or names)
a man. This distinction between signification
and appellation, in response to the rediscovery
of Aristotle's logical works (in this case, the
Categories) in the eleventh and twelfth cen-
turies eventually led to that major novelty of
medieval logic, the theory of properties of
terms.
Henry was introduced to Lesniewski's
systems by Czeslaw LEJEWSKI, when the latter
was appointed to the Chair of Philosophy at
Manchester in the early 1950s. Lesniewski's
HENRY
system of ontology is particularly fitted to the
treatment of medieval theories since it is a logic
of terms: each atomic sentence is construed as
consisting of two terms, the subject and the
predicate, connected by the copula. In this both
Lesniewski and the medievals were following
Aristotle. In fact, Henry's writings contain
among the best brief but instructive introduc-
tions to Lesniewski's systems.
One particular facet of Lesniewski's system
of ontology is that it is a free logic, that is a logic
free of existence assumptions. This made it apt
for application in another of Henry's works,
That Most Subtle Question (1984), in which he
took up the challenge of explaining Rabelais's
scholarly joke (in his Gargantua and
Pantagruel) ridiculing the medievals' apparent
concern with whether non-existents (such as the
chimera - a mythical creature) could consume
universals (themselves a perennial subject of
ontological debate). The solution lies in distin-
guishing meaning from reference (as Anselm
had) and in employing a formal language such
as Lesniewski's, in which type distinctions are
made clear.
Lesniewski extended ontology to a system of
mereology, a theory of part and whole. In his
last work, Medieval Mereology (1991), Henry
surveyed medieval theories of part and whole
(already prefigured in That Most Subtle
Question, sect. 4.5). Lesniewski's system,
extended by Lejewski and others, was applied
to the clarification of the theories of, inter alia,
Abelard, Aquinas, Buridan and Paul of Venice,
the latter's presented in an edition and transla-
tion of that section of his Logica magna which
Henry had been commissioned to prepare for
the British Academy edition of that work but
which sadly did not appear in the series origi-
nally planned.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Logic ofSt Anselm (Oxford, 1967).
Commentary on 'De grammatico': The
Historical-Logical Dimensions of a
Dialogue ofSt Anselms (Dordrecht and
Boston, 1974).
404
That Most Subtle Question (Quaestio
Subtilissima): The Metaphysical Bearing of
Medieval and Contemporary Linguistic
Disciplines (Manchester, 1984).
Medieval Mereology (Amsterdam and
Philadelphia, 1991).
Other Relevant Works
Medieval Logic and Metaphysics (1972).
Stephen Read
HEPBURN, Ronald William (1927-)
Ronald Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16
March 1927. After education at Aberdeen
Grammar School and national service in the
army, he studied at Aberdeen University, where
he graduated MA in 1951. He embarked on a
thesis entitled 'Cosmology and Value: Studies
in the Argumentation of Certain Late Sixteenth
Century and Seventeenth Century Works of
Literary Concern', for which he was later
awarded a PhD. He was appointed assistant
(1952-5), then lecturer (1955-60) in moral
philosophy at Aberdeen. From 1959 to 1960 he
was Visiting Associate Professor Of Philosophy
at New York University. He returned to Britain
as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham and,
in 1964, he was appointed to a Chair in
Philosophy at Edinburgh University. From
1975 until his retirement in 1996 he was
Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh.
He was Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of
Religion at Cambridge from 1965 to 1968.
Ronald Hepburn has written extensively in
the fields of aesthetics, environmental philoso-
phy and the philosophy of religion. The aim of
his first book, Christianity and Paradox (1958),
was to apply the techniques and insights of
Anglo-American, analytical philosophy, not to
'the crudest versions of theological concepts'
(p. 15) but to theology as it was actually prac-

tised by leading contemporary theologians.
Among other topics, he tackles those of a self-
authenticating 'I-Thou encounter' between
God and man, and the attempt by some the-
ologians influenced by existentialism to de-
emphasize the importance of the traditional,
historical claims of Christianity. In the case of
the self-authenticating encounter, he argues
that, whilst it is one thing to believe that I have
had some sort of an experience, it is quite
another to believe that my understanding of
that experience is correct. In particular, if it is
declared that my experience is of a God who is
'quite wmntelligible and opaque to human
reason' (Christianity and Paradox, p. 59), then
its ability to act as a foundation to a realist reli-
gious belief in God is entirely removed. Turning
to the case of the existentialist theologian who
wishes to separate the historical claims of
Christianity from their religious significance, he
insists that, to be Christian, religious belief must
be open to the risk of being historically refuted.
These sets of conclusions point to two possible
results: either to a realist Christianity, offering a
rationally assessable theology in which to place
the direct experience of God coupled with his-
torically refutable factual claims; or to a subjec-
tive, imaginative encounter with nature in which
talk of experiences of God and the stories of the
Bible function as fable, myth and symbol. Since
Hepburn argues that the sort of natural theology
required to support the former alternative
'contains enormous logical difficulties'
(Christianity and Paradox, Preface to American
edn, 1968, p. viii), the latter option appears
more plausible.
Much of Hepburn's subsequent work can
be seen as exploring what might be involved in
this imaginative encounter with nature. In his
influential paper, 'Contemporary Aesthetics
and the Neglect of Natural Beauty' (also col-
lected in 'Wonder' and Other Essays, 1984),
Hepburn discusses two sorts of aesthetic expe-
rience of nature: the contemplating of the indi-
viduality and uniqueness of single natural
objects; and the contemplation of the unity of
nature. He argues that there are 'certain incom-
405
HEPBURN
pletenesses in the experience of the isolated
particular, that produce a nisus towards the
other pole, the pole of unity' ('Wonder' and
Other Essays, p. 18). Analysing the different
ways that such unity is sought, he concludes
that these accounts 'are often metaphysically
extravagant and unperceptive of ambiguities
in their claims' (ibid., p. 23). Nevertheless, in a
typical fashion, Hepburn refuses to reject the
drive towards unity wholesale, instead urging
the patient teasing-out of 'the numerous and
important strands of experience that originally
prompted these accounts' (ibid., p. 23). The
exploration of these experiences of unity is
taken up again in 'Values and Cosmic
Imagination' (also collected in The Reach of the
Aesthetic, 2001). There, by way of considering
Wordsworth's understanding of the creative
power of nature as mirroring the operations of
the human imagination, and the comparison by
the radical theologian, Don Cupitt, of human life
to the sun's burning, pouring out and passing
away, he considers some of the possibilities for
constructing 'high-level (moral-religious-aes-
thetic) attitudes to nature-at-large' (The Reach of
the Aesthetic, p. xiii) whilst avoiding the dangers
of 'lyrical exaggeration' (ibid.).
Taken over his career, Hepburn's work rep-
resents an impressive exploration of what
remains after the abandonment of a theistic
worldview. His work has been seminal in the
development of environmental philosophy and
in extending the understanding of aesthetics
beyond the experience of the art object.
Characteristic of his approach is the contrast-
ing of two particular ways of looking at a
problem, a careful exploration of the difficul-
ties involved in each, and a refusal to reject
either out of hand.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Poetry and Religious Belief, in Alasdair
Maclntyre (ed.), Metaphysical Beliefs:
Three Essays (1957).
Christianity and Paradox: Critical Studies in
Twentieth Century Theology (1958; rev.
US edn, New York, 1968).
HEPBURN
A Critique of Humanist Theology (1963).
'Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of
Natural Beauty', in Bernard Williams and
Alan Montefiore (eds), British Analytical
Philosophy (1966), pp. 285-310.
'Wonder': and Other Essays: Eight Studies in
Aesthetics and Neighbouring Fields
(Edinburgh, 1984).
'Values and Cosmic Imagination', in
Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Philosophy, the
Good, the True and the Beautiful
(Cambridge, 2000).
The Reach of the Aesthetic: Collected Essays
on Art and Nature (Aldershot, 2001).
Other Relevant Works
'Cosmology and Value: Studies in the
Argumentation of Certain Late Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Century Works of
Philosophical and Literary Concern', PhD
thesis, University of Aberdeen (1955).
Entries in P. Edwards (ed.), Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (1967).
Stephen Watt
HESSE, Mary Brenda (1924-)
Mary B. Hesse was born in Reigate on 15
October 1924. She took a Bsc in special math-
ematics at Imperial College of Science and
Technology in London in 1945. One year later
she received an MSc from the same college and
shortly thereafter she continued her education
at University College London (UCL). In 1948
Mary Hesse defended her doctoral thesis on
electron microscopy and received her PhD. She
also holds an MSc in the history and philoso-
phy of science from UCL (1950). In July 2002
she was appointed Doctor of Science honoris
causa at the University of Cambridge.
Hesse's university career began when she
accepted a position as lecturer in mathematics
406
in 1951 at the University of Leeds. From 1955
to 1959 she taught at the University of London
as a lecturer in the history and philosophy of
science. In 1960 she began her long and dis-
tinguished association with Cambridge
University. She was first appointed lecturer in
history and philosophy of science, and in 1968
university reader in philosophy of science. In
1975 she was appointed to the position of
Professor of Philosophy of Science at the
History and Philosophy of Science (HPS),
Cambridge, which she continued to hold until
1985, when she took early retirement.
Between 1965 and 1969 she was Vice-
President of the British Society for the History
of Science and the editor of the British Journal
for the Philosophy of Science. She is a fellow of
Wolfson College, Cambridge, of which she was
Vice-President (1976-80). She became a fellow
of the British Academy in 1971 and was elected
President of the Philosophy of Science
Association in 1979. She has been a member on
numerous committees as well as visiting pro-
fessor on several occasions in the United States.
Mary Hesse's work demonstrates a lifelong
commitment to philosophical issues in both
natural and social science. Her scientific
training provided her with a profound respect
for science as theory and practice. She devoted
much of her subsequent work to those issues in
philosophy of science that engaged her gener-
ation: logical questions about science, the rela-
tionship between theory and observation, and
methods and foundational assumptions. Hesse
took a critical stance against the hypothetico-
deductive theory of scientific justification advo-
cated by, among others, Karl POPPER, and
argued in favour of an inductivist view of
science, then undervalued by many philoso-
phers. According to Hesse, inductive inferences
are more complex than deductive inferences.
She emphasized three particular types of induc-
tive inference that have played a crucial role in
both contemporary science and in the science of
the past. These three forms may be referred to
as inferences based on analogies, on models
and on metaphors.

One of her suggestions is that models in
science are resources for a metaphorical re-
description of what is being observed or exper-
imented upon. The essentially inductive model
of science that she developed - later referred to
as the 'Hesse-net' - owes much to the network
model first outlined by Duhem and adopted by
Quine. This model interprets scientific theory in
terms of a network of concepts related by laws,
in which only pragmatic and relative distinc-
tions can be made between the 'observable'
and the 'theoretical'. In The Structure of
Scientific Inference (1974) Hesse argues that the
network model of theories is more adequate
than previous attempts at relating observation
language to theoretical language. Here one can
also note her interest in the non-formal, non-
technical aspects of understanding scientific
work. Science is not very different from other
creative or intellectual practices. She compares
the way networks are built up with the way 'M.
Black suggests a poet builds up a web of
imagined associations within the poem itself
in order to make new metaphors intelligible'
(Structure of Scientific Inference, p. 32).
Hesse, like N.R. Hanson, T.S. Kuhn and
P.K. Feyerabend, among others, has a broad
outlook on matters concerning science. She
positions herself within the post-empiricist tra-
dition, where the influence from Duhem and
Quine is significant. Of particular importance
is the thesis of the underdetermination of
theories by empirical data, often referred to as
the Duhem-Quine thesis - meaning that several
theories may capture the same data and that
there is in principle an indefinite number of
theories that fit the observed facts more or less
adequately. According to Hesse, this thesis,
together with the turn in philosophy of science
from logical models to historical models and
some important historically oriented work, has
caused a revolution in the philosophy of
science. This fundamental change, called post-
empiricism, encompasses ideas about the rela-
tionship between theories and observations,
and about language and the logic of science; it
admits social factors in explaining science,
407
HESSE
which she finds plausible, but is also open to the
charge of relativism, which she fundamentally
rejects.
Another important theme in her philosoph-
ical writings is the claim that the philosophy of
science must be integrated with the history of
science. 'In writing the history of science there
will always be present, either implicitly or
explicitly, some philosophical view of the
nature of science', Hesse states as early as the
Preface to her widely read and much valued
Forces and Fields (1961). In this book, a his-
torical study of physics, Hesse devotes a con-
siderable amount of space to pre-seventeenth-
century work, particularly to the Greeks. To
trace the history of scientific ideas and their
relations with philosophy is a general aim of her
work. In this sense Hesse's view is similar to
those of Kuhn and Feyerabend, and like them
she uses examples from the history of science
both to question and to clarify philosophical
problems. The combined interest in history and
philosophy of science is based on the view that
the former is a valuable source in advocating a
post-empiricist philosophy of science. History
of science emphasizes contingency and con-
textualism, and offers empirical support to the
thesis of underdetermination.
Mary Hesse's work manifests both continu-
ity and change. Throughout her writings her
view of the essential role of analogies, models
and metaphors in science persists. Her interest
in the hermeneutical aspects of all intellectual
work is another recurring theme. In her later
writings, she has turned her attention to new
areas, such as the social sciences and to the
sociology of scientific knowledge. Her analyses
of the strong programme in the sociology of sci-
entific knowledge (in Revolutions &
Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science,
1980) were of major importance to the recog-
nition of sociological approaches to the under-
standing of science in society. Her open mind
and intellectual curiosity are also shown in her
way of taking feminist concerns into consider-
ation. Although she has never defined herself as
a feminist, she took feminist challenges to
HESSE
science seriously and in the 1990s she wrote
about and analysed the critique of mainstream
philosophy of science from a gendered point of
view.
Hesse is an Anglican and has taken much
interest in questions of science and religion. In
her retirement she has devoted her time and
curiosity to landscape history and published
several articles on this subject.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A full bibliography for Mary Hesse, which
includes not only her own writings but dis-
cussions of her work, may be found on a
website dedicated to her:
http ://digilander. libero. it/collodel/mary-
hesse/maryhesse.htm, accessed November
2004.
'Models in Physics', British Journal for the
Philosophy of Science, vol. 4 (1953), pp.
198-214.
Forces and Fields: A Study of Action and
Distance in the History of Physics (1961).
'Analogy and Confirmation Theory',
Philosophy of Science, vol. 31 (1964), pp.
319-27.
Models and Analogies in Science (1963;
extended repr. Notre Dame, 1966).
'Action at a Distance', in E. McMullin (ed),
The Concept of Matter (Notre Dame,
1963), pp. 372-90.
'Duhem, Quine, and a New Empiricism', in
G. Vesey (ed), Knowledge and Necessity
(London and New York, 1970), vol. 3, pp.
191-209.
The Structure of Scientific Inference (1974).
'Models of Method in the Natural and Social
Sciences', Methodology and Science, vol. 8
(1975), pp. 163-78.
'Theory and Value in the Social Sciences', in
C. Hookway and P. Pettit, Action and
Interpretation: Studies in the Philosophy of
the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 1978), pp.
1-16.
'Habermas's Consensus Theory of Truth', in
P.D. Asquith and I. Hacking (eds), PSA
1978 (1979), vol. 2, pp. 373-96.
408
Revolutions and Reconstructions in the
Philosophy of Science (Brighton, 1980).
'Science and Objectivity', in D. Held and J.B.
Thompson (eds), Habermas, Critical
Debates (1982), pp. 98-115.
'Socialising Epistemology', in E. McMullin
(ed.), Construction and Constraint: The
Shaping of Scientific Rationality (Notre
Dame, 1988), pp. 97-122.
'Models, Metaphors and Truth', in F.R.
Ankersmit and JJ.A. Mooij (eds),
Knowledge and Language, vol. 3,
Knowledge and Metaphor (Dordrecht,
1993), pp. 49-66.
Other Relevant Works
'Boole's Philosophy of Logic', Annals of
Science, vol. 8 (1952), pp. 61-81.
Science and the Human Imagination: Aspects
of the History and Logic of Physical
Science (1954).
'History and philosophy of Science in the
early Natural Sciences Tripos', Cambridge
Review, vol. 24 (1962), pp. 140-45.
'The Explanatory Function of Metaphor', in
Y. Bar-Hillel (ed), Logic, Methodology and
Philosophy of Science (Amsterdam, 1965),
pp. 249-59.
'Confirmation of Laws', in S. Morgenbesser,
P. Suppes and M. White (eds), Philosophy,
Science and Method: Essays in Honour of
Ernest Nagel (New York, 1969), pp.
74-91
Truth and the Growth of Scientific
Knowledge', in F. Suppe arid P.D. Asquith
(eds), PSA 1976 (1977), vol. 2, pp.
261-80.
'Comments on Kuhn's "Commensurability,
Comparability, Communicability"', in P.D.
Asquith and T. Nickles (eds), PSA 1982
(1983), vol. 2, pp. 704-11.
'Epistemology without Foundations', in A J.
Holland (ed.), Philosophy, its History and
Historiography (Dordrecht, 1985), pp.
49-68, 87-90.
'Changing Concepts and Stable Order',
Social Studies of Science, vol. 16 (1986),

pp. 714-26.
(with Michael A. Arbib), The Construction
of Reality (Cambridge, 1987).
'Science beyond Realism and Relativism', in
D. Raven, L. van Vucht Tijjssen and J. de
Wolf (eds), Cognitive Relativism and Social
Science (Utrecht, 1988), pp. 129-42; (2nd
edn, New Brunswick, 1992).
'How to be Post-Modern without Being a
Feminist', The Monist, vol. 77 (1994), pp.
445-61.
Further Reading
Barnes, B., D. Bloor and J. Henry, Scientific
Knowledge. A Sociological Analysis
(Chicagos, 1996).
Bloor, D., 'Epistemology or Psychology?',
Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science, vol. 5 (1975), pp. 382-95.
Collodel, M., Oltre il realismo e il rela-
tivismo: Uepistemologia di Mary Hesse
[Beyond Realism and Relativism: Mary
Hesse's Epistemology] (Venice, 2001), pp.
xix, 305.
Dorling, J., The British Journal for the
Philosophy of Science, vol. 26 (1975), pp.
61-71.
Haack, S., 'Surprising Noises: Rorty and
Hesse on Metaphor', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 88 (1987-8), pp.
293-301.
Hubbard, J.M., 'Scientific Realism and a
Philosophy of Nature', The New
Scholasticism, vol. 57 (1983), pp. 263-76.
Minogue, B.P., 'Realism and Intensional
Reference', Philosophy of Science, vol. 14
(1978), pp. 445-55.
Sellars, W., Science, Perception and Reality
(New York, 1963).
Suppe, F. (ed. and intro.), The Structure of
Scientific Theories, 2nd edn (Urbana,
1977).
Margareta Hallberg
409
HETHERINGTON
HETHERINGTON, Hector James Wright
(1888-1965)
Hector Hetherington was born in
Cowdenbeath on 21 July 1888 and died unex-
pectedly on a visit to London on 15 January
1965. He was the eldest son of Thomas
Hetherington and his wife Helen Mundell, a
farmer's daughter. He grew up in Tillicoultry,
where his father was the village chemist and
postmaster, and later a JP. After attending
Dollar Academy he studied at Glasgow
University (1905-10), graduating MA with
honours in classics, philosophy and economics.
At Glasgow Hetherington was much influenced
by the Professor of Moral Philosophy, Sir
Henry JONES, who appointed him his assistant
(1910-14). Subsequently he was lecturer in
philosophy at Sheffield (1914-15); Professor of
Logic and Philosophy at Cardiff (1915-20);
Principal and Professor of Philosophy at Exeter
(1920-24); Professor of Moral Philosophy at
Glasgow (1924-7) (following LINDSAY who
succeeded Jones); Vice-Chancellor of Liverpool
University (1927-36); and Principal and Vice-
Chancellor of Glasgow University (1936-61).
In 1914 Hetherington married Alison Reid,
also a Glasgow graduate. Of their two sons
the younger, Alastair, was editor of the
Guardian from 1956 to 1975.
Hetherington was a philosopher in the
Scottish idealist tradition, best remembered
now for guiding Glasgow University, during his
lengthy stint as Principal and Vice-Chancellor,
along the road to modernization. A skilled
administrator, natural diplomat and adroit
academic politician, Hetherington played a
large and cautiously progressive role in the
development of the British university system,
and beyond in the Commonwealth. In addition
to his executive posts at Exeter, Liverpool and
Glasgow he was twice Chairman of the
Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals
(1943-7,1949-52). He maintained close con-
nections with universities throughout the
Commonwealth and the USA, often visiting to
advise or lecture.
HETHERINGTON
Hetherington sat on the committees of
numerous educational and charitable organi-
zations, often as President or Chairman, and
had long associations with the Leverhulme and
Harkness foundations. He served on many gov-
ernment commissions, tribunals and boards of
enquiry, especially in the areas of employment
and labour relations. His services were recog-
nized by the award of many academic and civic
honours, including a knighthood in 1936.
Although a ready and stylish writer,
Hetherington published comparatively little,
and even less that was strictly philosophical. In
addition to a number of pamphlets, papers and
reviews, he wrote one book and half of two
more. The book followed his secondment to the
secretariat of the British delegation to the
International Labour Conference in
Washington in 1919, when he produced
International Labour Legislation. This was a
part-descriptive, part-analytical account of the
setting up of the International Labour
Organization, which, along with its parent, the
League of Nations, was to be part of the
postwar reconstruction of international rela-
tions. Previously Hetherington had written half
of Social Purpose (leaving the other half to J.H.
MUIRHEAD), the aim of which was to provide a
sound philosophical basis for social policy.
Later he published a volume in which he wrote
the life and edited the letters of his old profes-
sor Henry Jones. But his vision of philosophy
would have been satisfied by a life dedicated to
national and international amelioration though
the promotion, by word and deed, of educa-
tion, industrial reconciliation, citizenship and
democracy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(with J.H. Muirhead), Social Purpose: A
Contribution to the Philosophy of Civic
Society (1918).
International Labour Legislation (1920).
The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Jones,
Professor of Moral Philosophy in the
University of Glasgow (1925).
410
Other Relevant Works
The Conception of a Unitary Social Order',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
18 (1917-18), pp. 286-316
A Comment on British Democracy
(Glasgow, 1943).
Some Aspects of the British Experiment in
Democracy (Toronto, 1962).
Further Reading
Charles Illingworth, University Statesman: Sir
Hector Hetherington 1888-1965
(Glasgow, 1971)
Andrew Belsey
HEYWOOD THOMAS, John (1926-)
John Heywood Thomas was born in Llanelli
(then spelt Llanelly) on 11 November 1926. He
graduated BA and BD at the University of
Wales, later becoming DD (1965) and Hon.
DLitt (1993). He is also Hon. DD, Edinburgh
(1976). He was research fellow in philosophy,
University of Durham (1955-7); lecturer in
philosophy of religion, University of
Manchester (1957-65); reader in divinity,
University of Durham (1965-74); and
Professor of Christian theology, University of
Nottingham (1974-92). A recognized author-
ity on Kierkegaard and Tillich, he is a Swenson
Memorial Fellow and Member of the
Kierkegaard Akademi, and a minister of the
United Reformed Church.
During a period of postgraduate study at
Cambridge, and at a time when there was
growing, if belated, interest in existentialism
in Britain, H.H. FARMER encouraged Heywood
Thomas in the direction of a conceptual
analysis of Kierkegaard's thought. This yielded
Subjectivity and Paradox (1957). Kierkegaard
is first set in his religious and intellectual
context, and there follow lucid discussions of

the distinction between faith and proof, of faith
as the answer to a limiting question, and of
Kierkegaard's protest against Hegel, which
turns both upon the latter's attempt 'to make
God a purely public word' (Subjectivity and
Paradox, p. 71), and upon Hegel's failure to do
justice to the 'absurd' paradox that God
became man. Heywood Thomas shows how
Kierkegaard rebukes the rationalist error of
supposing that speculative philosophy can
justify the religious person's decision to believe;
and the empiricist error of understanding faith
as a matter of having certain feelings, rather
than as a real relation to God which entails
committed action. Christian experience is the
experience of One who is over against us, and
the first thing it prompts is not cogitation, but
reverence, worship.
In 1952 Heywood Thomas studied under
Tillich at Union Theological Seminary, New
York, gaining the STM. Tillich regarded his
Welsh student as his logical critic', a judgement
the accuracy of which is attested by Paul Tillich:
An Appraisal (1963). Unlike Kenneth
Hamilton, in his concurrently published book,
The System and the Gospel: A Critique of Paul
Tillich, Heywood Thomas does not set out
from a particular understanding of the gospel
with a view to showing how far Tillich falls
short of it. Rather, he expounds specific
Tillichian themes - his theological method,
doctrine of God, Christology, anthropology,
ecclesiology and doctrine of history - and eval-
uates them from the standpoint of a 'thera-
peutic' analyst bent upon removing logical con-
fusions. Tillich's method of correlation and his
understanding of 'symbol' receive particularly
searching scrutiny. An appendix concerns
'Catholic Criticisms of Tillich'.
Heywood Thomas next undertook the task,
equally challenging in its own way, of intro-
ducing Tillich to a more popular readership.
Paul Tillich (1965) is organized under the
headings of 'Life', 'Thought' and 'Significance'.
Tillich's intellectual roots in nineteenth-century
German idealism and his sensitivity to current
cultural and socio-political issues are revealed,
411
HEYWOOD THOMAS
and his theological contribution is carefully
evaluated. While approving of the place Tillich
(unlike Barth) accords to apologetics, Heywood
Thomas declares that 'No amount of protest-
ing that the content of the theological answer
is given in revelation can remove the offence of
regarding theology as having merely the value
of providing us with the answers to our ques-
tions instead of being the light that lightens
our feet so that even the question is given' (Paul
Tillich, p. 9).
The third volume of Tillich's Systematic
Theology had not appeared when the Appraisal
was published. It is well, therefore, that in
Tillich (2000) Heywood Thomas can draw
upon all of Tillich's works in harvesting the
fruit of his extended and detailed study of his
mentor. It is a fresh treatment of the major
themes, which concludes thus: 'What can be
said to be the greatest debt [Tillich] laid upon
those who have made a serious attempt to
understand him is simply that he has taught us
to recognize problems where we thought that
we already had answers' (Tillich, p. 186). That
Tillich's lesson was transmuted into a rigorous
educational ploy by his 'logical critic' is the
testimony of this grateful former student of
John Heywood Thomas.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Subjectivity and Paradox (Oxford, 1957);
repr. as Philosophy of Religion in
Kierkegaard's Writings (Lewiston, New
York, 1995).
Paul Tillich: An Appraisal (1963).
Paul Tillich (1965).
Tillich (2000).
Models in Theology (St Andrews, 2003).
further Reading
Sell, Alan P.P., The Philosophy of Religion
1875-1980 (1988; Bristol, 1998).
Alan P.P. Sell
HICK
HICK, John Harwood (1922-)
John Hick was born in Scarborough, the son of
a solicitor. Initially he planned to follow the
same career and embarked on the study of law
at University College, Hull, but as a result of a
conversion experience decided to train for the
ministry instead. At this point World War II
intervened. Hick was a conscientious objector
to war as such, but recognizing the need to
participate in some way, he served in the
Friends' Ambulance Unit in Egypt, Italy and
Greece. After the war he took a first in philos-
ophy from Edinburgh, followed by a DPhil on
faith and knowledge at Oxford. He then
trained for the Presbyterian ministry at
Westminster College, Cambridge and was
ordained in 1953. For three years he was a
minister in Northumbria before being called
to an assistant professorship in philosophy at
Cornell. In 1959 he became Stuart Professor of
Christian Philosophy at Princeton Theological
Seminary. After six years there, Hick went back
to Cambridge, initially for a sabbatical as bye-
fellow at Gonville and Caius College, and then
as a lecturer in philosophy of religion in the
Theological Faculty at Cambridge. In 1967 John
Hick was appointed to the H.G. Wood Chair of
Theology at the University of Birmingham,
where he stayed for fifteen years. During his last
three years at Birmingham, Hick spent half of
each year as Danforth Professor of Philosophy at
Claremont Graduate School (later Claremont
Graduate University) in California, and this
became a full-time appointment in 1982. Hick
'retired' at the age of seventy in 1992 and moved
back to Birmingham as a very active member of
their Institute for Advanced Research. He has
also served for the past ten years as a visiting pro-
fessor of the University of Wales, Lampeter.
Hick became a Christian through a powerful
evangelical conversion experience as a student at
Hull University. In his autobiography he writes,
for several days I was in a state of intense
mental and emotional turmoil during which
I became aware of a higher truth and greater
412
reality ... claiming my recognition ... the
reality that was pressing in upon me was not
only awesomely demanding but also irre-
sistibly attractive, and I entered with great joy
and excitement into the world of Christian
faith.
(An Autobiography)
Hick never doubted that this experience was a
genuine impact on him of the ultimate divine
reality. But whereas at the time he interpreted
this experience within the framework of a fun-
damentalist faith, he subsequently came to see
that there was no necessary connection between
his experience and the mode in which he first
articulated it. Like Schleiermacher before him,
Hick always believed in the reality and authen-
ticity of the experience itself, but came to dif-
ferentiate between this and the doctrinal frame-
work in which the experience had been
described. As we shall see, that personal expe-
rience and understanding was to be of crucial
importance fifty years later when Hick formu-
lated his Interpretation of Religion (1989).
However, at the time Hick simply took over
the whole evangelical package including belief
in the absolute authority of scripture, and that
such doctrines as the virgin birth, atoning death
and bodily resurrection of Christ and of salva-
tion are wholly dependent on accepting Christ
as one's personal saviour. At least part of the
intellectual excitement of Hick's subsequent
work is that he was for decades wrestling with
the challenge of reconciling the constancy of his
'faith' with the gradual changes he felt required
to make in its intellectual formulation.
Hick's first book, Faith and Knowledge
(1957), was a development from, and a largely
rewritten version of, his DPhil thesis. The
importance of the book lies in the way in which
Hick sought to justify religious believing as one
possible way of interpreting reality. Hick
believed that none of the various arguments
for God's existence could actually succeed in
establishing it. We appear to be living in an
ambiguous universe which can equally validly
be 'experienced-as' a wholly naturalistic order

or 'experienced-as' the product of a divine
creator. The believer is acting wholly rationally
if on the additional basis of religious experi-
encing he or she interprets the world religiously.
But the sceptic who has not had a religious
experience (or has not interpreted such experi-
ences as he or she may have had as being reli-
gious) is equally rational in embracing natu-
ralistic atheism. To many critics of Hick's
position, he gave away far too much. But in the
highly sceptical ethos of mid-twentieth-century
philosophy, Hick's work was very important.
In an intellectual climate where few philoso-
phers took religion at all seriously it was nec-
essary to defend the rationality of religious
believing as a legitimate way of understanding
reality. Hick successfully did this. He argued
that we are living at an 'epistemic distance'
from divine reality. In other words, from the
point of view of our theories of knowledge,
we cannot know for certain that God exists.
There is enough light to enable the believer
rationally to embrace the life of faith, but also
enough ambiguity for the sceptic to be rational
in rejecting it. This is important so that faith can
be a free response.
During the 1950s a major debate took place
between a group of Oxford philosophers and
others which came to be known as the
'theology and falsification debate'. In this
Antony FLEW persistently claimed that philo-
sophically sophisticated believers accepted in
reality the same worldview as their atheist
counterparts. Christians might indeed affirm
that God was our loving 'Heavenly Father' but
while earthly fathers would be driven to dis-
traction by the sufferings of their children, the
Heavenly Father appeared wholly indifferent to
their plight. Flew complained that when
Christian claims were questioned, believers con-
stantly gave ground so that what started out as
'brash confident assertions' gradually 'died the
death of a thousand qualifications'. To meet
this objection, Hick proposed the theory of
'eschatological verification'. There is a real dif-
ference between an atheistic and a Christian
understanding of reality, for one sees our
413
HICK
journey through life as leading nowhere, while
the other sees life as a journey towards an
eternal destiny. These different perspectives
affect our whole way of seeing reality and shape
our attitude to life. The Christian claim will
either be verified, if eternal life is real, or falsi-
fied if it isn't. This theory meets the requirement
of potential verification even though if there
were no life after death no one would be in a
position to verify it. It is therefore a meaning-
ful claim and one which makes a fundamental
difference to the way life is experienced.
However, in the 1950s life after death
seemed a particularly problematical belief. A
dualism of body and mind had become widely
criticized by leading philosophers. At the same
time Christian theologians insisted that resur-
rection of the body rather than immortality of
the soul was the distinctive Christian message.
Yet it seemed virtually impossible to defend
literal belief in bodily resurrection in the light
of what we know about nature. Although he
has always been a dualist himself, Hick thought
that the materialist challenge could be met. He
suggested that if God were to create an exact
replica of us in another space possessing
complete similarity of all bodily features and
full continuity of memory and mental disposi-
tion, then the basic criteria of personal identity
could be met, and the replicated person could
legitimately be said to have survived death.
Subsequently, Hick realized that the theory
does not depend on 'exact' similarity for that
would require life in a physical world identical
to our own which would face innumerable
practical problems. However, if one redefined
the theory in terms of a replica possessing 'suf-
ficient correspondence of characteristics with
our present bodies and sufficient continuity of
memory with our present consciousness' then
the thesis could be sustained. Hick's theory has
been intensely discussed as a possible way in
which the doctrine of the resurrection of the
body might be defended today.
John Hick's intellectual formation and first
academic appointments were very much in the
area of philosophy. He has always been pri-
HICK
marily a philosopher, albeit a philosopher much
concerned at first for the truth-claims of
Christianity, and later for the legitimacy of a
religious response as such. At this point one
should mention the importance of a succession
of textbooks Hick produced. Of these the most
important was his work on Philosophy of
Religion, first published in 1963 and regularly
reprinted and translated over the next forty
years. Since this work alone has sold well over
600,000 copies and has been circulated world-
wide, it is probably through this that Hick's
ideas have been most widely circulated. To this
might be added his collection of Classical and
Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of
Religion, which also remains in print after forty
years, his study of The Arguments for the
Existence of God and his co-edited work on the
ontological argument (The Many-Faced
Argument). When one is assessing the impact of
John Hick's work as a philosopher it is impor-
tant to remember the influence of such works
on generations of students across the globe.
However, his own original work continued
to develop. The writing of Faith and
Knowledge left Hick with two convictions. The
first was that the credibility of Christian believ-
ing depended on being able to offer at least
some response to the problem of suffering. The
second followed from it, for if any credible the-
ological response to suffering requires belief in
a life after death, then one must be able to
show that such a belief could be rationally spelt
out. Hence Hick embarked on two major
projects leading to Evil and the God of Love in
1966 and to Death and Eternal Life ten years
later.
Many people believe that Evil and the God
of Love is John Hick's greatest work. Certainly,
it is hard to imagine any serious discussion of
the problem of evil which did not refer to its
arguments. Hick showed that the classic
Augustinian explanation of evil as the product
of an aboriginal 'fall' was just too much at
variance with what evolutionary biology and
historical knowledge show about our place in
nature. But Hick also demonstrated that from
414
the time of St Irenaeus onwards there had
always been an alternative Christian view in
which humankind was not created perfect but
created in a state from which we could gradu-
ally progress. Hick showed that if this world
had been intended to be a paradise for already
perfected beings then the existence of evil would
certainly demolish Christian belief in a God of
love. However, if this world had been intended
to be a place in which we could develop as free
responsible agents then the existence of evil
becomes comprehensible as an inevitable part
of an environment in which we could exercise
both freedom and responsibility. What Hick's
'theodicy' argues is that a real objective material
world, governed by regular physical law, offers
an environment more suited to the development
of responsible agents than would an environ-
ment in which constant divine intervention
always saved humanity from the consequences
of its folly or from the heartache and challenge
implicit in any finite and physical existence. As
a Vale of soul-making' the hardships and chal-
lenges of life can serve a larger purpose, provided
of course that there is indeed a soul to make and
a larger purpose to serve. Hick's arguments do
not 'solve' the problem of evil, the extent and
nature of which remains a persistent challenge.
But what Hick's work does make clear is that
without belief in a future life there could be no
conceivable answer to the problem of evil. If
death means extinction, then old age, suffering,
disease and death have the last word and thereby
bring to nothing any belief that each person
matters to an all-sovereign God.
So eternal life is essential to the coherence of
Christian theism. But it is also an essential
element in other world religions. Consequently,
Hick determined to adopt a global perspective
and to draw on insights from any source which
might aid our understanding. The result was
that his book Death and Eternal Life is
undoubtedly the fullest and most comprehen-
sive account of ideas about a possible future
life, and draws together ideas from different tra-
ditions to create a plausible hypothesis as to
how things might be.

Hick suggests that at death our consciousness
temporarily enters a mind-dependent world,
somewhat as described in the Tibetan Book of
the Dead or in the writings of Hick's former
supervisor at Oxford, Professor H.H. PRICE.
This world would be a kind of dream environ-
ment built out of our memories and desires
and thereby revealing to us their true nature.
This would provide an opportunity for life-
review, self-revelation and self-assessment. It
would also provide opportunity for 'meeting'
through telepathic contact with deceased rela-
tives and friends, and perhaps an enhanced
awareness of the divine. After a period in this
bardo world, the person would be reborn into
another embodied existence not on earth but in
another space. Modern physics allows for the
possibility of plural spaces, and Hick notes that
in many Hindu and Buddhist texts reincarna-
tion is spoken of as normally happening in
other worlds. Hick believes that a succession of
such lives with intervals for reflection in
between would provide the most suitable
means for the human pilgrimage towards
ultimate reality.
When Hick sketched out this idea of con-
sciousness leaving the body and temporarily
entering a mind-dependent state to enable life-
review and telepathic meeting he was engaged
in pure speculation. He was asking the question
of what an immediate post-mortem existence
might conceivably be like. At the time the book
was published there was no public awareness in
Britain of near-death experiences. R.A.
Moody's Life after Life had been published in
America in 1973, and J.C. Hampe's To Die is
Gain had been published in Germany in 1975,
but their first British editions came out in 1977
and 1979 respectively. What is extraordinary,
however, is that once reports from people resus-
citated from apparent death came into the
public domain they did appear to provide
empirical support for Hick's speculation. Such
people consistently claimed that when their
hearts stopped beating and their lungs stopped
breathing 'they' went out of their bodies. They
described looking down and remembering the
415
HICK
resuscitation procedures and they talked of life-
review, telepathic meetings and enhanced reli-
gious awareness. Hence what Hick put forward
as pure theory now appears to have some
empirical justification. It will be fascinating to
see whether or not further research strengthens
or weakens this possibility!
In writing Death and Eternal Life Hick con-
sciously drew on a global religious perspective.
This reflects a change which had come over his
religious understanding since moving to
Birmingham in 1967. Before that he had lived
in an almost entirely Christian or post-Christian
environment. But on coming to Birmingham he
was asked to chair a group established to
develop a multi-religious syllabus for religious
education in Birmingham's schools. His sense
of social justice also led him to chair an inter-
faith group fighting against racial prejudice
called 'All Faiths for One Race'.
In these various capacities he came into close
working relationships with leaders of the
Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and Jewish communities,
and he subsequently received invitations to
attend worship. Attending worship in mosque,
gurdwara, synagogue or temple impressed on
Hick a sense that phenomenologically the same
kind of activity was taking place as happens in
Christian churches. In each place of worship
human beings were offering themselves up in
dedication and praise to a personal God,
addressed and reverenced as creator and lord.
He noticed that themes in hymns and prayers
continually overlapped with those of Christian
worship so that if one changed the names one
would often not be able to identify from which
religion the prayer came. Hick could not square
his previous conviction that God can only be
known through Christ with the profound com-
mitment to God he saw in the people he was
now working among. His move away from
Christian exclusivism was not therefore ini-
tially derived from new theological arguments
but from new life experiences. Naturally,
however, such experience swiftly affected his
theological understanding, particularly in
relation to the person of Christ.
HICK
For many years Hick had believed that com-
mitment to Christ was the only way to salvation,
but he had not dwelt on the negative implications
of this belief, namely that those who do not
know Christ are not saved, but presumably
damned. However, once he did reflect on this a
paradox of enormous proportions opened up.
For it would make a complete mockery of the
claim that God is love if in fact he had really so
ordered reality that the vast majority of humanity
were doomed to perdition. Salvation in this
ultimate sense could not therefore depend on
Christ alone. Hick felt that the paths scholars
such as Karl Rahner had taken to avoid this
problem by including everyone within
Christianity were dishonest to the integrity of
both Christianity and of other religions. People
of other faiths were not 'anonymous Christians'.
They did not have 'implicit faith' in Christ, nor
was the Christ of the Christian story actually at
work within other religious traditions. Hick also
did not believe that Jesus's death had brought
about a change in 'the steadfast love' of God
witnessed to by the Hebrew Bible. He therefore
could not accept Karl Earth's idea of an 'all-
inclusive election' brought about by Christ's
death, nor join in John-Paul ITs vision that 'every
human being without any exception whatever
has been redeemed by Christ'. Hick thought that
to make such claims for Christ and to stress his
uniqueness as God incarnate put Christianity
too far apart from other religions, and implied an
absoluteness to Christian truth which inevitably
diminished the claims of all other religions.
Hence Hick came to a re-evaluation of
Christian claims. At first he spoke of The Myth
of God Incarnate (1977). Later and more help-
fully he talked of The Metaphor of God
Incarnate (1993). He adopted these views not
only because of his awareness of the non-
Christian religions, but also because he felt that
a literal doctrine of the incarnation was both
internally incoherent and also false to the New
Testament evidence. He noted that although
Christian orthodoxy had affirmed the doctrine of
the incarnation, every attempt to 'explain' in
what sense Jesus was simultaneously divine and
416
human had been declared heretical. This is also
true today. No modern account of how the incar-
nation should be understood has ever won
general acceptance. Hick concluded that the
reason this had happened was because the
doctrine of the incarnation was not a preposi-
tional statement awaiting clarification, but a
metaphor inviting a response. Hick noted also
that virtually all New Testament scholars reject
the authenticity of the 'I am' sayings of the gospel
and assume that the historical Jesus had no
awareness of being divine. If this is so, then Hick
argued that Christianity should cease to make
ontological claims about Jesus, but instead
should accept that Jesus embodied God's love to
us in the same true, but metaphorical, sense as,
for example, Churchill embodied the British will
to resist the Nazis.
Hick believed that through seeing the incar-
nation of Christ as a myth or metaphor
Christians become more able to see God at work
in other lives and in other religious traditions.
This became part of his most controversial
hypothesis, religious pluralism. At first, on the
basis of his Birmingham experience, Hick
claimed that God has many names. But after
meeting Advaitic Hinduism in India and
Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Japan he felt the
word 'God' was too closely identified with
Christianity, so he spoke of The Real' instead.
This was developed initially in Problems of
Religious Pluralism but was then systematically
worked out in his Gifford Lectures An
Interpretation of Religion.
The essence of Hick's philosophy of religious
pluralism is that all religions are human responses
to a single transcendent Reality. He was con-
vinced that this is really real. Hick believed that
it would be fatal to religion for a non-realist
understanding to become normative. However,
while the religious experience of humanity may
enable believers to affirm the existence of tran-
scendent Reality, they cannot with the same cer-
tainty endorse what particular traditions say con-
cerning it. This is because what each tradition
affirms is always bound up with its overall world-
view and understanding. Hence each religion

endorses a 'persona' or 'impersona' of the Real.
Within each tradition this is the lens through
which The Real' may be seen. Dialogue may
help bring people together and philosophy of
religion may clarify understanding. But Hick
believed that we are simply not in a position to
argue that any one religious tradition should be
normative for all. What can be said is that each
of the great traditions seems capable of leading
to human fulfilment and of producing a sanctity
in which selfishness is overcome, and ultimate
reality can be encountered and experienced.
The importance of John Hick is that in the
second half of the twentieth century his writings
shaped the debates on some of the most vital
questions in philosophy of religion, Christian
theology and the study of religions. This does not
mean that his writings gained general assent, for
they generated at least as much opposition as
agreement. Nevertheless, he repeatedly set the
agenda for philosophy of religion in his time.
One reason for this is that Hick focused on really
important questions: the challenge to faith posed
by the theology and falsification debate of the
early 1950s, the problem of how one can
continue to justify belief in God in the face of the
horrendous evils of the twentieth century, the
credibility of believing in a life after death, and the
challenge to Christian theology of taking seri-
ously the religious experiences of people of other
faiths. To each of these four questions Hick
responded by producing a major scholarly
monograph providing the fullest survey of the
debate and making an original contribution to it.
These were supported by shorter secondary
works to popularize his conclusions. He also
wrote student textbooks and encyclopedia
entries. Hick is an extremely clear writer whose
argument can readily be followed. On top of all
this, Hick was a person for whom these debates
were existentially real, and although there is con-
siderable consistency in his writings he did not
hesitate to change his position in the light of
fresh evidence and fresh experience.
The importance of Hick's early writings has
been widely recognized. His concepts of 'epis-
temic distance' and 'experiencing-as' are gener-
417
HICK
ally seen as helpful additions to philosophical
thought while his theodicy is probably the most
widely discussed of all attempted 'solutions' to
the problem of evil. Hick's more speculative
investigations into 'eternal life' have been less
influential and the 'replica theory' is more often
criticized than affirmed. Hick's reinterpretation
of the doctrine of the incarnation has been largely
rejected by the churches. In part, this rejection
was based on a misunderstanding of Hick's
position. He did not 'deny' the incarnation but
instead suggested that it be understood as a
metaphorical rather than a prepositional claim.
Likewise Hick's theory of religious pluralism has
been more condemned than accepted by faith
communities. The theory is persistently carica-
tured as affirming that all religions are the same,
instead of being seen as an attempt to account for
their differences while at the same time affirming
that each of them is derived from human
responses to the one divine Reality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Faith and Knowledge (1957; 1966).
Evil and the God of Love (1966; 1977).
Death and Eternal Life (1976).
An Interpretation of Religion (1989).
Other Relevant Works
Philosophy of Religion (1963).
(Ed.), The Myth of God Incarnate (1977).
The Metaphor of God Incarnate (1993).
The fifth Dimension (1999).
An Autobiography (2002).
Further Reading
Badham, Paul, A John Hick Reader (1990).
Cheetham, David, John Hick: A Critical
Introduction and Reflection (2003).
Hewitt, Harold, Problems in the Philosophy
of Religion: Critical Studies in the Work of
John Hick (1991).
Sharma, Arvind, God, Truth and Reality:
Essays in Honour of John Hick (1993).
Paul Badham
HICKS
HICKS, George Dawes (1862-1941)
George Dawes Hicks was born in Shrewsbury
on 14 September 1862 and died in Cambridge
on 16 February 1941. He was educated at the
Royal Grammar School, Guildford (1876-80),
after which he went to study law in his father's
legal practice. However, his aim was to go to
university with a view to entering the Unitarian
ministry. From 1884 to 1888 Hicks studied
philosophy under Robert Adamson, who was
a profound influence on him, at Owens College
Manchester, graduating with first class
honours. He proceeded to Manchester College,
located in London and then Oxford, to study
for the ministry and to develop his philosoph-
ical studies under James Martineau and James
Drummond. In 1891 he went to Leipzig for
four,years, studying under Wundt, Heinze and
Volkelt. He obtained his PhD, written in
German, in 1896 on Kantian philosophy. In
1897 he became minister of Unity Unitarian
Church, Islington.
In 1903 he resigned this charge; in the fol-
lowing year he was made Litt D by Victoria
University, Manchester and was appointed
Professor of Moral Philosophy at University
College London, a post he held until 1928. He
lived in Cambridge from 1903 until his death.
Hicks was examiner in philosophy at various
periods to the universities of London,
Cambridge (where he also regularly lectured),
Glasgow, Aberdeen and Bristol. He was a
President of the Aristotelian Society and a
fellow of the British Academy.
From 1903 he devoted his life almost exclu-
sively to philosophy. A shy, sensitive and lonely
man, he was devastated by the death of his
first wife in 1908 and his second wife in 1935;
the loss deepened his intense involvement in
philosophy. Hicks maintained a strong reli-
gious commitment all his life, and remained,
unlike his close friend James WARD, who had
served briefly as a Congregational minister, on
the roll of Unitarian ministers until his death.
From his earliest years Hicks also retained a
deep interest in the 'metaphysical' issues raised
418
by scientific development. His only relaxation
was hill and mountain climbing, an activity he
pursued until a late age. Hicks's life until his last
years appears to have been one of constant
daily commuting between universities.
Hicks's early thought was based on idealism,
reached after detailed study of Kant.
In my undergraduate days I worked under
the guidance of Robert Adamson ... and by
the time I had taken my degree he had con-
vinced me that 'if we are to connect our
knowledge into coherency and system, and
to understand, so far as it may be given to us,
the significance of the universe in which we
find ourselves, we must resume the problem
as it came from the hands of Kant'.
('From Idealism to Realism', p. 109)
His prolonged detailed study, combined with
an excellent knowledge of German, enabled
Hicks to become one of the foremost com-
mentators on Kantian philosophy of his time.
It prompted him to become critical of what he
saw as the principle of self-consciousness within
Kant's works. This led Hicks to centre his
philosophical study on episternology and cog-
nition. He later claimed he had become a neo-
Kantian, although in the period up to about
1905 his sympathies were more with an
idealism of the Hegelian variety.
In the following years he became increas-
ingly convinced that realism was more philo-
sophically defensible than idealism. This arose
from the personal influence of James Ward,
F.H. BRADLEY'S thought on the distinction
between essence and existence, G.E. MOORE'S
refutation of idealism, and the whole trend of
Cambridge philosophical thinking of the period
which was based a realist theory of knowledge.
Hicks's paper to the Aristotelian Society in
1917, The Basis of Critical Realism, signalled
his change of view. In essence, the change con-
sisted of displacing self-consciousness, the prin-
ciple assumed by Kant to be the precondition
for knowledge, from the position it holds in
every system of idealism.

Hence he adopted a form of realism, believ-
ing that 'real things may be and are directly
received without owing either their being or
their nature to the circumstances of such per-
ception' ('From Idealism to Realism', p. 118).
'One way of expressing the central position of
(my) theory of knowledge would be to say that
cognition is, in all its various forms, essentially
one piece, essentially of one character, that even
the simplest and most rudimentary modes of
cognitive activity are already in essence acts of
judgment' (ibid., p. 126). He developed his def-
inition of critical realism, a term which Hicks
claimed he was the first to use, the adjective
'critical' being used in a Kantian sense. This
became the central pivot of his thinking, set out
in 1938 in Critical Realism: Studies in the
Philosophy of Mind and Nature, which brought
together his writings from 1916 to 1934. The
studies contained in this book represent his chief
contribution to philosophical thought.
Hicks developed the realist theory of knowl-
edge he had adopted to distinguish between
the act of knowing and the object known, from
which came the further distinction between the
'apprehended content' and the 'content of the
object'. We never take in the object's content in
its entirety but only the apprehended content
which is a selection. It cannot be assumed that
the constituent qualities of the object remain the
same when they become the apprehended
content. This means that the real thing may
appear different from what it really is. 'When
I am apprehending blue, I am not apprehend-
ing my awareness of blue, but the blue' (quoted
in de Burgh, p. 14). Hicks argued that when
seeing a star the apprehended content is not
dated from when the light rays first arose. The
long time lapse is only needed for the light to
reach our eye so that we may see the star at the
present time as it is now. He saw mental
processes in one continuum from the most
primitive to the most advanced. The process
may develop from the simplest, but judgement
and evaluation is inherent in all sense percep-
tion; the mind discriminates. In other words,
the ideas represented in the judgement are sub-
419
HICKS
stantial intermediaries in cognition.
He constantly inveighed against the habit of
treating the knowing subject as an object
among other objects; he insisted upon a
threefold distinction between the activity of
apprehension, the content apprehended, and
the apprehended object. He strove again and
again to make clear that by the content
apprehended we were not to suppose he
meant any tertium quid (third thing) standing
between the mind and its object.
(Stebbing, p. 333)
Hicks published little, except in the Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, until after he retired.
His work on Berkeley (1932) was widely
admired and was seen by some as a classic of
its kind. He wrote as an independent-minded
philosopher for fellow philosophers, and his
books could not be considered popular in any
sense. Most of his time was taken up in lectur-
ing, reading and reviewing. Hicks was in essence
a scholar and commentator, not a systematic
thinker, and left no system of philosophy behind
him. 'But he threw much light - a dry light as
befits the philosopher - on many of the most
important problems of modern thought. He
came, in his later years, to be recognised as one
of the most learned and judicious thinkers of his
generation' (de Burgh, p. 29).
His lecturing schedule was extensive and bur-
densome. He believed an undergraduate course
should awaken the mind to what has gone on
before, as without knowledge of past philoso-
phy, the student will be prey to every fashion-
able argument without the power to distin-
guish between the good and defective.
Adopting a Germanic lecturing arrangement,
he delivered fifteen lectures a week.
Here his strength and weakness as a teacher
was apparent. For, not only was the field
assigned a vast one, but the rate at which he
traversed it was so slow as to multiply inor-
dinately the number of lectures required to
cover it. For Hicks invariably dictated his
HICKS
matter ... The slowness of advance necessi-
tated by dictating also involved him in pro-
viding further, supplementary courses in
some subjects, in which he would amplify
details ... Each such course singly was doubt-
less most useful, but all collectively became
a crushing load.
(Keeling, p. 307)
From its inception in 1902 Hicks was involved
in the Hibbert Journal as its joint editor with
L.P. JACKS, with responsibility for reviews. Until
his death he contributed the regular 'Survey of
Philosophical Literature', which constituted a
comprehensive listing of the latest philosophy
over nearly forty years. Hicks's religion was
not divorced from his philosophy, and in his
mind his theory of knowledge was not divorced
from metaphysics. 'Although he ever saw
clearly that the spiritual value of philosophical
studies far outweighed their academic impor-
tance, he denied, however, that philosophy
could legitimately serve as a substitute for
religion or for religious faith' (Keeling, p. 307).
It follows from this that his second main
interest was the philosophy of religion. 'God is
a mind, the supreme Mind, a spiritual or self
conscious Being, the supreme spiritual Being -
that is the cardinal affirmation of religion'
(Philosophical bases of Theism, pp. 142-3).
He was almost as knowledgeable in theology
and its philosophy as he was in mainstream phi-
losophy. For the last thirty years of his life he
gave an annual address at the Presbyterian
College, Carmarthen, an academy for dissent-
ing ministers mainly consisting of Unitarians. Its
Principal was W.J. Evans, an old friend. For
many years, in conjunction with Evans, Hicks
was largely responsible for the syllabus of
studies adopted by the University of Wales for
degrees in divinity.
These Carmarthen addresses were primarily
directed at those wishing to enter the ministry
and were published as Ways towards the
Spiritual Life in 1928. Religion he saw as a
form of knowledge and as the three compo-
nents of cognition, will and feeling were part of
420
the mature mind, the philosophical theory of
religion he believed to be part of the religious
life. This was set out in his Hibbert Lectures,
The Philosophical bases of Theism, delivered in
Manchester in 1931. Though not a supporter
of revealed religion if more than human
rational intelligence was needed, he argued
against mysticism having any special place in
religion. What the mystic claims is not evidence,
and their experience witnesses only to subjec-
tive certainty, not objective certainty. Hicks
throughout his work attacked any example of
what he saw as subjectivism ~ 'whoever refuses
to accept an external warrant, such as an infal-
lible church or divinely inspired scriptures, has
no alternative but to turn to the method of free
rational enquiry, which in its more developed
stage is the method of philosophy'
(Philosophical bases of Theism, p. 10). Hicks's
writings on religion are rigorously bounded by
his views on epistemology and he maintains
throughout the principles he reached in his
theory of knowledge.
Perhaps his personal and philosophical
position is best summed in a quotation from
one of his Carmarthen Lectures, 'The
Vocations of the Scholar':
Let us not offer to those who are depending
on us for spiritual food that which has cost
us nothing ... Wisdom is the outcome only of
calm thought and earnest reflection; the
streets are beset with bustle and hurry and
turmoil. Withdraw, then, from them, not
intermittently but frequently and regularly,
into the quietude which is the absolute req-
uisite of the thinker. And, while thus for
yourselves patiently seeking truth, keep in
close touch with the wisdom and reverence
of the human centuries; catch the accents of
those who in reason and love have stood
nearer to the heart of things than you alone
can do ... and you will not: fail, once again,
to dispel the popular delusion that a scholar
among men cannot be a prophet of the living
God.
(Ways Towards the Spiritual Life, p. 32)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ways Towards the Spiritual Life (1928).
Berkeley (1932).
The Philosophical Bases of Theism [Hibbert
Lectures, 1931] (1937).
'From Idealism to Realism', in J.H. Muirhead
(ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy:
Personal Statements, 2nd ser. (1925), pp.
109-28.
Critical Realis: Studies in the Philosophy of
Mind and Nature (1938).
Further Reading
Anon., The Times, 18 February 1941, p. 7d.
de Burgh, W.G., 'George Dawes Hicks',
Proceedings of the British Academy, vol.
27 (1942), pp. 1-29.
Drummond, W.H., 'George Dawes Hicks',
Hibbert Journal, vol. 39 (April 1941), pp.
333-6.
Keeling, S.V., George Dawes Hicks, Mind,
vol. 100, no. 1999 (July 1941), pp.
306-309.
Stebbing, L. Susan, 'G.D. Hicks', Philosophy,
vol. 63 (July 1941), p. 333.
Alan Ruston
HINTON, John Michael (1923-2000)
J.M. Hinton was born in Hong Kong on 6 July
1923 and died in Oxford on 3 February 2000.
He was educated at Gordonstoun and the
University of St Andrews. He was appointed
assistant in logic and metaphysics at St Andrews
in 1950 and lecturer in philosophy at the
Victoria University of Wellington in 1953. In
1958 he moved to Worcester College, Oxford,
where he was first lecturer (until 1960) and then
tutorial fellow (until 1986). After his retirement
he was made an emeritus fellow of the college.
Like WITTGENSTEIN and RYLE, Hinton was
interested in questions about logic and how
421
HINTON
they might bear on our concepts about the
mind. He published numerous papers on logic
and language, but his most important work was
in the philosophy of mind. His only book,
Experiences: An Inquiry into Some Ambiguities,
was a logico-linguistic treatment of our concep-
tions of sense-experience, in particular, of visual
experience. It drew on three earlier publications:
'Visual Experiences', 'Experiences' and 'On Not
Having What You Are Given'.
In 'Visual Experiences' Hinton sought to
throw light on the ambiguities and confusions
he believed were inherent in the empiricist con-
ception of experience as something 'inner' by
contrasting it with the everyday conception of
experience as 'an event of which one is the
subject'. He did this by means of what he calls
a 'perception-illusion disjunction'. First, Hinton
gives us two statements descriptive of visual
experience:
(A) I see a flash of light: actual light.
(B) I have an illusion of a flash of light.
He then considers two propositions that could
be analysed out of these statements:
(AvB) Either I see a flash of light, or I have an
illusion of a flash of light.
Such a proposition, he says, asserts nothing
definite as to 'What is happening?'.
(Q) I psi, e.g. I see a flash, I have a visual
experience of a flash.
Where 'I psi' means I do assert something as a
definite answer to 'What is happening?' and
which is a logically sufficient condition for my
visual experience.
Hinton notes that empiricism, at least in
many of its forms, depends on (Q) being a
viable analysis of (A) and (B). However, after
arguing that (Q) cannot be shown to differ sig-
nificantly from (AvB), that (Q) does not provide
a definite answer to 'What is happening?' as
opposed to the non-committal answer of (AvB),
HINTON
he concludes that (Q) is not a viable analysis.
Hinton says that he does 'not want to deny
that seeing is, and involves, a visual experi-
ence. Seeing something is an experience, an
event of which one is the subject ...'
(Experiences, p. 226). It is rather that if (Q)
cannot be inferred from our visual experiences
then philosophical positions, such as empiri-
cism, which depend on it, remain unfounded.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Visual Experiences', Mind, vol. 76 (1967),
pp. 217-27.
'Experiences', Philosophical Quarterly, vol.
17 (1967), pp. 1-13.
'On Not Having What You Are Given',
Inquiry, vol. 10 (1967), pp. 313-16.
Experiences: An Inquiry into Some
Ambiguities (Oxford, 1973).
'Reply to I.C. Hinckfuss', Mind, vol. 82
(1973), pp. 278-9.
Other Relevant Works
'Seeing and Causes', Philosophy, vol. 41
(1966), pp. 348-55.
'Illusion and Identity', Analysis, vol. 27
(1967), pp. 65-76.
'Perception and Identification', Philosophical
Review, vol. 76 (1967), pp. 421-35.
Thenomenological Specimenism', Analysis,
vol. 40 (1980), pp. 37-41.
'Sense-Experience Revisited', Philosophical
Investigations, vol. 19 (1996), pp. 211-36.
Further Reading
Hinckfuss, I.C, 'J.M. Hinton on Visual
Experiences', Mind, vol. 79 (1970), pp.
278-80.
Pickering, F.R., 'A Refutation of an
Objection to the Causal Theory of
Perception', Analysis, vol. 34 (1974), pp.
129-32.
N. J. Fox
422
HIRST, Paul Heywood (1927-)
Paul Heywood Hirst was bom in Huddersfield.
He studied at Huddersfield College and then at
Trinity College, Cambridge, taking the
Mathematics Tripos in 1952. After seven years
as a teacher of mathematics, he was appointed
to the staff of the Institute of Education in 1959
and as Professor of Education at King's College
London in 1965. He took up the Chair of
Education at Cambridge in 1971, retiring in
1988. Since then he has been Emeritus
Professor of Education at Cambridge and has
held various visiting professorial appointments.
Hirst's philosophical work has largely been in
philosophy of education, an area in which he
has had a significant influence, particularly as
a theorist of liberal education, as an analyst of
epistemological distinctions within the cur-
riculum and as a commentator on the nature of
teaching.
Hirst's work enjoys an international reputa-
tion in the philosophy of education, and stands
in a long tradition of explanation and justifi-
cation of the nature of liberal education.
However, he has also developed influential
theses concerning the contextual nature of rea-
soning and the importance of social practices to
the understanding of education which are both
original and which bear affinities with the work
of MAClNTYRE, TOULMIN and OAKESHOTT.
Hirst's philosophical interests were first devel-
oped by coming into contact with philosophi-
cal debates at Oxford concerning particular
subjects such as mathematics, history and
theology. These interests were applied to a
concern that he had already developed as a
teacher educator for the justification of the
practice of teaching. This concern eventually
resulted in the work on the epistemology of
the curriculum for which he is best known.
Hirst is usually recognized most readily for
the 'forms of knowledge' thesis which had great
influence both within the philosophy of edu-
cation and, arguably, in some policy-making
quarters in the 1970s and 1980s. In a series of
papers he argued that in the area of proposi-

tional knowledge there were seven logically
distinct forms, acquaintance with each of which
was a necessary condition for the possession of
a liberal education. These forms were: religious
knowledge, literature and the fine arts, history,
human sciences, physical sciences, mathematics
and philosophy. The forms of knowledge are
distinguished, in turn, by the following features:
Central concepts: for example, gravity, accel-
eration, hydrogen, photosynthesis for the
physical sciences, God, sin and predestination
for religion.
Internal logical structure: for example,
axiomatic for mathematics, non-axiomatic
for history.
Distinctive truth tests: for example, matching
sense-data for physical sciences, validity of
inference for mathematics.
Mode of testability against experience: for
example, experimentation for the physical
sciences, calculation for mathematics.
The forms of knowledge were not conceived of
as rigid and impermeable structures, but as
hermeneutic principles for gaining a perspicu-
ous overview of prepositional knowledge. As
such, they were always open to debate and
commentary, and Hirst was ready to revise and
adapt his scheme in the light of both academic
debate and practical considerations. Thus he
later revised his list of forms of knowledge,
merging history and the human sciences and
adding moral knowledge. An interesting feature
of his approach to prepositional knowledge is
its multidimensionality. Thus we find logical
characteristics such a prioricity and a posteri-
oricity combined with conceptual ones such as
the centrality of certain concepts for particular
forms of knowledge. Forms of verification are
also specified, as are different modes of testa-
bility. In some ways then, Hirst's epistemolog-
ical classification encompasses both traditional
characterizations of prepositional knowledge in
terms of logical form, conceptual structure and
truth tests, and the practical elements of such
knowledge, notably the activities involved in
423
HIRST
discovery and verification. It could be argued,
then, that the forms of knowledge are charac-
terized by the distinctive nature of human prac-
tices in gaining and assessing such knowledge,
as well as by the formal descriptive categories
that distinguish different branches of preposi-
tional knowledge. Hirst did not, however, in his
earlier work, argue either that different kinds of
practical knowledge constituted forms of
knowledge, or that practical knowledge could
be informed by theoretical or prepositional
knowledge.
The educational relevance of this thesis was
that the forms of knowledge, descriptive as
they are of the range of rational activities of the
mind, characterize what it is to have a rational
mind. Insofar as they do this, a degree of
mastery of each of the forms of knowledge is
essential for a liberal education in the tradi-
tional sense, that is as a formation of a rational
mind. This does not mean that Hirst excluded
non-propositional knowledge from the cur-
riculum, merely that such types of knowledge
did not contribute to the liberal curriculum.
For example, both vocational education and
religious indoctrination or catechistic were rec-
ognized as forms of education, albeit not liberal
education. He maintained that the relationship
between acquaintance and prepositional
knowledge was unproblematic, that sense-data,
for example can readily serve as a source of dis-
cursive belief. He also held the thesis that lin-
guistic meaning entails that propositions
employed must be capable of being true or
false. A concern with truth was, therefore,
essential to the cultivation of a rational mind.
The forms of knowledge thesis was first set
out in the mid 1960s and attracted a great deal
of critical attention within the philosophy of
education. Criticism took a number of
approaches. First, it was argued that some of
the forms were not properly characterizable as
prepositional knowledge - this criticism was
applied to the forms of religious, moral and aes-
thetic knowledge in particular. In these cases,
their discursive element was better described by
some commentators as expressive, evaluative or
HIRST
hortatory, rather than propositional. A second
line of criticism focused on the logical structure
of the different forms, arguing that the criteria
develop too many distinct categories of propo-
sition. A third line of criticism argued that
knowledge cannot be partitioned into mutually
exclusive sets as Hirst's theory seems to imply.
However, Hirst's thesis has had strong defend-
ers over the years. For example, a defence of
Hirst can be found in MacKenzie (1998),
decades after the original formulation of his
views. Mackenzie argues that the forms of
knowledge can be seen as practices, or distinct
forms of discussion, each of which possesses
distinctive logical features. He thus argues that
appropriate permutations of four logical criteria
can be used to characterize all forms of knowl-
edge. Whether or not these criteria hold for
any particular set of propositions will help to
determine to which form of knowledge they
belong. These are: (a) bipolarity, (b) validity of
first-order classical logic, (c) referential trans-
parency, and (d) non-disputability by observa-
tion. Thus, a form of knowledge that satisfies
all four criteria is mathematics. By dropping or
weakening one or more of the conditions, one
can, argues MacKenzie, derive the other six.
Even moral, aesthetic and literary knowledge
can be incorporated by weakening (a) bipolar-
ity, to the requirement that the conclusion of an
argument could be a command rather than a
proposition. MacKenzie's arguments count
against the first two criticisms and the third
can be dealt with by showing that Hirst's thesis
does not require exclusive partitioning. Thus
there is nothing in Hirst's theory that implies
exclusive partitioning: what the theory sets out
to do can be described as a broad mapping of
the domain of propositional knowledge
together with variation in its characteristics
across different areas of rational human
concern. Hirst has never argued, nor does the
theory as set out above imply, that the mapping
entails a firm, unambiguous and non-revisable
classification for each item of knowledge. In
fact, Hirst's reluctance to be draw into rigid
classificatory schemes is, arguably, a strength of
424
his work and can also be seen in his later work
on rational practices.
A question raised by Hirst's thesis, which
arguably has received less attention than it
deserves, is whether or not it blocks attempts to
develop a context-free model of critical rea-
soning which can be applied irrespective of
subject-matter. Hirst appears to have thought
that this project was chimerical and there are
aspects of his work that have affinities with
the arguments of Toulmin :in 'The Uses of
Argument' (1958), which strongly defended
the position of the context and subject-bound
nature of informal reasoning. Toulmin, like
Hirst, emphasized the centrality of particular
subject-specific concepts and also laid emphasis
on the distinctiveness of truth tests in different
disciplines. MacKenzie's reappraisal of Hirst's
thesis, on the other hand, situates it in a frame-
work of classical logic, although it does not
exclude the use of non-classical forms of
argument. However, it does leave open the
extent to which discussion is conducted in
argument forms other than those of classical
logic.
Hirst originally designated religious knowl-
edge as a distinct form of knowledge. He was
criticized for this by, among others, D.Z.
PHILLIPS. Phillips argued that religious education
should involve allowing pupils to attain a sen-
sitive appreciation of religious beliefs, rather
than their being brought to believe a set of
truths. Hirst's views on religion as a form of
knowledge did undergo some evolution. While
he did not give up the idea that religion was, at
least potentially, a form of knowledge, he came
to think that this was no longer certain and
would depend on further work in theology.
Given this continuing uncertainty, he became
reluctant to endorse the confessional teaching
of religion in the state school system and instead
endorsed the comparative study of religious
beliefs in schools, a position that is now largely
the orthodoxy amongst religious education spe-
cialists. He did not exclude catechistic teaching
from education, only from liberal education. As
well as being influential within the philosophy

of education, the influence of the forms of
knowledge thesis also extended into the policy-
making world through his work with Her
Majesty's Inspectorate of Schools, whose pub-
lications on the curriculum, particularly in the
1980s, bear the mark of Hirst's thinking about
the curriculum.
By the end of the 1980s Hirst had come to
entertain considerable doubts about the forms
of knowledge thesis. In particular he was no
longer satisfied with the educational emphasis
that it seemed to place on propositional knowl-
edge. In the article entitled 'Education,
Knowledge and Practices' (1993) he took the
view that, for many, education was a form of
introduction to rational practices and that,
insofar as it was, it should be seen as practical
rather than propositional in character.
Rejecting the priority of propositional knowl-
edge, he argued that initiation into rational
practices and development of the ability to
reflect critically on those practices was crucial
to education, and that concern with proposi-
tional knowledge was secondary, although
important for a small number of academically
gifted pupils. Since that paper he has continued
to defend and to develop this position, citing the
influence of Charles TAYLOR, Maclntyre,
Aristotle and WITTGENSTEIN, among others, in
developing his concept of a practice. His later phi-
losophy of education has, therefore, a much
broader scope than his earlier work, being now
primarily concerned with education in a full sense
rather than merely academic liberal education.
Hirst's revised thesis appears to reject key
elements of his earlier work on the epistemol-
ogy of the curriculum, but there are also sig-
nificant continuities. The earlier thesis empha-
sized modes of verifiability and distinctive truth
tests, which are central to particular forms of
knowledge. Although it did put the major
emphasis on propositional knowledge, Hirst's
conception of a form of knowledge had prac-
tical elements from the outset, so the later thesis
represents, to some extent, a revision of prior-
ities rather than a complete reversal of his
earlier thinking. Thus, while he has not rejected
425
HIRST
his earlier work on the requirements of liberal
education, he does not think that such an edu-
cation is necessary for the cultivation of a
rational mind, although liberal education con-
tinues to be one way of achieving such an end.
Those practices that are educationally signifi-
cant are rational practices, and initiation into
them involves mastery of their internal stan-
dards of critique. Unlike Maclntyre, who is
undoubtedly an influence on this later work,
Hirst is reluctant to endorse a specific theory of
practices. He is not particularly concerned with
the boundaries between different practices, nor
with the internal goods peculiar to each, and he
is prepared to accept that the identification of
practices and the distinction between different
practices is to some extent both underdeter-
mined and purpose-relative.
What the current account of practices does
not fully clarify, and which may be a point of
further work in the philosophy of education, is
the way in which propositions, both empirical
and practical, which are generated through
non-applied investigations, then come to
inform the practice itself. Even if the rational-
ity of certain practices has to be characterized
to some extent by the propositional knowledge
that is used within them, it does not follow
that all practices require propositional knowl-
edge generated by other practices in order to
sustain themselves. Although the argument has
to proceed case by case, Hirst's revised theory
can allow both that some practices may evolve
by generating propositional knowledge which
is then used to inform them and that some
practices may import propositional knowledge
generated in other ones. It is arguable therefore
that, just as Hirst's earlier work offered a way
of describing and analysing the traditional
liberal curriculum, his later work on practices
can be used to perform a similar job on the
broader educational curriculum, which also
encompasses the traditional liberal one.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(with R.S. Peters), The Logic of Education
(1970).
HIRST
Knowledge and the Curriculum (1974).
Moral Education in a Secular Society (1974).
'Education, Knowledge and Practices', in R.
Barrow and P. White (eds), Beyond Liberal
Education (1993).
Further Reading
MacKenzie, J., 'Forms of Knowledge and
Forms of Discussion', Educational
Philosophy and Theory, vol. 29 (1998), pp.
27-49.
Christopher Andrew Winch
HIRST, Rodney Julian (1920-99)
Rodney Julian Hirst was born in Sheffield on 28
July 1920 and died on 14 January 1999. He
was educated at Leeds Grammar School and at
Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated
MA in 1948. After a year as a lecturer in logic
and metaphysics at St Andrews he moved to
Glasgow University, where he spent the rest of
his teaching career, as lecturer in logic (1949-59),
senior lecturer (1959-61) and Professor of Logic
(1961-81). He was Dean of the Faculty of Arts
from 1971 to 1973 and Vice-Principal from
1976 to 1979.
Hirst was primarily a philosopher of percep-
tion. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was
especially cognizant of the relevant physiology
and psychology. In his 'Perception, Science, and
Common Sense' (1951) he argued for the admis-
sibility - contra philosophers like H.H. PRICE -
of scientific evidence to philosophical studies of
perception. This theme continues in his later
work: he incorporates physiological research in
his positive account of perception in The
Problems of Perception (1959), and includes, in
addition to philosophers, psychologists and neu-
rophysiologists in his collection, Perception and
the External World (1965). Finally, in collabo-
ration with an anatomist and a psychologist,
426
Hirst published Human Senses and Perception
(1964), an interdisciplinary address of the issues
of sense perception. Given the continued popu-
larity of behaviourism and its many anti-scien-
tific tenets, Hirst's approach is especially note-
worthy for his time.
Hirst argued for the plausibility of certain
common sense assumptions: that the objects of
perception are publicly accessible and immedi-
ately perceived, and that phenomenological expe-
rience is not necessarily a perfect or true repre-
sentation of the objects perceived. He maintained
that in spite of attacks launched by sense-datum
theorists, these assumptions can be defended,
and with them a kind of naive realism. In con-
structing his theory, Hirst gives an exception-
ally lucid and careful analysis of the sense-datum
theory. His discussion of the arguments from
the relativity of perception, illusion and halluci-
nation are exceptional resources for any student
of perception ('Perception, Science, and Common
Sense'; Problems of Perception; Perception and
the External World). His criticisms of these argu-
ments and the theoretical concepts they motivate,
made on largely common sense grounds, remain
among the ones most often proffered today.
Regarding the argument from illusion, for
example, Hirst argues that to infer from an
object's varying appearances that there is some
entity in addition to the object is to reify the
look of an object. Instead, we should simply say
that an object may have several appearances.
Hirst also criticizes the concept or term 'sense-
data', concluding ultimately that it is unhelpful
as to the philosophical issues at hand. Most
notably, he questions what he calls the immedi-
acy assumption, which holds that we have a
kind of infallible access to sense-data. This charge
adds purchase to a commonly pressed ontolog-
ical worry: what category of thing is a sense-
datum? If, as purported by Price, sense-data are
neither material objects nor located in the per-
ceiver, then 'they must be regarded as entities so
queer and paradoxical as to condemn the theory
which depends on their postulation' (Problems of
Perception, p. 67). And this charge involves not,
Hirst urges, merely an acquiescence in theoreti-

cal novelty; we simply have no metaphysical cat-
egories to accommodate these entities or the
dualisms they invite.
Hirst's positive theory of perception, the
Aspect theory, fuses his common sense intu-
itions, his empirical-mindedness and his theo-
retical parsimoniousness. He emphasized that
perception should be thought of as a process.
We should not think of light impinging upon
the rod and cone cells of the retina as causing
the visual perception of a red, bulgy object.
Rather, seeing a tomato is a process, and both
of the former events are part of such a process.
Put in Hirst's terms, these are two aspects of the
same event. Aspects are modes of access to an
event (or object) but are not to be identified
with the event nor with any other unique entity.
According to Hirst, various dualists, for
example the sense-datum theorist and the rep-
resentative theorist, fail to acknowledge this
last point, and thus postulate unnecessary
entities - 'ideas', 'sense-data', 'representations'
- to make ontological space for what are most
simply understood as points of view.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Perception, Science, and Common Sense',
Mind, vol. 60 (1951), pp. 481-505.
Problems of Perception (New York, 1959).
Human Senses and Perception (Toronto,
1964).
Perception and the External World (New
York, 1965).
Other Relevant Works
'Mathematics and Truth', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 3 (1953), pp. 211-24.
'Sensing and Observing, Part I', Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 28
(1954), pp. 197-218.
'Form and Sensation: Part IF, Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 39
(1964), pp. 155-72.
Philosophy: An Outline for the Intending
Student (New York, 1968).
Dustin R. Stokes
427
HOBHOUSE
HOBHOUSE, Leonard Trelawney
(1864-1929)
L.T. Hobhouse was born in St Ive, a village
near Liskeard in Cornwall, on 8 May 1864
and died in Alen^on, Normandy on 21 June
1929. He was the son of Reginald and Caroline
Hobhouse. His father was Archdeacon of
Bodmin (1877-92). He was educated at
Malborough School and then at Corpus Christi
College, Oxford. He acquired first class Greats
in 1887 and after graduation returned initially
to Merton College as a prize fellow, then, in
1894, went as tutorial fellow to Corpus
Christi. He married Nora Hadwen in 1891. In
1897 Hobhouse left Oxford to write for the
Manchester Guardian. This whole period,
between 1890 and 1914, was one of enormous
social and political ferment in Britain, and
Hobhouse was fully committed to the liberal
cause in British politics. He became directly
associated with the 'new liberalism'. In 1902
he left Manchester for London, although he
continued writing for the Manchester
Guardian. In 1907, after a series of journalis-
tic posts, including editorship of The Tribune
(a liberal daily newspaper), he took up the
first chair of sociology in Britain (the Martin
White Chair of Sociology at the University of
London). He also became fully involved in
editing a new journal, the Sociological Review.
In 1925 he was elected a member of the British
Academy.
Hobhouse often felt deeply uncomfortable
with academic life and was initially also
doubtful about the whole occupation of being
an academic philosopher. Further, his main
academic concerns were, as he saw them, in
sociology. His later academic career, between
1907 and 1928, was spent in the first chair of
sociology in Britain. This was, in fact, the only
chair of sociology in Britain until the mid
1940s. However, if one examines his better-
known theoretical works, one would be hard
put to classify them immediately as sociology
- certainly as it is now generally understood.
Yet, his sociological work was, in his own
HOBHOUSE
mind, integral to his philosophy. The relation
between the two disciplines was syncretic.
There were four main formative influences
on his theoretical work from the 1890s: pri-
marily, evolutionary theory in general, and
more specifically, the evolutionary ideas of
Herbert Spencer; further, the philosophy of
Hegel and particularly British Hegelianism. In
the latter movement, T.H. Green and Bernard
BOSANQUET were of particular significance. In
addition, the positivist ideas of Auguste Comte
were of importance, and, finally, the ideas of
the utilitarian tradition, specifically those of
J.S. Mill.
His intellectual preoccupations can be
divided into four main areas: first, his initial
work was done in epistemology. His first sys-
tematic philosophical work was the Theory
of Knowledge (1896). This substantial treatise
was concerned with the validity of the postu-
lates of empirical knowledge and the possibil-
ity of a rational reconstruction of experience.
It argued for an idiosyncratic organic view of
rationality which was to underpin all his sub-
sequent work. The key theme was that human
thought was seen as an organic structure held
together by a mutual support of parts, under-
going change as it developed, but maintaining
its identity through all its modifications. The
entire system of human knowledge was thus
envisaged as an evolving system of empirical
growth or development, utilizing the data of
accumulating experience and the method of
critical rational reconstruction. The same
themes of rationality and knowledge, as a
gradual harmonious rational integration of
experiences, underpinned his conceptions of
philosophy, sociology, comparative ethics,
social psychology, and indeed his philosophy
of the new liberalism. This particular notion of
organic rationality contains many resonances
of Bosanquet's idealist philosophy.
However, a lot of the discussion in the above
book was also taken up with criticism of
idealist arguments. The book, overall, can be
characterized as an early contribution to the
school of 'critical realism'. His main objection
428
to idealism was that it tended to regard
concepts as independently real and unitary
entities. For Hobhouse, this was fundamentally
mistaken. Concepts had to be referred back to
real experiences. This did not mean that he
totally abandoned idealism. He was also
equally critical of naive forms of realism and
phenomenalism. He aimed at a via media
between idealism and naive realism.
Essentially, he wanted to 'empiricize' idealism,
to make many of the idealist themes more
directly applicable to the worlds of scientific
evolution and social psychology. Thus, for
example, his conception of evolutionary devel-
opmental harmony was basically a fuller
empirical amplification of the idealist notion of
self-realization in relation to the common
good. His ambiguous, yet often highly critical
relation with idealism was taken up again,
however, in a more passionate and polemical
tone, in his vigorous critique of Bosanquet's
social and political philosophy in The
Metaphysical Theory of the State (1918).
Essentially the latter book is an extended com-
plaint against giving the concept of the state
too independent and unitary an existence.
His second preoccupation focused on the
examination of the mass of empirical detail on
mental evolution, initially in the animal world
and then in humanity. This led him initially to
lifelong interests in animal psychology, compar-
ative psychology, anthropology and comparative
ethics - that is, ethics treated from an evolu-
tionary perspective. In this area he developed
his evolutionary conception of development. He
proceeded to trace the main forms and stages of
animal and human development. This work
formed the core of his psychological and socio-
logical writings. His work on the study of mental
evolution and development in the animal and
human worlds culminated in his book Mind in
Evolution (1901). Five years later he developed
his ideas on comparative ethics and religion, as
part of this evolutionary sociological perspective,
in Morals in Evolution (1906).
Hobhouse's third preoccupation focused on
social and political philosophy. His work here

was also reinforced by his practical commit-
ments to Edwardian new liberal politics. He
wrote, for example, a seminal popular treatise
on Liberalism for the Oxford Home University
Library series in 1911. This latter work became
a widely admired statement of the general
position of the new liberalism in Britain. This
was one of a number of more popular politi-
cal works that Hobhouse wrote throughout
his working life, addressed to particular issues
or events. The better known are The Labour
Movement (1893), Democracy and Reaction
(1904), The World in Conflict (1915) and
Questions of War and Peace (1916). Further,
it is important to note that Hobhouse saw no
divorce between his evolutionary sociology,
general philosophy and his more practical
conception of the new liberalism - a point
which has been systematically explored in
more recent scholarship, particularly by
Michael Freeden (1976, 1978). The goal of
evolutionary development for humanity (and
liberalism) was the ultimate rational harmony
of human experience. This implied a limited
empirically orientated conception of teleol-
ogy. The more systematic philosophical work
in this areas culminated in his book the
Rational Good (1921). The conclusions of
the latter work were then focused on the struc-
tures and processes of social and political
organization in his work The Elements of
Social Justice (1922).
His fourth and final preoccupation was the
process of metaphysical synthesis, that is his
attempt at an overarching philosophical system,
in which he tried to bring together all his prin-
cipal philosophical, psychological, evolutionary
and sociological concerns. Essentially, he
wanted to try to resolve the position of mind
within the whole evolutionary structure of
reality and then to apply this notion of devel-
opment to all social phenomena. This project
has resonances with Herbert Spencer's work.
His initial attempt at synthesis was contained in
the first edition of his Development and
Purpose (1913). He then attempted a generic
summary of all his sociological and psycho-
429
HOBHOUSE
logical work in his Social Development (1924),
Finally, he engaged in a substantial revision of
his earlier Development and Purpose, which
was finally published in 1929.
Hobhouse made wide-ranging contributions
to the early development of social science,
comparative ethics and social psychology in
Britain. In his sociology he provided an exten-
sive social morphology and theory of social
evolution which is now usually regarded with
considerable scepticism. The unabridged appli-
cation of evolutionary theory to mental or
social phenomena no longer has the following
it had in Hobhouse's time. However, any
revival of interest in social Darwinism will no
doubt resurrect his ideas at some point in this
next century. He was also a somewhat unwit-
ting founder of the critical realist movement in
philosophy which developed substantially in
the early twentieth century and helped to
supplant idealism during the 1920s and 1930s.
Yet, it is still important to recall that Hobhouse
had no interest in naive realism and he retained
deep sympathies with aspects of idealist
thought. Hobhouse's most pervasive influence
arose from his social and political philosophy,
not so much his systematic work linking social
evolution and politics, as his passionate for-
mulation of a new philosophy of social liber-
alism. This has worn best out of all his diverse
writings. His metaphysical work, although
immensely impressive and wide-ranging in its
attempt to forge a comprehensive synthesis,
again, has also suffered from the fluctuating
fortunes of evolutionary theory in the social
sciences. In addition, his optimistic humanistic
vision, entailing greater rational harmony, has
looked increasingly suspect in the light of war
and pogrom in the twentieth century. Hobhouse
recognized this point on many occasions nearer
the end of his life, particularly after the carnage
of World War I. Yet, overall, Hobhouse's ener-
getic attempt to reconcile empiricism and ratio-
nalism, in the light of a rational reconstruction
of experience, remains as an important philo-
sophical achievement which has yet to be fully
appreciated in its entirety.
HOBHOUSE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Labour Movement (1893).
The Theory of Knowledge: A Contribution
to some Problems of Logic and
Metaphysics (1896).
Mind in Evolution (1901).
Democracy and Reaction (1904; repr.
Brighton, 1972).
Morals in Evolution: A Study in
Comparative Ethics, 2 vols (1906).
Liberalism (Oxford, 1911).
Social Evolution and Political Theory
(1911).
Development and Purpose: An Essay
Towards a Philosophy of Evolution
(1913; rev 2nd edn, 1929).
(with G.C. Wheeler and M. Ginsberg), The
Material Culture and Social Institutions
of the Simpler Peoples: An Essay in
Correlation (1915; repr. 1930).
The World in Conflict (1915).
Questions of War and Peace (1916).
The Metaphysical Theory of the State: A
Criticism (1918; repr. 1993).
The Elements of Social Justice (1922; repr.
1993).
The Rational Good: A Study in the Logic
of Practice (1921; repr. 1993).
Social Development: Its Nature and
Conditions (1924; repr. 1993).
Other Relevant Works
'The Philosophy of Development', in J.H.
Muirhead (ed.), Contemporary British
Philosophy (1924), pp. 149-88.
Sociology and Philosophy: A Centenary
Collection of Essays and Articles, ed. M.
Ginsberg (1966).
L.T. Hobhouse: Liberalism and Other
Writings, ed. James Meadowcroft
(Cambridge, 1994).
Further Reading
Barker, Ernest, Political Thought in England
1848-1914(1915).
, 'Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse':
1864-1929', Proceedings of the British
430
Academy, vol. 15 (1929), pp. 536-54.
Carter, H., The Social Theories of L.T.
Hobhouse (Durham, 1927).
Clarke, Peter, Liberals and Social Democrats
(Cambridge, 1978).
Collini, Stefan, 'Hobhouse, Bosanquet and
the State: Philosophical Idealism and
Political Argument in England 1880-1918',
Past and Present, vol. 72 (1976), pp.
86-111.
, Liberalism and Sociology: L.T.
Hobhouse and Political Argument in
England 1880-1914 (Cambridge, 1979).
Freeden, M.S., 'Biological and Evolutionary
Roots of the New Liberalism in England',
Political Theory, vol. 4 (1976), pp. 471-90.
, New Liberalism: An Ideology of
Social Reform (Oxford, 1978).
Greenleaf, W.H., The British Political
Tradition, vol. 2 (1983).
Griffin, C.M., 'L.T. Hobhouse and the Idea of
Harmony', Journal of the History of Ideas,
vol. 35 (1974), pp. 647-61.
Hobson, J.A. and M. Ginsberg (eds), L.T.
Hobhouse: His Life and Work (1931; repr.
1993).
Meadowcroft, J., Introduction to L.T.
Hobhouse: Liberalism and other Writings
(Cambridge, 1994).
Owen, J.E., L.T. Hobhouse, Sociologist
(1974).
Vincent, Andrew and Raymond Plant,
Philosophy Politics and Citizenship: The
Life and Thought of the British Idealists
(Oxford, 1984).
Weiler, Peter, 'The New Liberalism of L.T.
Hobhouse', Victorian Studies, vol. 16
(1972), pp. 141-61.
Andrew Vincent

HODGES, Herbert Arthur (1905-76)
H.A. Hodges was born in Sheffield on 4
January 1905 and died in Reading on 2 July
1976. He was educated at King Edward VII
Grammar School, Sheffield and Balliol College,
Oxford, where he obtained firsts in Classical
Moderations (1924) and literae humaniores
(1926). Under the influence of A.D. LINDSAY, he
became interested in the thought of Wilhelm
Dilthey, gaining a DPhil on the subject in 1932.
He was briefly lecturer in philosophy at New
College, Oxford, then successively lecturer
(1928-34) and Professor of Philosophy
(1934-69) at Reading University. Raised a
Methodist, he embraced atheism temporarily in
his undergraduate days before joining the
Church of England. In later years he became a
prominent Christian apologist and lay theolo-
gian.
In his early career, Hodges lectured on polit-
ical philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of
science and religion. His research bore fruit in
two books, Wilhelm Dilthey: An Introduction
(1944) and a comprehensive exposition, The
Philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey (1952). Hodges
presented Dilthey's model of the 'lived experi-
ence' of human beings as the combination of a
Romantic view of the knowing, feeling and
willing self with empiricist attention to the
social and historical influences conditioning it.
From this Dilthey developed the concept of
'understanding' (the imaginative reconstruc-
tion and reliving of the experience of others) as
the aim of human studies, in contrast to 'expla-
nation' in the natural sciences. He used the
term Weltanschauung to describe the integrated
worldview shaped by each person's life experi-
ence, and believed that philosophy could under-
take a classification of worldviews according to
their rooting in cognitive claims, value judge-
ments and moral precepts.
Hodges followed Dilthey in interpreting
human experience holistically and from within
consciousness. In his Riddell Memorial Lectures,
Languages, Standpoints and Attitudes (1953) -
in agreement with R.G. COLLINGWOOD, who
431
HODGES
also drew on Dilthey - he redefined meta-
physics as examination of the absolute presup-
positions which shape the particular 'stand-
point' (a partial and limited Weltanschauung)
from which assertions are made about reality.
Believing that much philosophical confusion
arises from failure to identify conflicting stand-
points, he proposed that philosophy's task is to
understand, compare and evaluate standpoints.
He highlighted the volitional element in
thinking as a fundamental cause of differing
attitudes to the world and the self, concluding
that principles, standpoints and attitudes should
be evaluated by an existential test - their ability
to open up possibilities of life, experience and
activity.
In his 1956-7 Gifford Lectures on 'The Logic
of Religious Thinking', revised and published
posthumously, Hodges conceded that belief in
God is not properly called knowledge, since
'God' is not an object open to empirical inves-
tigation. He rooted theistic belief in the intu-
ition of a transcendent Agent energizing the
whole of reality, generating both personal
analogies of relationship and the acknowl-
edgement of mystery. Finding neither the tra-
ditional arguments of natural theology nor the
evidence of religious experience demonstrably
persuasive, he nevertheless contended that
theism has its own coherence and meaningful-
ness as a pattern of belief and behaviour pro-
moting spiritual transformation and intellec-
tual growth. He concluded that the conflicting
claims of theistic and atheistic standpoints are
resolvable not by rational argument but by an
existential choice expressing a value judgement
about authentic selfhood. Hence the intellectual
dilemma of the believing philosopher: 'he must
continually say less than he believes, in order
not to say more than he thinks he can prove'
(God Beyond Knowledge, p. 3).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Wilhelm Dilthey: An Introduction (1944).
The Philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey (1952).
Languages, Standpoints and Attitudes (New
York and Toronto, 1953).
HODGES
God Beyond Knowledge (London and
Basingstoke, 1979).
Other Relevant Works
Christianity and the Modern World View
(1949).
The Pattern of Atonement (1955).
Death and Life Have Contended (1964).
Christopher M. Jones
HODGSON, Leonard (1889-1969)
Leonard Hodgson was born in London on 24
October 1889 and died in Leamington Spa on
15 July 1969. He was educated at St Paul's
School, London and Hertford College, Oxford,
where he read both classics and theology. He
was ordained into the Anglican ministry in
1913 and became Vice-Principal of St Edmund
Hall, Oxford in 1914. In 1919 he became Dean
of Divinity at Magdalen College, Oxford and
in 1925 Professor of Christian Apologetics at
General Theological Seminary, New York. He
was a canon of Winchester Cathedral from
1931 to 1938, when he was elected Regius
Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology and
Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. In 1944 he
succeeded Oliver Chase QUICK (who had been
a significant influence on the development of his
own thought) as Regius Professor of Divinity
until his retirement in 1958.
In The Place of Reason in Christian
Apologetic (1925), which became the founda-
tion for his future work, he held that the Creeds
were 'a rational construction' which aimed to
express 'something about the universe without
ignoring the problem presented by the appear-
ance of Jesus Christ upon the pages of this
world's history' (p. 41). In his collection of
philosophical essays, Essays in Christian
Philosophy (1929), he elaborated his philo-
sophical position emphasizing both the rational
432
character of revelation and the importance of
experience. He sought a via media between
idealism and positivism: it was 'God's will', he
held, that man 'should think' (ibid., p. 168). His
Paddock Lectures, The Grace of God in Faith
and Philosophy (1936), present a critical syn-
thesis between philosophy and theology:
Christian philosophy was 'the attempt to inter-
pret the meaning of all things in the light of
God's self-revelation in Christ' (p. 20). Later in
his career his theology developed in a more
systematic direction with the publication of his
Edinburgh Croall Lectures, The Doctrine of
the Trinity (1944). He claimed that the Trinity
was 'not an irrational mystery' (ibid., p. 95) but
could be expressed philosophically. His
Glasgow Gifford Lectures For Faith and
Freedom (1956) returned to the relationship
between philosophy and theology in a system-
atic discussion of the great doctrines of the
faith. From 1954 until 1966, as Warden of
William Temple College, Rugby, he brought
industrialists, psychiatrists, sociologists and the-
ologians into conversation, which led to Sex
and Christian Freedom (1967), in which he
tried to 'talk twentieth-century common sense
without being disloyal to our ordination vows'
(p. 8).
Hodgson stressed the unity of philosophy and
theology, and always retained a sense of the
intelligibility of the universe. Although he was no
original thinker he was highly regarded as a
teacher and lecturer. He was influential in
helping shape the path of English theology in its
quest for the integration of the material and the
spiritual, which he saw as 'the obverse and
reverse sides of a single process' (Essays, p. 48).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Place of Reason in Christian Apologetic
(Oxford, 1925).
Essays in Christian Philosophy (1930).
The Grace of God in Faith and Philosophy
(1936).
The Doctrine of the Trinity (1944).
Sex and Christian Freedom (1967).

Other Relevant Works
Platts, T.C., 'A Comparative Study of the
Theologies of Leonard Hodgson and John
Baillie', Oxford, DPhil.
Mark D. Chapman
HODIN, Josef Paul (1905-95)
Josef Paul Hodin was born in Prague on 17
August 1905 and died in London on 5
December 1995. After his primary and sec-
ondary education at, respectively, the
Kleisteitner Realschule and the Neustadter
Realgymnasium, he read law at Charles
University in Prague. He served in the
Czechoslovak Resistance in World War II,
before coming to Britain to work as a press
attache to the exiled Norwegian government in
London from 1944 to 1945. He then under-
took postgraduate study in art and art criticism
at London University, where he gained his doc-
torate. In 1949 he became the first Director of
Studies at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in
London, a post which he held until 1954. He
was a member of the British Society of
Aesthetics, and received many honours, includ-
ing, in 1945, the international prize for art crit-
icism at the Venice Bienniale, and an honorary
professorship at Vienna University in the
1960s.
Hodin is best known as an art critic and his-
torian, with particular interests in the work of
artists such as Naum Gabo, who fled from
Nazi Germany, the Norwegian expressionist
painter Edvard Munch, and the group of artists
and sculptors, foremost among whom were
Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Bernard
Leach and Ben Nicholson, who were associated
with or settled in St Ives in Cornwall from the
outbreak of World War II onwards. As Hodin's
wife inherited a house in nearby Carbis Bay, he
and his family spent much time in Cornwall,
433
HODIN
and he thus became heavily involved with the
postwar artistic and cultural changes in
England and in Cornwall in particular.
Hodin sets his views on art and art criticism
against the larger issue of the malaise of modern
culture. He says that in the modern age, there
is a dehumanization and impoverishment of
our spiritual capacities brought about by the
rise, dominance and hostility of the scientific
outlook. Science has engendered scepticism and
the dissolution of traditional values, and the
many dualisms inherent in the whole of the
Western philosophical tradition have not
proved to be an effective antidote. Examples of
such dualisms include the two-worlds system of
Plato, Bacon's and Descartes's division of
reality into the subjective and the objective,
and the view, formulated by Kant amongst
others, that the mind can know nothing of
things in themselves, or as they really are.
Drawing on Goethe, he proposes the develop-
ment of a unified, world-affirming, dynamic
metaphysics, in which religious, aesthetic and
scientific elements, and the attitude of reverence
for nature should be integrated.
Hodin asserts that, within this metaphysical
system, we can avoid the pitfalls of subjectivity
and objectivity in art criticism. If we adopt the
subjective position, the implication is that all
assessments of art are equally worthy. An
objective position, on the other hand, would
indicate that one form of art (the chief con-
tender being classical art) is elevated as having
universal, transcultural pretensions.
Whereas the artist interprets nature through
her art, the art critic interprets, assesses and
evaluates works of art themselves. The critic
must be both sensitive and creative, in that he
must have a living relationship to the works of
art which he assesses and evaluates. Art criti-
cism is inevitable, as even in the absence of the
professional critic, there would still be conver-
sational exchanges about works of art.
In opposition to those who ignore the origins
of a work of art, Hodin takes the view that the
critic should take an interest in the personality
of the artist, insofar as it affects his creativity.
HODIN
Such creativity, and hence great art, incorpo-
rates technical expertise, personal expression,
and the development and extension of artistic
tradition. All great art must come from, and
reflect the concerns of, its age, and the abstract
art which emerged during the twentieth century
reflects the displacement of human beings by
the impersonal principles of science.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Art and Criticism (1944).
The Dilemma of Being Modern (1956).
The Timeless and the Timebound in Art',
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
vol. 16 (1958), pp. 497-502.
'Herbert Read: The Man and his Work - A
Tribute', journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, vol. 23 (1964), pp. 169-72.
The Aesthetics of Modern Art', journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 26
(1967), pp. 181-6.
Modern Art and the Modern (1972).
The Time Element in the Work of Art as
Creation', Diotima, vol. 2 (1978), pp.
30-36.
Kathryn L. Plant
HOERNLE, Reinhold Friedrich Alfred
(1880-1943)
Reinhold Friedrich Alfred Hoernle was born in
Bonn on 27 November 1880 and died in
Johannesburg on 21 July 1943. A British
subject by birth, Hoernle was the son of the
Indologist A.F.R. Hoernle (1841-1918) and
grandson of one of the early missionaries in
India under auspices of the London Missionary
Society, C. T. Hoernle. Hoernle spent his early
years in India, attended elementary and sec-
ondary school in Germany, and proceeded to
Balliol College, Oxford in 1899, to prepare for
a career in the Indian Civil Service. Through the
434
influence of his tutor, J.A. SMITH, and Edward
Caird, Hoernle turned to philosophy. He
received a second class in Classical
Moderations (1901), but first class honours in
literae humaniores (1903) (BA, 1903; MA,
1907), winning the Locke Scholarship in
Mental and Moral Philosophy in 1903. In 1904
Hoernle was elected to a Senior Demyship at
Magdalen College conditional on undertaking
a BSc (which he completed with a thesis on
'Modern Theories of the Will' in 1907), but in
late 1905 he moved to St Andrews to serve as
assistant to the Professor of Moral Philosophy,
Bernard BOSANQUET.
Supported by testimonials from Caird,
Bosanquet and Smith, but also from F.H.
BRADLEY and Henry JONES, Hoernle was
appointed Professor of Philosophy at the South
African College (later the University of Cape
Town) in 1908, where he remained until
December 1911. From 1912 until 1914, he
held the newly established professorship at
Armstrong College in Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
before moving to Harvard (1914-20). In 1920
Hoernle returned to his old chair at Newcastle
- the ostensible reason for this was his wife's
health, though it also likely had to do with
Hoernle's disappointment in not being
promoted at Harvard in 1919. He left
Newcastle in 1923 to take up the Chair of
Philosophy at the University of the
Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. With the
exception of visiting professorships at Bowdoin
College, Maine (1926) and at the University of
Southern California (1930), he remained there
until his early death in 1943.
The breadth of Hoernle's interests, as well as
his prodigious capacity for work, were evident
from his beginnings. By the time he had left for
his first professorship, at the age of twenty-
eight, he was the author of some five articles
and a large number of book reviews. The topics
were rather wide-ranging, though they focused
on the philosophy of Kant, on psychology
(especially the psychology of judgement) and
the theory of knowledge. Hoernle was partic-
ularly interested in the relation between prag-

matism and absolutism, and his critique of the
former nevertheless won him the respect of the
Oxford pragmatist, F.C.S. SCHILLER. Hoernle
briefly challenged some elements of idealism
found in the work of the Professor of Moral
Philosophy at Aberdeen, J.B. BAILLIE, though he
soon reaffirmed his own commitment to
idealist thought.
Hoernle described the first half of his pro-
fessorial life, beginning with his move to Cape
Town, as his Wanderjahre. His duties at the
South African College were heavy, leaving little
time to write. His move to Newcastle allowed
him to resume research on volition and mental
states, and it was there that he (together with
his South African wife, Agnes Winifred) com-
pleted an authorized translation of Rudolf
Steiner's Die Philosophic der Freiheit [The
Philosophy of Freedom] (1916). He pursued his
strong interest in Kant and in the philosophical
currents sweeping the European continent, but
also in the debate between 'neo-realism' and
idealism. In addition, Hoernle remained in
contact with the South African situation - par-
ticularly through his successor at the South
African College, Hugh REYBURN.
When Hoernle moved to Harvard in 1914,
Royce was in his declining years, but being in
the United States allowed Hoernle to engage
first-hand with the work of leading American
philosophers, such as R.B. Perry and W.E.
Hocking. This was a productive period:
Hoernle wrote often in both philosophical
journals and popular magazines, such as The
New Republic. During this time, Hoernle also
delved more deeply into the writings of John
Theodore Merz - a chemist and philosopher
who sought to find principles, in the sciences
and in the arts, that would contribute towards
a unification of knowledge (see his History of
European Thought in the Nineteenth Century,
4 vols, 1896-1914) - and to whom Hoernle
dedicated his second book.
Hoernle's interests ranged from epistemology
to philosophical psychology to the philosophy
of religion, but while at Harvard he was par-
ticularly concerned with two issues: the relation
435
HOERNLE
between the mental and the physical, and the
ongoing debates between idealists and the 'new'
realists. Hoernle believed that he had found a
way of addressing these questions through the
'empirical' statement of idealism or 'speculative
philosophy' represented by Bosanquet - which
provided the basis for what Hoernle would
later call his 'synoptic method'.
Hoernle's 1920 Studies in Contemporary
Metaphysics brings together his work on the
preceding themes with his responses to then
current American and British thought.
Hoernle's primary objective in this book was to
'save the appearances' - that is, to save many
of our basic intuitions on these topics. He
entered into the 'mechanism versus vitalism'
controversy, rejecting both the view that there
is a special vital force in nature that cannot be
reduced to physico-chemical processes, as well
as the view that mechanism supplies a satis-
factory explanation by itself. Hoernle insisted
that the most plausible account is that, in
biology at least, teleology is dominant over
mechanism. Consistent with this, Hoernle also
argued that the study of religion should focus
on experience, rather than dogmas; to be reli-
gious is not so much to believe in another
world, but to appreciate the value of this world.
The Studies is not a systematic work, and
Hoernle prefaces the book with the remark
that it is a first set of studies to be completed
with a subsequent work on idealism and
realism. Nevertheless, he maintains that it
reflects a systematic philosophy, showing that
'experience, taken as a whole, gives us clues
which, rightly interpreted, lead to the percep-
tion of ... a graded order of varied appear-
ances [in the universe]' (Studies in
Contemporary Metaphysics, p. v). It also
exhibits his 'synoptic' approach, 'which itself
rests on the assumption that truth has many
sides, and that to the whole truth on any subject
every point of view has some contribution to
make' (Race and Reason, p. xvi). For Hoernle,
this synoptic method is both an attitude and an
ideal. Reaction to the book was somewhat
muted. While acknowledging Hoernle's
HOERNLE
'flexible and assimilative mind', critics such as
the realist John LAIRD suggested that these
Studies exhibited complacency with regard to
the current, more strongly empiricist, philo-
sophical debate. Others regarded it as
somewhat 'insular'.
Hoernle's return to Newcastle in 1920
brought with it not only more teaching and
administrative work, but the opportunity of
giving extramural lectures to a popular
audience. A series of such lectures was rewrit-
ten and published, in 1923, as Matter, Life,
Mind, and God. Hoernle's objective was to
trace some of the chief movements in contem-
porary thought, with a view to seeing 'whether
they do not hold out the promise and possibil-
ity of a unity in our spiritual life' (Matter, Life,
Mind, and God, p. ix). Hoernle notes several
limitations of both mechanistic and contem-
porary behaviouristic theories and, interest-
ingly, endorses much of A.N. WHITEHEAD'S
critique of 'the' scientific concept of matter.
Again, Hoernle concludes with a chapter on
religion - calling on his readers 'to fill our lives',
here and now, 'with things that are eternal'.
Critics were receptive to the book, noting espe-
cially Hoernle's 'limpid clearness' in style;
Brand Blanshard, for example, refers to the
'grace and urbanity' present in the book.
When Hoernle left Newcastle in late 1923 to
take up the Chair of Philosophy at
Witwatersrand, his Wanderjahre came to an
end. In 1924 he published a short volume on
Idealism as a Philosophical Doctrine-, it was
expanded in 1927 as Idealism as a Philosophy,
with additional chapters on James Ward's
Berkeleyan 'spiritual pluralism', Kant's critical
idealism as a method in science, and remarks on
the development of philosophy from Kant to
Hegel. Designed initially as a 'map' to guide
students through the different senses of
'idealism' then current in Anglo-American phi-
losophy, the key chapters trace out, in careful
detail, the distinction between the idealism of
Berkeley on the one hand, and that of Kant,
Hegel, and their successors, on the other. While
it did not fulfil Hoernle's earlier promise of a
436
volume on idealism and realism, this book
made distinctions that were increasingly over-
looked in the turn in British philosophy from
idealism to logical empiricism. In the expanded
version, Hoernle also developed the
Bosanquetian view of nature as a mechanical
order within a teleological order. While
Idealism as a Philosophical Doctrine is dedi-
cated to the memory of Bosanquet, and while
Hoernle described himself as a 'Bosanquetian'
in his 1924 autobiographical essay 'On the
Way to a Synoptic Philosophy', Hoernle's views
are better seen as inspired by, rather than
merely extending, Bosanquet's work.
Nevertheless, both Hoernle's broad philo-
sophical approach, as well as his later political
views are consistent with principles that one
finds earlier in Bosanquet.
At Witwatersrand, Hoernle lectured on ethics
- primarily, Plato and Aristotle - as well as
logic and psychology, though he was joined
from 1931 to 1937 by Andrew Murray, who
took on the new course in political philoso-
phy. Practical affairs were never far removed
from Hoernle's interests. Even in the Studies in
Contemporary Metaphysics Hoernle had
argued that a speculative view is not 'alien to
the practical task of meeting the varied inci-
dents of human life with steadfast wisdom' (p.
vi). Hoernle's 'synoptic method' was also a
reflection of this - that 'Wherever I have lived,
I have found in myself a desire to identify
myself with the life around me, to enter into it
and share it from the inside, rather than to
stand outside as a mere spectator or even to
reject it as foreign to myself (Race and Reason,
p. xvi).
Perhaps because his wife was a pioneer social
anthropologist and one of the first scholars of
Bantu studies in South Africa, Hoernle devel-
oped an interest in the Bantu and the impact of
Western civilizations on them. From the time of
his return to South Africa, Hoernle became
increasingly involved in issues concerning racial
relations. He also became fluent in Afrikaans so
that he could give both courses of lectures and
public addresses throughout the country.

Hoernle was a trenchant critic of the policy of
segregation proposed by the Hertzog govern-
ment in 1924, and was a founding member
(1929), member of the executive (from 1932),
and Chair (from 1934) of the South African
Institute of Race Relations. He was also Chair
of the Bantu Men's Social Centre in
Johannesburg; Chair of the Johannesburg Joint
Council of Europeans and Natives; a govern-
ment-appointed member of the South African
Council for Educational and Social Research -
the first national research grant council - (from
1934); Chair of the Society of Christians and
Jews (from 1937); and one of the six South
African delegates to the British Commonwealth
Relations Conference, held near Sydney in
September 1938. Not only was Hoernle one of
the leaders of the leading figures of the
movement in South Africa against segregation,
but he was later praised in one of the most
popular novels about the South African situa-
tion - Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country.
Despite his exhausting committee work,
Hoernle was still able to publish on philo-
sophical topics. He continued to respond to
the work of some of the leading idealists,
including McTAGGART and the American, John
Elof Boodin, but also wrote on Kant, univer-
sals, causation and volition, and the role of
science in philosophy. The focus of Hoernle's
writing, however, involved philosophy and
culture - particularly the concept of 'the souP
of a people and whether (and how) local
cultures might develop in relation to dominant
cultures. Hoernle's view in these latter essays is
decidedly 'liberal'. Many of these essays were
collected and republished after his death, in
Race and Reason (1945). But perhaps the best
example of Hoernle's applied social and polit-
ical philosophy was his South African Native
Policy and the Liberal Spirit, the Phelps-Stokes
Lectures at the University of Cape Town in
1939, which he repeated, in Afrikaans, at the
University of Stellenbosch.
While Hoernle's approach to social and polit-
ical issues is attentive to individual interests, like
Bosanquet, Hoernle is not an individualist.
437
HOERNLE
Since classical liberalisms tend to be individu-
alistic, Hoernle believed that they would not
work in multicultural states like South Africa.
Moreover, for Hoernle, liberty exists only in a
community - specifically, 'as a system of rights
defined by law and guaranteed by the State; or,
at least, as ... approved by custom and con-
vention' (Race and Reason, p. 1). Liberty, then,
is not just a matter of the relation of the indi-
vidual to the state, but also involves relations
among collectivities. Drawing on T.H. Green's
notion of positive liberty, Hoernle saw that
freedom required allowing social groups to
maintain and develop their unique characters.
Opposed to segregation, Hoernle believed that
the only practicable alternative was 'assimila-
tion' . His position here is, however, ambiguous.
At times, he seems to favour the assimilation of
native cultures into the 'Western', though his
principles allow that assimilation could go the
other way, and he thinks it probable that 'in
making Western Civilization their own, the
African peoples will retain elements of their own
traditional culture' (Race and Reason, p. 111).
Nevertheless, Hoernle's idealism did not commit
him to a political 'monism' - this was Andrew
Murray's later concern with idealist thought.
While Hoernle recognized the importance of
unity in society and in the state, like many other
idealists, he would maintain that idealist 'wholes'
require diversity.
Hoernle's views in social and political phi-
losophy and public policy are provocative,
especially in light of current efforts to deal with
globalization and the challenges of pluralism to
local culture. While Hoernle clearly recognizes
that liberties and rights have a place only within
a social context, he also holds that culture has
a fundamental value.
Hoernle considered moving to a permanent
position in the United States in 1940, but his
involvement in South African political life was
strong and his finances were modest, so that he
did not take up the offer. It has been said that
his relatively early death at sixty-three was due
largely to the strain of his extensive work in
South Africa.
HOERNLE
Shortly after his death, former students col-
lected some of his early work in a collection
entitled Studies in Philosophy (1952). This
volume includes a number of (undated) unpub-
lished essays on theories of truth, but also an
interesting study of why many of the absolute
idealists rejected epistemology.
Although the political impact of Hoernle's
work was significant in his time, the philo-
sophical importance of his views on culture
and community is only beginning to be appre-
ciated. Hoernle's initial studies on metaphysics,
epistemology and philosophical psychology,
while serious and sustained, were neither espe-
cially original nor influential. Some have sug-
gested, however, that had he not become as
active in social and political affairs, and had he
lived longer, he would have made a more sub-
stantial contribution not only to idealism, but
to metaphysics in general.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Trans, with Agnes Winifred Hoernle),
Rudolph Steiner, The Philosophy of
Freedom: A Modern Philosophy of Life
Developed by Scientific Methods, ed. H.
Collison (1916); enl. and rev. edn, The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1922).
Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics
(1920).
Matter, Life, Mind, and God: Five Lectures
on Contemporary Tendencies in Thought
(1923).
Idealism as a Philosophical Doctrine (1924);
exp. as Idealism as a Philosophy (1927).
South African Native Policy and the Liberal
Spirit: Being the Phelps-Stokes Lectures
Delivered before the University of Cape
Town, May, 1939 (Cape Town, 1939;
repr. Johannesburg, 1945).
Race and Reason: Being Mainly a Selection
of Contributions to the Race Problem in
South Africa (Johannesburg, 1945).
(Ed.), Studies in Philosophy, with a memoir
by Daniel S. Robinson (1952).
Hoernle's papers are located in the Archive of
the University of the Witwatersrand, in
438
Johannesburg. Letters to and from Hoernle
are found in the South African Institute of
Race Relations archive, also at
Witwate.rsrand.
Other Relevant Works
'On the Way to a Synoptic Philosophy', in
J.H. Muirhead (ed.), Contemporary British
Philosophy: Personal Statements, 1st ser.
(1924), pp. 129-56.
Further Reading
The lengthiest published bibliography of
Hoernle's work is Beverley Berkah
Kaplan's Race Relations in South Africa, as
Illustrated by the Writings ofA.W.
Hoernle, R.F.A. Hoernle and].D.
Rheinallt Jones: A Bibliography
(Johannesburg, 1971). A complete bibliog-
raphy of Hoernle's work appears in
William Sweet, British Idealism in South
Africa (forthcoming, 2006).
Freed, Louis Franklin, 'R.F.A. Hoernle: A
Critical Analysis of his Contributions to
Philosophy with Special Reference to his
Synoptic Treatment of Diverse Dimensions
of Reality', DLitt et Phil thesis, Pretoria,
1965.
Malan, G.H.T., 'Die Idealisme van Prof
Hoernle', Tydskrifvir Wetenskap en Kuns,
vol. 3 (1924-5), pp. 187-97.
Nash, Andrew, 'Colonialism and Philosophy:
R.F. Alfred Hoernle in South Africa,
1908-11', MA thesis, Stellenbosch, 1985.
Olivier, Gerrit, N.P. van Wyk Louw and
R.A.F. Hoernle: Notes on Liberal and
Nationalist Discourse in South Africa,
1939-1955 (Johannesburg, 1994).
Sweet, William, British Idealism in South
Africa (forthcoming, 2006).
William Sweet

HOGBEN, Lancelot Thomas (1895-1975)
Lancelot Thomas Hogben was born on 8
December 1895 and died in North Wales on 22
August 1975. He was the son of Thomas
Hogben a dry-salter from Southsea. In World
War I he was imprisoned as a conscientious
objector, but in World War II his Marxist ideals
influenced him to fight the common enemy by
serving as a colonel on the War Office staff.
After 1918 he lectured, first in zoology at
Imperial College London, then in physiology at
Edinburgh, then as assistant professor at
McGill University, Montreal. From 1927 to
1930 he was Professor of Zoology in Cape
Town, then returned to the London School of
Economics to a Chair of Social Biology. There
he applied his mathematical expertise to the
study of the genetics of the fruit fly Drosophila
in his investigations into human population
studies. In 1936 he was elected FRS, and he was
appointed Regius Professor of Natural History
at Aberdeen in the following year. He resigned
in 1941 to become Professor of Zoology at
Birmingham, and from 1947 to 1961 he
occupied the Chair of Medical Statistics spe-
cially created there for him. After retirement he
was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the new
University of Guyana until 1963.
Hogben's father was a fundamentalist lay
preacher and the son rejected religion for scien-
tific humanism. He was an active Labour Party
campaigner after the 1918 war and in 1931 was
one of a group of British scientists to be pro-
foundly influenced by the Soviet view,
expounded at the Second International Congress
of the History of Science and Technology in
London, that science was a progressive force
unless distorted by capitalism, and should serve
as the model for social and economic planning.
The group included J.D. BERNAL, J.B.S.
HALDANE, Hyman Levy, Joseph NEEDHAM and
J.G. Crowther, a science reporter on the
Manchester Guardian.
As a result of post Vietnam War protests
about the use of capitalist resources in science for
destructive ends, in 1969 the British Society for
439
HOGBEN
Social Responsibility in Science was inaugurated
by a number of left-wing liberals, social democ-
rats and Marxists. Hogben was a founder
member. However, he was never a committed
Marxist but a socialist who thought dialectical
materialism was 'a confusion of terms' (Lancelot
Hogben's Dangerous Thoughts, p. 270).
As a biologist, in his Nature of Living Matter
(1930), Hogben advocated a 'mechanistic phi-
losophy'. A feminist, he was drawn to investi-
gate hormonal influences on sex differences;
as a socialist, he investigated biological differ-
ences in class and race. He believed that scien-
tific socialism would enable a planned economy
to produce an abundance of socially useful
goods for the whole population.
Although his academic work was chiefly in
zoology and medical statistics, he was best
known through his educational books
Mathematics for the Million (1936), written
while in hospital, and Science for the Citizen
(1938), written while commuting by railway
between London and Devon at weekends.
Apart from these and his research papers, his
output of popular science books was enormous,
including simpler books such as Signs of
Civilization and Mathematics in the Making,
and he displayed his fascination with philology
in the Loom of Language (1943).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Nature of Living Matter (1930).
Genetic Principles in Medicine and Social
Science (1931).
Mathematics for the Million: A Popular Self
Educator (1936).
Science for the Citizen: A Self Educator
Based on the Social Background of
Scientific Discovery (1938).
Lancelot Hogben's Dangerous Thoughts
(1939).
(Ed.), Frederick Bodmer, Loom of Language
(1943).
Statistical Theory: An Examination of the
Contemporary Crisis in Statistical Theory
from a Behaviourist Viewpoint (1957).
HOGBEN
Further Reading
Crowther, J.G., The Social Relations of
Science (1941).
Werskey, Gary, The Visible College (New
York, 1978).
Alan Cohen
HOGG, Alfred George (1875-1954)
Alfred George Hogg was born in Ramleh,
Alexandria on 23 July 1875and died in Elie, St
Andrews on 31 December 1954. Of Scottish
missionary parents, he studied philosophy at
the University of Edinburgh (1893-7; MA),
where he was a student of Andrew Seth
(PRiNGLE-PATnsoN) and influenced by the work
of Kant, Hegel, Croce and Bergson. He began
theological study at the United Presbyterian
Hall (1897) but experienced a crisis of faith,
leaving at the end of his first year. In 1901
Hogg attended lectures by the Ritschlian Arthur
Titius at the University of Halle. He returned
that autumn to theological studies - which he
completed in early 1902, though he did not
seek ordination until 1915.
Hogg accepted a post at Madras Christian
College in India in 1903, becoming Professor of
Mental and Moral Science in 1909, and
Principal of the College (1928-38). In Madras,
confronted with the vitality of Indian philoso-
phy, Hogg wrote his most philosophical work.
He left India in 1939, did parish work in
northern England and Scotland during the war,
and retired to Scotland in 1947.
Hogg's earliest published writings focus on
Christianity, examining faith in light of agnos-
ticism, but also engaging Hindu philosophy.
Like many Western philosophers in India at
the time (e.g., John MACKENZIE), Hogg initially
held that Hinduism lacked a solid ethical
theory. In an exchange with the Indian philoso-
pher Subrahmanya Sastri, and in articles later
440
published as Karma and Redemption (1909),
Hogg rejected Hindu views of the soul and
particularly the claim of parallels between
Hinduism and Christianity. For cross-cultural
philosophy and religious exchange to occur,
Hogg offered a 'method of selective contrasts'
- identifying central, but contrasting, beliefs of
Christianity and Hinduism, and subjecting both
to philosophical analysis. Hogg believed that
this would show Indian philosophers that
Hindu thought was inadequate, and would
turn them to European or Christian ideas.
Though Hogg later modified his approach
substantially, it had a profound effect on a
young student, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who
witnessed the exchange with Sastri.
Radhakrishnan was motivated by Hogg's
critique to write an MA thesis challenging
Hogg's view - 'The Ethics of the Vedanta and its
Metaphysical Presuppositions' - and to develop
his own idealism. Other students who became
leading figures in philosophy in mid-twentieth-
century India include T.M.P. Mahadevan,
C.T.K. Chari, and V.A. Devasenapathi.
Hogg's philosophy was influenced by
Pringle-Pattison. While his courses on ethics
followed J.S. MACKENZIE'S Manual of Ethics
(1892), he rejected the monistic tendencies of
philosophical idealism for a more dynamic -
'personalist' - view. A book, Jesus and the
Secret of Virtue, which aimed at a perfection-
istic moral psychology, was started, but aban-
doned. Yet Hogg defended idealism against
attacks by Albert Schweitzer ('The Ethical
Teaching of Dr. Schweitzer', 1925) and in his
1933 Principal Miller Lectures at Madras, The
Challenge of the Temporal Process', he argues
for pursuing the duties (as earlier idealists
would say) of one's 'station'.
Hogg rejected being called a theologian.
Concerned with the nature of religious belief
and how Western philosophy and religious
thought could relate to India, he had no
patience for the non-rational in religion, and
was a strong critic of Karl Barth. In 1935 he
was chosen President of the Indian
Philosophical Congress. In his address, The

Claim of Society on the Metaphysically
Minded', he described philosophizing as 'an
imperious spiritual necessity', and called on
philosophers to serve as a 'counterpoise to the
specialist' and to be concerned with broad
issues, such as the rising communism and
fascism in the West.
Hogg maintained strong philosophical inter-
ests, though his later writing focused on com-
parative religion. This is evident in late lectures
given in Edinburgh and Glasgow on 'The
Christian Message to the Hindu'. Opposing
triumphalism, Hogg insisted that 'the assertion
of difference must never degenerate into the
claim of superiority'.
Hogg's work placed him at the forefront of
those British 'philosopher-missionaries' who
engaged Indian philosophical thought in a
direct and constructive way. His writings show
the beginnings of Western efforts to partici-
pate in cross-cultural philosophical dialogue,
and also suggest how philosophical idealism is
open to non-Western thought.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Mr. S. Subrahmanya Sastri on Hindu
Philosophy', Madras Christian College
Magazine, vol. 22 (1904-1905), pp.
121-8.
Karma and Redemption (Madras, 1909).
The Ethical Teaching of Dr. Schweitzer',
International Review of Missions (1925),
pp. 237-51.
The Christian Message to the Hindu [Duff
Missionary Lectures, 1945] (1947).
Further Reading
Chari, C.T.K., 'Alfred George Hogg as a
Teacher of Philosophy', Souvenir Volume:
38th Session of the Indian Philosophical
Congress (Madras, 1964), pp. 61-4.
Sharpe, Eric J., Alfred George Hogg,
1875-1954: An Intellectual Biography
(1999).
William Sweet
441
HOLLAND
HOLLAND, Roy Fraser (1923-)
Roy Holland was born in Manchester on 18
March 1923. He was educated at Manchester
Grammar School from 1934 to 1941, and was
awarded a scholarship at University College,
Oxford in 1941. His time at Oxford was inter-
rupted by war service from 1942 to 1946. He
was awarded the degree of MA in 1948 and a
BPhil in 1950. His tutors at Oxford were G.A.
PAUL and Peter SlRAWSON, and his research
was supervised by Gilbert RYLE.
Holland was appointed assistant lecturer at
the University College of Swansea in 1950,
lecturer in 1952 and senior lecturer in 1959. He
became a senior lecturer at the University of
Leicester in 1965 and reader there in 1966. He
held the Chair of Philosophy at the University
of Leeds from 1967 to 1983, and then became
emeritus professor. He retired from teaching in
1986.
Holland was President of the Aristotelian
Society from 1981 to 1982, and President of the
Mind Association during 1985 to 1986. He
became an honorary fellow of the University of
Wales, Swansea in 1994, a council member,
Royal Institute of Philosophy in 1989, and was
a member of the Management Committee for
Analysis from 1958 to 1997.
Most of Holland's main papers are collected
in his book, Against Empiricism (1980), and
five are not published elsewhere. He was the
originator and editor of the distinguished series,
Studies in Philosophical Psychology. His
involvement with the Royal Institute of
Philosophy reflected his sympathy with its aim
of preserving the connection between philoso-
phy and common understanding, an aim which
is exemplified in the three aspects of Holland's
work which may be said to predominate.
First, his critique of empiricism attacks the
view that human experience is built out of frag-
mentary data provided for the mind by our
senses. In 'The Empiricist Theory of Memory'
he examines accounts of remembering that
treat it as a form of perception or quasi-per-
ception, distinguished from other experiences
HOLLAND
by a special quality. In The Link Between
Cause and Effect' he argues that it is by
ignoring the diversity of materials, movements
and forces at work when things interact with
each other that Hume is led to treat causal
transactions as relations of uninterrupted reg-
ularity between events. In Tor Ever?' he ques-
tions the sense of idealized versions of the
concept of endless duration.
The second aspect of Holland's work is his
distinctive treatment of topics in the philosophy
of religion. Denying the common view that it
makes no sense to speak of a violation of a
law of nature, he argues, in The Miraculous',
that we may be confronted with a contradiction
between what is conceptually impossible and
what is empirically certain. He develops this
theme in 'Lusus naturae' and in 'Naturalism
and Preternatural Change'. In The Form of
"The Problem of Evil"' he challenges the
assumption that a good God would eliminate
evils, and that their existence entails that God
has good reasons for allowing them.
The third and most distinctive aspect of
Holland's work is seen in his treatment of
values. The fragmentary data of empiricism,
cut off from teaching and learning, can give no
account of education, or of the transmission of
its disciplines. While emphasizing the impor-
tance of such disciplines, Holland wants to go
further by bringing in something hard to
explain - the idea of nourishment for the soul.
In 'Is Goodness a Mystery?' he connects this to
a notion of encountering absolute goodness,
which he also finds hard to explain. Neither
consequentialism nor prescriptivism can
account for such encounters. In Platonic mode,
Holland insists that absolute goodness, seen, for
example, in certain aspects of magnanimity,
cannot be explained in terms more ultimate
than what is shown in it. Its existence among us
is a mystery not to be surmounted.
Most of Holland's fifteen years at Swansea
were shared with Rush RHEES, Peter WlNCH and
J.R. JONES. Others came to label them, and some
of their successors, the Swansea School of
Philosophy, or Swansea Wittgensteinians.
442
Undoubtedly, the Wittgensteinian influence
was both strong and distinctive. Yet, as
Holland's penetrating papers show, such influ-
ence, far from deterring, helped to form a philo-
sophical authorship distinctive in its own right.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Against Empiricism (Oxford, 1980).
Contains the papers discussed in this entry.
(Gen. ed.), Studies in Philosophical
Psychology (1957-90).
The Empiricist Theory of Memory', Mind,
vol. 63 (1954), pp. 464-86..
'Lusus naturae', in D.Z. Phillips and Peter
Winch (eds), Wittgenstein: Attention to
Particulars (Basingstoke, 1989), pp. 45-60.
'Naturalism and Preternatural Change', in
Raimond Gaita (ed.), Value and
Understanding (1990), pp. 32-41.
D. Z. Phillips
HOLLIS, James Martin (1938-98)
Martin Hollis was born in London on 14
March 1938 and died of a brain tumour in
Norwich on 27 February 1998. He was
educated at Winchester and at New College,
Oxford, where he received his BA in PPE in
1961 (MA, 1964). He spent 1961 to 1963 as
Harkness Commonwealth Fund Fellow in the
USA, studying at Berkeley and Harvard. From
1963 to 1966 he worked at the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, while teaching part-
time at New College and Balliol College,
Oxford. Leaving the Foreign Office, he was
appointed lecturer in philosophy at the
University of East Anglia in 1967, where he
remained for the rest of his life. He was
promoted senior lecturer in 1972 and professor
in 1982. Hollis served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor
of UEA and as President of the Aristotelian
Society. He was fellow of the British Academy

and Chairman of its Philosophy Section. He
was visiting professor at Universities in
Germany, Canada and the USA, and lectured
in India and China. Hollis succeeded Stephan
KORNER as editor of the journal Ratio. He was
a JP in Norwich from 1972 to 1982. He had a
great interest in puzzles, and contributed puzzle
columns to a number of publications including
New Scientist and Cogito. (A collection of these
was published as Tantalizers in 1970.) He was
also a strong and enthusiastic chess player.
The leading philosopher of the social sciences
in the English-speaking world, by the time of
his death, Hollis had authored eight books and
co-authored two, while editing four collections
and publishing some ninety papers. His work
was translated into a number of languages,
including Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Polish
and Japanese. The leitmotiv of Hollis's work
was reason. True to the seventeenth-century
rationalists whom he so much admired, Hollis
asserted 'the epistemological unity of mankind',
the view that 'some beliefs are universal ...
There are, because there have to be, percepts
and concepts shared by all who can under-
stand each other ...'. But Hollis's was a dis-
tinctively modern version of rationalism. It
incorporated the insights of social scientists
into the problematic nature of the self and the
perils of relativism which attend their investi-
gations. The most important insight was that
the self emerges by engaging with other selves
in its environment, yet remains a crucial
autonomy to understand and transform that
environment.
In the development of Hollis's thought, three
landmark books stand out: Models of Man
(1977), The Cunning of Reason (1988) and
Trust within Reason (1998). In the first of
these, Hollis contrasted two rival models of
man: 'plastic man' and 'autonomous man'. The
former, which was prevalent in much social
theory at that time, was frequently labelled
'positivist'. It included many variants of func-
tionalism which explained human behaviour as
the outcome of different mixtures of nature
and nurture. Against it, Hollis posed the
443
HOLLIS
counter-model of 'autonomous man'. This
approached the agent from the 'internal point
of view', requiring the social scientist to explain
human behaviour by attributing patterns of
rationality to agents. In a six-word epigram,
'rational action is its own explanation'. More
fully, 'social action can be understood only as
the rational expression of intention within
rules'. Models of Man leaves unexamined the
overarching context of rules within which par-
ticular cultures conduct their particular patterns
of rule-governed behaviour. To that extent, the
ghost of relativism had not yet been laid.
In The Cunning of Reason Hollis produced
an extended ideal-type reconstruction of homo
economicus, the agent of instrumentally
rational choice, who is the central figure of
'modern political economy'. Hollis argued that
the paradoxes generated within economic
theory cannot be solved unless the narrow psy-
chological model of an agent driven exclusively
by wants and beliefs is transformed, and the
agent is once again set in a social environment
that is essentially moral, embodying roles and
duties, expectations and claims.
In his final years (1987-98), despite heavy
administrative burdens, Hollis was at the height
of his creative powers. He co-authored a book
on international relations. He was more and
more intrigued by the puzzles thrown up by
game theory and the theory of choice. He pub-
lished numerous papers in this area and edited
The Theory of Choice with colleagues in eco-
nomics and political theory. He published a
demanding textbook, The Philosophy of Social
Science: An Introduction in 1994, having
already published a significant introductory
text on philosophy (Invitation to Philosophy)
in 1985, and a collection of his own most
important papers, Reason in Action, in 1996.
Hollis's last work was Trust within Reason,
based on a series of public lectures delivered in
the previous year in the United States. The
book is short but ambitious. It embodies
Hollis's final and most sustained critique of
instrumental rationality. In Trust within
Reason Hollis also entered the debate between
HOLLIS
liberalism and communitarianism, to defend a
strong version of 'fighting' liberalism, which
he linked to the thesis of the 'epistemological
unity of mankind'. With a fresh array of argu-
ments, he aimed to show that the paradoxes
thrown up by game theory cannot be solved
within the paradigm of instrumental rational-
ity, however much that paradigm is deepened
and refined. Nor can instrumental rationality
provide a solid basis for the ties of trust which
hold societies together. That is true even when
the idea of instrumental rationality is enriched
and deepened to include the drives of sympathy
and compassion. Hollis's detailed criticisms of
the game theorists are driven by a moral imper-
ative, to find a form of society corresponding to
Rousseau's requirement that it should combine
'what right permits with what interest pre-
scribes'. It was in Rousseau's Social Contract
that Hollis found the phrase 'a remarkable
change in man', which he read as an anticipa-
tion of his own idea of the transition from
instrumental to expressive rationality.
According to this reading, individuals come to
express their identity by acting according to
the norms of the society which they themselves,
along with their fellow citizens, create and
sustain. We make ourselves what we are by
engaging in a common project with others.
But this insight brings with it another
dilemma, one which had already been posed at
the conclusion of Models of Man. On the one
hand, it is better to engage with others expres-
sively rather than instrumentally. On the other
hand, if we do that by absorbing ourselves
wholly in the common project, we risk losing
the critical distance provided by universal
Enlightenment reason. So Trust within Reason
leaves us with this problem: how is it possible
to mediate between the particular demands of
expressive rationality and the universal critical
standards of Enlightenment reason?
Hollis did not provide a definitive answer to
that question. But he suggested that the solution
must lie in a fundamental union of theory and
practice. The starting-point might be to regard
the social world as 'an intersubjective fabric
444
spun from shared meanings which persist or
change as we negotiate their interpretation
among ourselves'. The suggestion was that the
practical behaviour of real people is modified
by the principles embodied in the human
sciences used to study them, principles which
they have themselves implicitly absorbed.
Returning to the central therne of Models of
Man, Hollis followed Max Weber in insisting
that there is a radical difference between the
objects and the methods of the human sciences
on the one hand, and those of the natural
sciences on the other. The human sciences,
unlike the natural ones, are addressed to mean-
ingful relations and interactions between
human beings. For writers in this Weberian
tradition, rule-governed systems are categori-
cally different from mere regularities of behav-
iour, and the former are not reducible to the
latter.
In Trust within Reason Hollis held that there
is a categorial distinction between the 'external'
and the 'internal points of view' concerning a
rule-governed system. In advocating that 'inter-
nalist' approach to the human sciences, Hollis
was implicitly rejecting the rival approach of
'externalist' behaviourist psychologists, who
held that meaningful, rule-governed interac-
tion is secondary, a mere epiphenomenon on
some more basic drives. Hollis proposed that
we should prefer the internalist to the exter-
nalist approach for two reasons: first, because
it is superior to its rival at the bar of theory,
and, second, because, in practice, by adopting
it we will come to engage with our fellow men
and women in a different and better fashion. If
we adopt a behaviourist approach to the
human sciences, we will treat other human
beings as external items, subject to instrumen-
tal, at best humane, manipulation. If we are
influenced by Weberian principles, on the other
hand, we shall have the intellectual resources to
relate to others in a rule-governed game, inter-
preters of a shared language and culture.
In these respects, Weberian internalism is
more congenial to liberal sensibilities than
externalist behaviourism. But it still remained

to be seen whether internalism, understood in
terms of expressive reason, could be made com-
patible with liberalism. In the concluding pages
of Trust within Reason Hollis advocated two
principles: (1) 'a communitarian idea about
persons', and (2) 'a constructivist understand-
ing of free action and the common good'. With
(1) we can understand how a self emerges
through a play of meaningful interactions with
others, since there are no 'naked selves' pre-
existing our encounters with them. With (2) we
can understand that to act freely is to act as a
member of a team in cooperation with others,
engaged in the formulation and realization of
a 'common good'.
Principles (1) and (2) together provide the
resources for understanding expressive ratio-
nality and group action. Hollis sought to
combine those principles in a grand synthesis:
Liberals are citizens of the world which they
construct on liberal principles. They sub-
scribe to a communitarian idea about
persons but trump it by insisting that com-
munities must accept liberal ideas about uni-
versal demands of the right and the good ...
Practical wisdom ... relies on a constructivist
understanding of free action and the
common good, while also submitting its con-
structions to a universal and a priori test of
truth.
(Trust within Reason, p. 162)
But Hollis was still concerned that in adopting
the two principles we may have lost the critical
ground from which we could judge the differ-
ent communities which provide different mate-
rials for constructing any particular 'under-
standing of free action and the common good'.
As he observed, 'No doubt it helps to regard the
good as in part a construct, rather than a dis-
covery. But, if it were solely a construct, all
sorts of further trouble would arise. Nor, if all
reduces to struggle for who determines the kind
of construct, can liberalism always win' (ibid.).
How, in other words, can the recommended
approach be prevented from sliding into rela-
445
HOLLIS
tivism? Liberals, we were told, are (or become)
'citizens of the world they construct on liberal
principles'. A relativist could interpret that
phrase as meaning that liberals construct their
liberal world and non-liberals construct their
non-liberal world, and the two worlds must
just co-exist. In his own ironic epigram: liber-
alism for liberals, cannibalism for cannibals.
Hollis, of course, did not intend it to have that
relativist meaning, as is made clear by his insis-
tence on the 'universal demands of the right and
the good' and 'a universal and a priori test of
truth'. But just what could be the source of
those 'universal demands' and that 'a priori
test'?
Trust within Reason, no less than its prede-
cessors, left the reader with as many questions
as answers. In that respect, it was a true expres-
sion of its author's adventurous, inquiring
mind. It remains as a fitting, incomplete epitaph
to one of the twentieth century's foremost
philosophers of the social sciences.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Light of Reason (1970).
(with EJ. Nell), Rational Economic Man: A
Philosophical Critique of Neo-Classical
Economics (Cambridge, 1975).
Models of Man: Philosophical Thoughts on
Social Action (Cambridge, 1977).
Invitation to Philosophy (Oxford, 1985).
The Cunning of Reason (Cambridge, 1988).
(with Robert Sugden), 'Rationality in Action',
Mind, vol. 102 (1993), pp. 1-35.
Trust within Reason (Cambridge, 1998).
Other Relevant Works
'The Limits of Irrationality', European Journal
of Sociology, vol. 7 (1967), pp. 265-71.
'Witchcraft and Winchcraft', Philosophy of the
Social Sciences, vol. 2 (1972), pp. 89-103.
(Ed. with Frank Hahn), Philosophy and
Economic Theory (Oxford, 1979).
(ed. with S. Lukes), Rationality and Relativism
(Oxford, 1982).
'Education as a Positional Good', Journal of
Philosophy of Education, vol. 16 (1982), pp.
HOLLIS
235-44.
'Reasons of Honour', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 87 (1986-7), pp.
1-19.
'A Death of One's Own', Philosophy, vol. 23
(1988), pp. 1-15.
(with Steve Smith), Explaining and
Understanding International Relations
(Oxford, 1990).
Rationalitdt und soziales Verstehen (Frankfurt,
1991).
The Philosophy of Social Science: An
Introduction (Cambridge, 1994).
Reason in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of
Social Science (Cambridge, 1996).
Further Reading
Gauthier, David, Review of Trust Within
Reason, Philosophy & Phenomenological
Research, vol. 62 (1998), pp. 487-90.
King, Preston (ed.), Trusting in Reason: Martin
Hollis and The Philosophy of Social Action,
(2003)
Sugden, Robert, Review of Trust Within
Reason, Economics and Philosophy, vol. 15
(1999), pp. 127-36.
Timothy O'Hagan
HOLMES, Edmond Gore Alexander
(1850-1936)
Edmond Holmes was born in County
Westmeath, Ireland on 17 July 1850 and died
in Chelsea on 14 October 1936. He was
educated at the Merchant Taylor's School in
London and at St John's College, Oxford,
where he gained his MA. In 1875, he took up
a post as HM Inspector of Schools, from which
he retired in 1910.
In his works, Holmes maintains that Western
thought is bankrupt, and he declares that this
is due to its having been dominated by one or
446
more of a series of dualisms: those between the
self and the object, nature and the supernatural,
mind and body, or being and not-being. In
taking the example of the dualism of nature and
the supernatural, Holmes says that when
Western thought was dominated by the latter,
it was beset by the narrowness, rigidity and
dogmatism of Judaism and later, of the
Christian churches. In our own era, attention is
focused on nature and materialism, with the
result that Western thought is now concen-
trated on science, which is regarded as the
paradigm of knowledge. Thinkers in the
Western world are ready to think new
thoughts, but they have no new ideas: in con-
tinuing with the metaphor of bankruptcy,
Holmes states that Western thought has no
credit to draw on.
There is in Holmes's works a strain of intel-
lectual elitism. He says that Western thought
has been deferential to the notions of the
'ordinary man', who, for example, takes liter-
ally the Christian imagery of heaven, hell and
judgement day. Such undemanding beliefs
release humankind from the hard struggle to
attain a true appreciation of reality.
According to Holmes, a true awareness of
reality can be gained only by turning to the
Eastern religions. Both Buddhism and
Hinduism hold that, just as experience is
mediated through the mind of the individual, so
reality is mediated through the Universal Mind
which is reality itself, and of which the indi-
vidual mind is a particular manifestation.
Holmes's views on religion and metaphysics
permeate his approach to education. He main-
tains that the purpose of the educator is not to
close the minds of the young by filling them
with facts, but to allow them to explore the
world freely as a preparation for an awareness
of ultimate reality.
Holmes is one of a myriad of Western
thinkers who have explored the richness of
Eastern philosophy and religion, and this fas-
cination with the thought of the East shows no
sign of abatement in the West.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
What is Poetry? (1900).
What is Philosophy?(1905).
What Is and What Might Be: A Study of
Modern Education (1911).
The Tragedy of Education (1913).
All is One (1921).
Freedom an Growth and Other Essays
(1923).
Self-Realisation: The End and the Aim of Life
(1927).
The Experience of Reality: A Study of
Mysticism (1928).
The World of Self or Spirit (1929).
Philosophy without Metaphysics (1930).
The Headquarters of Reality (1933).
Kathryn L. Plant
HONDERICH, Edgar Dawn Ross (or Ted:
1933-)
Ted Honderich was born in the Canadian
village of Baden on 30 January 1933. Between
1952 and 1959 he studied at the University of
Toronto. After several false starts, and some
time spent working as a journalist, he gradu-
ated with a degree in English literature and
philosophy. As a postgraduate at University
College London, Honderich was supervised
by A.J. AYER, Stuart HAMPSHIRE, Bernard
WILLIAMS and Richard WOLLHEIM. In 1962 he
took up a position as lecturer at the University
of Sussex, where he began work on the book,
Punishment: The Supposed Justifications, for
which he would eventually be awarded his
PhD. In 1964 Honderich returned to
University College, where he remained until
retirement, successively holding the positions
of lecturer, reader, professor and Grote
Professor. Ted Honderich currently lives in
Frome in Somerset, and continues to work on
philosophy.
447
HONDERICH
Honderich's philosophical interests include
determinism, philosophy of mind and political
philosophy. In the first two areas, he offers a
broadly naturalist approach supplemented by
an unusual account of consciousness. In polit-
ical philosophy, his views are left wing and
tend to be controversial. Honderich has edited
numerous series and volumes of philosophy,
including The Oxford Companion to
Philosophy. In 2002 he published Philosopher:
A Kind of Life, which contains a mixture of
autobiography and philosophical reflection.
Determinism, as Honderich conceives it, is
the view that all of our thoughts and actions are
the effects of previous events. Suppose, for
instance, that I reach for a glass of wine. If
determinism is true, then there is long chain of
previous events, some neural and some envi-
ronmental, that caused this act to occur. Effects,
for Honderich, are necessitated by their causal
circumstances. So given the chain of neural and
environmental events, my act of reaching for
the glass of wine was inevitable. To put it
simply, determinism implies that 'choices are
fixed by heredity and environment' (How Free
Are You?, p. 31). Honderich contrasts this
approach with theories of action that appeal to
the idea of free will. According to such theories,
we have a special power to originate decisions
and actions. Even given the very same chain of
neural and environmental effects, I could have
exercised this power and reached instead for a
cup of tea. Free will theories suggest that
humans are in some sense different from plants
and machines; that we are not entirely bound
by the causal laws that govern the rest of the
world.
Honderich claims that determinism provides
a much better account of our decisions and
actions than the free will approach. His
argument for this conclusion begins with his
endorsement of psycho neural intimacy. This is
the idea that there is a very close connection
between mental events and neural events. For
instance, my decision to reach for a glass of
wine is accompanied by a neural event N -
and the connection between the two is such that
HONDERICH
one could not occur in the absence of the other.
Every neural event, Honderich continues, is
the necessary consequence of a long chain of
neural, bodily and environmental events. Given
psychoneural intimacy, it follows that the same
is true of mental events too. That is, the close
connection between the mental and the physical
leaves no room for the supposed power of orig-
ination. This conclusion, Honderich maintains,
is untouched by fashionable appeals to
quantum theory. According to a certain inter-
pretation of quantum theory, some events are
not necessitated by prior causes. But these are
events that involve extremely small particles -
and we have no good reason to believe that this
indeterminism is amplified into indeterminism
at the level of neurons. In other words,
Honderich maintains that the indeterminism
suggested by quantum theory does not conflict
with the determinism that he endorses.
What does determinism imply about human
freedom? There are usually taken to be two
sorts of answer to this question. The incom-
patibilist maintains that freedom is incompat-
ible with determinism. I act freely in reaching
for the wine only if it is true that I could have
done otherwise - and this, of course, is some-
thing that determinism renders impossible. In
contrast, the compatibilist aims to reconcile
the two notions by proposing an alternative
conception of freedom. She might suggest, for
instance, that I act freely in reaching for the
wine because I am doing what I want to do.
Honderich maintains that both of these posi-
tions are mistaken. They are mistaken because
they assume that we have a single, settled
notion of freedom and this is not the case.
According to the alternative picture that
Honderich presents, we have two sorts of life-
hopes. The first kind involves thinking of our
futures as unfixed. I may hope, for instance,
that although my nature and environment
inclines me towards laziness, I can assert my
will in order to rise above this tendency. Such
life-hopes involve the notion of origination,
and are therefore incompatible with determin-
ism. We also hope, however, that our desires
448
are not always frustrated by the world or by
ourselves - we hope not to be dominated by
others, or to be self-indulgent, or to be sick, or
to be in jail. This second sort of life-hope,
Honderich claims, is compatible with the view
that our decisions and actions are causally
determined. The rational response to deter-
minism, then, is to embrace the second sort of
life-hope and abandon the first. Honderich
admits, however, that this is not a task easily
accomplished.
Part of Honderich's philosophy of mind has
already been touched upon: he believes that
there is an intimate connection between the
mental and the neural. My decision to reach for
the glass of wine is accompanied by a neural
event N - and neither neural event nor mental
event could occur in the absence of the other.
How should we explain this intimacy? One
possibility would be to hold that N and the
decision are identical. That is, there is but one
event, which has both mental and neural prop-
erties. Honderich rejects this proposal on the
grounds that it fails to grant the mental a
proper causal role. To see this, suppose that a
single event, with both mental and neural prop-
erties, causes my arm to extend towards the
wine glass. It is natural to maintain that it is the
neural properties of the event that caused this
to happen. But in this case the mental proper-
ties of the event - the fact that it is a decision
to reach for the wine - play no role in explain-
ing my action; the mental becomes unaccept-
ably epiphenomenal. (Honderich uses this
argument against Donald Davidson's anom-
alous monism in a series of papers published in
Analysis.) In place of the identity approach,
Honderich offers his union theory. Mental
events and neural events are not identical, but
nomically connected - connected, that is, in
the way in which the temperature of a gas is
related to its pressure. The act of reaching for
the wine is jointly caused by the decision to
drink more wine and by the neural event that
is its nomic correlate.
In recent years, Honderich has supplemented
union theory with a highly novel account of

perceptual consciousness. It seems that I am
aware of my surroundings in a way in which a
computer, or a brick, is not. But what does
this consciousness or awareness amount to?
Honderich's suggestion is as follows: 'phe-
nomenologically, what it is for you to be per-
ceptually conscious is for a world somehow to
exist, a changing totality of things'
('Consciousness as Existence Again', p. 1). The
world in question, however, is not the physical
world that is accessible to everyone. Rather, it
is my own perceptual world - that is, a world
that is particularly dependent upon my per-
ception of it. What does this mean? It means
that certain aspects of my perceptual world
have a special dependence on my neural and
perceptual apparatus. For instance, the redness
of an apple in my perceptual world depends on
the fact that I see it as red - whereas, in contrast,
the redness of an apple in the physical world
depends upon the reactions of perceivers in
general. The apple of my perceptual world is in
time and space, but because of its peculiar depen-
dence on me, it is not quite a physical object.
Instead, the perceptual apple is a constituent of
the physical apple that is in turn a constituent of
the physical world. Honderich gives this theory
the name of consciousness as existence. He
claims that it has the merit of capturing the sub-
jectivity of consciousness while remaining within
a broadly naturalist tradition.
Apart from his early book on punishment,
Honderich's political philosophy concentrates
on the related topics of inequality and terror-
ism. Here the facts of inequality play a central
role. Consider two such facts. (1) Individuals in
the four African nations of Zambia,
Mozambique, Malawi and Sierra Leone have
an average life expectancy of forty years. In
contrast, those in wealthy countries such as
Britain and the United States can expect to live
to the age of seventy-eight. (2) The average
annual income for the same group of African
nations is $220 per person. In the United States,
however, the average is $29,240 per person.
(See, for example, After the Terror, chap. 1.)
Honderich sums up these differences, together
449
HONDERICH
with differences in health and political liberty,
with the following claim: most people living in
the wealthy nations have good lives; most
people living in the poor nations have bad ones.
Also fundamental to Honderich's political phi-
losophy is the principle of humanity (some-
times referred to as the principle of equality).
This is the principle that we should take
rational steps to get those who have bad lives
over the line into having good lives. We should
do this, for instance, by transferring wealth
from the richer nations to the poorer ones.
The facts of inequality and the principle of
humanity lead Honderich to a number of more
concrete conclusions. One of these is that 'We
have done overwhelmingly wrong, and
continue to do overwhelmingly wrong, in
failing to help those Africans and others whose
lives are cut short' ('After the Terror: A Book
and Further Thoughts', p. 167). A further con-
clusion is that the wrongs done by omission in
Africa and elsewhere provided a necessary
context for the terrorist attacks of September
11. Thus the wealthy countries have some
moral responsibility for these attacks. A third
conclusion is that 'terrorism is not by definition
wrong ... in particular, not all terrorism used
by peoples in seeking freedom and power in
their living places is wrong' (ibid., p. 177).
Honderich illustrates this point by appeal to the
example of Palestinian terrorism against the
state of Israel. Given the current situation, he
argues, the Palestinians have no other means of
acquiring the great goods of freedom and
power. The principle of humanity therefore
secures them a moral right to terrorism. This
conclusion was controversial enough to have
Honderich's book After the Terror briefly with-
drawn from publication in Germany.
Honderich's autobiography Philosopher: A
Kind of Life aims to give us a picture of what
it is like to be a working philosopher in the late
twentieth century. The book is notable for its
frank portrayal of sex, litigation and depart-
mental politics. But it also contains readable
summaries of Honderich's philosophical views
and their connection to his personal life. There
HONDERICH
emerges a picture of a highly ambitious philoso-
pher, unafraid of controversy and obsessed with
'getting things straight'. Few of Honderich's
philosophical opinions are widely accepted. But
his fluid writing style, and his willingness to
commit himself to an unfashionable position,
ensure that his work finds a wide audience -
both in academic circles and elsewhere.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Punishment: The Supposed Justifications
(1969).
Three Essays in Political Violence (1976);
rev. versions published as Violence for
Equality: Inquiries in Political Philosophy
(1980) and Terrorism for Humanity:
Inquiries in Political Philosophy (2003).
A Theory of Determinism: Mind
Neuroscience and Life Hopes (Oxford,
1988); pub. in 2 pts as Mind and Brain
(Oxford, 1990) and The Consequence of
Determinism (Oxford, 1990).
How Free Are You? The Determinism
Problem (Oxford, 1993)
Philosopher: A Kind of Life (2002).
After the Terror (Edinburgh, 2002).
On Consciousness (Edinburgh, 2004).
On Determinism and Freedom (Edinburgh,
2004).
On Political Means and Social Ends
(Edinburgh, 2004).
Other Relevant Works
The Argument for Anomalous Monism',
Analysis, vol. 16 (1982), pp. 59-64.
'Consciousness as Existence Again',
Proceedings of the Twentieth World
Congress in Philosophy, vol. 9, Philosophy
of Mind, ed. B. Elevitch; also at
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/ted3.htm,
accessed November 2004 (page references
to online version).
'After the Terror: A Book and Further
Thoughts', The Journal of Ethics, vol. 7,
no. 2 (2003), pp. 161-81.
Anna Sherratt
450
HORSBURGH, Howard John Neate
(b. 1918).
Howard J.N. Horsburgh was born in
Darjeeling, India. He obtained a BSc in eco-
nomics from the University of London in 1948,
and an MA in philosophy from the University
of Glasgow in 1950, after which he obtained a
BLitt from the University of Oxford in 1953,
his dissertation being on justification in ethical
discussion. Horsburgh began his career as an
assistant in the Moral Philosophy Department
of the University of Edinburgh (1952-5),
becoming research fellow in social philosophy,
Australian National University (1955-7);
Professor of Philosophy, Magee University
College, Londonderry (1957-60); lecturer
(1960-63) and subsequently senior lecturer
(1963-9) in moral philosophy, University of
Glasgow; visiting professor, Department of
Philosophy, University of Guelph, Ontario
(1967); Professor of Philosophy, University of
Victoria, British Columbia (1969-84); and
visiting professor at the International Christian
University, Tokyo (1975-6).
An early member of the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and a member of
the Peace Pledge Union, Florsburgh's main
interest lies in social and political philosophy,
particularly non-violence and alternatives to war.
Much of his writing defends M.K. Gandhi's
system of satyagraha. His principal work on this
theme is Non-Violence and Aggression (1968),
in which he condemns war as irrational, morally
erosive and a violation of the Kantian principle
of 'respect for persons' - a principle which influ-
ences much of Horsburgh's social philosophy.
Horsburgh elucidates Gandhi's principles of
satyagraha as satya (regard for truth), ahimsa
(non-violence) and tapasya (preparedness for
self-suffering). In his Mahatma Gandhi (1972),
Gandhi's principles of satyagraha are set out in
summary form, while Horsburgh's later books,
Power Taming (1991) and Quenching Wrath
(1992) are less strictly philosophical, dealing
with the practicalities of working out non-violent
alternatives to war.

Horsburgh addresses wider issues in social
and political philosophy. 'Purpose and
Authority in Morals' (1956) sets out to recon-
cile differences between deontologists and tele-
ologists, while 'The Criteria of Assent to a
Moral Rule' (1954) develops R.M. HARE'S
attempt to reconcile the notion of akrasia with
moral belief. Other pieces of writing deal with
specific moral concepts, in particular human
freedom, trust and forgiveness. These go
beyond conceptual analysis, often relating them
to human warfare: for example, 'The Ethics of
Trust' raises issues concerning collective
security in the context of political alliances.
A few articles lie in the field of philosophy of
religion, where Horsburgh rejects reductionist
accounts of religious belief, such as those of
R.B. BRAITHWAITE, R.M. Hare and Paul van
Buren. The article 'The Claims of Religious
Experience' (1957) is a defence of religious
experience against critics who adopt a verifi-
cationalist approach to religion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'The Criteria of Assent to a Moral Rule',
Mind, vol. 63 (1954), pp. 345-58.
'Freedom and Real Will Theories',
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 34
(1956), pp. 92-105.
'Purpose and Authority in Morals',
Philosophy, vol. 31 (1956), pp. 309-23.
'The Claims of Religious Experience',
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 35
(1957), pp. 186-200.
'Trust and Social Objectives', Ethics, vol. 72
(1961), pp. 28-40.
'Trust and Collective Security', Ethics, vol. 72
(1962), pp. 252-65.
Non-Violence and Aggression: A Study of
Gandhi's Moral Equivalent of War
(London and New York, 1968).
Mahatma Gandhi (London, 1972).
'Forgiveness, Canadian Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 4 (1974), pp. 269-82.
Power Taming: Peace Making Strategies for
the World (East Wittering, West Sussex,
1991).
451
HUBY
Quenching Wrath: Collective Security and
Nonviolence (Glasgow, 1992).
Other Relevant Works
'Mr Hare on Theology and Falsification',
Philosophical-Quarterly, vol. 6 (1956), pp.
256-9.
'The Distinctiveness of Satyagraha',
Philosophy East and West, vol. 19 (1969),
pp. 171-80.
'Van Buren on Christ and Freedom', Sophia,
vol. 13 (1974), pp. 22-9.
'Reply to Kai Nielsen' ['On Justifying
Violence'], Inquiry, vol. 24 (1981), pp.
59-73.
'Professor Braithwaite and Billy Brown',
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 36
(1958), pp. 201-207.
George D. Chryssides
HUBY, Pamela Margaret (nee Clark: 1922-)
Pamela Clark was born in Dulwich on 21 April
1922 and was educated at Lady Margaret Hall,
Oxford (1940-44 and 1945-7, with MA in
1947). After being an assistant lecturer in
classics at Reading (1944-5) and lecturer in
philosophy at St Anne's Society, Oxford
(1947-9), she worked in philosophy at
Liverpool (assistant lecturer, 1949-52; lecturer,
1952-71; senior lecturer, 1971-83; reader
1983-7, when she retired, as honorary research
fellow).
Huby's publications range widely in both
the history of philosophy and philosophy itself,
including metaphysics and philosophy of mind,
ethics and logic. One way in which she differs
from most contemporary philosophers is in her
willingness to take paranormal phenomena
seriously. Insisting that they may obey scientific
laws, though not those of matter-based science,
she gives brief descriptions of the nature, and
HUBY
some of the evidence for, many different kinds
of paranormal phenomena including two pol-
tergeist cases based on her own experience,
tentatively concluding that minds may not be
confined to a single body and may be aware of
and influence things and people both physi-
cally and in ways not yet understood. She has
also written on the paranormal in Aristotle and
some later writers. A closely related topic is
that of survival of death, and in an article on
this Huby uses ideas from WITTGENSTEIN to
discuss what would count as survival and what
form such survival might take, concluding that
whether we survive is basically an empirical
issue.
In perhaps Huby's main philosophical article
she claims that the universe, if real, must be
finite in space and time. Starting from Kant's
first antinomy, she first rejects RUSSELL'S criti-
cisms of it and then turns to whether an actual,
as against potential, infinity is possible. (The
qualification 'if real' in her claim is to exclude
discussion of the merely potential infinite,
which is what she thinks Cantor taught us how
to deal with.) She then argues that the distance,
however large, between any two objects must
be finite, even if it could have been larger, and
that the total number of objects cannot be
Alepho because that is not a natural number like
a million, etc. Finally she adds, much more
briefly, that the universe must have existed for
only a finite time. The article provoked two dis-
cussion notes, to which she replies mainly that
their authors in fact beg the question against
her.
In the history of philosophy Huby's work
ranges from Plato to the thirteenth century,
but after two early and elementary books on
Greek Ethics and Plato and Modern Morality
and a handful of articles on Plato, Aristotle
and the Epicureans, her main interest has
centred on Theophrastus, and she has played a
major part in both editing and contributing to
a considerable number of books, especially in
the Project Theophrastus series. In these she
discusses the nature and reliability of our
sources in later antiquity and the middle ages
452
for reconstructing his views (many of his own
writings having been lost). As well as helping to
edit a two-volume texts and translations of the
sources for Theophrastus she has written a
major commentary on Theophrastus's psy-
chology, covering sensation, imagination, epis-
temology and especially intellect, with a similar
volume on his logic forthcoming.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Comm.), Theophrastus, Psychology (Leiden,
1999).
The First Discovery of the Freewill Problem',
Philosophy, vol. 42, no. 162 (October
1967), pp. 353-62. Discussed by W.F.R.
Hardie in Philosophy, vol. 43, no. 165
(July 1968), pp. 274-8.
'Kant or Cantor? That the Universe, if Real,
Must be Finite in Both Space and Time',
Philosophy, vol. 46, no. 176 (April 1971),
pp. 121-32. With discussion and reply in
subsequent issues.
'Some Aspects of the Problem of Survival', in
S.C. Thakur (ed.), Philosophy and
Psychical Research (London and New
York, 1976), pp. 122-41.
The Paranormal in the Works of Aristotle
and his Circle', Apeiron, vol. 13 (January
1979), pp. 53-62.
Theophrastus and the Criterion', in P. Huby
and G. Neal (eds), The Criterion of Truth,
(Liverpool, 1989), pp. 107-22.
'Paranormal Phenomena', in R. Tallis and H.
Robinson (eds), The Pursuit of Mind
(Manchester, 1991), pp. 171-86.
Other Relevant Works
Greek Ethics (1967).
Plato and Modern Morality (1972).
(Trans.), Priscian of Lydia, On Theophrastus
on Sense-Perception (1997).
(Comm.), Theophrastus, Logic (Leiden,
forthcoming).
A. R. Lacey

HUDSON, William Donald (1920-2003)
W.D. Hudson was born in Skipton and died in
Exeter on 1 November 2003. After training at
Manchester, and taking a London BD in 1943,
he served as a Baptist minister at West Vale,
Halifax (1944-8) and Atherton, Manchester
(1948-60). Meanwhile, he turned to philoso-
phy, studying at Liverpool under D.J.
O'CONNOR and P.M. HUBY, and taking a
London MA in 1954 and a London PhD (with
a thesis on Richard Price) in 1958. He then
worked at Exeter (lecturer, 1960; senior
lecturer, 1966; reader and also Sub-Dean of
the Faculty of Arts, 1969 or 1970), retiring in
1986.
Hudson's philosophy covers three broad
though connected areas: ethics, philosophy of
religion and the philosophy of WITTGENSTEIN.
His method, especially in his books, and in
ethics, consists largely in reviewing the work of
others in commentaries or histories, and in this
respect he might be compared to the ancient
commentators on the works of Aristotle, or
those medieval writers who embodied their
thought in commentaries on either Aristotle or
the Sentences of Peter of Lombardy.
Two main influences on Hudson have been
Wittgenstein and, especially in ethics, R.M.
HARE. Much of his writing comes towards the
end of the dominance of British philosophy by
the linguistic philosophy movement, one of
whose features was to insist on a sharp dis-
tinction between substantive moral questions,
for example about abortion or war and peace,
and questions, alone regarded as philosophical
in this area, about, for example, the meaning of
moral terms, or whether moral judgements can
be true or false, or how they are related to the
factual statements brought in to ground them.
Hudson refers to these two types of question as
normative ethics and meta-ethics respectively,
and starts Modern Moral Philosophy (1970) by
emphasizing the distinction and saying that he
will be concerned only with meta-ethics, as
against what he elsewhere (A Century of Moral
Philosophy, p. viii) calls 'moral preaching and
453
HUDSON
pampleteering' (though without intending to
denigrate these). Linguistic philosophy,
however, was waning, and he admits that
'moral philosophers are turning their attention
again to practical problems' about things like
sex or war (Modern Moral Philosophy, p. 18),
though he still insists that one's views on meta-
ethics may influence one's views on moral edu-
cation, or on the grounding of one's normative
views, and may help one to reason effectively,
but do not commit one to any particular nor-
mative views. In particular, he insists on dis-
tinguishing the logical principle that one must
be consistent in one's moral judgements, on
pain of not really uttering moral judgements at
all, from the moral principle of impartiality,
that one should not favour oneself, a distinction
important in connection with his sympathy
with the logical 'universalizability thesis'
implicit in Hare's prescriptivism.
Despite all this, however, a lot of his writing
concerns the distinctions between utilitarianism
and intuitionism, doctrines which, following
Hare, he classifies under normative ethics (A
Century of Moral Philosophy, p. 186).
Utilitarianism embodies the substantive view
that one should pursue the general happiness,
and his own view inclines towards this, though
not uncritically. He accepts, for example, that
we should help the needy and compensate the
disabled even though this may not promote
the greatest happiness overall (Reason and
Right, pp. 115-16), and that some further prin-
ciple, such as one of equity, is needed to deal
with conflicts of obligation (ibid., pp. 124-5).
Hudson's opposition to intuitionism is what
most clearly shows the influence of Hare and
Wittgenstein, in particular of Wittgenstein's
later theory of meaning as use, which supple-
mented by J.L. AUSTIN'S theory of speech-acts
leads to an open-ended enquiry into what
function moral terms perform rather than what
they stand for. The result for Hudson is con-
siderable sympathy for Hare's prescriptivism,
whereby we choose for ourselves what to
approve of and prescribe for others, but subject
to the logical (not moral) constraint that our
HUDSON
prescriptions must be universalizable. To call
something right, etc., is not to ascribe some
property to it but to engage in a certain action
concerning it (roughly to prescribe it). 'Moral
terms do not so much have a meaning as do
a job', as he puts it in 'Moral Arguments'
(p. 535).
But if we choose what to value or prescribe
(subject to consistency), can just anything count
as a moral judgement? Hudson thinks that to
provide a criterion for morality is 'the most
interesting question in morality at the moment'
(Tact and Moral Value', p. 135) and criticizes
Hare for letting in just anything universaliz-
able. He thinks some judgements, though not
directly contradictory, would be 'logically odd',
like 'Virtue deserves punishment' (Reason and
Right, pp. 94-5; cf. A Century of Moral
Philosophy, pp. 136-7), and seems also to
think (though not very clearly: ibid., pp. 165-8)
that moral considerations are overriding. More
specifically, he suggests that moral reasons must
depend on 'beliefs concerning the facts of
human existence' ('Fact and Moral Value',
p. 138), and that 'the thing to do, where moral
judgement is concerned, is to commend that
which will result in man becoming more com-
pletely what you take him to be' (see his reply
to Helm, p. 146)
Some of the biggest issues in modern moral
philosophy concern the relations between
morality and reason, objectivity and truth. The
eighteenth-century dispute between rational-
ists and moral sense theorists is an example of
the dispute concerning rationality, though both
sides accepted the reality of objective moral
properties which intuitionism and the moral
sense could detect, and Hudson rejects both of
them as being forms of intuitionism (see Ethical
Intuitionism, 1967).
An extreme form of the attempt to found
morality on reason is the claim that moral con-
clusions can be logically entailed by non-moral
premises, or colloquially that 'ought' can be
logically deduced from 'is'. Hudson's edited
book The Is/Ought Question (1969) is mainly
concerned with this problem, ending with a
454
few more general essays on description and
evaluation. He includes two contributions of
his own. The first is a straightforward defence
of the orthodox interpretation of a famous
passage in Hume that started the whole dis-
cussion. The second, rather more surprising in
view of his own inclination to prescriptivism, is
a tentative defence of the main protagonist of
the derivability view, J.R. Searle, against
various other contributors to the volume - ten-
tative because he does not claim to have shown
that Searle's derivation is valid.
Hudson's own view on reason, truth and
objectivity in morals is slightly complex. In 'On
the Alleged Objectivity of Moral Judgement'
(1962) he takes the objectivity of moral judge-
ments to have traditionally meant that 'they
are statements of fact known by a faculty of
moral intuition' (p. 534), and this he rejects,
while his prescriptivism implies that such judge-
ments cannot be straightforwardly true or false.
But this does not mean that reason has no part
to play. In fact he insists several times (cf. also
A Century of Moral Philosophy, p. 129;
Reason and Right, p. 74) that it always makes
sense to ask for a reason for a moral judgement;
sometimes we can do so for expressions of
taste, etc. too, but there the process will always
come to an end. But this position is surely
unhappy. What reason could I give for saying
'Torturing for fun is wrong'? In fact, as we
have seen, his general position makes our
ultimate values and moral judgements a matter
of choice, though we must always be prepared
to defend the consistency of our decisions.
In Hudson's other main area of interest, the
philosophy of religion, the influence of
Wittgenstein is equally prominent - both his use
theory of meaning and treatment of religion
itself. One of the tests Hudson offers in
'Theology and the Intellectual Endeavour of
Mankind' (1985) for the respectability of
theology is that religion is a going concern, like
our belief in physical objects, and though it is
not universal, life without it would lack a
dimension which is an integral part of human
life. One might wonder whether a belief in

physical objects is as dispensable as belief in
religion, despite the existence of idealists, but
Hudson's view plainly derives from
Wittgenstein's notion of a 'form of life', or a
'language-game' which is in fact 'played' (see
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Bearing of his
Philosophy upon Religious Belief, p. 67). He
borrows from Wittgenstein's later philosophy
the idea of religious belief as the forming of a
'picture' of reality. (This is quite different from
Wittgenstein's earlier 'picture' or referential
theory of meaning.) The believer sees reality in
a certain way, interpreting, for example, certain
bad events not as accidents but as punishment
for his sins, if he believes in a Last Judgement.
But religious belief on this view involves
certain affective attitudes (e.g., awe) and com-
mitments (e.g., to obey God), and Hudson
thinks that for Wittgenstein this involvement is
not just psychological but also logical, in that
anyone without it would not be holding the
same belief, so that for Wittgenstein the believer
and the unbeliever are not contradicting each
other. Hudson interprets this as meaning that
'the unbeliever does not use the pictures as the
believer does and this is not a matter of the one
contradicting the other' (Wittgenstein and
Religious Belief\ p. 192), and appeals to P.
STRAWSON'S view that a sentence like 'The king
of France is wise' is not false, but neither true
nor false, if there is no such king.
Hudson is clearly sympathetic to this view
and seems to adopt it. But there are complica-
tions, and his attitude is somewhat ambiva-
lent. To say that believers and unbelievers
cannot contradict each other because they are
simply looking at things in different ways
suggests that the question 'Does God really
exist?' is meaningless, which he thinks it plainly
is not. At this point he distinguishes, following
Carnap, between questions internal to a given
sphere (such as, in history, 'Why did Caesar
cross the Rubicon?') and questions external to
it (such as 'Is the past real?'). He then claims
that 'Does God really exist?' is external to
religion because God is presupposed by tradi-
tional religion as the past is by history. But
455
HUDSON
what do we mean by saying that something
'really exists'? One thing he insists on is that we
must have a criterion for answering in any
given case (see Wittgenstein and Religious
Belief, pp. 82-3). Within physical science a cri-
terion might be 'actual spatio-temporal
location', i.e. being a physical object. We might
find a criterion for whether physical objects as
such really exist, but we could always ask
whether whatever satisfies that condition does
really exist, which would require another cri-
terion, and so on into a regress. In fact he
compares the situation to MOORE'S view of
'good', where it is always an open question
whether what satisfies any proposed definition
of it really is good. Ultimately, we simply have
to choose what are to be our criteria for
whether something exists, he thinks, though
we should not (on pain of unintelligibility)
allow the existence of what would be incoher-
ent or inconsistent (see A Philosophical
Approach to Religion, pp. 97-105). We can
compare his similar approach to how we get
our ultimate values. In the religious case we
have to choose whether to adopt a certain
picture.
This may sound as though Hudson is a sort
of existentialist but in fact he has always
emphasized the reasonableness of religion. He
adheres to analytical philosophy (ibid., p. 3)
and has no sympathy for those who attribute
contradictory or unintelligible attributes to
God, since 'nonsense does not cease to be
nonsense because it is talked about God'
('Transcendence', p. 98) - though he sees a
problem about what constitutes sense or
nonsense here. Later ('The Concept of Divine
Transcendence') he argues that God is tran-
scendent in the empirical sense of being beyond
all human knowledge, but not in the logical
sense of being beyond all coherent description
in ordinary language. God may have certain
attributes in a different sense from that in which
we have them, but only to a certain extent.
Religious language may go beyond ordinary
language but must be continuous with it.
Statements about God must share the entail-
HUDSON
ments and incompatibles of similar statements
in other spheres but not necessarily all of them.
'God is our father' means that God stands in a
certain caring relation to us but not that he is
our biological parent. That God exists in fact
plays the role of a 'fundamental proposition'
for religion in Wittgenstein's sense, or a 'tacit
presupposition', as Hudson prefers to call it.
God is a 'constitutive concept' of religion; it
constitutes a limit to our thought rather than
transcending such a limit (as early Wittgenstein
thought). He rejects any appeal to the tradi-
tional arguments (from design, first cause, etc.),
but he is ambivalent on whether God's exis-
tence could be empirically falsified: for
'Theology and the Intellectual Endeavour of
Mankind' such an attempt would be a category
mistake, but the early 'An Attempt to Defend
Theism' (p. 27) rebuts the vacuousness objec-
tion by denying that 'no circumstance which
[the theist] could conceivably encounter would
make him abandon [his faith]'. He vacillates
too on whether immortality should be inter-
preted literally (though without explaining
why, if not, such misleading temporal language
is used).
But while Hudson defends religion vigor-
ously against attacks on its rationality (though
admitting he cannot solve the problem of evil)
he gives us little positive reason to choose the
religious 'picture', beyond calling life poorer
without it and saying it might be 'constitutive
of man'.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Moral Arguments', Mind, vol. 68, no. 272
(October 1959), pp. 533^.
'Fact and Moral Value', Religious Studies,
vol. 5 (1962), pp. 29-39.
'On the Alleged Objectivity of Moral
Judgments', Mind, vol. 71, no. 284
(October 1962), pp. 530-34.
'An Attempt to Defend Theism', Philosophy,
vol. 39, no. 147 (January 1964), pp.
18-28.
'Transcendence', Theology, vol. 69, no. 549
(March 1966), pp. 97-104.
456
Ethical Intuitionism (London and New York,
1967).
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Bearing of his
Philosophy upon Religious Belief (London
and Richmond, Virginia, 1968).
Reason and Right: A Critical Examination of
Richard Price's Moral Philosophy (1970).
Modern Moral Philosophy (1970; 2nd much
exp. edn., dropping one chapter,
Basingstoke, 1983).
A Philosophical Approach to Religion
(1974).
Wittgenstein and Religious Belief (1975).
'What Makes Religious Beliefs Religious?',
Religious Studies, vol. 13 (1977), pp.
221-42.
'The Concept of Divine Transcendence',
Religious Studies, vol. 15 (1979), pp.
197-210.
'The Rational System of Beliefs', in D.
Martin, J.O. Mills, W.F. Pickering (eds),
Sociology and Theology: Alliance and
Conflict (Brighton, 1980), pp. 80-108.
A Century of Moral Philosophy (Guildford,
1980).
The Light Wittgenstein Sheds on Religion',
Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 6
(1981), pp. 275-92.
The Is/Ought Problem Resolved?', in E.
Regis (ed.), Gewirth's Ethical Rationalism
(Chicago, 1984), pp. 108-27.
Theology and the Intellectual Endeavour of
Mankind', Religious Studies, vol. 21
(1985), pp. 21-37.
Other Relevant Works
(Ed.), The Is/Ought Question (1969).
Further Reading
Burke, T.E., Review of A Philosophical
Approach to Religion, Religious Studies,
vol. 11 (1975), pp. 352-4.
Diamond, M.L., Review of Wittgenstein and
Religious Belief, Religious Studies, vol. 15
(1979), pp. 107-18.
Helm, P., 'Fact and Moral Value - A
Comment on Dr Hudson's Paper',

Religious Studies, vol. 5 (1969), pp.
140-44.
Jones, Peter, Review of Reason and Right,
Philosophical Books, vol. 12, no. 2 (1971),
pp. 12-14.
A. R. Lacey
von HUGEL, Friedrich (1852-1925)
Friedrich von Hiigel was born in Florence on 5
May 1852 and died in Kensington on 27
January 1925. He was the eldest of three
children of Baron Karl von Hiigel (an Austrian
diplomat) and his Scottish wife Elizabeth
(Farquharson). Friedrich had no formal
academic study, receiving an eclectic private
education at home (although he later received
honorary doctorates from Oxford (DD, 1920)
and St Andrews (LL. D, 1914)). Aside from his
reading of the Greek and Roman classics, von
Hiigel developed a strong interest in the natural
sciences - particularly geology - which he
retained throughout his life. But his health was
not good; as a young man, von Hiigel went
through periods of nervous depression, and he
suffered from chronic deafness.
The von Hiigel family moved to England in
1867. At the age of twenty-one, von Hiigel
married Mary, the daughter of (Lord) Sidney
Herbert; together they had three daughters.
Having an independent income, von Hiigel was
able to devote his life to study, writing and lec-
turing, and, later, spiritual counselling. He was
influenced by the apologetics of the Oxford
Tractarian, William George Ward (from 1873),
and by John Henry Newman (from 1874), and
his expertise in biblical studies was developed
through study with the Belgian Bollandist
Charles de Smedt. In Paris in 1884 von Hiigel
met the eminent 'Apostle of Paris', Abbe Henri
Huvelin, who had a profound effect on von
Hiigel's spiritual life.
457
von HUGEL
Von Hiigel's interests spanned philosophy,
theology and biblical criticism, and spirituality.
He did not begin writing, however, until his
forties, and while his work was predominantly
in English, it always retained a distinctive
Germanic style. Von Hiigel quickly became
known for both his commitment to his Roman
Catholic faith and his openness to other reli-
gions. He was impressed by the advances in sci-
entific method and in historical criticism and
scholarship (particularly biblical criticism), with
which he thought the Catholic Church needed
to engage in order to bring Catholicism into the
contemporary world. Von Hiigel was an early
associate of Alfred Loisy, and from 1897, the
mentor and friend of Father George Tyrrell; he
became a leading figure of what was later called
the Catholic modernist movement. Although
named in a letter from the Congregation of the
Index (of forbidden books) in 1907, von Hiigel
avoided the polemical excesses of Loisy and
Tyrell, and escaped the official censure of mod-
ernism that followed Pope Pius X's decree
Lamentabili sani exitu (1907) and his encycli-
cal Pascendi dominici gregis (1907). Von Hiigel
always saw himself as a dutiful son of his
church, and his more controversial views on
biblical criticism and faith, found in his unpub-
lished papers and letters, remained unknown
until the 1980s. Following the attack on mod-
ernism, von Hiigel pursued his researches in a
more circumspect way, and was an active
member of the London Society for the Study of
Religion from its founding in 1908 until his
death - although he remained under suspicion
from papal authorities.
Von Hiigel's first important book was The
Mystical Element of Religion: As Studied in
Saint Catherine of Genoa and her Friends
(1908), which became a classic text in religion
and mysticism. Here he advanced the view
that there were three elements or stages of
religion, analogical with childhood, youth and
adulthood - the traditional/institutional, the
rational/argumentative and the experimen-
tal/mystical. In von Hiigel's view, there is a
natural transition through these stages during
von HUGEL
the believer's life, and while there is always a
tendency for one to dominate, all three
elements are necessary for mature faith. Von
Hugel then proceeded to illustrate this at length
through an analysis of the mystical/volitional
character of the writings of the late fifteenth-
century saint, Catherine of Genoa, and, in the
process, articulated the underlying 'psychology
of mysticism'.
Von Hiigel's second major work, Eternal
Life: A Study of its Implications and
Applications (1912) - initially planned as an
article for James Hastings's Encyclopaedia of
Religion and Ethics - provides a series of his-
torical studies on the notion of eternity and
eternal life. Beginning with a survey of
Oriental, 'Israelitish' and Hellenistic religion
and cult, von Hugel traces the changes in the
understanding of 'eternity' through early,
medieval and modern Christianity, to post-
Kantian and Hegelian (including British
idealist) thought. He discusses some of the
influences of evolutionism, socialism and insti-
tutional religion, before concluding with some
brief remarks on the meaning of the idea of
eternal life, and its place in the spiritual life.
In this and in later work, such as his Essays
& Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion
(1921), von Hugel makes a number of signif-
icant philosophical and religious claims. First,
von Hiigel's analysis of religion is one that is
centred in practice - specifically, the practice of
'adoration' (see Eternal Life, p. 392), and he
held that all religions, so far as they recog-
nized the fundamental importance of the ado-
ration of the divine, contained truth. Second,
he argued that the future of Christian church
lay in making room for not only the intellec-
tual and institutional, but also the 'experiential'
(including the mystical) elements of faith. In
this, von Hugel clearly acknowledges the value
of spirituality over purely intellectual matters
of doctrine. He was opposed to religious exclu-
sivism, but also maintained that religion is not
something fundamentally subjective.
Nevertheless, third, von Hugel recognized the
importance of institutions in the spiritual life.
458
There can be no spiritual development without
a relation to community., and von Hugel
refused to advise people to leave their 'home'
religious tradition unless they could seriously
claim that it was inadequate to the demands of
their spiritual life. The 'third element' of
religion, then, required the believer to engage
in a double process - to be independent of the
world in some respects, but to retain a relation
to one's fellow human beings through reli-
gious institutions.
Von Hugel was a critic of idealism and of
monism - both of which he saw as being too
'one-sided'. Here he was convinced by the
arguments of the realist Jarnes WARD, yet he
was also influenced by the idealists Henry
JONES and Andrew Seth PRINGLE-PATTISON,
who provided him with a means of overcom-
ing the division between 'subject' and 'object'
with their argument that both are given
together in experience. This capacity of
bringing together insights from disparate meta-
physical views led to von Hiigel's influence on
many outside his immediate circle - including
Pringle-Pattison's student, the Edinburgh
Professor of Metaphysics, Norman KEMP
SMITH.
Von Hiigel's analysis of religion rested on an
underlying philosophical position that was
'realist' and 'dualist'. He defended a 'critical
realism' - 'realist,' so far as he insisted on the
existence of an objective world (including the
'transcendent') outside of individual minds,
and 'critical' in that this realism required a
rigorous examination of the nature of this
reality and religious experience. Von Hugel
was a dualist in that he maintained that there
had to be a reality beyond the physical and
finite. Although radically other and transcen-
dent, a basic sense of this 'Infinite' - the reality
of God - was rooted in human experience.
Von Hiigel's dualism, then, is fundamentally
an anti-positivism or anti-empiricism - one
reflecting throughout reality the duality of the
finite and infinite - and he drew on this in the
intellectual examination of, but also the apolo-
getic for, his own religious faith.

During and following World War I, von
Hugel maintained a high degree of productiv-
ity. His The German Soul in its Attitude
towards Ethics and Christianity, the State and
War (1916) was succeeded by a number of
essays, collected in two volumes entitled Essays
& Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion
(first series, 1921; second series, posthumous,
1926). Here von Hugel covers a wide range of
issues, ranging from the conceptual ('What do
We Mean by Heaven? and What do We Mean
by Hell?') to the historical (The Apocalyptic
Element in the Teaching of Jesus') and apolo-
getic ('Progress in Religion', 'Preliminaries to
Religious Belief,' and 'The Essentials of
Catholicism'). The second series of essays
focuses particularly on the issue of the nature,
role and character of authority and institu-
tions within Catholicism, but also addresses
such topics as 'Suffering and God', where he
shows a strong awareness of the presence of
evil and of doubt in the world, and a refusal to
underestimate them or reduce the reality of
God to something metaphorical. This latter
aspect of von Hiigel's philosophical theology
was an important influence on those who came
to him for spiritual advice.
Von Hugel was elected Gifford Lecturer at
the University of Edinburgh (1924-6). He
proposed to speak 'Concerning the Reality of
Finites and the Reality of God: A Study in
their Interrelations and their Effects and
Requirements within the Human Mind', but
was unable to deliver the lectures due to ill
health; his manuscript notes for these lectures
were posthumously published (along with
notes for another study on the work of the
Anglo-Indian poet and author, Sir Alfred
Comyn Lyall) in 1931, under the title The
Reality of God, and Religion & Agnosticism.
Von Hugel attracted a wide range of friends
and acquaintances, and his personal influence
was epic. He became a close associate of the
neo-Kantian theologian and proponent of his-
torical criticism, Ernst Troeltsch (see his 1923
edition of Troeltsch's Christian Thought: Its
History and Application), his writings also had
459
von HUGEL
a strong influence on the English philosophers
C.C J. WEBB and Hilda OAKELEY. Aside from
his academic work, von Hugel was also a spir-
itual counsellor and mentor to a number of his
contemporaries, including the English mystic
Evelyn Underbill (who long corresponded with
him and was formally under his guidance from
1921 to 1925). At his death, von Hiigel's con-
tributions to religion, spirituality and philoso-
phy were acknowledged by both Christians
and non-Christians alike. Several volumes of
his letters have appeared, focusing mainly on
his spirituality, but more recently concerning
the 'modernist' movement.
Following his death, von Hiigel's personal
library and papers were donated to the
University of St Andrews, where they occupy
a central place in archives devoted to late nine-
teenth and early twentieth-century religious
thought. In recent decades, von Hiigel's
writings have been influential in ecumenical
and in non-Catholic religious thought, and he
has been the subject of studies by Lawrence
Barman, Ellen Leonard and others.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Mystical Element of Religion: As
Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and
her Friends, 2 vols (1908).
'John, the Apostle', 'Alfred Loisy', 'John,
the Gospel of St.', in Encyclopaedia
Britannica, llth edn (1911), vol. 15, pp.
432-3, 452-8; vol. 16, pp. 926-8.
Eternal Life: A Study of its Implications
and Applications (Edinburgh, 1912).
The German Soul in its Attitude Towards
Ethics and Christianity, the State, and
War. Two Studies (1916).
Essays & Addresses on the Philosophy of
Religion (London, Toronto and New
York, 1921).
Essays & Addresses on the Philosophy of
Religion. Second Series (London,
Toronto and New York, 1926).
The Reality of God, and Religion &
Agnosticism; Being the Literary Remains
of Baron Priedrich von Hugel (London
von HUGEL
and New York, 1931).
Letters from Baron Friedrich von Hugel to
a Niece, ed. Gwendolen Greene (1928).
Selected Letters, 1896-1924 (London,
Toronto and New York, 1928).
Briefwecbsel 1909-1931 (Paderborn,
1981).
Further Reading
Barmann, Lawrence F., Baron Friedrich v.
Hugel and the Modernist Crisis in
England (Cambridge, 1972).
De La Bedoyere, Michael, The Life of
Baron von Hugel (1951).
Kelly, James J., Baron Friedrich von
Hiigel's Philosophy of Religion (Leuven,
1983).
Leonard, Ellen M., Creative Tension: The
Spiritual Legacy of Friedrich von Hugel
(Scranton, Pennsylvania, 1997).
Nedoncelle, Maurice, La pensee religieuse
de Friedrich von Hiigel (1852-1925)
(Paris, 1935); trans. Marjorie Vernon,
Baron Friedrich von Hiigel: A Study of
his Life and Thought (London and New
York, 1937).
Rollmann, Hans, Troeltsch, von Hiigel,
and Modernism5, The Downside Review,
vol. 96 (1978), pp. 35-60.
Zorzi, Giuseppe, Auf der Suche nach der
verlorenen Katholizitat: die Briefe
Friedrich von Hiigels an Giovanni
Semeria, 2 vols (Mainz, 1991).
William Sweet
HULME, Thomas Ernest (1883-1917)
Thomas Hulme was born in Endon in
Staffordshire on 16 September 1883 and died
in action in World War I on 28 September
1917, eighteen months after receiving his com-
mission in the Royal Marines artillery. Hulme
460
was educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme High
School for Boys, where he gained numerous
prizes for mathematics and the sciences. He
was awarded a Mathematics Exhibition to St
John's College, Cambridge, and went up in
1902, but was sent down in 1904 for unortho-
dox and rebellious behaviour. He then enrolled
at the University of London but left after only
a short time and in 1906 went to Canada,
where he worked on the railways and as a lum-
berjack. During this Canadian visit he formu-
lated and wrote down the philosophical ideas
that were later published as 'Cinders'. He
returned to England in 1907 but soon departed
again, this time for Brussels., where he taught
English for a year, returning to London in
1908. By this time his interests had broadened
considerably to include a critical concern with
poetry and the nature of language, and a pas-
sionate advocacy of the philosophy of Henri
Bergson, whose thought he later rejected. By
1911 he was developing an interest in political
theory. In 1912 he was granted readmission to
Cambridge but could not take up his place
because of a personal scanda I that necessitated
his fleeing to Germany to escape prosecution.
It was during this trip that he encountered
Wilhelm Worringer, whose ideas on art imme-
diately fascinated and inspired him. Worringer
regarded classical art as 'geometric' and quasi-
religious in character, revealing humanity's
sense of its own 'fallen' condition and also its
sense of something beyond and above itself. In
contrast, he saw romantic or 'vital' art as overly
concerned with feelings, and expressive of deca-
dence. These views were consonant with
Hulme's own.
When World War I broke out in 1914
Hulme enlisted as a private. His experiences in
the trenches evoked again the bleak conception
of reality that he had first expressed in
'Cinders'. In 1915 he was wounded and sent
home but returned to the trenches in 1916. All
the time he was writing letters, notes, essays and
diaries and, whenever possible, giving lectures
declaring his views on warfare, political and
social theory, and pacifism. He engaged in a

heated dispute with Bertrand RUSSELL in the
Cambridge Magazine, contesting Russell's view
that human nature is governed by impulses
that give rise to wars. His last philosophical
thoughts are contained in a series of seven
articles he wrote during his convalescence from
1915 to 1916 and which were published in
instalments as 'A Notebook' in the New Age.
In the articles he explored a profusion of diverse
ideas, drawing on the works of Husserl,
Bergson, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Pascal, Meinong
and G.E. MOORE, not in order to present a
comfortable synthesis but to enlist any ideas
that might provide bastion for his own con-
ceptions. Very little of his work was published
in his lifetime but in 1924 and 1929 his friend
Herbert READ edited and published collections
of his notes and essays. A further collection
was published by Sam Hynes in 1955.
Hulme was an aesthetician, critic, poet, and
literary theorist, and one of the founders of the
imagist movement. His philosophical ideas
form a structure for his theories of art, literature
and politics, and have a shrewdness and vitality
that do much to compensate for the accusations
of amateurism sometimes made against them.
Hulme's short life was crammed with rich and
varied experiences. He was a member of the
Poets' Club, knew Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot,
Rupert Brooke, Bertrand Russell and many
other notable thinkers and creative artists. He
exerted important influences on developments
in poetry, language and literature. Although
he wrote only a handful of poems, two or three
of these were deemed by T.S. Eliot to be
'among the most beautiful short poems in the
English language'.
The philosophical ideas in 'Cinders' are
vividly expressed and call up intuitions that
seem to be embedded in the human mental
constitution. Hulme maintains that ultimately
'all is flux', that the world is a plurality with no
large or common purpose but that it appears to
have a pattern and order because 'the moralists,
the capital letterists, attempt to find a frame-
work outside the flux, a solid bank for the
river, a pier rather than a raft' (Collected
461
HULME
Writings, p. 10). In fact, he says, the underly-
ing bedrock of what we have consists merely of
cinders, through and over which we work
ephemeral paths of order and meaning. Our
world is 'a kind of manufactured chessboard
laid on a cinder heap' (ibid., p. 9). He likens
language to 'a gossamer web' that connects
people but which, when used to excess, gener-
ates a kind of disease causing human beings to
think of it as a means of explaining themselves
rather than as simply that which connects them
to each other and enables them to create the
orderliness that is the super-imposed 'chess-
board'. Only human consciousness gives the
world a unity; death is 'a breaking up into
cinders' and 'there is no unity of laws, but
merely of the sorting machine' (ibid., pp. 9,
10); it is motives that are the constitution of our
mental world and 'the only unalterable and
fixed things in the world' (p. 16). In short, he
believed that the philosophies we devise are
elaborations made in response to human needs
and desires, and that all general statements
about truth, reality and so on are in the end
only amplifications of human appetites.
Hulme's interest in Henri Bergson seems to
have started in 1907, and in 1909 he wrote an
article, 'The New Philosophy', expounding
Bergson's ideas. The article was published in the
New Age for 1 July 1909. This enthusiasm for
Bergson gave rise to twenty further articles, a
translation of his Introduction a la metaphysique
and, in 1911, lectures given in London and
Cambridge. Bergson was extremely pleased with
this propagation of his ideas and when Hulme
applied for readmission to St John's, Cambridge
in 1912, he wrote a glowing recommendation of
Hulme to the college.
What had attracted Hulme to Bergson's
thought was the latter's challenge to mechanism
and his expression of it in 'the dialect of the
time'. He did not think that Bergson had
broken new ground in philosophy because he
believed that it could not be done. He wrote: 'It
is impossible at this time of day to take up an
absolutely new attitude towards the cosmos
and its persistent problems' (Collected Writings,
HULME
p. 131). By November 1911 Hulme was
doubting his allegiance to Bergson, having been
persuaded at a meeting with the literary critic,
Pierre Laserre, that Laserre's opinion that
Bergson was nothing but the last disguise of
romanticism was probably correct.
The notion of terse, exact and unadorned
truth is germane to Hulme's fierce prescription
for the reform of poetry and is a dominant
principle of the imagist movement which flour-
ished between 1910 and 1917 and of which he
and Ezra Pound were theorists and founders.
The imagists rejected romanticism because of its
self-indulgence and its optimistic faith in
progress. In its place Hulme proclaimed a new
classicism that would be free from the con-
finement and necessity of metre, and whose
poetic power derived from the shock of vivid
images and metaphors, delivered in an instant
and couched in the most exact terms that
would acquaint us with 'the tragic significance
of life'. What he sought was a pure objectivity,
the perfect conveying of experience. He defined
art as a passionate desire for accuracy, and the
essential aesthetic emotion as an excitement
generated by direct communication. In
'Romanticism and Classicism' he wrote: 'The
great aim is accurate, precise and definite
description. The first thing is to recognize how
difficult this is' (Collected Writings, p. 68).
T.S. Eliot was an important figure in the
movement away from romanticism, and when
he reviewed Hulme's translation of Georges
Sorel's Reflexions sur la violence (1916) for
the Monist he was immediately impressed not
only by the anti-romanticism of Sorel's thought
but also by Hulme's Preface and its footnotes.
Eliot shared Hulme's convictions concerning
classicism and his belief in original sin, and the
two were alike also in their rejection of
humanism and the optimistic belief in human
progress. Both were much concerned with
religion, though with different conceptions of
it, Eliot espousing a rigorous Anglican style of
orthodox Christianity that contrasted sharply
with Hulme's somewhat unstructured concep-
tion of the Absolute.
462
In his last writings, collected together in 'A
Notebook', Hulme returned to his analysis of
the human condition as apparently meaningful
but fundamentally without coherence or unity.
He detected a like pattern in the history of phi-
losophy: a surface of scientific and impersonal
orderliness that is actually a kind of fudge con-
sisting of 'something perfectly human and arbi-
trary cloaked in a scientific vocabulary'
(Collected Writings, p. 430). This seemingly
impersonal and objective structure of the sci-
entific method had, he claimed, characterized
philosophy since the Renaissance, but was
actually no more than a prop for aims and
conceptions that are really personal ones,
'nearer to the heart's desire'. To counter this
'scandal', that is the human failure to under-
stand its situation, he undertook what he called
a 'Critique of Satisfaction', concluding from it
that once we recognize our falsification of the
divine we are able to reject the romantic
humanism that seeks perfection on our own
level and that gives rise to 'that bastard thing,
Personality, and all the bunkum that follows
from it' (ibid., p. 347). In place of the human-
istic romanticism revealed by his critique he
sets up his notion of a religious attitude that
averts from the cultivation of personality and
that is grounded in the acceptance of original
sin. This religious attitude does not seem to
have any affiliation with the personal and incar-
nate god of Christianity. Rather, its austere
and stoical temperament seeks an awareness of
the Absolute and an unflinching realization of
the hard, dry truths of the human situation. The
core of Hulme's philosophical thinking, along
with his views on the Absolute and original
sin, was the conviction that the fundamental
human mistake was that of failing to recognize
that the three regions of reality, mathematical
physics, organic life, and religion and ethics, are
quite separate from each other. Our error, he
maintained, is in trying to elide them and 'to
place Perfection where it should not be - 'on the
human plane' - thereby bringing about what he
described as 'the falsification of the divine'
(ibid., p. 437).

Hulme was shrewdly appreciative of the phi-
losophy of G.E. Moore, although it took him
years, he said, to understand it. In particular he
admired Moore's analysis of goodness as a
simple, unanalysable quality that is perceived in
a non-sensory way. Moore's dismissal of ethical
naturalism was consonant with Hulme's own
claims about the separateness of the ethical
from the organic and inorganic realms, and
with his views concerning the human appre-
hension of the Absolute. What he had found so
difficult in Moore, and also in Russell and other
philosophers, was their concern with language.
He could not see how a study of the nature of
propositions and the characteristics of human
speech could be of significance to philosophy.
Surprisingly, perhaps, his reading of similar
though differently expressed views in Husserl
enabled him to understand what Moore was
doing and to see, as he put it, 'the possibility of
the rationalist, non-empirical method'
(Collected Writings, p. 441).
Hulme has never been placed squarely within
the ranks of twentieth-century philosophers. It
was not his style to marshal careful arguments
or to advance his case with circumspection.
His explorations in philosophy, as in all else,
were exuberant and iconoclastic, and his
pursuit of the bare hard truth had a markedly
Sisyphean persistence, a kind of pessimistic joie
de vivre that permeated everything he did. He
believed that humankind was essentially bad
and could only achieve anything of value in
both politics and ethics through severe disci-
pline and order. He lived with a sense of crisis,
holding to or changing his convictions with a
passion that was generated by his concern to
discover the absolute truth of things, even
though he was sure he could never do so.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Collected Writings ofT.E. Hulme, ed.
Karen Csengeri (Oxford, 1994).
Other Relevant Works
'The Complete Poetical Works of T.E.
Hulme', New Age, 25 January 1912, p.
463
HUXLEY
307.
'The Note-Books of T.E. Hulme', ed. Herbert
Read, New Age, vol. 30 (January-April,
1922).
Speculations, ed. Herbert Read (1924).
further Speculation, ed. Samuel Hynes
(Minneapolis, 1955).
Selected Writings, ed. Patrick McGuinness
(1988).
Further Reading
Ferguson, Robert, The Short Sharp Life of
T.E. Hulme (2003).
Jones, Alun R., The Life and Opinions of
T.E .Hulme (1960).
Roberts, Michael, T.E. Hulme, with an
Introduction by Athony Quinton
(Manchester, 1982).
Diane Collinson
HURST, Martha, see Kneale
HUXLEY, Aldous Leonard (1894-1963)
Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey
on 26 July 1894 and died in Los Angeles,
California on 17 December 1963. His grand-
father on his father's side was the biologist
Thomas Henry Huxley, his great uncle on his
mother's side was the poet Matthew Arnold,
and his brother Julian HUXLEY was a noted
biologist and eventual Director-General of
UNESCO. Huxley began his education at Eton
(1908-11), but was forced to leave without
completing his studies and return home because
of a serious eye infection. The infection left
him nearly blind for at least a year, damaged his
HUXLEY
vision irreparably, and kept him from pursuing
a career in medicine. In 1913 he entered Balliol
College, Oxford, where, in 1916, he gained a
first in English. During this time he met D.H.
Lawrence, with whom he developed a close
friendship. In 1917 he took a post as master at
Eton; he had already begun to publish poems,
a genre he eventually abandoned for the novel
and essay. He regularly visited London, where
he socialized with T.S. Eliot and Bertrand
RUSSELL and became known in the Bloomsbury
circle of Virginia Woolf. Huxley left Eton in
1919 to pursue the more lucrative career of
journalism, writing for the Athenaeum, the
Westminster Gazette, and House and Garden.
In 1919 he married Maria Nys at Bellem in
Belgium. In 1923 Huxley was able to give up
journalism and write fiction full-time, living
mostly in London, Italy and France, but also
travelling extensively. After years of building his
reputation as a novelist and essayist, Huxley
published his most famous work, Brave New
World (1932). Around 1934 Huxley became
interested in Eastern mysticism, a preoccupa-
tion that would inform his work for the rest of
his life. He joined the Peace Pledge Union in
1935 and lectured on pacifism. In 1937 he
moved to the United States for health reasons,
settling in and around Los Angeles, California,
where he wrote screenplays. In 1953 Huxley
began to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs
as a means of attaining transcendent states of
consciousness. He took mescaline and LSD
about a dozen times over a ten-year period and
corresponded with Timothy Leary, a guru of
the emerging counter-culture movement.
Despite his deep reservations about drug use,
people saw him as celebrating and popularizing
drug experimentation. Huxley was diagnosed
with cancer in 1960. He died in 1963, on the
same day President John F. Kennedy was assas-
sinated.
In his lifetime Huxley published almost fifty
works in many different genres. Besides novels,
he wrote travel books, histories, poems, plays
and essays on a variety of subjects including
philosophy, art, sociology, religion and morals.
464
In the 1920s Huxley wrote satirical novels such
as Antic Hay (1923) and Those Barren Leaves
(1925), culminating in the more highly devel-
oped Point Counter Point (1928), which
depicts the intellectual and artistic climate in
England in the mid 1920s. He also wrote
several witty and sophisticated essays, estab-
lishing himself as a man of letters and a social
satirist. In his collection Proper Studies (1927)
he deplored mass culture and promoted the
establishment of a 'true' aristocracy based solely
on talent. Relatedly, he was a proponent of the
eugenics movement and believed that people
must cultivate individual excellence against
modern society's will to conformity. From his
beginnings as a copy editor, Huxley expressed
fear about the dangers of advertising and about
the majority's susceptibility to propaganda,
and Brave New World expresses these social
themes as fiction. The novel marks a stylistic
and thematic departure from the more lyrical
works of the 1920s. Instead of the droll
urbanity of the dinner party, Huxley presents
a cold dystopian vision of the future in stark,
scientifically descriptive prose. This world
encapsulates mass society in its extreme.
Everything is predetermined, controlled and
manipulated by a pervasive government.
Huxley moved from writing agreeable conver-
sation and amusing sexual situations to explor-
ing the mental and spiritual conflicts of the
twentieth century. In Brave New World and his
later novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) he explores
the anguish of the intelligent person in a de-per-
sonalized world.
A common criticism of Huxley's fiction is
that it is too didactic, that his characters are
merely puppets for his thoughts. Even Huxley
considered himself more essayist than novelist.
This might explain why he abandoned pure
fictional writing after he moved to California
and chose the essay as the primary medium for
expressing his ideas. His 1937 collection of
essays, Ends and Means, again criticized mass
man and his lack of distinction in a commod-
ity culture, yet Huxley's political and social
views had begun to mellow with his explo-

ration of mysticism and Eastern philosophy.
His focus remained on man in society, but he
began to relate all of his work to a conception
of 'ultimate reality'. Instead of the disdainful
detachment of his youth, he embraced the brah-
minical view of non-attachment, though how
much of a departure this was from his earlier
position has been debated. Huxley's movement
from deploring mass man to celebrating the
solitary seeking enlightenment culminated in
The Perennial Philosophy (1945), a handbook
for developing socially and spiritually. Where
the earlier Huxley would have looked to music
and poetry as an anodyne for what he and
many of his contemporaries saw as the frag-
mentations and vitiation of modern culture, he
turned from the arts to a spiritual experience
that he believed would heal the individual and
society by unifying them in an ultimate reality.
In the 1920s Huxley had mocked religion with
the jaded disdain of intellectual detachment.
Though he never condoned any form of orga-
nized religion and remained concerned with
social problems his entire life, his mystical phi-
losophy bound his work after 1936. Some see
this as a definitive break with the past, others
as the natural result or development from his
earlier belief in the individual and his desire
for its greater awareness.
Still, his life in the United States seemed quite
different from his European experiences. In
California Huxley had the opportunity actively
to explore ways to achieve spiritual enlighten-
ment. He attended seances, practiced hypnosis
and studied ESP. Most famously, he experi-
mented with hallucinogenic drugs to achieve
higher states of consciousness, about which he
wrote in The Doors of Perception (1954) and
Heaven and Hell (1956). One might see it as
ironic that the same author who criticized the
escapism of the drug Soma in Brave New
World would see drug use as a possible solution
to the mind-numbing attack of mass culture.
But Huxley believed that unlike narcotic drugs,
hallucinogenic drugs had the potential to
expand consciousness and link the individual to
an ultimate reality. Unfortunately, he was dis-
465
HUXLEY
appointed in this hope that drugs could help
him achieve poetic and spiritual enlightenment.
In Brave New World Revisited (1958)
Huxley examined the predictions of his novel
in light of the changes that had occurred in the
world since its original publication more than
twenty-five years earlier. He saw the same
problems of overpopulation, over-organization
and psychological techniques of manipulation
now plaguing his own society. He enjoined his
readers to fight against these potential tools of
government control. Huxley's last work,
Literature and Science (1963), written while
he was dying of cancer, brought him full circle
back to his Victorian ancestors, the biologist
T.H. Huxley and the poet Matthew Arnold. In
this study, Huxley argues that the division
between 'the two cultures' is arbitrary, that it
is the responsibility of the literary artist to
understand the language of science and the
rules of nature, and the responsibility of the sci-
entists to relate their physical discoveries to a
metaphysical and moral base.
Huxley was a writer of literature who was
always fascinated by science, desiring a scien-
tific precision in his prose and scientific detach-
ment in his stance. Nevertheless, Huxley appre-
ciated the language of science more than the
practice of experiment. He saw both the
positive and negative possibilities of the sciences
for modern society. His most celebrated work,
Brave New World, rejected any form of scien-
tific optimism and presented a nightmare vision
of how science and technology destroy indi-
viduality and force conformity.
Huxley did not believe that science could
solve life's problems, but he believed that it
revealed the deep mystery of life and confirmed
our inability ever completely to know that
mystery. More than biology, he was fascinated
by the implications of the theories of Einstein
and Heisenberg. He saw a relationship between
modern physics and the mystery of the meta-
physical, and believed that the new physics
could restore to the intellectual community a
spiritual component that he found lacking
there.
HUXLEY
Huxley always and increasingly focused on
how human beings could live more fully by
pushing the boundaries of experience. He
strove in his writings to understand the indi-
vidual experience in relation to what he termed
'the Whole Truth'. The dialectical struggle in
his writing between art and science led him to
a third term - mysticism. This was not as much
a new direction for Huxley as a new vocabulary
with which to express themes that consumed
him his entire life: time and transcendence,
social and solitary man, the nature of ultimate
reality, a search for order and union, and the
desire to become more fully aware of our exis-
tential condition. The older Huxley yearned to
escape the self through mysticism and Eastern
philosophy, but the self, ideal and social, always
remained his greatest concern.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Those Barren Leaves (1925).
Proper Studies (1927).
Point Counter Point (1928).
Brave New World (1932).
Eyeless in Gaza (1936).
Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature
of Ideas and into the Methods Employed
for their Realization (1937).
The Perennial Philosophy (1945).
The Doors of Perception (New York, 1954).
Brave New World Revisited (1958).
Island (1962).
Literature and Science (1963).
Complete Essays, ed. Robert S. Backer and
James Sexton, James, 6 vols (Chicago,
2000-2002).
Other Relevant Works
Chrome Yellow (1921).
Antic Hay (1923).
On the Margin: Notes and Essays (1923).
Music at Night and Other Essays (1931).
Words and their Meanings (Los Angeles,
1940).
The Art of Seeing (1943).
Ape and Essence (1949).
Themes and Variations (1950).
466
Heaven and Hell (19'56).
Adonis and the Alphabet and Other Essays
(1956).
The Letters of Aldous Huxley', ed. G. Smith
(1969).
Further Reading
Brander, Laurence, Aldous Huxley: A
Critical Study (1970).
Brooke, Jocelyn, Aldous Huxley (1954).
Deery, June, Aldous Huxley and the
Mysticism of Science (1996).
Kuehn, Robert E. (ed.), Aldous Huxley: A
Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood
Cliffs, 1974).
Meckier, Jerome (ed.), Critical Essays on
Aldous Huxley (New York, 1996).
Murray, Nicholas, Aldous Huxley: A
Biography (New York, 2002).
Thody, Philip, Aldous Huxley: A
Biographical Introduction (1973).
Eric Susser
HUXLEY, Julian Sorell (1887-1975)
Julian Sorell Huxley was born in London on 22
June 1887 and died in London on 14 February
1975. He was the eldest son of Leonard
Huxley, editor of the Cornhill Magazine, and
his wife Julia Arnold, a school teacher. There
were two other sons, Trevenen and the eventual
novelist, Aldous (HUXLEY), and a daughter
Margaret. On his father's side he was the
grandson of Charles Darwin's great friend
Thomas Henry Huxley, and his maternal line
descended from the famous Headmaster of
Rugby School, Dr Thomas Arnold and his poet
son Matthew Arnold. Thus he inherited two
distinct traits, his love of scientific inquisitive-
ness from the Huxleys and his love of literature
from the Arnolds. A less desirable inheritance
was the recurrent depression that at one time

necessitated treatment by electro-convulsive
therapy. Julian was educated at Eton and
Balliol College, Oxford, where he not only
gained a first in natural sciences in 1909, but
also won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for
English Verse. A scholarship enabled him to
spend a year at the marine biology laboratory
in Naples after which he returned to Balliol as
lecturer in zoology for two years. From 1912 to
1916 he worked at the Rice Institute in
Houston, Texas as assistant professor of
biology. There he met the geneticist Hermann
Muller, who made Huxley aware of the impor-
tance of genetics to any study of evolution.
He returned to Britain in 1916 and spent the
last two years of World War I in the Intelligence
Corps on the Italian front. After the war he
married Juliette Baillot (they had two sons),
and he was introduced by his brother Aldous to
many of the literary and artistic members of the
Bloomsbury Circle before returning to Oxford
as a fellow of New College and senior demon-
strator in zoology. There he became a close
friend of J.B.S. HALDANE, who was lecturing in
genetics. In 1925 he was appointed Professor of
Zoology at King's College London, but
resigned after two years to devote his time to
research and writing. It was his last academic
position, although he held the post of Fullerian
Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution
from 1926 to 1929. In 1932, together with
Haldane, Lancelot HOGBEN and F.A.E. Crew,
he founded the Society for Experimental
Biology in an attempt to get away from the
earlier emphasis on descriptive and taxonomic
biology in favour of a more science-based
experimental approach to the subject. From
1935 to 1942 Huxley was Secretary of the
Zoological Society of London, a post that
involved running the London Zoo.
Unfortunately his innovative ideas did not
always meet with the approval of the Council
and he eventually was forced to resign. As a
member of a dining club which included Solly
Zuckerman, Haldane, BERNAL and Crowther
he anonymously co-authored an influential
Penguin Special Science in War (1940), which
467
HUXLEY
advocated that the government needed to
appreciate that the fullest use of scientific
resources was needed if Britain was to win the
war. He was elected FRS in 1938 and knighted
in 1958, the year when he gave the main
address to the International Zoological
Congress held in London in honour of the cen-
tenary of the joint publication of Darwin's and
Wallace's papers on natural selection. In 1946
he was appointed the first Director-General of
UNESCO in recognition of his promotion of
world literacy and his popular scientific writing.
Huxley's scientific interests were widespread.
His love of ornithology and early expertise in
animal behaviour led to Konrad Lorenz con-
sidering him to be one of the founders of
ethology. In 1929, together with H.G. WELLS
and G.P. Wells, he published The Science of life
- an impressive popular book on biology,
which did not, however, gain as great a popu-
larity as the authors hoped. In 1932 his
Problems of Relative Growth dealt with the dif-
ferential growth of various parts of the body,
and was a seminal work on the subject.
Perhaps his main scientific achievement was
his work on evolution. In 1940 he edited The
New Systematics^ in which his own chapter
dealt with the latest discoveries in genetics
relating to animal classification. At a meeting
organized by the Geological Society of America
in 1941 he joined a group of scientists who
were determined to reconcile Darwinism with
the new discoveries in genetics. The group also
included the geneticists G. Ledyard Stebbins
and Theodosius Dobzhansky, palaeontologists
George Gaylord Simpson and Glenn L. Jepsen,
the mathematical geneticists Sir Ronald A.
Fisher and Sewall Wright and the zoologist
Ernst Mayr. They named this new theory -
which was formulated by adding the concept of
random mutation to Darwin's natural selec-
tion - the 'synthetic theory of evolution' or the
'modern synthesis'. In a short time this theory
came to be known as 'neo-Darwinism'. In 1942
Huxley published Evolution: The Modern
Synthesis which expounded the ideas of neo-
Darwinism and in which he put forward his
HUXLEY
view that humankind had not only become the
agent for evolution on the planet but alone had
the potential for further evolutionary progress.
For this work he was awarded the Darwin
Medal of the Royal Society. In 1958 he was
honoured by giving the main address to the
International Zoological Congress held in
London to mark the centenary of the joint
papers given by Darwin and Wallace.
Huxley was typically apolitical, although for
a time President of the Association of Scientific
Workers, a body originally set up as a socialist
trade union. In the 1930s he was a founder
member of the Society for Political and
Economic Planning (PEP) and an associate of
the Next Five Years Group, both organizations
including staunchly radical members such as
Harold Macmillan, Lord Rutherford and
Richard Gregory, the editor of Nature.
However, under the influence of his left-wing
friends Hogben, Haldane, J.G. Crowther,
Hyman Levy and Joseph NEEDHAM he gradu-
ally revised his views on Russia, eugenics and
the existence of 'pure' science. A visit to the
USSR in 1931 persuaded him that 'through the
elevation of science and scientific method to its
proper place in affairs the new Russia ... is in
advance of other countries' (A Scientist among
the Soviets, p. 110). By 1934 he had swallowed
the Marxist line and wrote that 'science is not
... engaged on the abstract task of pursuing uni-
versal truth, but a social function intimately
linked up with human history and human
destiny' (Scientific Research and Social Needs,
pp. 15-16).
Before 1931 he had strongly espoused the
eugenic views that were popular at the time. He
felt that the evils of slum life were not only due
to living in such conditions, but that the type of
people inhabiting them would naturally have
gravitated towards slum environments. He
advocated that in order to keep down the
numbers of the working class, unemployment
benefit should be granted only on condition
that the men should contract to have no more
children (What Dare I Think, p. 88). Hogben
persuaded him that such ideas were similar to
468
those of the Nazi Party, and in 1936 when
Huxley addressed the Eugenics Society he
emphasized the importance of environment in
development - favouring nurture rather than
nature. He later came to the conclusion that it
was necessary for biologists to devise an envi-
ronment that would disentangle nature from
nurture so as to determine the best way to
improve intelligence and good health. Such a
suitable productive environment was one 'orga-
nized primarily for the benefit of consumers
and workers' ('Social Biology', p. 521).
However after the Lysenko debacle which
antagonized many previously pro-Soviet scien-
tists, Huxley reversed his ideas once more and,
condemning the lack of free scientific discussion
in Russia, declared that scientists should be
able to continue their work free of political
interference and that the Soviet practice of
science could no longer be considered sound.
After visiting Russia in 1945 to attend the
bicentenary of the Academy of Sciences - a
visit during which Huxley had publicly debated
with Lysenko, enabling him to write on the
controversy with firsthand knowledge - he was
invited to be Acting Secretary of the
Preparatory Commission to form UNESCO.
He set out to establish UNESCO's philosophy
as that of scientific humanism in which art and
science would be of equal value in the rela-
tionship of humankind with nature and the
past. As the first Director-General, although
appointed for only two years, Huxley
attempted to establish the organization's direc-
tion in concerning itself chiefly with tackling
world poverty and education, and conservation
of the environment.
At this time he was also defining his views on
religion. He now advocated what he called evo-
lutionary humanism, which incorporated some
of his longest held philosophical views. In an
article in the Humanist in 1962 he wrote that
Christianity was no longer relevant as it con-
flicted with modern knowledge of the facts of
existence, and that God was 'little more than
the smile of a cosmic Cheshire Cat'. As a
humanist, he believed that man

is not alien to nature, but a part of nature,
albeit a unique one. He is made of the same
matter and works by the same energy as the
rest of the universe. He is not only a product
of the universal process of evolution, but
capable of affecting the process which has
produced him, and of affecting it either for
good or ill. His true destiny is to guide the
future course of evolution on earth towards
greater fulfilment, so as to realize more and
higher potentialities.
('The Coming New Religion of
Humanism', pp. 5-6)
Whereas in humanism the individual and
society are seen as interrelated, in Marxism,
which he now also disavowed, the individual
was presented in opposition to society. One of
humanism's fundamental tenets is that this
world and the life in it can be improved, and
that it is our duty to try to improve it, socially,
culturally and politically. Society should be
organized in such a way as to give the greatest
number of people the best chance of realizing
their potentialities, for themselves and for their
community. It would do so by providing
opportunities for education, for adventure and
achievement, for cooperating in worthwhile
projects, for meditation and withdrawal, and
for self-development and unselfish action.
469
HUXLEY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(with H.G. Wells and G.P. Wells), The
Science of Life (1929).
What Dare I Think? (1931).
The Captive Shrew and Other Poems of a
Biologist (Oxford, 1932).
A Scientist among the Soviets (1932).
Scientific Research and Social Needs (1934).
(with A.C. Haddon), We Europeans, a
Survey of 'Racial' Problems (1935).
(with F. Crew et al), 'Social Biology and
Population Improvement', Nature, vol.
144, 6 September 1939, pp. 521-2.
Science in War [Anon.] (1940).
(Ed.), The New Systematics (1940).
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942).
Soviet Genetics and World Science, Lysenko
and the Meaning of Heredity (1949).
UNESCO, its Purpose and Philosophy (Paris,
1946).
'The Coming New Religion of Humanism',
The Humanist, vol. 22, no. 1
(January-February 1962), pp. 3-6.
Memories (1970).
Further Reading
Hooper, Judith, Of Moths and Men (2002).
Huxley, Juliette, Leaves of the Tulip Tree
(1986).
Wersky, G., The Visible College (1988).
Alan Cohen
 I
INGE, William Ralph (1860-1954)
William Ralph Inge was born in Crayke,
North Yorkshire on 6 June 1860 and died in
Brightwell in Berkshire on 26 February 1954.
After education at Eton and King's College,
Cambridge he taught at his old school and
was ordained into the Anglican ministry in
1888. He was fellow of Hertford College,
Oxford from 1889 to 1905. After a brief
period as vicar of All Saints', Innismore
Gardens in London, he was appointed Lady
Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge
in 1907, and in 1911 became Dean of St Paul's
Cathedral, London. He was one of the leading
churchmen of his age, gaining a reputation for
controversial opinions through his regular
newspaper columns, particularly in the
Evening Standard. He soon earned the title
The gloomy Dean' for his pessimism about
democracy and for his insistence on not tying
Christianity to the spirit of the present age.
Nevertheless, his two widely read series of
Outspoken Essays (1919, 1922) betray the
spirit of the age in their defence of eugenics and
racial supremacy. From 1924 to 1934 he was
President of the Modern Churchmen's Union,
the leading liberal organization of the Church of
England. His modernism was founded on the
Greek spirit of free enquiry and the pursuit of
truth. He resigned as Dean of St Paul's in 1934,
retiring to Brightwell and continuing to lecture
and publish widely until the end of his life.
The clearest expression of his religious and
philosophical system is given in 'Confessio
470
fidei', which outlines a strongly Platonist faith
with an emphasis on the presence of the 'inde-
structible and eternal' values of Goodness,
Beauty and Truth in the immanent world of
'space and time' (Outspoken Essays, 1922,
pp. 31-2). At the same time he stresses the
importance of mystical experience as the proof
and 'bedrock of religious faith' (ibid., p. 14).
Throughout his life he continued to emphasize
the experiential in religion, writing in 1948: 'If
our highest and deepest experiences cannot be
trusted, it is useless to seek for truth anywhere'
(Mysticism in Religion, p. 168). He had begun
his study of mysticism in his 1899 Bampton
Lectures (Christian Mysticism) and he contin-
ued to engage seriously with mystical writers
from across the centuries especially in his
Paddock Lectures (Personal Idealism, 1906)
and his Hulsean Lectures (The Platonic
Tradition in English Religious Thought, 1926).
Mysticism, he felt, with its utter confidence in
the reality of 'absolute and eternal values',
together with its 'open mind towards the dis-
coveries of science' and 'receptive attitude to
the beauty ... of creation', would help move
the churches beyond the confessional conflict
which characterized the modern situation (The
Platonic Tradition, p. 33).
Inge's acknowledgement of the higher
world, to which the human being could
ascend, rested on his deep sympathy with the
Platonist tradition. Indeed he felt that
Christianity at its most fundamental level was
identical to Platonism, to which the doctrine of
the incarnation had been added as 'the

keystone in the arch' (Outspoken Essays,
1922, p. 46). Undoubtedly his most impor-
tant academic achievement are his Gifford
Lectures, The Philosophy ofPlotinus (1918),
which offer an account of the development of
Neoplatonism together with a detailed discus-
sion of the main lines of Plotinus's thought.
Inge displays the enthusiasm of a disciple,
finding in Plotinus 4a wise and inspiring spiri-
tual guide' (ibid., vol. 1, p. 9), and showing the
indissoluble relationship between Christianity,
Platonism and Western civilization: 'We
cannot preserve Platonism without Christianity
nor Christianity without Platonism, nor civil-
isation without both' (ibid., vol. 2, p. 227).
Inge's legacy is as a great stylist and inter-
preter of Plotinus. His spiritual form of
Christianity seems strangely anachronistic in a
theological world which has rediscovered the
importance of history. Similarly, his immensely
popular and provocative style was used to
express idiosyncratic opinions which have
become increasingly unacceptable.
471
INGE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Christian Mysticism (1899).
Personal Idealism and Mysticism (1906).
Faith and its Psychology (1909).
The Philosophy ofPlotinus, 2 vols (1918).
Outspoken Essays, 2 series (1919, 1922).
The Platonic Tradition in English Religious
Thought (1926).
Mysticism in Religion (1947).
Diary of a Dean, St. Paul's, 1911-1934
(1949).
Further Reading
Fox, Adam, Dean Inge (1960).
Helm, Robert Meredith, The Gloomy Dean
(Winston-Salem, 1962).
Mark D. Chapman
 J
JACKS, Lawrence Pearsall (1860-1955)
L.P. Jacks was born in Nottingham on 9
October 1860 and died in Oxford on 17
February 1955. He was educated at University
School, Nottingham, at Manchester New
College, London from 1882 to 1886 (MA,
1886) and at Harvard from 1886 to 1887. At
Harvard he came under the influence of Josiah
Royce. In 1887 he became assistant minister to
Stopford Brooke at his Bloomsbury chapel,
and in 1889 married Brooke's daughter Olive,
with whom he had five sons and a daughter.
In 1888 he was appointed Unitarian minister
at Renshaw Street Chapel, Liverpool, then
moved in 1894 to the Church of the Messiah,
Birmingham. From 1915 to 1931 he was
Principal of Manchester College, by then at
Oxford. Apart from his own work, Jacks's sig-
nificant contribution to British philosophy was
as editor of the Hibbert Journal, which he served
from its foundation in 1902 until 1948. By 1910
it had become probably the leading journal for
the free exchange of ideas on religion and phi-
losophy in Britain. A special issue in 1909, 'Jesus
or Christ?', created worldwide interest. The
Hibbert Journal provided the medium for the
publication of continental philosophy in the early
twentieth century which reflected Jacks's interest,
and introduced the work of Alfred Loisy to
British readers. It also created debate amongst
leading scholars on the relationship between
science and religion. Jacks was a disciple of
Bergson and had little sympathy with the current
trends of British academic philosophy.
472
Jacks's published output over a period of
fifty years was large, consisting of visionary
works, biographies, articles and addresses. He
was an active, influential arid popular lecturer
in the 1920s and 1930s in both Britain and
North America, which was recognized by the
award of numerous honorary degrees. In his
addresses he argued that a spiritual way of life
was essentially rational (Religious Perplexities,
1922). He also wrote semi-philosophical
parables, often set in a rural background, which
had a wide appeal (the Legends ofSmokeover
series and Mad Shepherds went to numerous
editions).
Jacks was essentially an individualist who
aimed to speak to the intelligent person. He
argued after World War I that modern life had
become increasingly mechanical, and the
military spiral had become more deadly than
the economic one. He saw humankind going
along a dangerous path, a view encapsulated in
his Revolt against Mechanism (1933). The
mechanical mind has a passion for control - of
everything except itself. Beyond the control it
has won over the forces of nature it would now
win control over the forces of society, and win
it by the same method, that of stating the
problem and producing the solution, with
social machinery to correspond' (Revolt against
Mechanism, p. 43).
By the 1930s he had left a belief in institu-
tional religion behind him and argued that edu-
cation was the hope for the future (The
Education of the Whole Man, 1931). In 1938
his BBC Radio National Lecture, the forerun-

ner of the Reith Lecture, was on morals and
progress; it outlined the main elements of his
message that humankind must save itself from
the mechanistic world using education and
world vision as the means.
Jacks was 'the last of the Victorian prophets
in the line of Thomas Carlyle' (L.A. Garrard,
DNB). He was in essence a preacher arguing
for a natural religion for the common man
using twentieth-century means of communica-
tion. His books were popular rather than philo-
sophically profound, and his consistent
approach was to make moral ideas, based on
aspects of philosophy, understandable to the
intelligent lay person.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Religious Perplexities (1922).
The Education of the Whole Man (1931).
Revolt against Mechanism (1933).
Confessions of an Octogenarian (1942)
Near the Brink (1952).
Other Relevant Works
The Alchemy of Thought (1910).
The Listener, 16 February 1938.
Further Reading
Anon., The Times, 18 February 1955.
, The Inquirer, 26 February 1955.
Alan Ruston
JEANS, James Hopwood (1877-1946)
James Hopwood Jeans was born in Ormskirk,
Lancashire on 11 September 1877 and died in
Dorking, Surrey on 16 September 1946. He
was educated at Merchant Taylor's School,
London (entering in 1890) and Trinity College,
Cambridge (entering in 1896), where he read
mathematics and the members of staff included
Alfred North WHITEHEAD. He took his MA by
473
JEANS
proxy in 1903, due to a tubercular infection of
the knee that he had had since 1899. In 1904
he was appointed as a university lecturer in
mathematics at Cambridge. In the same year his
first treatise was published on The Dynamical
Theory of Gases, which he had written during
his convalescence at the sanatoria. He was
invited to Princeton University in 190. Whilst
there he published The Mathematical Theory of
Electricity and Magnetism (1908). In 1910 he
was appointed Stokes Lecturer in Applied
Mathematics at the University of Cambridge,
but from 1912 he devoted himself entirely to
mathematical research. In 1923 he undertook
research at the Mount Wilson Observatory in
Pasadena, California, where he was appointed
research associate, and in 1928 he was
knighted.
Jeans, along with EDDINGTON a few years
later, decisively helped the acceptance of the
new quantum theory, and Bohr's then unortho-
dox theory of the atom and atomic spectra;
Jeans first with his 1914 Report on Radiation
and the Quantum Theory. Jeans had a friendly
rivalry with Eddington that carried over into
popular works on science. After Eddington's
Nature of the Physical World of 1928, Jeans
published The Universe Around Us in 1929;
both were very successful. Jeans and Eddington
had a long-running argument over the mecha-
nism by which energy was created in the stars,
Eddington here prevailing. Jeans's interests in
mathematical physics were in both the analysis
of the very small (molecular physics) and in
the analysis of the very large (cosmogony).
Herein there was some similarity with the tastes
and activities of Poincare in cosmogony and the
molecular. Both made classical contributions to
the theory of the forms of equilibrium of
rotating gravitating fluid masses and their sta-
bility, and both were interested in the philo-
sophical significance of this work. Jeans
produced a classic of astronomy in 1917 with
Problems of Cosmogony and Stellar Dynamics,
for which he was awarded the Adams Prize of
the University of Cambridge; this was then
published as a book in 1919. It contained
JEANS
researches on the forms of equilibrium of
rotating, gravitating masses, both compress-
ible and incompressible, and their application
to the astronomical universe.
In 1942 Jeans published Physics and
Philosophy. He saw that the new developments
in theoretical physics had suddenly shown the
territory between physics and philosophy to
be of immense importance and interest for both
subjects. He saw quantum theory as having
taken us away from materialism: particles
existing and moving in physical space, and in
the wave picture mental constructs existing and
moving in conceptual spaces. Quantum theory
could, for him, refine the subject-object rela-
tionship of philosophy: just as the wave
controls the particles, so the mental controls the
material. However, Physics and Philosophy
was largely a critique of philosophy in favour
of physics, with philosophy crudely typified,
representing a sort of straw man for Jeans. He
saw many of the old problems of philosophy as
owing their existence to imperfections of
language. Some look very different when trans-
lated into the language of science, whilst others
vanish away in scientific thought: for example,
problems involving the word 'infinity', which
he saw pure mathematics as having removed
from the sphere of philosophy. Jeans really
always thought as a mathematician, and always
considered himself to be a mathematician.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Dynamical Theory of Gases (Cambridge,
1904).
An Elementary Treatise on Theoretical
Mechanics (Boston, 1907).
The Mathematical Theory of Electricity and
Magnetism (Cambridge, 1908).
Radiation and Quantum Theory (1914).
Problems of Cosmogony and Stellar
Dynamics (Cambridge, 1919).
Astronomy and Cosmogony (Cambridge,
1928).
Eos, or the Wider Aspects of Cosmogony
(1928).
The Universe Around Us (Cambridge, 1929).
474
The Mysterious Universe (Cambridge, 1930).
The Stars in their Courses (Cambridge,
1931).
The Expansion of the Universe (Birmingham,
1933).
The New Background of Science
(Cambridge, 1933).
Through Space and Time (Cambridge, 1934).
Man and the Universe (1936).
Science and Music (Cambridge, 1938).
An Introduction to the Kinetic Theory of
Gases (Cambridge, 1940).
Physics and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1942).
Further Reading
Milne, Arthur Edward, Sir James Jeans: A
Biography. With a Memoir by 5.C.
Roberts (Cambridge, 1952).
Andrew Aitken
JESSOP, Thomas Edmund (1896-1980)
Thomas Edmund Jessop was born in
Hudderfield on 10 September 1896 and died in
Hull on 10 September 1980. The son of
Newton and Georgiana Jessop (nee Swift), he
received his BA (1921) and MA (1922) from
the University of Leeds, and his BLitt at Oriel
College, Oxford in 1924, and began his career
as an assistant lecturer at the University of
Glasgow (1925-8). Jessop became the first
member of the Philosophy Department at the
University of Hull, serving as its sole member
for seventeen years, while also teaching courses
for the psychology degree. He was the first
Ferens Professor of Philosophy from 1928 to
1960, after which he served from 1960 to 1980
as professor emeritus, teaching at various uni-
versities abroad. Jessop received a Litt D
(honoris causa) from both the University of
Dublin and the University of Hull, and he was
awarded the Order of the British Empire for his

educational work with the British forces. Jessop
was also a noted writer of travel guides. He was
married to Dora Jessop (d. 1965).
Jessop is best known for his bibliographical
and editorial contributions to the study of
George Berkeley. Jessop's The Works of
George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (co-edited
with A.A. LUCE, 1948-57) superseded A.C.
Eraser's earlier editions of Berkeley's collected
works, and remains the standard source for
Berkeley commentators. Likewise, Jessop's A
Bibliography of George Berkeley ... With an
Inventory of Berkeley's Manuscript Remains by
A.A. Luce (1934) was highly praised, and con-
tinues to be a useful tool for scholars.
Jessop is additionally recognized for his con-
troversial development of an account of
Berkeley as a common sense realist. Although
the interpretation is sometimes called the
'Luce-Jessop' interpretation, both Luce and
Jessop claimed independence in developing the
view. It is a testament to the importance of the
view, that while it has generally been rejected
by most Berkeley commentators, it nonetheless
remains a topic of contemporary discussion
(see Luce).
A staunch Methodist, Jessop also wrote
extensively on the relationship between
Christianity and both ethics and science. Aside
from being an important theme in his writings
on both Berkeley and Hume, it was likewise a
central theme in his own philosophy. In works
such as Law and Love: A Study of the Christian
Ethics (1940) Jessop represented Christian
practice as overly legalistic, and insisted instead
upon the centrality of love, which he saw as a
uniquely Christian contribution to ethics. The
fund of benevolence in Christendom ... may be
fairly attributed to the religion of Christendom',
Jessop claimed in The Christian Morality
(1960). The sympathy that jumps across the
world has sprung ... from the Christianized
conscience' (p. 112).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Bibliography of George Berkeley by T.E.
Jessop; with an Inventory of Berkeley's
475
JOACHIM
Manuscript Remains by A.A. Luce (1934;
upd. and rev. edn, 1968).
A Bibliography of David Hume and of
Scottish Philosophy from Francis
Hutcheson to Lord Balfour (1938); repr.
with revisions as A Bibliography of David
Hume and of Scottish Philosophy (1983).
(Ed. with A.A. Luce), The Works of George
Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, 9 vols
(1948-57; repr. in 3 vols with suppl. to
vol. 1 by Desiree Park, Milwood, 1979).
Berkeley: Philosophical Writings (1952).
Other Relevant Works
Law and Love: A Study of the Christian
Ethics (19^).
The Christian Morality (1960; repr. 1964).
Talia Mae Bettcher
JOACHIM, Harold Henry (1868-1938)
Harold Henry Joachim was born in London
on 28 May 1868 and died in Croyde in Devon
on 30 July 1938. The son of a wool merchant
who as a boy had come to England from
Hungary, he was educated at Harrow, and
then at Balliol College, Oxford (where he was
a pupil of R.L. Nettleship). Elected in 1890 to
a prize fellowship at Merton, from 1892 he
was a lecturer in philosophy at St Andrews
(where he served as assistant to William
Knight), returning in 1894 to Oxford, first as
a lecturer at Balliol College (where he worked
as a colleague to J.A. SMITH, and under the
mastership of Edward Caird) and then in 1897
as fellow and tutor at Merton College (where
he succeeded William Wallace and was a col-
league of F.H. BRADLEY). In 1907 he married
his first cousin, daughter of the famous vio
linist, Joseph Joachim, with whom he had
three children. Joachim was himself an accom-
plished musician and it is interesting to see
JOACHIM
how, where other philosophers illustrated their
work with visual examples, it came naturally
to him to use musical ones. For two years,
from 1917, he was occupied with war work in
London. In 1919 he was elected Wykeham
Professor of Logic at New College, where he
succeeded the realist John COOK WILSON, a
post he held until his retirement in 1935.
Greatly influenced by Hegel, as well as by
those British thinkers whom Hegel had influ-
enced, Joachim shared the general idealist view
which dominated Oxford philosophy of his
day. That is to say, he was an absolute idealist.
He held that the nature of reality is grasped
most clearly through the twin notions of expe-
rience and unity, the latter drawing us away
from any 'subjective' or 'personal' interpreta-
tion of the former towards a holistic and objec-
tive understanding of the ideal nature of things.
He was influenced by his near contemporaries
J.A. Smith and, especially, F.H. Bradley.
Indeed, he was often thought of as simply a
follower of Bradley; something not helped
perhaps by the fact that after Bradley's death
he collected together his papers (including the
unfinished essay on relations) which, together
with Bradley's sister Marian de Glehn, he
edited for publication. But, in truth, although
Bradley was a strong influence on him, he
remained his own thinker, clearly diverging at
times from Bradley's position. In particular,
he shared with many the sense that Bradley
was too much influenced by realism and
empiricism, too conceding to the difference
between thought and reality. Moreover,
Joachim adopted the coherence theory of
truth, a position which Bradley never held
(although a great many have mistakenly
thought that he did).
The coherence theory of truth was the
subject of the 1906 book on which his fame
principally rests. Entitled The Nature of Truth,
it offers a full account and defence of the
theory of truth favoured by most of the ideal-
ists of that generation. The work was signifi-
cant for the way in which it put into systematic
form theories and arguments that, to date and
476
despite their key role, others had only barely
indicated or loosely developed. At the time it
excited considerable debate, one rather unfor-
tunate consequence of which is that this book
is now largely known only through Bertrand
RUSSELL'S criticisms of it. But that exchange,
while it did much to shape Russell's own
views, hardly gave a fair representation of the
book, not least because most of Russell's
remarks were really aimed over Joachim's
shoulder at Bradley.
Joachim begins the book by dismissing alter-
native accounts, starting with the notion of
truth as correspondence, or consisting in a
structural isomorphism between complexes.
Crucially, his discussion operates under the
assumption that the correspondence must be
'for' a mind since, he insists, '[tjruth ... is not
truth at all except in so far as it is recognised,
i.e. except in so far as it is the living experience
of a mind' (The Nature of Truth, p. 14). It
must therefore be thought of as a correspon-
dence, not between a mental item and a non-
mental item (between a judgement and
material reality), but rather between two
mental items (between a judgement and either
a perception or the accepted facts). But, argues
Joachim (taking the first possibility), identity of
structure is impossible where the relations hold
between different materials; between ideas, on
the one hand, and between perceptions, on
the other. The reasoning behind this claim
invokes the characteristically idealist thesis
that there can be no purely external relations,
which holds that just what any relation is
depends on precisely what entities it relates,
and so it would be impossible ever to have
exactly the same relations holding between
different sets of things. (This argument, if
sound, would be equally effective against
taking the correspondence relation as one
between judgement and material reality.) On
the other hand, argues Joachim (taking the
second possibility), if the 'reality' to which our
judgement corresponds is something like the
accepted facts of a scientific theory, then in
effect this is nothing more than another judge-

ment or set of judgements as, and really we are
moving towards a notion of truth as coher-
ence, a relation between two or more judge-
ments or beliefs.
He moves on to consider a view which he
finds in the most recent works of Bertrand
Russell according to which truth and falsity,
since they seem still to hold of matters whether
or not we experience them (a chord remains
harmonious whether or not we hear it), are to
be taken as immediate characteristics of objec-
tive universals, eternal and unchangeable
'propositions', which can be apprehended only
intuitively. While admitting that there is indeed
a sense in which experiencing makes no differ-
ence to the facts, Joachim rejects such abstract
entities on the grounds that they would involve
a complete severance of the experienced from
experience. As an idealist, he cannot in the end
allow any purely external relation between the
knowing subject and the known world; he cannot
accept that reality exists in a way wholly inde-
pendent of what is thought about it. He is equally
sceptical of the notion of intuition to which this
theory appeals. It simply fails to address the epis-
temological worries we should legitimately raise.
The bare fact that an apprehension is 'immediate'
does not, he says, create any presumption in
favour of its truth. On the contrary, it rouses
suspicion, insofar as 'immediate intuition' is often
just a last resort for a belief which the believer
cannot justify or yet abandon.
Thinking the alternative options exhausted
(and it is perhaps significant that he does not
consider the pragmatic theory of truth),
Joachim then moves on to argue that in reject-
ing the previous theories, we have, in effect,
been employing our own positive understand-
ing of truth as consisting in coherence. This he
then develops. On this model truth is a question
of immanent systematic coherence, that is of
harmonious fit, within a larger system of
judgements, expanding outwards until we
finally reach the whole of knowledge, sys-
tematic, self-contained and unique in its com-
pleteness. 'The truth itself is one, and whole,
and complete, and ... all thinking and all
477
JOACHIM
experience moves within its recognition and
subject to its manifest authority' (The Nature
of Truth, p. 178), he concludes. Rejecting any
account in terms of merely formal logic, as
well as the distinction between necessary and
contingent truth, the coherence he advocates,
which is more than just logical consistency, is
understood in terms of the living development
of concrete thought and experience. This is,
moreover, an account of the nature of truth,
not simply a criterion for it.
Crucial to the theory is the fact that the
whole in which judgements find their truth is
no mere sum or aggregation of single truths -
such an arrangement, he says, would be 'as if
one were to treat the Choral Symphony as a
collection of beautiful sounds, Othello as an
aggregate of fine ideas, or a picture by
Rembrandt as a sum of colours and lines' (The
Nature of Truth, p. 100) - instead the rela-
tionships between the judgements are internal,
each being made just what it is by its position
in the whole, and this means that the holism
which we find for truth holds also of meaning.
Every judgement is really the abbreviated state-
ment of a meaning which would ideally require
the whole system of knowledge for its adequate
expression, and no partial conception or expe-
rience is ever adequate to the whole, so never
wholly adequate. But it must be added that we
are not thereby completely severed from reality;
our concepts can to some extent express the
whole, for each judgement is 'subject to a
complex mass of conditions unexpressed and
yet implied', from which 'inarticulate back-
ground' it draws its meaning and truth (ibid.,
p. 107). Since this whole process of contextu-
alization is a matter of more or less, we thus
find ourselves with a doctrine of degrees of
truth and reality.
One of the most notable things about the
Nature of Truth is that, although written by a
representative of the idealist school and sup-
portive of the coherence theory, it is frank
about (and indeed highly perceptive of) the
problems of that theory, the last chapter of
the book being devoted to critique. In this
JOACHIM
respect it stands comparable to Andrew Seth
PRINGLE-PATTISON'S Hegelianism and
Personality, as a landmark of internal criti-
cism for the idealist school. Joachim finds two
main problems with the theory he has outlined.
The first concerns error. According to this
holistic theory - and this is what happens with
both Spinoza and Bradley - error is under-
stood as defective truth. It is a question of
taking as the last word a fragment out of
context which, reconnected, would look very
different. It is partial or incomplete knowl-
edge which takes itself as truth. Both parts of
this formulation are necessary, stresses
Joachim. A mere part of the truth may be incor-
porated as a harmless moment within a wider
truth. It is precisely our confidence in its truth
which 'constitutes the distinctive character of
error'. But therein, he argues, lies 'its power for
mischief. [For] this feature is never annulled
and never converted into an element of the
fuller knowledge' (The Nature of Truth,
p. 145). What we believe may be assimilated
into a greater truth, but not our belief in it. He
illustrates this via the case of Spinoza.
The second problem he locates is that the
coherence theory ends up postulating a kind of
truth that human knowledge can never reach.
An ideal system is too high above our heads
really to use; none of the things we 'know' are
true in that sense. Joachim objects to the notion
of a wholly mind-independent truth - it would
be nothing to us - but recognizes that the coher-
ence theory is in its own way just as fatally
divorced from real epistemology. Human
knowledge, knowledge as it is for us, is always
about an 'other', something independent of the
individual knowing subject, to which truth in
the end for us is always a matter of correspon-
dence. But, he admits, we have done nothing to
show how or why 'this self-diremption of the
one significant whole' (The Nature of Truth,
p. 172) takes place. How and why this seem-
ingly unbridgeable gap between appearance
and reality opens up remains mysterious.
The coherence theory, he concludes, 'may
thus be said to suffer shipwreck at the very
478
entrance to the harbour' (ibid., p. 171). But,
although not wholly true, this does not prevent
it being truer than other theories, and perhaps
as true as any theory can be; a conclusion
which, though unsettling, does not, he adds
with rigorous honesty, in itself undermine the
arguments adduced in its support.
During his tenure as Wykeham Professor of
Logic, Joachim delivered twice-weekly lectures
on 'logical subjects', and many of these were
collected together and published posthumously
in 1948 as Logical Studies. For the most part,
they defend an idealist logic of the kind devel-
oped earlier by Bradley and BoSANQUET. They
urge an understanding of logic as the science of
knowledge-or-truth, dealing with judgements,
not abstract propositions. The work is not
formal. And the position is always a holist one,
displayed in the Bradleian idea that in judge-
ment we refer not the subject to the predicate,
but the assertion as a whole to reality as a
whole, and also in the idea that judgement is
modified by its context of supporting judge-
ment, so that meaning and truth short of the
whole must always be matters of degree. It also
defends a doctrine of the concrete universal. All
this is orthodox, and in a sense the book's
orthodoxy was its problem. By the time
Joachim was lecturing, after World War I; logic
had moved on. Joachim had not. Russell and
MOORE'S analytic approach, the new scientific
work of such figures as Planck and Einstein,
Poincare's conventionalism, none of these was
Joachim really equipped to address, nor did he
try, with the result that his work seemed
anachronistic.
The second, most lengthy and perhaps the
most valuable of the book's three sections
contains an attack on foundationalism.
Dismissing candidates in turn, he argues at
some length that not at the level of self-feeling,
sense perception nor conceptual intuition can
there ever be an indisputable starting point for
philosophy. The popular division of knowl-
edge into 'immediate' and 'discursive' is thor-
oughly 'shaken and discredited', he urges.
(Logical Studies, p. 171). Knowledge is not

built up on foundations, but rather forms a
coherent whole. Descartes he singled out as
someone who had believed in self-evident intu-
itions that could be used in this way, and it was
his opposition to this idea that lay behind
Joachim's interest in Descartes's work, partic-
ularly the Regulae, his commentary on which
was published posthumously.
In the final section of Logical Studies he
returns to the question of truth: its proper
object and its nature. He distinguishes three
positions. There is the subjective position in
which the individual subject's complex or com-
pounded ideas agree or disagree with the facts
and there is the objective view in which judge-
ment considered logically as that which is true
or false is taken to exist independently of anything
psychical or psychological; truth and falsity being
just basic properties of it. Third, there is what he
calls the idealist view which sees judgement as a
synthesis of fact with idea, 'the ideal expansion of
a fact.' (Logical Studies, p. 182). According to this
view, truth lies in the whole and anything less
than that is a matter of degree. It cannot be said
that in this later treatment much advance is made
on the position of the Nature of Truth. The dis-
cussion concludes with two unresolved problems.
First, there is the fact that falsity and error have
a positive character of their own and cannot
simply be equated with incomplete knowledge or
partial truth. Second, the theory sees knowledge
as all-inclusive, self-supporting and timelessly
complete, while in our experience it is an endless
process of growth in time, advancing, evolving
and fulfilling itself but never finished or com-
pleted.
In addition to his independent metaphysical
reflection, Joachim was also a careful and
painstaking historical scholar, widely respected
for his contributions to the study, not only of
Descartes, but also and more particularly of
Spinoza and Aristotle. Perhaps unlike other
idealists, who tended to look at the history of
philosophy contextually with an eye to the
development and general pattern, Joachim was
minutely textual. His own views, however,
were not hidden, as can be seen from his 1901
479
JOACHIM
A Study of the Ethics of Spinoza, which,
although a thorough and careful commentary
in full scholarly detail, nonetheless sets out an
idealist reading of Spinoza, and from his com-
mentary on Spinoza's Tractatus de intellectus
emendatione, which was published posthu-
mously in 1940.
In many respects Joachim followed Hegel's
interpretation of Spinoza as having anticipated
some of the most important doctrines of
absolute idealist philosophy. In this respect, in
the context of the history of British idealism, his
interpretation is comparable with that put
forward by John Caird in his Spinoza (1888),
though it is much larger in scope, more sys-
tematic, and less concerned with the religious
import of Spinoza's position. Joachim approves
of Spinoza's attempt to make sense of the whole
of things, which, with acknowledged indebt-
edness to Bradley, he sees as the aim of philos-
ophy. And he claims that Spinoza's proof of the
necessary existence of God is valid, although
understanding it as the thesis that under the
influence of thought the contingency and finite-
ness with which we start are replaced by self-
conditioned necessity and infinite or complete
reality, it sounds more like Hegel than Spinoza.
Although recognizing that it is not just an 'ideal
shadow', Spinoza's view of the individual self
as not ultimately real was one in which he
found himself in sympathy; the differences of
this or that knowing mind, he suggested in the
Nature of Truth, are but 'accidental imperfec-
tions, superficial irregularities, in the medium
through which truth is reflected', just as 'the
temporal processes of our knowing are mere
incidents in the manifestation of truth' (p. 167).
His exposition, however, is not wholly con-
gratulatory and he finds much to criticise also.
He finds a contradiction in Spinoza's concep-
tion of God as at once excluding all determi-
nation and comprehending an infinite diver-
sity of ultimate characters. And also that
Spinoza reduces particular things to the status
of illusions. This stems from the defective geo-
metrical deductive method (although he opti-
mistically sees inklings of a more successful
JOACHIM
Hegelian method) leading to a conception of
substance as abstract and empty. What is
wanted is something concrete. He says 'all the
distinctive features of the worlds of Extension
and Thought seem to vanish as "illusions" one
by one, until you are left with the singleness of
the attributes: a singleness not concrete but
abstract' (Ethics of Spinoza, p. 114).
Besides Spinoza, Joachim was also an
acknowledged authority on Aristotle. A trans-
lation of De lineis insecabilibus appeared in
1908, while in 1922 he published a transla-
tion, together with an Introduction and
Commentary of De generatione et corruptione.
He also wrote a handful of Articles on Aristotle,
as well as a book on the Nicomachean Ethics
published posthumously in 1951.
Joachim's output was not great (he was too
careful and modest ever to write much) and nor
was his influence. Notable pupils of his
included T.S. Eliot and Brand Blanshard (bot.
much influenced by him if in different ways),
but in many respects, and certainly by the time
he occupied the Oxford chair, he was widely
felt to be a figure rather after his time and not
worthy of the attention of those caught up with
new ideas. In consequence of this, his merit as
a philosopher has always been underrated. As
he was too careful and honest to make bold
statements, and of a persuasion out of step
with the philosophy of his day, the tendency
has been to dismiss him as a mere imitator or
a dry scholar. But this character of his thought
stems from the fastidious care with which he
executed it. He will not demand attention, but
for anyone prepared to give him a hearing, he
will more than reward the effort spent. He was
not an innovator in idealist thought, he was
rather a foot soldier, but one more rigorous and
worthy of attention than many others.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Study of the Ethics of Spinoza (Oxford,
1901).
The Nature of Truth (Oxford, 1906).
Logical Studies (Oxford, 1948).
480
Other Relevant Works
Spinoza's Tractatus de intellectus emenda-
tione: A Commentary (Oxford, 1940).
Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford,
1951).
Descartes' Rules for the Direction of the
Mind (Oxford, 1957).
Further Reading
Blanshard, Brand, 'A Philosophical Logician',
The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 3 (1949),
pp. 249-60.
Parkinson, G.H.R., 'Spinoza and British
Idealism: The Case of H.H. Joachim',
British journal for the History of
Philosophy, vol. 1 (1993), pp. 109-23.
Walker, R., 'Joachim on the Nature of
Truth', in W.J. Mander (ed.), Anglo-
American Idealism 1865-1927 (Westport,
Connecticut, 2000), pp. 183-97.
W.J. Mander
JOAD, Cyril Edwin Mitchirison (1891-1953)
Cyril Joad was born in Durham on 12 August
1891 and died in Hampstead on 9 April 1953.
He was educated at BluridelPs School in
Tiverton and at Balliol College, Oxford, where
in 1914 he won the John Locke Scholarship
and gained his MA. Later that year he took up
a post in the Ministry of Labour, where he
remained until 1930. He then became the Hea.
of the Philosophy Department at Birkbeck
College, London, a post which he held until his
death. He was awarded a DLitt from London
University in 1936. In the latter part of his life,
he regularly appeared on the panel in the first
series of the popular radio programme The
Brains Trust'.
During a long and distinguished career, Joad
consistently held out against the dominant
philosophical trend of the time, which was

largely concerned with theories of language
and meaning, and particularly logical posi-
tivism, which he condemned for 'eviscerat[ing]
the universe' to a far more radical extent than
had its philosophical ancestor Hume, and for
being intolerant and dogmatic. He accused such
theories of breaking with millennia of tradi-
tion in Western philosophy by elevating science
to pre-eminence in knowledge, and more specif-
ically by rejecting the realm of objective values,
which he termed 'the dropping of the object'.
This rejection had helped to bring about a crisis
in civilization, with its attendant rootlessness
and decadence, the subject of one of his publi-
cations.
In his critique of logical positivism, he
outlined the now standard objections to it: that
the principle of verification in A.J. AYER'S
second edition of Language, Truth and Logic
(1946), i.e. that a proposition is meaningful if
and only if it is either analytic or empirically
verifiable, is not self-referential and thus that
the principle itself is meaningless; and that the
principle conflates the issues of meaning and
verification, whereas the former is logically
prior to the latter. A more interesting objection
is that, as empirical verifiability consists of sense
experience or, as Joad puts it, 'sense contents',
there is thus the problem of how these 'sense
contents' relate to physical objects. For Joad,
logical positivism ends in subjectivity and an
implicit rejection of the 'common sense' view
that physical things are objective and public.
Logical positivism also rejected ethical and aes-
thetic values by treating their purported expres-
sions not as statements, but as mere grunts of
approval or disapproval of actions, or of like
and dislike of aesthetic objects.
Theories of meaning have their place in phi-
losophy, and older readers might recall the
Joad of the Brains Trust frequently asking for
clarification in the meaning of terms, but the
positive aspect of Joad's philosophy centred
on the question of values. Drawing on both
Plato and Aristotle, he argued that there is an
objective realm consisting of four principal
values: truth, happiness, goodness and beauty.
481
JOAD
Happiness and goodness are to be achieved by
the moral development and excellence of the
soul, that non-natural part of each human
being which aspires to join the realm of values,
whereas truth and beauty are totally indepen-
dent of human beings. Moral experience is a
necessary condition of moral development and
excellence, and both are to be fostered by the
use of practical reasoning or the practical intel-
lect. Our appetites or desires should be con-
trolled and channelled by such reasoning. Our
knowledge of beauty and truth as objective
values is also dependent on our willed and
responsive experiences of particular great
works of art, or of particular truths, which are
both manifestations of their corresponding
values in the objective realm. Finally, our reli-
gious consciousness, manifested in religious
experience, has as its cause, and yields an
awareness of, the independent 'object' of
religion, who is the personal Deity.
In politics Joad rejected the Hegelian concept
of the state, and all theories derived from it. He
maintained, in keeping with an Aristotelian
approach, that the chief function of the state is
to permit its citizens to develop the virtues, but
unlike Aristotle he maintained that all states
should be democratic: the best way of ensuring
that citizens obey the law is that the law-
making body is ultimately responsible to the
citizens.
Joad was a self-confessed popularizer or, as
he put it, 'vulgarisateur'. He claimed that any
intelligent lay person should be able to under-
stand a philosophical text, and he often
appealed to the 'common man' as support for
his own philosophical views. He rejected the
position that philosophy has a specialized tech-
nique, and it was his contention that many
philosophers had not bothered to learn and
practise the art of writing clearly. His own
writings are lucid, elegant and witty. He also
claimed that philosophers should not concen-
trate exclusively on philosophy, thus turning it
into a narrow academic discipline, but should
have some public and practical experience of
the extra-philosophical world.
JOAD
Contemporary philosophy today, whilst still
concerned with language and meaning, has
again broadened out into the traditional areas
of metaphysics and value, and has left behind
the restrictions of logical positivism, a devel-
opment which Joad would surely have
welcomed.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Robert Owen: Idealist [Fabian Society
Publication] (1928).
Matter, Life and Value (1929).
Philosophical Aspects of Modern Science
(1932).
Guide to Philosophy (1936).
Guide to the Philosophy of Morals and
Politics (1938).
Philosophy for our Times (1940).
Guide to Modern Thought (1942).
Decadence: A Philosophical Inquiry (1948).
A Critique of Logical Positivism (1950).
The Recovery of'Belief'(1952).
Further Reading
Findlay, J.N., 'Dr Joad on the Verification
Principle', Hibbert journal, vol. 48
(1949-50), pp. 120-26.
Kathryn L. Plant
JOHNSON, William Ernest (1858-1931)
W.E. Johnson was born in Cambridge on 23
June 1858 and died in Northampton on 14
January 1931. His last days to one side, he
breathed Cambridge, his family - Liberal in
politics, Baptist in religion - forming a centre of
the city's social life, with his father running a
well-known local school where the young Will
was educated. As well as being well treated to
religion - though he later retreated - Will wa
dealt asthma and love of the piano, both set to
advance into later years, the former unhappily
482
so in contrast with the latter. His piano playing
became exquisite, meeting eventually with even
WITTGENSTEIN'S approval. In 1879 Johnson
entered King's College, Cambridge, where he
read mathematics and then the moral sciences,
concentrating on psychology and economics
before focusing on logic. He secured a univer-
sity lectureship in 1896 and in 1902 became
fellow of King's and Sidgwick Lecturer in
Moral Science, positions held until his death.
Because of his ill health, perfectionism and
modesty he published little; his fellowship
renewals would often have failed but for the
support of John Maynard KEYNES, who would
seek funding, a funding to which Wittgenstein
contributed. Johnson was much admired by
his contemporaries for his intellect, generosity
and kindliness. He was a sociable man - a ma.
who, wrapped in asthma and an old red shawl
(in which he also lectured), gave regular Sunday
tea parties for students and colleagues, his con-
versation embracing architecture, music and
literature.
In 1921 Johnson's volumes on logic, based
on lectures given over the previous decade,
began to appear, as did recognition beyond
Cambridge in the form of a British Academy
fellowship and two honorary doctorates. Three
volumes reached publication; the planned
fourth, on probability, did not - due to illness
and a desire to respond fully to Keynes's A
Treatise on Probability. (The fourth volume'
initial chapters appeared posthumously in
Mind.) In contrast to the dust on the outside
and the apparent dullness within, Johnson's
Logic is coloured by romance. It was Naomi
Bentwich, one of Johnson's students, who,
being so impressed by her lecturer, persuaded
him to publish, devoting herself to the project.
Johnson, a widower of many years, fell in love;
and the attractive young Naomi and affection-
ate elderly Will sought marriage. Others were
having none of it, and Naomi turned her atten-
tions - pointlessly - to Keyrtes.
Johnson the lecturer was known for his
rigour and subtlety, but Johnson the author of
Logic puts in a less polished performance. The

work was written in failing health, compiled
from lecture notes, and his arguments and ter-
minology are sometimes bewildering; but there
are philosophical compensations and his
writing, in places, displays the care and acuity
of a G.E. MOORE'S. The Aristotelian syllogistic
tradition in the background, Johnson's Logic
was influenced by John Stuart Mill, C.S. Peirce
and John Venn and, in part, responds to
elements in the work of Gottlob Frege and
Bertrand RUSSELL.
With Aristotelian logic being swept to more
and more distant historical shores as the
Russellian and Wittgensteinian climate took
hold, Johnson's work was, by his death,
appearing quaint and quirky - and quickly for-
gotten. But for occasional references to his
determinable/determinate distinction, it largely
continues so to be. It is, though, undeservedly
forgotten. Johnson gave early expression to
ideas now commonplace; he challenged some
Aristotelian and Russellian regimentations; and
his teaching influenced significant others.
Russell and the philosophical Keyneses (Neville
KEYNES and son, Maynard) acknowledged his
generous help. G.E. Moore, P.P. RAMSEY, R.B.
BRAITHWAITE, C.D. BROAD - they were all
instructed by him - as was Wittgenstein. In
Wittgenstein's case, the pedagogical relation-
ship was brief, the young student announcing
that Johnson had nothing to teach him.
Apparently Johnson ended the supervisions,
frustrated by his pupil's resistance to genuine
discussion. Johnson reported - with an irony
that Wittgenstein would have missed - that
even at their first meeting Wittgenstein was
teaching him. A friendship subsequently devel
oped.
Extending far beyond the typical confines of
formal logic, Johnson's Logic engages meta-
physics and epistemology. Logic, narrowly
understood, deals with formal relations
between propositions - whether p entails g,
whether '/? therefore q* is a valid argument -
and Johnson develops a formal calculus in his
1892 papers. In his Logic Johnson gives promi-
nence to the epistemic and psychological
483
JOHNSON
features of inference: for example, in order to
infer q from p one needs to assert or believe that
p. Johnson's work is kitted out with catego-
rizations - he admired Kant - and he delights
in dressing up distinctions with new or revived
terms, parading before us continuants and
occurrents, substantives and adjectives, nomic
necessities and contingencies, characterizing
ties, coupling ties and many more ties.
Johnson, from the 1890s, although incon-
sistent in his own use, explicitly distinguishes
between sentences, assertions and propositions,
stressing that people's different thoughts and
different attitudes - for example, asserting,
assuming, hypothesizing - can have the same
prepositional content, a claim that is important
and now standard. It is one also made by Frege
and one whose significance was stressed much
later by P.T. GEACH, whose teachers included
his father, whose teachers included Johnson.
Reluctant to ascribe quasi-existence to
propositions, Johnson understands them con-
ditionally, in terms of what can be asserted.
Assertions involve someone thinking at a par-
ticular time in a particular context; but,
abstracted from such particulars, they can typ-
ically be considered as characterizations of
facts. With embryonic gesturing towards per-
formative awarenesses, Johnson proposes that
to say that a proposition is true can be to
approve of assertions with that propositional
content; saying that something is false is to
express disapproval. Performance apart, the
ascription of 'is true' is explicitly (though not
always consistently) described as 'redundant'.
The proposition, that it is true that p is no sec-
ondary proposition concerning that p but just
is the proposition that p. (Frege puts forward a
similar suggestion in a then unpublished note of
1915.) What needs to be understood is what it
is to assert that p - a matter of how assertions
accord or discord with the facts. It is highly
likely that this led Ramsey to his comments
that became seen, somewhat misleadingly, as
introducing 'the redundancy theory', generating
a variety of deflationary theories later in the
century. While both Johnson and Ramsey think
JOHNSON
of 'is true' as redundant, neither thinks redun-
dant an account of what makes propositions
true.
Just as Johnson distinguishes between propo-
sitions and assertions, with propositions essen-
tially involving assertibility, so he distinguishes
between implication and inference, p implying
q essentially being the possibility of justifiably
inferring q from p. If q can be validly deduced
from p, then q must be contained within p,
but this leads to no paradoxical conclusion
that formal inference makes no advance in
thought. One epistemic condition for someone
to infer q from p is that the assertion that p
results from no previous assertion that q.
Inference's epistemic features also enable
Johnson to take a shot at the (so-called)
material implication paradoxes whereby any
false proposition materially implies any propo-
sition and any true proposition is materially
implied by any proposition, p materially
implying q being taken as logically equivalent
to either not-p or q. These would only be para-
doxes were the corresponding inferences valid;
but, argues Johnson, if one denies that p, then
asserting p in order to infer something else
would be to contradict oneself; and believing q
and, on that basis, seeking to infer q from just
any proposition would be an engagement in cir-
cularity.
Getting clear about inference is also impor-
tant in understanding the reportage of beliefs,
as Johnson shows in his 'Analysis of Thinking'
(1918). Consider the Provost's belief that all
Cambridge logicians are logical. Whether the
belief should be reported as 'With respect to
every Cambridge logician, she believes each is
logical' or as 'She believes that every Cambridge
logician is logical' depends on which inferences
are justified. Suppose that Miss C is a
Cambridge logician: then the former belief
report permits one to infer that the Provost
believes that Miss C is logical, but the latter
report allows no such inference, unless it is also
true that the Provost believes Miss C to be a
Cambridge logician. Such distinctions,
deployed by some medieval logicians, came to
484
the fore, decades after Johnson's death, in dis-
cussions of referential opacity.
In analysing prepositional structures, Johnson,
acknowledging Mill's connotation/denotation
distinction, separates an expression's meaning
from what the expression is used to indicate,
arguing that proper names, with regard to
meaning, differ radically from descriptive
phrases. The meaning of proper names hangs
on what they indicate, though he, like Russell,
doubts whether all ordinary proper names are,
so to speak, properly proper. Introducing the
expression 'ostensive definition', Johnson sees
proper names as receiving their meaning
through ostensions that take place in appro-
priate circumstances, subsequent successful uses
of the name depending on backward refer-
ences. Analogously, indefinite descriptions in
narratives - 'once upon a time there was a
certain boy named "Jack" who had a beanstalk
and he ...' - prepare the way for future refer-
ences. Johnson glimpses a referent determina-
tion picture that became associated years later
with Saul Kripke's innovations.
While recognizing that linguistic features can
lead to faulty generalizations, Johnson sees the
linguistic subject/predicate distinction as mir-
roring a 'substantive/adjective' distinction that,
despite the name, is metaphysical in nature.
Some have alleged an incompleteness of pred-
icates in contrast to the completeness of
subjects; but while 'Socrates is wise' can be
derived from an incomplete predicate form'...
is F completed by a subject variant, it can also
be derived from '#...' completed by a predicate
variant. Johnson highlights differences between
compound predicates and compound subjects.
He might be suggesting, for example, that the
predicate 'is wise' can be compounded with
'not', generating 'is unwise'; but 'Socrates'
cannot similarly generate a subject
'UnSocrates'. Johnson's metaphysical distinc-
tion, akin to the particular/universal, is, he
somewhat obscurely insists, an abstraction: a
characterizing tie ties being wise to Socrates,
and the tie blends into an assertive tie when we
assert that Socrates is wise. Although Ramsey

rejected what he took to be Johnson's
argument, later philosophers, such as Geach,
have developed Johnsonian type thoughts and
have followed him in railing against elaborate
verbal transformations that attempt to show all
propositions to be identities.
A true proposition in subject-predicate form
offers no guarantee of a corresponding sub-
stantive/adjective fact. Although adjectives can
characterize adjectives, the proposition that red
is a colour is not saying that red is characterized
by being coloured. Red/colour, in contrast to
square/four-equal-sided, exemplifies a deter-
minate/determinable relationship. Johnson
seems to have the following in mind: that a
geometrical figure is square is entailed by the
propositions that the figure has four equal sides
and that it has at least one right angle, but that
the rose is red is not entailed by the proposition
that it is coloured combined with another
proposition ascribing a further straightforward
feature (one insufficient for redness). The rose
is coloured, that is it is determinable as red or
yellow, etc. Colour's determinates are exclu-
sively grouped together, with a peculiar kind of
difference between them, one that fails to hold
between any one of them and the determinates
of other determinables, such as shape, pitch
and pressure. Determinates under the same
determinable can be ordered and they compete,
so to speak, for the same metaphysical space.
Determinables fall under no higher-level deter-
minables.
Metaphysical investigations by Johnson
possess a robust sense of reality, one that a
Russell or Quine would admire: he challenges
talk of different universes of discourse - of a
universe of imaginary items, for example. A
queasiness, though, would envelop a Quine
when Johnson distinguishes between acciden-
tal generalizations and laws of nature - for he
characterizes the latter as embracing possibili-
ties. It might be that every gas, when heated,
expands, but, if only an accidental connection,
that amounts to, concerning any gas, its either
expanding or not being heated; and this might
be so because recalcitrant gases miss out on
485
JOHNSON
being heated. For the generalization to be law-
like it needs to justify a belief that were these
unheated gases to have been heated, they would
have expanded. Johnson's example is the
brakeless train. Because we are prudent and
believe brakeless trains dangerous there are no
brakeless trains. Therefore, regarding each
train, either it has brakes or is dangerous; but
that fails to capture the thought of a nomic
necessity existing such that being brakeless
causally necessitates danger. This approach
involving possibilities - an approach rarely rec-
ognized as one adopted by Johnson - became
popular decades later through a revival of
Leibniz's possible worlds.
In Johnson's world there are substantive con-
tinuants - such as pebbles, pineapples and
people - and these are not collections of
temporal stages; but there are also substantive
occurrents - events and processes - and these
can be grasped as such collections. A continu-
ant's identity requires no persisting character-
istics, but does require the potential for a law-
like series of changes, a series of occurrent
states. Johnson resists seeing change as nothing
but one feature or item being replaced by
another; for him, changes are the manifesta-
tions of determinables and are to be under-
stood as involving both immanent and transe-
unt causality.
Johnson was an early worker in philosophi-
cal analysis, spotting misleading surface simi-
larities, searching for underlying forms, yet well
aware of risks of squeezing disparate items into
a single category. He can baffle both with
regard to his distinctions and the point of them;
yet few pages pass without some thought-pro-
voking or valuable observation, be it to do
with epistemic and metaphysical possibilities, or
the use of the word 'not', or arguing that even
if 'God is an existent' is analytically true, there
remains the question of whether there is a God.
In his Logic he discusses sciences' foundations,
mind-body, and inductive reasoning; in his
'Analysis of Thinking' he argues that pains are
no more objects of our experiencing than
dreams are objects of our dreaming. Johnson is
JOHNSON
often drawn to what people do and can do
through their sayings and reasonings - for
example, in understanding the nature of propo-
sitions - and here there are seeds of the natu-
ralism popular later in the century.
The motto of Johnson's Logic is the tradi-
tional 'Man is a rational animal'. His work
merits study by those who seek the thoughts of
both a rational animal and kindly philosopher.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Logic, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1921,1922,
1924).
Other Relevant Works
The Logical Calculus', Mind, vol. 1 (1892),
pp. 3-30, 235-50, 340-57.
'Hypothetical in a Context', Mind, vol. 4
(1895), pp. 143-4.
'Analysis of Thinking', Mind, vol. 27 (1918),
pp. 1-21,133-51.
'Probability', Mind, vol. 41 [three chaps of
the projected 4th vol. Logic] (1932), pp.
1-16; 281-96; 409-23.
Further Reading
Broad C.D., 'William Ernest Johnson', in
Ethics and the History of Philosophy
(1952).
Keynes, J.N., Formal Logic, 4th edn (1906).
Moore, G.E., Lectures on Philosophy, ed.
Casimir Lewy (1966).
Prior, A.N., 'Determinables, Determinates
and Determinants', Mind, vol. 58 (1949),
pp. 1-20; 178-94.
Ramsey, P.P., Philosophical Papers, ed. D.H.
Mellor (Cambridge, 1990).
Peter Cave
486
JOHNSTON, George Alexander
(1888-1983)
George Alexander Johnston was born in
Jamaica and died in Dublin on 9 August 1983.
He graduated from the University of Glasgow
as Master of Arts with first class honours in
classics and philosophy in 1912, and as Doctor
of Philosophy in 1918. Johnston became
actively involved in the political and social
concerns that were central to his philosophical
work by entering the public service. He served
as assistant secretary with the Ministry of
Labour in the United Kingdom before 1920
and through World War II, and joined the
International Labour Office (ILO) in 1920 as
chief of section before returning to the ILO as
Assistant Director-General in 1945. He became
Treasurer and Financial Comptroller of the
ILO in 1948, a position he held until his retire-
ment in 1953. His dedication to issues relating
to labour continued long after his retirement
from official public service. Johnston served as
special adviser to the Director-General of the
ILO until 1954, when he took on the role of
Secretary-General to a government training
institute in Istanbul. He was a member of the
United Nations mission to Vietnam from 1955
to 1956 and then served as Director of the
London Office of the ILO from 1956 to 1957.
He spent the last fourteen years of his life
studying the ILO archives, publishing The
International Labour Organisation: Its Work
for Social and Economic Progress in 1970.
Johnston was also an officer of the Order of
Orange-Nassau.
Johnston's only major work in philosophy is
his 1923 book on The Development of
Berkeley's Philosophy. The book traces the
evolution of Berkeley's thought with a particu-
lar focus on his metaphysics and theory of
knowledge. Johnston presents Berkeley as a
'typical' English philosopher of that period
whose concerns were: (1) predominantly practi-
cal, (2) epistemically oriented and (3) champi-
oned by psychological and inductive methods.
Johnston points to Locke's general theory of

ideas and Cartesianism (Malebranche, in par-
ticular) as the major influences on Berkeley's
thought. Johnston claims that Berkeley's criti-
cisms of Locke's abstract ideas are grounded in
a psychological disagreement regarding how
they are formed, and a metaphysical disagree-
ment regarding their ontological character or
status. According to Johnston, Berkeley does
admit to the existence of universals, but simply
denies that they take the form of abstract ideas.
Johnston maintains that there are only two
classes of ideas in Berkeley's philosophy (rather
than the usual three): ideas of sensation and the
mental images formed by memory and imagi-
nation. The so-called third class of ideas, i.e.
elements of mind relating to reflection, are not
'ideas' at all, but notions. Contrary to Husserl
and Lyons, Johnston claims that a 'notion' is a
concept or a universal that is 'present to the
mind' and which has as its objects: (1) spirits,
(2) mental operations and (3) relations
(Development of Berkeley's Philosophy,
p. 168). Johnston also presents Berkeley as an
occasionalist who, like Malebranche, holds that
only acts of creation grounded in spirit can be
real causes (hence the problematic character of
matter). The result is a world of experientially
isolated subjects whose otherwise separate and
private domains are brought into harmonious
correlation through a process of occasional
intervention whereby 'moment to moment God
adjusts the several worlds' (ibid., p. 69).
Johnston is perhaps better remembered for
his social and political work, and in particular
his contribution to international labour, than
for his work in philosophy as such. Even so, his
study of Berkeley stills stands as an important
contribution to those hoping to understand the
evolution of Berkeley's thought.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'The Influence of Mathematical Conceptions
on Berkeley's Philosophy', Mind, vol. 25
(1916), pp. 177-92.
The Development of Berkeley's Philosophy
(1923; New York, 1965).
International Social Progress: The Work of
487
JONES
the International Labour Organisation of
the League of Nations (1924).
(Ed.), Berkeley's Commonplace Book (1930).
The International Labour Organisation: Its
Work for Social and Economic Progress
(1970).
Philip Rose
JONES, Emily Elizabeth Constance
(1848-1922)
E.E. Constance Jones was born in Wales and
died in Weston-super-Mare on 9 April 1922.
She attended Alston Court in Cheltenham during
1865-6, and entered Girton College, Cambridge
in October 1875, where, prompted by having
read Henry Fawcett's Manual of Political
Economy (1863) and Mill's Logic (1843), she
chose the Moral Sciences Tripos. After receiving
a first in 1880, having studied with Henry
Sidgwick, James WARD and J.N. KEYNES, she
completed the translation of Lotze's
Mikrokosmus initiated by Elizabeth Hamilton.
Returning to Girton in 1884, Jones served as
lecturer of moral sciences, librarian, Vice-
Mistress and lastly Mistress of the College from
1903 to 1916. A steady contributor to
International Journal of Ethics, Mind and
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society', she
served on the Aristotelian Society's Executive
Committee from 1914 to 1916, having joined
the Society in December 1892. She spent her
final years in Weston-super-Mare, drafting As /
Remember (1922) and working on a transla-
tion of Hegel's 'Larger Logic'.
Jones's major work is A New Law of Thought
and its Logical Bearings (1911), the product of
years of refinement of her proposal to replace the
Law of Identity in its form of A is A with the
Law of Significant Assertion: 'Every Subject of
Predication is an identity (of denotation) in diver-
sity (of intension)' (p. 3). Contending that the tra-
JONES
ditional Law of Identity is inadequate to justify
propositions of the form S is P, S is not P, she
argued that if categorical propositions are to
have significance, then the first law of thought
must be of the form A is B. By addressing
problems associated with Carroll's barber-shop
paradox and accounts of immediate inference
and the syllogism, Jones highlighted the 'new'
law's efficacy in resolving difficulties in formal
logic. Of historic import is that the identity-in-
diversity view first appeared in her Elements of
Logic as a Science of Propositions (1890), two
years prior to Frege's analysis of categorical
propositions in 'Uber Sinn und Bedeutung',
though Lotze's influence upon both apparently
accounts for their separate paths to similar views.
Regarding questions of influence, a recent sug-
gestion that BRADLEY in Appearance and Reality
(2nd edn, 1897) and RUSSELL in The Principles
of Mathematics (1903) were indebted to Jones's
view of identity (see Waithe and Cicero) requires
caution. The Bradley Papers and Bradley's pub-
lished discussion point to L.T. HOBHOUSE being
the prod for his further consideration of identity,
and the evidence presented for Russell's alleged
indebtedness remains circumstantial. Yet this
suggestion cannot be wholly dismissed, since
both men routinely read the journals in which
Jones's logical articles appeared.
Jones's ethical writings were wielded chiefly in
defence of the rationality of Sidgwick's ethical
hedonism, whose lectures on Green, Spencer
and Martineau she also edited. She offered close
analyses of criticisms advanced by Bradley, J.S.
MACKENZIE, G.E. MOORE, James SETH and F.H.
Hayward. Jones's philosophic acuity and will-
ingness to join issue in ethics and logic with her
contemporaries make her writings an especially
good read.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Elements of Logic as a Science of
Propositions (Edinburgh, 1890).
An Introduction to General Logic (1892).
A New Law of Thought and its Logical
Bearings (Cambridge, 1911).
488
Other Relevant Works
A Primer of Logic (New York, 1905).
A Primer of Ethics (1909).
As I Remember (1922).
Further Reading
Anon., 'In Memoriam: E. E. Constance
Jones', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 22 (1921-2), pp. 224-5.
Ladd-Franklin, Christine, Critical Notice of
Elements of Logic as a Science of
Propositions, Mind, vol. 15, no. 60
(October 1890), pp. 559-63.
Lefevre, Walter, Review of An Introduction
to General Logic, Philosophical Review,
vol. 2, no. 1 (January 1893), pp. 81-2.
Mackenzie, J.S., 'The Late Miss E. E.
Constance Jones, Litt.D.', International
Journal of Ethics, vol. 33, no. 2 (January
1923), p. 228.
Schiller, F.C.S., Critical notice of A New Law
of Thought and its Logical Bearings, Mind,
vol. 21, no. 82 (April 1912), pp. 246-50.
Stout, G.F., The Late Miss E. E. Constance
Jones', Mind, vol. 31, no. 123 (July 1922),
pp. 383-4.
Waithe, Mary Ellen and Samantha Cicero,
'E. E. Constance Jones (1848-1922)', in
Mary Ellen Waithe (ed.), A History of
Women Philosophers, vol. 4 (Dordrecht,
1995), chap. 2, pp. 25-49; partial bibliog-
raphy, pp. 418-19.
Carol A. Keene
JONES, Henry (1852-1922)
Henry Jones was born in Llangernyw,
Denbighshire on 30 November 1852 and died,
after a prolonged and painful battle against
mouth cancer, on 4 February 1922. He is
buried in the churchyard at Kilbride, the Isle of
Bute, Scotland. He was the third son of Elias

Jones, a shoemaker, and Elizabeth Williams.
He left school at the age of twelve years to
become apprenticed to his father, but was per-
suaded to resume his education and won a
scholarship to Bangor Normal Teacher
Training College in 1870. He became the
Headmaster of the small Ironworks School at
Brynammam, South Wales in 1873. Influenced
by his strong Methodist family background,
Jones became a registered Calvinistic minister.
He won a scholarship to study at Glasgow
University in 1875, where he was influenced by
Edward Caird and John Nichol.
Jones graduated with first class honours and
won the Clark Fellowship which enabled him
to assist Caird in his teaching and study for four
more years, the bulk of which was spent in
Glasgow. In 1882 he married Annie Walker.
They had six children; two died young, and a
third was taken prisoner of war in Turkey. A
fourth was killed in France during the war.
Jones was appointed to a lectureship at
University College, Aberystwyth, where his
public disagreements with the Principal led to
the termination of his contract. In 1884 he
became Professor of Philosophy and Political
Economy in the newly established University
College of North Wales. Intellectually, he was
much more at home in Scotland, where he was
appointed in 1891 to the Chair of Logic,
Rhetoric and Metaphysics at St Andrews and
Dundee University. In 1894, in competition
with John Watson and D.G. Ritchie, Jones was
appointed to Caird's Chair of Moral
Philosophy at Glasgow.
He was awarded honorary doctorates from
the University of St Andrews and the University
of Wales. He was elected a fellow of the British
Academy in 1904, and was knighted in 1912.
He became a Companion of Honour a few
weeks before his death in 1922. He was
Hibbert Lecturer at Manchester College,
Oxford for many years, and Gifford Lecturer at
Glasgow University in 1920 and 1921. He
served on Haldane's Royal Commission of
1916-17 into the University of Wales. He was
a strong supporter of the federal structure of the
489
JONES
University of Wales and was instrumental in
preventing moves to establish the autonomy
of the constituent colleges. He was a member
of the Universities Mission to America in 1918.
Despite a great deal of personal tragedy he
campaigned on behalf of the Parliamentary
Recruitment Committee throughout Wales
during World War I in an attempt to avert syn-
dicalist opposition from North Wales slate
quarrymen and miners in Merthyr.
After abandoning his aspirations to become
a Calvinistic Methodist minister Jones made
philosophy his vocation. Like Caird, Jones
imbued his philosophy with both religious and
poetic imagery. Philosophical idealism, for him,
was the doctrine of Jesus, which taught the
divinity of all men, and he preached his phi-
losophy with the fire and fervour of a Welsh
nonconformist minister, whose diminutive
stature was ennobled by a huge charismatic
presence. He worked out his philosophical
position quite early in his career in two books
and two articles: Browning as a Philosophical
and Religious Teacher (1891), The Philosophy
of Lotze (1895), The Nature and Aims of
Philosophy' (1893) and 'Idealism and
Epistemology' (in two parts, 1893). He
returned to serious philosophical writing in his
Gifford Lectures, A Faith That Enquires
(1922).
Jones was a devoted follower of Hegel, but
rejected the idea that philosophy had no prac-
tical contribution to make to the conduct of the
substantive activities about which it theorized.
He applied his method of analysis to the most
important social and political issues of his day:
compulsory state education, university educa-
tion for women, the role of the state, heredity
and moral inheritance, citizenship, the moral
responsibility of the press, the obligations of
employers to their employees, ethical imperial-
ism and the moral issues of war. Idealism was
a practical philosophy offering feasible solu-
tions to seemingly intractable problems. The
most important of his partially polemical polit-
ical tracts were Idealism as a Practical Creed
(1909), The Working Faith of a Social
JONES
Reformer (1910) and The Principles of
Citizenship (1919).
On the whole, Jones tended to address only
those critics who were idealists opposed to
monism, such as Lotze and Andrew Seth
PRINGLE-PATTISON, or critics such as Martineau
and L.T. HOBHOUSE, who, although not overt
idealists, had sympathy with certain of its doc-
trines. The principal exception he made was a
sustained attack on Herbert Spencer (The
Social Organism', 1883), whose pervasive influ-
ence he deplored and who, for Jones, was the
epitome of the stupidity of English people.
Subjective idealism constituted the greatest
threat to absolute idealism. Subjective idealism
accused the latter of having dissolved individ-
ual consciousness into experience as a whole,
and for having postulated that the universe
itself was a system of cohering worlds of ideas.
In the Philosophy of Lotze Jones argued that
the assumption of modern philosophy was that
in order to be intelligible, reality must be con-
ceived as a rational system whose organizing
principles were exhibited in every part. The
universe was a rational or spiritual unity. The
question of the relation of knowledge to reality
had always preoccupied philosophers, but it
was not until the 1890s that the epistemologi-
cal issues were being clearly demarcated.
Inspired by Lotze's peculiar combination of
idealism and realism, subjective or personal
idealists accused absolute idealists of having
no epistemology, and of continuing to confuse
it with metaphysics and ontology.
Jones saw these criticisms as an irrelevance.
Idealism neither had, nor did it need to have, an
epistemology. The charge that absolute
idealism had been unable to account for the
link between thought and reality because it
made the latter the product of the former was
in Jones's view, fundamentally misconceived.
No idealist denied the distinction between
thought and reality. None maintained that
knowledge of a fact or event was that fact or
event itself. 'It is,' he said, 'inconsistent with the
possibility of knowledge that it should be the
reality which it represents' (The Philosophy of
490
Lotze, p. 273). The problem of epistemology
was to explain how the transition is effected
from conscious states to the reality of which we
are conscious. From this subjectivist assump-
tion critics themselves had been unable to tran-
scend the dichotomy between thought and
reality.
It was Hegel who self-consciously completed
the Kantian Copernican revolution in philoso-
phy by, instead of reconciling differences as
Kant had attempted, assuming unity and then
proceeding to differentiate it. Hegel started
with the conception of reality as absolute self-
consciousness, or Spirit, which expressed and
knew itself in all things. Ideas did not stand
between the thinking intelligence and the world
of reality; the ideas were reality expressed in the
thinker who in that expression made it his, or
her, own. It was therefore not with thoughts
disengaged from the thinker., nor with abstract
worlds of ideas, with which Hegel was con-
cerned, but with the process of thought as the
realization of Spirit, or God, in all reality. The
subjective and objective are not separated by a
world of ideas, but are differentiations of the
one all-encompassing unity. In answer to the
critics who accused idealism of lacking an epis-
temology, Jones emphasized that Hegel did not
need one because 'to him there is no activity
which, ultimately, is not the activity of Spirit.
And, in consequence, the laws of thoughts. On
this account his Metaphysic is also a Logic, a
science, not of the connexions of ideas, but of
the operation of mind' ('Idealism and
Epistemology', p. 306). Hegelianism was to b
recommended for its radical new starting-point
of differentiating unity rather than reconciling,
or unifying, opposites.
For Jones, reasoning depends upon hypothe-
ses. Those that presented the knowing subject
as the starting point of philosophy had proved
untenable. A hypothesis was more than a guess:
it is presented to the intellect by the world we
seek to understand. We hold them only so long
as the realm of reality seems to support them.
Like Karl POPPER after him, Jones believed that
hypotheses, while capable of being refuted, are

never ultimately proven, but always in the
process of being proved. All forms of enquiry
require 'working hypotheses' before any
advance can be made in understanding experi-
ence. A hypothesis, while lacking certainty,
'commends itself to our notice by the range
and clearness of the light it seems to throw on
the manifold data of our experience' ('Nature
and Aims of Philosophy', p. 164).
Evolution was, for Jones, the great unifying
hypothesis towards which all aspects of expe-
rience converged. He rejected the naturalistic
evolution of Darwin and Spencer, and the
divide between cosmic and ethical evolution
posited by T.H. Huxley, and in fact, like
Ritchie, took Hegel as the exemplar of a much
more satisfactory spiritual evolution. Jones's
first book, Browning as a Philosophical and
Religious Teacher, attempted to demonstrate
how philosophy, poetry, religion and science
were converging in the unifying idea of evolu-
tion. If the universe is a unity, then there can be
no absolute distinction between the modes in
terms of which we comprehend it. In this
respect, science, poetry, religion and philoso-
phy, although sovereign and independent in
their own spheres, were not autonomous and
alternative conditions of life, but merely its dif-
fering and mutually inclusive aspects, which
did not rival but, on the contrary, comple-
mented each other. Art, for example, did not
have a separate object from morality or phi-
losophy, each was not confined to the separate
spheres of beauty, the good and knowledge,
respectively, but instead they invaded the whole
of reality with their pervasive illuminating
lights. The unimaginativeness of British phi-
losophy, characterized by stultifying caution,
rendered it incapable of achieving the truths of
that country's great poets, Browning,
Wordsworth and Tennyson, and its literary
heroes Carlyle and Coleridge. Each mode may
reach the same conclusions as philosophy,
having travelled by different routes. Poetry, for
example, arrived by short cuts at the results of
philosophy, without the endless arguments.
In taking Hegel as his starting point, Jones
491
JONES
assumed that reality is a rational evolving spir-
itual unity, that is God expressing himself in
and through every element in the living
organism. Such an assumption entailed con-
ceiving society as an evolving social organism
whose parts were mutually inclusive. The
person was society individuated, and the
welfare of each was the responsibility of the
whole. Correlatively, the welfare of the whole
was the responsibility of each. Institutions
should therefore be developed to encourage
the process of individual moral development.
Each individual had social responsibilities that
were fulfilled by ensuring that every place of
work, every institution, and every home, was a
school of virtue. All oppositions are false when
society is understood as an evolving spiritual
unity, in the process of achieving moral per-
fection by degrees. Any attempt to promote
the interests of one class at the expense of
another denied the common good and per-
verted the social ideal.
All practical reforms, social, economic or
political, depend upon a vision of the whole; a
criterion by which to discover the meaning and
purpose of reality, and by which the social
reformer measures the shortcomings of society.
We confront the world through philosophy
and morality in order to make our intellectual
and practical life intelligible. Genuine history
was the story of the unfolding of this con-
frontation, revealed, not in a succession of royal
houses, but in 'dynasties of ideas' (Idealism as
a Practical Creed, p. 22). Idealism, in compar-
ison with other creeds, was a philosophy that
distorted reality less; found reasonable room for
more of its facts; was less incoherent; and did
not forget Spirit, which alone was omnipresent
where truth was in question.
In addressing practical problems Jones con-
sistently maintained that the Hegelian hypoth-
esis of unity must guide the enquiry. Unity was
not a third category transcending and obliter-
ating the opposites it wished to unite, but
instead one of the opposites itself. The essential
elements had to include, or presuppose, the
correlative opposite. The acknowledgement of
JONES
differences, or opposites, did not presuppose
that knowledge was a matter of unifying dif-
ferences, nor colligating discrete entities into
coherent systems. If we acknowledge that
opposites are correlative, and mere abstrac-
tions if taken in themselves, the question of
'bringing them together cannot arise5 (Idealism
as a Practical Creed, p. 226).
By way of illustration, take, for example,
Jones's treatment of the individual versus social-
ism debate. He thought the opposition between
individualism and socialism was false because
the individual and society are mirror images of
each other. The person is nothing less than
'society individualized, its impersonal forces
focused' (Working Faith of the Social
Reformer, p. 284). Both individualists and
socialists, Jones contended, made the same
assumption. They presupposed an increase in
the activity of the state limited the opportuni-
ties for individual enterprise. They agreed that
the extension of the state entailed restrictions
upon individual will. The desirability of the
restrictions was what they differed about.
It was, however, a mistaken view of the
relation. The individual soul was thoroughly
social and the coming of socialism could with
equal force be viewed as the coming of indi-
vidualism. Measured in terms of what the state
could do for the individual, and what the indi-
vidual could do for himself, or herself, and
society, it was evident that individual freedom
(not capricious choice) and the extension of
state activity had grown concurrently. There
was no evidence of a decrease in competition in
private enterprise, nor diminished activity. On
the contrary, considerably more opportunities
for world trade had come about as a conse-
quence. Socialism, rightly understood,
enhanced the life of the individual, deepened the
personality, and enabled the person to conceive
and effectively pursue. 'True' as opposed to
'false' socialism empowered the individual and
created stronger and better citizens. Socialism
did not diminish individualism but enabled
more people to enjoy more opportunities
provided by an advanced social life. The limits
492
of state socialism could not be determined by
abstract principles. The test of any extension of
state activity must always be the question of
whether the individual personality was being
offered a wider opportunity to develop, and
development in this sphere could never be
effected by a weakening of individual respon-
sibility.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Browning as a Philosophical and Religious
Teacher (Glasgow, 1891).
'Idealism and Epistemology', 2 pts, Mind, vol.
2 ns (1893), pp. 289-306, 457-72.
'The Nature and Aims of Philosophy', Mind,
vol. 2ns (1893), pp. 160-73.
The Philosophy ofLotze (Glasgow, 1895).
Idealism as a Practical Creed (Glasgow,
1909).
The Working faith of a Social Reformer
(1910).
The Principles of Citizenship (1919).
A Faith that Enquires [Gifford Lectures]
(Glasgow, 1922).
Other Relevant Works
Dinasyddiaeth Bur (Caernarfon, 1911).
(with J.H. Muirhead), The Life and
Philosophy of Edward Caird (Glasgow,
1921).
Old Memories, ed. Thomas Jones (1922).
Essays on Literature and Education, ed.
H.J.W. Hetherington (1924).
Further Reading
Boucher, David and Andrew Vincent, A
Radical Hegelian: The Political and Social
Philosophy of Henry Jones (Cardiff and
New York, 1993).
, 'Henry Jones: Beyond Socialism and
Liberalism', in British Idealism and
Political Theory (Edinburgh, 2000), pp.
157-84.
Hetherington, H.J.W., The Life and Letters
of Sir Henry Jones (1924).
David Boucher

JONES, John Robert (1911-70)
J.R. Jones was born in Pwllheli on 4 September
1911 and died in Swansea on 3 June 1970. He
was at school in Pwllheli before going up to the
University College of Wales at Aberystwyth in
1929. After graduating with first class honours
in philosophy he did research for an MA at
Aberystwyth before going to Balliol College,
Oxford, where he worked on his DPhil. He
was appointed to a lectureship at Aberystwyth
in 1939 and remained there until 1952, when
he became Professor of Philosophy at Swansea.
Apart from a visiting professorship at the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in
1961, he remained at Swansea until his
untimely death from cancer in 1970.
Jones's writings were all short but he pub
lished extensively in both English and Welsh.
His articles in English amounted to a dozen in
the leading British and American philosophical
journals, and reflect two of his main areas of
philosophical interest: problems in metaphysics
(for instance, to do with universals and partic-
ulars) and problems in epistemology, especially
to do with knowledge of persons. Jones's eight
articles in the leading Welsh philosophical
journal, Efrydiau Athronyddol, reflect these
same interests but extend much more broadly.
They also include papers on the history of phi-
losophy (Plato and Spinoza), on political phi-
losophy (including one on The Concept of a
Nation') and on the philosophy of religion.
In his inaugural lecture in 1953 Jones took
the opportunity to respond to the challenge to
religion of logical positivism. In speaking of
religion as involving 'myth', he wished to
disagree with those for whom mythical
thinking was a characteristic only of a presci-
entific mentality. On the contrary, Jones
argued, myth 'is the only form of thinking by
which we can hope to make coherent what we
but imperfectly understand - the world in its
total dimension, the world in the terrifying but
fascinating aspect which it presents to feeling
when regarded from within the depth of our
human predicament' (p. 15). To speak of a
493
JONES
myth as 'true' is not to say that it corresponds
to the facts. 'The essential requirement of myth
in my sense is not that any facts should directly
verify it but that its content should be felt to be
intrinsically important' (ibid., p. 17). Myths
such the Resurrection or the Divine Man have
been of great significance for 'the culture of
the West' (ibid., p. 20).
Jones was a great champion of the Welsh
language and indeed of Welsh nationhood and,
in recognition of this, a volume on him was
included in the Writers of Wales series. Its
author, Dewi PHILLIPS, is one of the most dis-
tinguished of his students. Jones was very influ-
ential in Wales and Phillips's own philosophy
owes a significant debt to him. Partly becaus
he was content, in many of his papers, to write
for the Welsh-speaking intellectual community
his work is less well known than it should be in
the Anglophone world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Are the Qualities of Particular Things
Universal or Particular?', Philosophical
Review, vol. 58 (1949), pp. 152-70.
'Our Knowledge of Other Persons',
Philosophy, vol. 25 (1950), pp. 134-48
Religion as True Myth (Swansea, 1953).
'Sense Data: A Suggested Source of the
Fallacy', Mind, vol. 63 (1954), pp
180-202.
'How Do I Know Who I Am?', Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 41
(1967), pp. 1-18.
Other Relevant Works
'Characters and Resemblances',
Philosophical Review, vol. 60 (1956), pp
551-62.
'Love as Perception of Meaning', in D.Z.
Phillips (ed.), Religion and Understanding
(Oxford, 1967), pp. 141-53.
(with D.Z. Phillips), 'Belief and Loss of
Belief, Sophia, vol. 9 (1970), pp. 1-7.
Further Reading
Aaron, R.I., 'John Robert Jones', Efrydiau
JONES
Athronyddol, vol. 34 (1971), pp. 3-16.
Phillips, D.Z., J.R. Jones [Writers of Wales
series] (Cardiff, 1995).
Stuart Brown
JONES, Owen Rogers (1922-2004)
O.K. Jones was born in Llanrhaeadr yng
Nghinmeirch in Denbighshire in October 1922
and died in Aberystwyth on 3 January 2004.
After attending Denbigh Grammar School he
spent the war years doing essential work on a
farm. He went up to the University College of
North Wales in Bangor in 1946 and studied
under H.D. LEWIS and T.H. McPHERSON. He
graduated BA, BD and PhD (1955), with a
thesis on The Idea of Transcendence in Recent
Religious Thought'. He embarked on further
study at Oriel College, Oxford (1955-7), where
he completed a BLitt under the supervision of
Ian T. RAMSEY. He spent his teaching career,
apart from a visiting appointment at St Olaf s
College, Minnesota, at the University College of
Wales, Aberystwyth, where he was appointed
assistant lecturer in 1957, lecturer in 1959,
senior lecturer in 1964 and reader in 1974. He
was Dean of the Faculty of Arts (1970-72).
After his retirement in 1983 he continued to
lecture part-time until 1986.
Jones's theological studies at Bangor encour-
aged him to focus on the philosophy of religion.
At a time when reductionist accounts of reli-
gious concepts were common he came to focus
on the concept of holiness as unlikely to yield
to such an account. In his first book, The
Concept of Holiness (1961), he sets out to
explicate talk about holiness by linking it to talk
about holy objects, fear, power, love, whole-
ness, separatedness and morality. We may, he
suggests (in a way similar to Ramsey), be led by
this process to an insight into the nature of
holiness.
494
Jones continued to publish in philosophy of
religion but also contributed to a wide range of
then topical philosophical debates, especially in
epistemology and the philosophies of mind and
language. Many of his papers, in Analysis and
other leading journals, are quite short discus-
sion notes. But three more substantial publica-
tions may be taken as representative of his
work in these fields. In his 1975 paper 'Can
One Believe what One Knows?' he resists the
claim of Zeno Vendler that believing some-
thing and knowing it are mutually exclusive. In
his 1983 paper on Trying' he argues against a
common analysis of action that not all actions
require any trying and that trying involves a
doubt or difficulty condition. In 1971 he edited
a collection of papers, to which he wrote a
judicious Introduction, on the private language
argument. Jones's interests later focused on the
philosophy of mind and in 1986 he co-
authored Philosophy of Mind. Although it was
advertised as an introduction, the authors
developed a sympathetic account of function-
alism.
Jones spent his entire academic career, apart
from his two years in Oxford, in parts of Wales
where the Welsh language is, for many, the
first language. Though he taught in English, he
was bilingual and wrote frequently for Welsh
journals such as Efrydiau Athronyddol and Y
Traethodydd. After his retirement many of his
more substantial publications were in Welsh.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Things Known without Observation',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
61 (1960-61), pp. 129-50.
The Concept of Holiness (1961).
'Can One Believe what One Knows?',
Philosophical Review, vol. 84 (1975), pp.
220-35.
Trying', Mind, vol. 92 (1983), pp. 368-85.
(with Peter Smith), The Philosophy of Mind
(Cambridge, 1986).
Other Relevant Works
'In Disputation of an Undisputed Thesis',

Analysis, vol. 28 (1970), pp. 24-9.
(Ed. and intro.), The Private Language
Argument (1971).
Stuart Brown
JONES, Peter Howard (1935-)
Peter Jones was born in London on 18
December 1935. He was educated at Highgate
School and Queen's College, Cambridge.
Having worked as a regional officer for the
British Council in London (1960-61), he
returned to Cambridge as a research scholar
(1961-3). He was an assistant lecturer in phi-
losophy at the University of Nottingham
(1963-4), before moving to the University of
Edinburgh, where he spent the rest of his
academic career (lecturer in philosophy,
1964-77; reader, 1977-84; professor, 1984-98;
emeritus professor, 199 8-; Director, Institute
for Advanced Studies in the Humanities,
1986-2000).
Jones's main contributions to philosophy have
been in the areas of aesthetics and Hume studies.
In his first book, Philosophy and the Novel
(1975), he develops a theory of 'creative inter-
pretation' of literature. This theory puts forward
a view of literary interpretation that emphasizes
the freedom a reader has in making sense of
texts: '[t]he coherence or significance of a text is,
so to say, a variable property, dependent upon
the contextual knowledge, interests and view-
point of a reader' (Philosophy and the Novel, p.
8). However, such interpretation is not purely
subjective: whilst it attributes 'purposiveness
without any actual purpose' (ibid., p. 181) in a
text, that purposiveness has to be an aspect of
the text for it to be available to the reader. Using
this approach, Jones investigates the 'philo-
sophicalness' of four nineteenth-century novels
(Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, The Brothers
Karamazov and A la recherche du temps perdu.)
495
JONES
In Humean studies, Jones has emphasized
the need for philosophers to engage with the
historical background to Hume. In Hume's
Sentiments (1982), for example, he investigates
the background to Hume's concept of senti-
ment in thinkers such as Cicero and
Malebranche.
Jones has been a visiting lecturer at a number
of universities, including giving the Gifford
Lectures at the University of Aberdeen
(1994-5), delivered under the title 'Science and
Religion before and after Hume'. He has also
been actively involved in public life, for
example as a trustee of the National Museums
of Scotland (1987-99) and as a member of the
Spoliation Advisory Panel concerning the treat-
ment of artworks looted during the period
1933 to 1945.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Philosophy and the Novel (Oxford, 1975).
Hume's Sentiments (Edinburgh, 1982).
Other Relevant Works
'Collingwood's Debt to his Father', British
Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 9 (April 1969),
pp. 437-9.
'Another Look at Hume's Views of Aesthetic
and Moral Judgments', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 20 (January 1970), pp.
53-9.
'A Critical Outline of Collingwood's
Philosophy of Art', in Michael Krausz
(ed.), Critical Essays on the Philosophy of
R. G. Collingwood (Oxford, 1972).
'Hume's Aesthetics Reassessed',
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 26 (January
1976), pp. 48-62.
(Ed. with David Daiches and Jean Jones),
Hotbed of Genius: The Scottish
Enlightenment 1730-1790 (Edinburgh,
1986).
(Ed.), Philosophy and Science in the Scottish
Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1988).
(Ed.), The 'Science of Man' in the Scottish
Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1989).
(Ed. with Andrew Skinner), Adam Smith
JONES
Reviewed (Edinburgh, 1992).
'Hume's Literary and Aesthetic Theory', in
D.F. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Hume (Cambridge, 1993).
'Hume', in N.F. Bunnin (ed.), The Blackwell
Companion to Philosophy (Cambridge,
1996).
Further Reading
Debrett's People of Today (2003).
Stephen Watt
JONES, William Tudor (1865-1946)
William Tudor Jones was born in
Ponthydfendigaid, Cardiganshire on 8
September 1865 and died in Torquay on 12
June 1946. He was educated at the village
school, where he subsequently taught.
Preaching in Calvinistic Methodist churches
while still a boy, he studied at University
College, Aberystwyth for two years from 1889.
He was ordained as a minister in 1892, fol-
lowing a year at Trevecca Calvinistic Methodist
Theological College. While serving churches in
Cardiff he came under the influence of
Professor J.S. MACKENZIE, under whom he
studied philosophy from 1896 to 1899 at
University College, Cardiff. His studies helped
unsettle his theological position so in 1898 he
left the Methodists, joining the Unitarian
ministry at Swansea the following year.
As early as 1902 Jones was drawing atten-
tion to German philosophy. Jones was given
leave of absence by his congregation to study at
Jena under Eucken and Wendt (PhD, 1905).
'My congregation came to my aid when a great
intellectual hunger gripped my mind and soul'
(Memoir, p. 91). In 1906 he and his wife left for
New Zealand, where he founded a Unitarian
church in Wellington. Subsequent ministries
were in Islington (1910-15), Bristol (1915-33;
496
MA University of Bristol, 1919) and Torquay
(1933-7), when he retired. He was known as a
forceful speaker (in English and Welsh), lecturer
and preacher, with a dominant interest in the
philosophy of religion.
Jones was an interpreter and translator of
German philosophical thought, and in partic-
ular that of Rudolf Eucken (Nobel Prize for
Literature, 1908). He was the first to make
Eucken's thought known in Britain, and to
provide translations of his key works in English
- The Truth of Religion (1911), Knowledge
and Life (1913) and Present Day Ethics (1913)
met a ready market. Eucken's philosophy of
ethical activism emphasizing the centrality of
actual human experience and the need for
incessant striving after the spiritual life was
popular from about 1911, though his fame
was short-lived. Jones was seen as among
Eucken's leading disciples, so his interpreta-
tions of Eucken's thought had wide circulation
and not only in Britain. He wrote on his own
exposition of Eucken's approach in works such
as Nature, Thought and Personal Experience
(1926).
Jones, while not an original thinker, wrote
simply and with clarity, with 'the rare gift of
seeing problems from the point of view of those
to whom they are absolutely new, and of pre-
senting the fruits of philosophy in the familiar
language of everyday affairs' (The Training of
Mind and W/7/, p. v). Explanations of his
personal ethical and spiritual position flowed
from his pen, and he was editor of the Library
of Contemporary Thought (Williams and
Norgate) and the Library of Philosophy and
Religion (Hodder and Stoughton). From 1916
to 1919 he lectured for various government
departments, latterly addressing battalions of
young men in the forces and munitions. This
experience influenced his writings connecting
philosophy with education - Training of Mind
and Will (1919) and The Making of Personality
(1920) were the result.
While throughout the 1920s he regularly
published books explaining philosophical
concepts as well as their connection with

religion, his later works returned to German
philosophy. The explanation and evaluation
of contemporary thought in Germany had been
at the centre of his studies for decades. The
changing political scene in Europe in 1930
meant there was demand in Britain and
America for the fruits of his research.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An Interpretation of Rudolf Euckens
Philosophy (1912).
The Philosophy of Rudolf Eucken
[Philosophies Ancient and Modern series]
(1914).
The Spiritual Ascent of Man (1916).
Training of Mind and Will (1919).
What Philosophy Is (1921).
The Metaphysics of Life and Death (1923).
The Reality of the Idea of God (1929).
Contemporary Thought in Germany, 2 vols
(London and New York, 1930,1931).
Other Relevant Works
Memoir, in Caroline Titford and William
Tudor Jones, History of Unity Church
Islington, London (1912).
Alan Ruston
JOSEPH, Horace William Brindley
(1867-1943)
H.W.B. Joseph was born in Chatham on 28
September 1867 and died in Oxford on 13
November 1943. The son of an Anglican cler-
gyman and a schoolboy at Winchester, Joseph's
conduct was inspired in adult life, according to
C.C.J. WEBB, by 'pietas towards the religious
traditions of his home and his school' (DNB
1941-50, p. 440). His entire career as student
and teacher was spent at New College, Oxford,
to which he went up in 1886 and where, under
the tuition of COOK WlLSON, amongst others,
497
JOSEPH
he achieved a first in both Mods (1888) and
Greats (1890). He became a fellow in 1891.
'When I was an undergraduate there were
very few teachers in Oxford who did not regard
the case for realism as finally disposed of.'
Joseph had gone to Oxford in 1886, but by the
time he uttered these words in a lecture given
in 1929, the dominant philosophical position
there had changed from idealism to realism. As
Joseph goes on to say, 'that things known are
independent of mind is asserted on all sides to-
day' (Essays in Ancient and Modern
Philosophy, p. 209). This shift had been largely
inspired by Cook Wilson. He had criticized
analytical philosophy, claiming that knowledge
itself was unanalysable. A perception was, in
fact, a direct apprehension, and not a mere
appearance, of an object, or a thing extended
in space and existing independently of mind.
Even secondary qualities, since these were
sense-data, were independent of mind, whether
or not they were subsequently connected by
mental (ideal) relations.
Joseph had been taught by Cook Wilson and
was for a time a follower of him towards his
brand of realism. But Joseph's own critical
analyses led him to doubt the Wilsonian
position. Firstly, it seemed that the secondary
qualities had to stand in a necessary relation
with the perceiver, therefore they could not be
independent of the perceiver and so could not
be direct apprehensions of objects. Secondly,
though accepting that things can only be con-
ceived as extended in space, he denied the infer-
ence that there were spatially extended things
that existed independently of the perceiver. But
if even the primary qualities could not be
shown to exist independently, then the realist
position, that perception was a direct appre-
hension of objects, was itself an unsafe one.
These doubts were first expressed no later than
1910-11 (see 'The Psychological Explanation
of the Development of the Perception of
External Objects'); but it is in the 1929 lecture
referred to above that Joseph's position is made
most forcefully. For the discussion, Joseph
chose Berkeley, whose doctrine was most
JOSEPH
strongly opposed to realism, and Kant, who
had claimed to have refuted Berkeley the most
convincingly in his 'Refutation of Idealism' in
the Critique of Pure Reason. Joseph begins by
claiming that Kant's refutation, that the 'empir-
ically determined consciousness of my own
existence proves the existence of objects in
space outside me' (Essays in Ancient and
Modern Philosophy, p. 211), fails both in the
detail of the proof and because it is at variance
with what Kant says about the synthetic unity
of apperception. Joseph goes on to compare
Kant and Berkeley. He finds a 'remarkable
agreement' between the two in that both doc-
trines imply that the order of our ideas or pre-
sentations occur just as they would if they really
corresponded to the ordering of bodies in space
and time whose actions and interactions were
determined by the laws of nature. Such an idea
or presentation that can be so corresponded to
a body is a real idea, is of an object, and is not
a mere subjective state. Furthermore, according
to Joseph, in both Kant and Berkeley, these
objects are not independent of mind: in
Berkeley objects exist in the world scheme of
the divine mind; in Kant they exist in the
scheme of the human mind. But Joseph claims
that Berkeley does not show how the ordered
thoughts of the divine scheme enter the finite
mind as sensible experiences; and Kant does not
show how the activity of the finite mind can
spontaneously order our thoughts. He con-
cludes that both philosophers were in error,
that neither can prove any reality to a nature
beyond experience. He goes on to state that 'I
think we must say that we are immediately
aware of a world of things in space' (Essays in
Ancient and Modern Philosophy, p. 227), that
is as an immediate apprehension of figures and
space relations, though it is 'the thought of a
difference between what is and how it appears
to us ... [that] presupposes the existence of
"things outside me"' (ibid., p. 229). But both
empirical investigation of our immediate expe-
rience and the problems regarding the infinity
and infinite divisibility of space lead Joseph to
conclude that things do not have the real shapes
498
that they seem to have in immediate experience:
that 'our common-sense realism is thus rudely
shaken' (ibid., p. 230), 'that we cannot be so
easily quit of the idealist' (p. 229). An impor-
tant earlier paper of 1919, 'On Occupying
Space', had also discussed these problems as
they concerned the concept of space.
Joseph is best seen as a disciple of Plato and,
though to a lesser degree, of Aristotle. He
studied Plato constantly, interpreting him in
an imaginative way in order to bring out
aspects of the doctrine that he considered were
not made sufficiently explicit by the master.
At times he criticizes Aristotles' interpretations
of Plato. This was reflected in his lectures.
During his time at Oxford he was regarded as
the foremost expositor of the Republic, such
that his lectures were published posthumously
as Knowledge and the Good in Plato's
Republic (1948), in addition to the five essays
on the subject in Essays in Ancient and Modern
Philosophy, which he had published himself.
Joseph believed that 'my knowledge is of ...
a reality which is independent of my knowing
it', though that real world, as well as my own
mind, depended on a greater mind: 'I do not
believe ... that my mind is independent of that
mind of which the world is not independent'
(Some Problems in Ethics, p. 42). What Plato
had to say on the good and the just profoundly
influenced Joseph's ideas on how knowledge
was to be acquired, not only in the field of
ethics, but in all areas of philosophical inquiry.
It is through the discovery of an ever-increasing
number of necessary connections between indi-
vidual facts that human beings move towards
knowledge, though 'we do not really know
anything unless we know it in all its linkages'
(ibid., p. 108), a clear affirmation of the coher-
ence theory of truth. In 'The Concept of
Evolution' (published in Essays in Ancient and
Modern Philosophy) Joseph reveals his funda-
mental ideas on the concept of development,
which show the influence of Aristotle's discus-
sions of the potential and the actual. But this
important work by Joseph also displays some
of his fundamental positions in the fields of

metaphysics and ethics. 'The Concept of
Evolution' was originally delivered as the
Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford in 1924; but
Joseph wastes no time in stating that 'I cannot
stand here to praise him as a philosopher'
(Essays in Ancient and Modern Philosophyr, p.
303). He accuses Spencer and those others who
promote the theory of evolution of being guilty
of loose thinking; that they have failed to ade-
quately consider the key terms of their theory.
For example, what is the precise nature of that
which actually undergoes evolutionary devel-
opment? In addressing this issue himself Joseph
sets about distinguishing between physical and
mental development. Physical development,
that on which evolutionary theory is based, is
not really development at all, since a body is not
a unitary being itself but only an aggregate of
material parts, ultimately atoms, all changes
to the body being no more than redistributions
of these parts. The only rational conception of
development, according to Joseph, is one which
includes a changeless being and which yet man-
ifests changes in its properties. Atoms do not
manifest change; and an aggregation of them
lacks a single changeless being. A purely phys-
icalist account of development is therefore fal-
lacious. Joseph argues that it is only with an
immaterial account of being that the concept of
development and evolution is tenable. Of the
mind, Joseph says that 'here we find both the
profoundest diversity, and the most assured
unity, as well as the most indisputable devel-
opment' (ibid., p. 325). As proof of this ego
unity, he cites the activity of choice in which we
observe that from a multiplicity of drives, par-
ticular desires, one is selected for realization,
and this according to a ruling principle: i.e. the
manifestation of this principle is at the same
time the manifestation of a unity. This unity,
along with the series of changes it brings about,
constitutes the true development of the indi-
vidual human being. Accordingly, the evolution
of entire species are to be described as the pro-
gressive unfolding of those characteristics deter-
mined by the unity of each species. Indeed, the
evolution of the entire universe, according to
499
JOSEPH
Joseph, has to be seen as a progressive mani-
festation of 'the fundamental nature of the
universe, for the universe is itself the all-embrac-
ing unity, that determines thereout its own
diversity' (ibid., p. 332).
Integral to this account of development is
Joseph's fundamental position of ethics,
touched on in 'The Concept of Evolution' and
more fully elaborated in Some Problems in
Ethics. When the unity that is the ego in the
individual human being makes its choice of
actions, the individual asks himself which is
the 'best choice'. According to Joseph 'that
question implies that he conceives, and desires,
what is good' ('The Concept of Evolution', p.
326). However, it is not the case with the soul
'that all its diversity appears in consciousness'
(ibid.), i.e. it is Joseph's assertion that whether
or not we are aware of it, the principle of the
good acts in us and through us in determining
our particular actions: 'men's purposes seem
often unable to shape themselves except in
action' (Some Problems in Ethics, p. 57). The
principle of the good progressively realizes itself
through the selecting from the possible actions
of individuals those actions which are most
conducive to an overall manifestation of the
good. Hence, a particular action is good insofar
as it contributes to this general realization of the
good, and not by virtue of the good perceived
in its particular end as particular desire.
There is much in Joseph's account of devel-
opment, his analysis of being and the concept
of space that is reminiscent of Leibniz. Indeed,
Joseph taught Leibniz's philosophy at Oxford
for thirty years, and his lectures were posthu-
mously published.
In 1906 Joseph had published An
Introduction to Logic, a thorough account of
the subject in its traditional Aristotelian form,
for which Joseph was best known for many
years. However, the prominence of the work
became overshadowed by RUSSELL'S Principles
of Mathematics, for Joseph's book had not
examined the nature of mathematical reason-
ing at all. Subsequently, in 'A Defence of Free-
Thinking in Logistics' (1932), he went on to
JOSEPH
attack Russell's work, and in 'What Does Mr
W.E. Johnson Mean by a Proposition?' (1927)
he attempted to refute the formal approach to
logic.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An Introduction to Logic (Oxford, 1906).
The Psychological Explanation of the
Development of the Perception of External
Objects', pt 1, Mind, vol. 19 (1910), pp.
305-21; pt 2, Mind, vol. 19 (1910), pp.
457-69; pt 3, Mind, vol. 20 (1911), pp
161-80.
'On Occupying Space', Mind, vol. 28 (1919),
pp. 336-9.
'What Does Mr W.E. Johnson Mean by a
Proposition?', pt 1, Mind, vol. 36 (1927),
pp. 448-66; pt 2, Mind, vol. 37 (1928), pp
21-39.
Some Problems in Ethics (Oxford, 1931).
'A Defence of Free-Thinking in Logistics', pt
1, Mind, vol. 41 (1932), pp. 424-40; pt 2
Mind, vol. 42, pp. 417-43.
Essays in Ancient and Modern Philosophy
(Oxford, 1935).
Knowledge and the Good in Plato's Republic
(Oxford, 1948).
Lectures on the Philosophy of Leibniz
(Oxford, 1949).
Other Relevant Works
Labour Theory of Value in Karl Marx
(Oxford, 1923).
'Universals and the "Method of Analysis'",
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 6 (1926), pp. 1-16.
'Logic and Mathematics', Philosophy, vol. 3
(1928), pp. 3ff.
'Indirect Knowledge', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 9 (1929)
pp. 51-66.
'Is Goodness a Quality?', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 11 (1932
pp. 132-45.
'Life and Pleasure', Philosophy, vol. 20
(1945), pp. 117-28,195-205.
500
Further Reading
Smith, A.H., 'Horace William Brindley
Joseph, 1867-1943', Proceedings of the
British Academy (1948), pp. 375-98.
Includes bibliography.
Metz, Rudolf, trans. J.W. Harvey, I.E.
Jessop and Henry Sturt, A Hundred Years
of British Philosophy (1938), esp. pp.
525-9.
Passmore, John, One Hundred Years of
Philosophy (1957), esp. pp. 249-55.
N.J.Fox
JOYCE, George Hayward (1864-1943)
George Hayward Joyce was born in Harrow-
on-the-Hill on 13 November 1864 and died at
Heythrop College, Oxfordshire on 15
November 1943. He was educated at
Charterhouse (1878-83) and at Oriel College,
Oxford (1883-7), where he read literae human-
lores. After Oxford he studied for a year in
Germany: six months at the University of
Leipzig, and six months at the University of
Bonn. After some years in the .Anglican ministry
he converted to Roman Catholicism and
entered the Society of Jesus. He studied phi-
losophy and theology in various Jesuit colleges
and in 1904 was appointed Professor of Logic
and Metaphysics at St Mary's Hall, Stonyhurst,
Lancashire. In 1909 he was appointed
Professor of Dogmatic Theology at St Beuno's,
Tremeirchion, North Wales, and moved with
the college to Heythrop in Oxfordshire in 1926.
He was appointed Dean of the Faculty of
Theology in 1931. He died in office.
Joyce's Principles of Natural Theology
(1923), like his Principles of Logic (1908), was
a widely read textbook characteristic of early
twentieth-century scholasticism. It follows the
main lines of other scholastic treatises on the
subject, but also considers Kantian and
 JOYCE

Hegelian thought in some detail. His exposition BIBLIOGRAPHY

and defence of Thomism is orthodox and 'The Foundation of Aesthetics', The
rather unbending. When he turns to Kant and American Catholic Quarterly Review, vol
Hegel, however - including the neo-Hegelian 24 (1899), pp. 37-48.
philosophy of the English idealists - he is both The Source of Moral Obligations, The
fair and astute, and it is perhaps regrettable American Catholic Quarterly Review, vol
that he did not devote more of his energies to 26 (1901), pp. 41-53.
this kind of critical study. He appears to have Principles of Logic (1908; 2nd edn, 1916;
ignored the neo-Kantian scholasticism of 3rd edn, 1923).
Joseph Marechal, preferring instead the ortho- The Question of Miracles (1914).
doxies of Louis Billot and Reginald Garrigou- Principles of Natural Theology (1923; 2nd
Lagrange. edn, 1924; 3rd edn, 1934).
For all his orthodoxy and his deeply reli-
gious commitment to Thomism, he did not Other Relevant Works
shirk the difficult questions. Towards the end 'La Foi qui discerne d'apres St Thomas',
of Principles of Natural Theology Joyce strug- Recherche de Science Religieuse, vol. 6
gles, with at times considerable subtlety, to rec- (1916), pp. 433-55.
oncile providence with free will, and God's
benevolence with the existence of evil. If God Peter Gallagher
does not merely create human beings, but also
maintains them in being, he must be in some
sense involved as First Cause even when they
will an evil act. And if he foresees how they ar
going to act - not just what they do, but also
what they pray for - he must arrange his prov-
idence accordingly. In the end Joyce admits
that there remains 'a mystery of free-will', and
that 'the existence of moral evil must ever
remain the greatest of the world's mysteries'
(Principles of Natural Theology, 1934, p. 606)
On the standard Thomist issues Joyce was
expert and thorough. He insisted on a real dis-
tinction between essence and existence.
Essences are really distinct in creatures and
identical in God, so nothing univocal can be
said about God and creatures. Joyce is partic-
ularly good when he explains what is meant by
analogical knowledge of God and the analogy
of being.

501
 K
KEELING, Stanley Victor (1894-1979)
Stanley Victor Keeling was born in Islington on
9 August 1894 and died in Paris on 28
November 1979. He studied at Southend
Secondary School in Essex, where he remained
until c. 1911. Afterwards his education was
self-directed until he attended college some
eight years later. Keeling was imprisoned as a
conscientious objector to World War I.
Disobeying the 1916 act of military conscrip-
tion, he was arrested on 13 January 1917 and
convicted seventeen days later in court martial
on 30 January. He was incarcerated at
Wormwood Scrubs on 2 February 1917 and
later moved to Dartmoor, around 29 August
1917. After his release from prison not long
before 10 April 1919, he enrolled at University
College London in June of that year. Keeling
did not take on an advised curriculum there
until October 1920 under George Dawes
HICKS. Bertrand RUSSELL befriended Keeling
and along with Alfred North WHITEHEAD con-
vinced him to continue his studies at Trinity
College, Cambridge, where he was admitted on
1 October 1922 as an entrance exhibitioner. He
was awarded the degree of BA in 1924, having
been allowed an aegrotat in pt II of the Moral
Sciences Tripos. After Trinity, Keeling spent
two years in France. He entered first the
University of Toulouse, where he received a
certificat d'etudes superieures, then attended
the University of Montpellier, where he pre-
sented a thesis on La nature de ^experience
chez Kant et chez Bradley and took his docteur
502
es lettres in 1925. University College London
awarded Keeling a degree of MA with distinc-
tion in 1926. Keeling turned down a fellowship
at Harvard University and took a position at
the Department of Philosophy at University
College London, where he was appointed suc-
cessively lecturer, senior lecturer, and reader,
from 1927 to 1954. Keeling was honoured
officier d'Academic.
Keeling is best known for his 1934 mono-
graph on Descartes's system of philosophy.
The book enjoyed a second edition in 1968
and for decades served as the standard English
introduction to the subject. When it first
appeared it truly filled a gap for there were
then hardly any good books in English on the
philosophy of Descartes. Keeling was thor-
oughly acquainted with French work on the
subject - particularly that oi: his good frien
Etienne Gilson. In contrast with the more his-
toriographical tradition of the French, Keelin
interprets Descartes's philosophy 'through con-
ceptions and in language more readily under-
stood to-day' (Descartes, p. i.x). Although th
book does provide some original interpreta-
tion, the concluding critical chapter is admit-
tedly sketchy.
Keeling's obituary in The Times is entitled
'Lone Path in Philosophy', referring to his dis-
appointment with the philosophy taught at
Cambridge in the 1920s. The one exception
was John McTaggart Ellis McTAGGART, whom
Keeling deemed the greatest metaphysician of
the twentieth century. After McTaggart's death
Keeling edited his philosophical papers in a

volume entitled Philosophical Studies, pub-
lished in 1934. In the Introduction to that
edition, Keeling examines McTaggart's
idealism and its relation to Bertrand Russell's
atomism. Keeling contributed a seminal
chapter on McTaggart's metaphysics to
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson's book on
MacTaggart.
Although his reputation was mainly that of
a scholar and teacher, Keeling left part of a
more complete work which he had planned on
the nature of time. The unfinished essay was
first published in 1990 under the title Time
and Duration. In this work, he argues that our
common sense conception of time is amiss:
what we misconceive as temporality is better
conceived in terms of change. In his meta-
physics, the present, as the realm of change, is
the only reality and the only place where action
can occur. He maintains that the successive
regeneration of 'presentness' is, at bottom, what
time is.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Logic and Reasoning (1929).
Descartes (1934; 2nd edn, Oxford, 1968).
(Ed. with intro.), Philosophical Studies by the
Late]. McT. E. McTaggart (1934; repr.
with a new Introduction by Gerald
Rochelle, Bristol, 1996).
'Descartes: Annual Lecture on a Master
Mind. Henriette Hertz Trust of the British
Academy', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 34 (1948), pp. 57-81; and
separately as monograph (1948).
Time and Duration: An Unfinished Essay,
ed. by Gerald Rochelle with a foreword
and introduction by Edward Senior (Little
Wenlock, 1990).
Other Relevant Works
Anon., The Times, 15 December 1979, p. 14
Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes (ed.),/. McT.
E. McTaggart, with chapters by Basil
Williams and S.V. Keeling (Cambridge,
1931).
503
KEMP
Further Reading
Broad, Charlie Dunbar, 'Critical Notice of
S.V. Keeling's Descartes', Mind, vol. 44
(1935), pp. 70-75.
Enrique Chavez-Arvizo
KEMP, John (1920-)
John Kemp was born in Kent on 6 February
1920 and educated at Simon Langton
Grammar School, Canterbury. In 1938 he wa
admitted to University College, Oxford to read
Mods. His undergraduate career was inter-
rupted by war service in which he served in the
medical corps and took part in parachute oper-
ations on D-Day and in the Rhine Crossing. He
returned to Oxford in 1945 and graduated
with first class honours in literae humaniores.
He names as significant influences while at
Oxford the markedly different figures of E.F.
CARRITT and George PAUL, the former influ-
enced by neo-idealism, the latter insisting on a
scrupulous analytic precision. In 1948 Kemp
was appointed lecturer in the Department of
Moral Philosophy at St Andrews (senior
lecturer, 1955). From 1964 until his retiremen
in 1985 he was Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Leicester. In 1962 he was
appointed by the Analysis committee to the
editorship of Philosophical Books, a position he
held until 1972.
Kemp wrote three books. The first (1964) is
a study of reason, action and morality, which
in a short compass offers some critical history
of ethics and a careful analysis of the nature of
ethical judgement and ethical reasoning.
Kemp's work, like that of others in the analytic
tradition, for example, TOULMIN and NOWELL-
SMITH, is of interest in displaying how a more
careful and scrupulous attention to the nuances
of ethical language can rescue ethics from the
crudely dismissive emotivist accounts offered b.
KEMP
such iconoclastic logical positivists as AYER.
(See also Kemp's 1951 'Moral Attitudes and
Moral Judgments'.) The second book, on Kant
(1968), deals with the principal subjects of
Kant's thought, including aesthetics, episte-
mology, metaphysics, morality and theology. It
still remains as a lucid and reliable introduction
to this philosopher. The third work (1970)
studies ethical naturalism as it is found in
Hobbes and Hume and looks at two main
types of ethical theory, also from the point of
view of the then contemporary analytical phi
losophy. There are discussions of egoism,
ethical naturalism, the social contract, virtue
and the important Humean notion of
sympathy. Kemp's contributions to the study of
Hobbes are further complemented by an article
studying that philosopher's view of man as
shown in his remarks on pity and charity
(1982).
Three other pieces of writing deserve
mention. One is the lecture given on his inau-
guration as Professor of Philosophy at Leicester.
The lecture contains remarks on philosophy
and on ethics which contribute to our under-
standing of how those subjects were conceived
in mid century by an analytically trained
philosopher. A second is an intervention in the
vehement and still continuing debate about the
relevance of a knowledge of the artist's inten-
tions. Kemp comes down on the side of those
sceptical about the relevance of such knowledge
to critical understanding. Finally, there is the
article 'Pain and Evil' (1954), which, starting
from a clarification and criticism of Bentham's
claim that pain is an evil, and, indeed, the onl.
evil, seeks to shed light on what the relation
actually is between pain and evil.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reason: Action and Morality (1964).
The Philosophy of Kant (1968).
Ethical Naturalism: Hobbes and Hume
(1970).
Other Relevant Works
'Moral Attitudes and Moral Judgments',
504
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 1 (1951), pp.
338-47.
'Pain and Evil', Philosophy, vol. 29 (1954),
pp. 13-26.
'The Work of Art and the Artist's Intentions',
British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 4 (1964),
pp. 146-54.
The Concept of Moral Goodness (Leicester,
1965).
'Hobbes on Pity and Charity', in J.G. Van der
Bend (ed.), Thomas Hobbes: His View of
Man (Atlantic Highlands, 1982).
Colin Lyas
KEMP SMITH, Norman Duncan
(1872-1958)
Norman Duncan Smith was born in Dundee on
5 May 1872 and died in Edinburgh on 3
September 1958; he was cremated three days
later. The sixth and youngest child of a cabinet-
maker, he attended high school in his home
town before entering the University of St
Andrews on a scholarship at the age of sixteen.
Among his teachers at St Andrews were the
eminent classical scholar John BURNET and the
idealist philosopher Henry JONES. After gradu-
ating with first class honours in 1893 Smith
spent part of the next several years in European
capitals studying philosophy and languages. In
1896 he returned to Scotland to take up the
position of assistant to Robert Adamson, Chair
of Logic and Rhetoric at Glasgow. Smith's first
book, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy
(1902), was very well received, and earned him
the DPhil from St Andrews. While he was at
Glasgow, his reputation as an expositor grew,
even drawing the attention of William James,
who praised him for his sketch of Avenarius in
Mind. In 1906 Smith was awarded the Stuart
Chair of Psychology at Princeton University
after being interviewed for the job by Woodrow

Wilson, then President of Princeton. He rose to
Chairman of the Department of Philosophy
and Psychology and then, in 1914, to the
McCosh Chair in Philosophy. During a return
visit to Scotland in 1910 he married long-time
friend Amy Kemp, whose last name he substi-
tuted for his own neglected middle name. His
major writing project while at Princeton was
the Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason, which was mostly completed by the
outbreak of World War I but not published
until its conclusion. Kemp Smith was appar-
ently happy in the United States, and certainly
widely respected. Nevertheless, in 1916 he
obtained leave from Princeton to join the British
war effort, and served in various government
posts in London until the armistice. On the eve
of his return to Princeton, the prestigious Chair
of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh became
vacant. With the Commentary now published to
uniform acclaim, and with the support of
numerous international figures, including
Woodrow Wilson (by this time President of the
United States) and Henri Bergson, Kemp Smith
put forward his name for consideration. He was
elected to the chair in 1919 and occupied it for
the remainder of his career. His most ambitious
work of original philosophy, Prolegomena to
an Idealist Theory of Knowledge, was published
in 1924. The work for which he is most widely
known, the masterful translation of Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason, appeared in 1929,
followed by an abridgement for students in
1934. Kemp Smith next turned his attention to
his own country's greatest philosopher (who
had himself been denied a chair at Edinburgh
two centuries before), publishing an edition of
the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in
1935 and the influential Philosophy of David
Hume in 1941. Kemp Smith retired from
teaching in 1945 but continued to work vigor-
ously for another decade. His last major work,
New Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes
(1952), revisited the subject of his first book,
published exactly one half century earlier.
Kemp Smith is the twentieth century's most
influential English-speaking historian of
505
KEMP SMITH
modern philosophy. His focus on Descartes,
Hume and Kant both reflected and reinforced
the status of this troika in Anglo-American phi-
losophy. In the Preface to his Studies in the
Cartesian Philosophy Kemp Smith remarked
that there existed only one other work in
English exclusively devoted to Descartes. Today
there are many published each year. Kemp
Smith's emphasis in this work is on meta-
physics, rather than epistemology, and he
places the mind-body dualism at the founda-
tion of Descartes's philosophy, rather than the
cogito or the theory of ideas. Dualism leads to
the representative theory of perception since
the mind can directly know only its own states,
and this in turn leads to the cogito since the
bare fact of cognition is known best of all. He
argues further that because Descartes accepts
the scholastic doctrine that each substance has
an essence peculiar to itself, and by which the
substance is fully known, he is unable to
account for any relation between mind and
body. Malebranche's occasionalism is thus for
Kemp Smith already implicit in Descartes. Only
the first half of Studies is Descartes exegesis; the
rest traces the influences of, and reactions to,
the Cartesian philosophy from Spinoza through
Kant. His last book, New Studies in the
Philosophy of Descartes, continues the
emphasis on metaphysics, but takes much more
detailed account of Descartes's natural philos-
ophy as well as the development of his thought
over the course of his life. He also attended to
the explosion in Descartes studies that had
occurred since the first book, and for which he
could justly take much credit.
Yet Kemp Smith is much better known for
his contribution to Kant scholarship. In 1918
his massive Commentary on the first Critique
was warmly welcomed as a corrective to the
prevailing tendency to read Kant from the point
of view of Hegel. Based on the 1787 second
edition of the Critique, Kemp Smith endorsed
and developed Hans Vaihinger's theory that
the work was not composed with a continuous
and uniform intent, but rather pieced together
from various manuscripts written between
KEMP SMITH
1769 and 1780. Thus he finds in the transcen-
dental deduction strong traces of four distinct
stages in the evolution of Kant's thought. This
reading enabled Kemp Smith to account for
major inconsistencies in the text as by-products
of its 'pre-critical' remnants. But although this
'patchwork' interpretation of the work as a
whole has not been widely embraced, the
Commentary has had a lasting influence for
its emphasis on the realist side of Kant's phi-
losophy and for it meticulous, philosophically
rigorous and historically informed exposition.
Several early reviewers of the Commentary
noted their eager anticipation of Kemp Smith's
translation of the Critique, which finally
appeared in 1929, quickly replacing the trans-
lations of Muller and Micklejohn. For genera-
tions scholars and students alike have valued
Kemp Smith's translation for its precision, tech-
nical nuance and relative accessibility.
According to an oft-repeated legend - which
seems to originate in A.C. EwiNG's obituary of
Kemp Smith - certain German philosophy pro-
fessors prefer their students begin with Kemp
Smith's translation instead of the original.
Like his Commentary on Kant, Kemp
Smith's Philosophy of David Hume righted an
errant tendency in the scholarship of his time.
In this case, the tendency was to read Hume as
essentially a sceptic who had brought empiri-
cism to its logical, and fundamentally negative,
conclusion. For Kemp Smith, the sceptical
arguments in Book I of the Treatise against
rational justifications of induction, causality
and the external world are meant to clear the
way for the alternative naturalistic form of
explanation exemplified in the moral theory
of Books II and III (which he maintains were
composed first). Although not all Hume
scholars accept the notion that he 'entered into
his Philosophy through the Gateway of Morals'
(Philosophy of David Hume, p. 12), Kemp
Smith's recovery of a positive, naturalistic pro-
gramme in the Treatise is now more or less
taken for granted. His other main contribu-
tion to Hume studies is a critical edition of the
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which
506
has a book-length Introduction discussing
Hume's relation to his native Calvinism, his
treatment of religion in other works and of
course the arguments of the Dialogues them-
selves. Kemp Smith defends the then unpopu-
lar view that, notwithstanding Pamphilus's
closing pronouncement in favour of the believer
Cleanthes, Hume's own position throughout is
steadfastly that of the sceptic Philo. Far from a
cautious rapprochement of sceptical philosophy
and religion, the Dialogues are according to
Kemp Smith a thoroughgoing and deliberate
attack on 'the religious hypothesis'.
Kemp Smith's contributions to the philoso-
phy of his own time have not aged as well as his
commentaries and translations, perhaps
because they belong to a philosophical tradi-
tion, namely idealism, that fell dramatically
out of favour with the rise of analytical philos-
ophy. Kemp Smith's brand of idealism is not
opposed to realism, but rather to materialistic
forms of naturalism. Thus, in his Prolegomena
to an Idealist Theory of Knowledge, which was
heavily influenced by Samuel ALEXANDER and
Henri Bergson, Kemp Smith maintains that
'spiritual values have a determining voice in
the ordering of the universe' (p. 1). The book
offers sustained attacks on the representational
theory of perception and the supposed subjec-
tivity of secondary qualities, and also presents
a theory of cognition along Kantian lines. The
notion that spiritual values are at work on a
cosmic scale has a religious ring to it and Kemp
Smith was indeed very interested in religion,
though he was never himself a member of any
church. A number of his best papers on this and
other topics are collected in the posthumous
volume The Credibility of Divine Existence.
In the title paper, he maintains that the divine
is known by 'immediate experience' rather than
by inference. Along with papers on Locke,
Hume and WHITEHEAD, the volume also
contains a psychologically penetrating reflec-
tion on 'Fear: Its Nature and Diverse Uses' and
a programmatic consideration of the question
'How far is Agreement Possible in Philosophy?'.
Kemp Smith's answer is that because philo-

sophical problems are humanistic problems
'which bring into play the whole man as well as
all the sciences' their resolution depends on
'recognition of the manner in which the past
history of philosophy predetermines, consciously
or unconsciously, our present-day problems'
(Credibility of Divine Existence, p. 188). By
such arguments, and even more by his own
example, Kemp Smith has shown the mutual
dependence between philosophy and its history.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy (1902).
A Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason (1918; 2nd rev. and exp. edn,
1923).
Prolegomena to an Idealist Theory of
Knowledge (1924).
(Trans.), Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason (1929; abridged edn, 1934).
(Ed. with intro.), David Hume, Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion (1935; 2nd
edn. with suppl., 1947).
The Philosophy of David Hume: A Critical
Study of its Origins and Central Doctrines
(1941).
New Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes:
Descartes as Pioneer (1952).
(Selec. and trans.), Descartes' Philosophical
Writings (1952).
Other Relevant Works
Preface, in John Handyside (trans.), Kant's
Inaugural Dissertation and Early Writings
on Space (1929).
John Locke; The Adamson Lecture for 1932
(Manchester, 1933).
(Ed. with intro.), A.A. Bowman, Studies in
the Philosophy of Religion (1938).
The Credibility of Divine Existence: The
Collected Papers of Norman Kemp Smith,
ed. G.E. Davie, R.D. Macalennan and
AJ.D.Porteous(1967).
The Letters of Baron Freidrich von Hiigel
and Professor Norman Kemp Smith, ed.
L.F. Barmann (New York, 1981).
507
KENNY
Further Reading
Ewing, A.C., 'Norman Kemp Smith,
1872-1958', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 45 (1959), pp. 296-306.
Geoffrey Gorham
KENNY, Anthony John Patrick (1931-)
Anthony Kenny was born in Liverpool on 16
March 1931. He was educated at the
Gregorian University in Rome and St Benet's
Hall, Oxford, receiving his DPhil in 1961. He
had been ordained priest in 1955, but returned
to the lay state in 1963. He was an assistant
lecturer at Liverpool (1961-3); lecturer at
Exeter and Trinity Colleges, Oxford (1963^-);
and fellow of Balliol College (1964-78). From
1978 to 1989 he was Master of Balliol, and
from 1989 to 1999 Warden of Rhodes House,
and professorial fellow of St John's. From 1984
to 2001 he was also a Pro-Vice-Chancellor of
Oxford. His activities outside Oxford included
being President of the British Academy
(1989-93) and Chairman of the British Library
Board (1993-6). In 1974 he became an FBA.
He was knighted in 1992 and he is now an
emeritus fellow of St John's.
Kenny is the author of more than thirty books,
about twenty translations and edited works, and
over sixty articles. His work, which is still con-
tinuing, extends beyond academic philosophy to
theology, literature, history and biography, and
politics, although much of his writing in these
areas involves an application of philosophy. His
strictly philosophical publications include several
on the history of philosophy, and particularly on
the four philosophers in whom he has been most
interested: Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes and
WITTGENSTEIN. Besides this, he has contributed
especially to the philosophy of mind and action,
but also to philosophy of religion and to ethics.
He sees a close connection between historical
KENNY
and problem-based studies in philosophy, believ-
ing that the insights of the past are still highly
relevant; and a significant part of his work, espe-
cially in philosophy of religion, combines the
two approaches. His most influential works to
date are probably Action, Emotion and Will
(1963) for philosophy of mind, The God of the
Philosophers (1979) for philosophy of religion,
and Aquinas on Mind (1993) and The
Aristotelian Ethics (1978) for the history of phi-
losophy.
Although much of Kenny's work is exegetical,
whether of individual philosophers (Descartes,
1968; Wittgenstein, 1973; The Aristotelian
Ethics] or of areas of philosophy, as in many
parts of The God of the Philosophers, he does of
course put forward major ideas of his own, even
in works that are intended as historical studies.
Particularly important are his theory of the
nature of philosophy, along with its implica-
tions, his theory of emotion and motivation,
and his analysis of arguments concerning the
existence and nature of God.
There is a particularly interesting combina-
tion of scholarship and philosophy in The
Aristotelian Ethics, a book which establishes the
importance of the relatively neglected Eudemian
Ethics, in particular by showing that three central
books of disputed origin but previously usually
assigned to the Nicomachean Ethics do belong
to the Eudemian. This is important for Kenny
not only to establish what was Aristotle's most
mature ethical theory, but also because he
believes that the theory of the Eudemian Ethics,
that the ideal life is not contemplation alone but
a combination of contemplation and activity, is
a better ethical theory than that of the
Nicomachean Ethics - and one he has done his
best to follow. This book is also one of the first
examples of the use in the humanities of com-
puterized statistics to establish stylometric con-
clusions: The Computation of Style (1981) is a
textbook on how to do this.
The theory of philosophy itself is demon-
strated throughout Kenny's writings, both
'pure' and 'applied'. It is set out in particular in
the first chapter of Aquinas on Mind, and is as
508
follows. Philosophy begins with the posing of
very large questions and problems. It advances,
in the first stage, by the greater understanding
of these problems, which involves breaking
them down into smaller and more intelligible
questions. Some of these questions will be
empirical, and one way in which philosophy
progresses is by ceasing to be philosophy and
becoming science. Other issues - those in, for
example, theory of meaning., ethics, epistemol-
ogy and metaphysics - will remain philosoph-
ical: progress here is by greater understanding
of the question, and sometimes by solving some
of the smaller questions revealed by the greater
understanding. In both cases, to understand
the issue at all we still have to go back to its
original formulation by the great philosophers
of the past, so that the history of philosophy
remains permanently relevant in a way that
the history of science does not. This view of phi-
losophy has much in common with that of J.L.
AUSTIN, but makes an advance on Austin's view
by recognizing that some issues are irre-
deemably philosophical, and also that we need
to study the history of philosophy not only at
the beginning of our inquiry but at every stage
of it. Kenny, moreover, has rightly resisted the
claims of relativism and postmodernism, and
continued to believe that the theories of
philosophers are not to be seen as true or false
relative to a particular viewpoint or way of
seeing the world, but as true or false in an
absolute sense, even though it is very hard work
to sort out which parts of a philosophical
theory are true, and even though the mistakes
of a great philosopher of the past may be no
disgrace and very illuminating. He has also
continued to believe that we should not reduce
philosophy to the history of ideas: we have to
understand the historical context in order to
grasp what a thinker of the past actually said;
but we need to learn what he said not simply
because it was influential but because it will
help us to get nearer to the truth. One interest-
ing consequence of this, which he does not, I
think, state explicitly, but which is displayed in
many places in his work, is that the thinkers of

the past turn out to be both more and less dif-
ferent from us than one might expect: more dif-
ferent in that their scientific and even 'common-
sense' assumptions were not ours, less different
in that their pedagogic milieu was sometimes
very similar (on this, see again the first chapter
of Aquinas on Mind).
Kenny's theory of emotion, motivation and
voluntary action is particularly to be found in
Action, Emotion and Will, but also in Will,
Freedom and Power (1975) and Freewill and
Responsibility (1978). It derives partly from
Aristotle and Aristotelianism, and partly from
the rejection by Wittgenstein and others of the
classical empiricist theory of action, according
to which motives are mental events, most typ-
ically, feelings, which cause our actions by
giving us an internal 'push' to behave in a
certain way. This is replaced by reminding our-
selves that it is people who think and feel, or,
in more philosophical language, have minds
and therefore intellect and will, and it is people
who do things, so that we cannot reduce what
they do and undergo, mentally and physically,
to relations between events. We must also
realize that emotions are essentially people's
attitudes towards states of affairs, which may
be expressed in many different ways, for
example in feelings, behaviour, thinking or all
three (thus wanting something may involve any
or all of feeling its lack, trying to get it, or
thinking 'it would be nice if ...'). Given these
attitudes, we can understand what people do by
realizing that as a result of their attitudes, of
what they like and dislike, they prefer some
states of affairs to others and will try to bring
them about, so that our large vocabulary of
words for motives identifies ways in which one
state of affairs may be preferred to another: to
be motivated by gratitude is to prefer the state
of affairs in which one has returned a favour to
the one in which one has not. There remains the
difficult and complex question of which of
these attempts to produce a preferred state of
affairs are voluntary and how they differ from
those that are involuntary: hence Kenny's
extensive writing on free will.
509
KENNY
All this part of Kenny's work, though in an
Aristotelian tradition, is also fundamentally
Wittgensteinian insofar as it brings us back, as
a first stage, to how we actually talk; indeed,
Kenny's deepest philosophical debt is to G.E.M.
ANSCOMBE and to her interpretation of
Wittgenstein. But Kenny's work goes beyond
Wittgenstein in its attempt, necessarily unfin-
ished but successful at many points, to give a
systematic account of mind and action:
ordinary language, for Kenny, does not dissolve
philosophical problems, but does give us
evidence as to what the problem is and how it
can be solved, or at least how we can make
progress. For a time his work seemed to be
neglected, and there were attempts to revive
the classical theory; but there has been a recent
revival of this Aristotelian/Wittgensteinian
approach to mind, emotion and motive, which
is proving decidedly fruitful (a recent Royal
Institute of Philosophy volume on the emotions,
edited by Anthony Hatzimoysis, contains
several papers using this approach, as well as
others in contrast).
In philosophy of religion, Kenny's work is
especially to be found in The Five Ways (1969),
The God of the Philosophers, and most recently
in the collected essays called The Unknown
God (2004). The first of these examines in
detail Aquinas's arguments for God's existence,
and the second the traditional Western theistic
view of God's attributes, while the third takes
up the nature of religious language: in particu-
lar, The God of the Philosophers, though short
- it is based on his Wilde Lectures at Oxford
is indispensable for anyone working in this
field. The conclusions are that none of these
arguments works as a proof, and that this tra-
ditional concept of God is inconsistent, but
that this does not show that any concept of
God is inconsistent. What follows from this, for
Kenny, is what may be called a real agnosti-
cism, a genuine uncertainty whether God exists
(as opposed, we might say, to what is called
agnosticism, which is really a belief that God
does not exist but one cannot prove it). Most
recently, he has moved towards the idea that
KENNT
religious language should be understood on
the model of poetry, and begun to consider
what this might imply and look at what poets
and philosophers in poetic mood have to say or
imply about religious belief. Throughout, he
has held that it is either true or false that God
exists; that this question can and should be
treated rationally; that what the philosophers of
the past have had to say about it is relevant;
and, above all, that it is important whether
religion is 'a snare and a delusion, or ... some-
thing precious and glorious'.
There is much else of importance in Kenny's
work, which includes the application of phi-
losophy to politics in The Ivory Tower (1985)
and elsewhere, works on stylometry, studies
of Wyclif and of Arnold, Clough and Hopkins,
and in particular A Brief History of Western
Philosophy (1998), with its modest aim of
being 'more accurate than RUSSELL, more inter-
esting than COPLESTON'. His philosophical
importance, which is only part of his achieve-
ment, consists in a large body of work which
will continue to help those working in the
history of philosophy and in philosophy of
religion, from beginners to seasoned scholars;
in a major contribution to the philosophy of
action; and in preserving the sense that philo-
sophical questions are real and important ques-
tions, which study of past philosophers, includ-
ing unfashionable ones, can help us to under-
stand, and which sustained and serious thinking
can move us a little way towards answering.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Action, Emotion and Will (1963).
Descartes: A Study of bis Philosophy (New
York, 1968).
The Five Ways (1969}.
Wittgenstein (1973).
Will, freedom and Power (Oxford, 1975).
Freewill and Responsibility (1978).
The Aristotelian Ethics (Oxford, 1978).
The God of the Philosophers (Oxford, 1979).
Aristotle's Theory of the Will (1979).
Aquinas (Oxford, 1980).
The Computation of Style (Oxford, 1981).
510
The Ivory Tower: Essays in Philosophy and
Public Policy (Oxford, 1985).
The Metaphysics of Mind (Oxford, 1989).
Aquinas on Mind (1993).
Frege (1995).
A Brief History of Western Philosophy
(1998).
The Unknown God: Agnostic Essays (2004).
Other Relevant Works
Two volumes of autobiography:
A Path from Rome (1985).
A Life in Oxford (1997}.
further Reading
Hatzimoysis, Anthony (ed.), Philosophy and
the Emotions (Cambridge, 2003)
A. H. Lesser
KEYNES, John Maynard (1883-1946)
John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge
on 5 June 1883 and died in Tilton, Sussex on
21 April 1946. His father, John Neville KEYNES,
was a lecturer in logic and, later, university
registrary, so the young Maynard imbibed
Cantabrigian academia, dining with his father's
philosophy friends such W.E. JOHNSON.
Maynard was educated at Eton and, in 1902,
went up to King's College, Cambridge. Brilliant
at school, brilliant at university, he subse-
quently entered the India Office of the British
Civil Service, then secured a fellowship at
King's, and in 1924 became Bursar (a position
he held until his death), significantly enhancing
the college's wealth and intellectual reputation.
From 1908 to 1915 he was university lecturer
in economics. He was elected fellow of the
British Academy in 1929 and, through his pio-
neering work in economics, became the epony-
mous creator and hero of Keynesianism. Much
of his life was spent at the British Treasury: he

was its Principal Representative at the 1919
Paris Peace Conference, virtually the de facto
Chancellor of the Exchequer during World
War II and key economic figure at the Bretton
Woods Conference and Washington
Negotiations. Arguably the greatest economist
since Adam Smith, he secured worldwide fame.
In 1942 he received a barony - becoming Lord
Keynes of Tilton - a Cambridge Honorary
Doctorate of Science, fellowship of the Royal
Society and, but for his death, would have
received the Order of Merit.
Keynes was a man of many worlds, a
polymath, walking, seemingly effortlessly,
between the bohemian Bloomsbury Group and
the Civil Service establishment, between homo-
sexuality and heterosexuality - he praised
homosexual sodomy, yet married a Russian
ballerina - and between the highest interna-
tional negotiations and weekend Cambridge
college meetings. Founder of the Cambridge
Arts Theatre, he transformed the British Arts
Council, collected nineteenth and twentieth-
century French and English paintings and was
a serious book collector, identifying (with Piero
Sraffa) Hume as the author of the anonymously
written Abstract of Hume's Treatise. He was a
fine essayist, yet also enjoyed a day's pig
farming. In philosophy he encouraged
BRAITHWAITE and RAMSEY, funded
WITTGENSTEIN and drew Sraffa to Cambridge,
who proved a catalyst for Wittgenstein's later
work. Bertrand RUSSELL spoke of Keynes's intel-
lect being the sharpest and clearest that he
(Russell) had ever known; and, for many,
Keynes was the ablest Englishman of his gen-
eration. Although initially trained in mathe-
matics and later securing, by far, his greatest
influence as an economist - his collected works
mainly of economics, amount to thirty volumes
- he wrote his fellowship dissertation in phi-
losophy, philosophy and economics being then
grouped within the moral sciences. This dis-
sertation developed into his one philosophical
work, A Treatise on Probability (1921) -
though miscellaneous philosophy notes exist
in King's College's archive and some philo-
511
KEYNES
sophical reflections occur in his essay on
Ramsey (in Essays in Biography', 1933) and
his Two Memoirs (1949).
Keynes's Treatise is a work of mathematical
theorems, yet also of clear English prose,
ranging over chance, statistics and induction,
using examples from lotteries, astrology and
other minds, dealing with, amongst others,
Bayes, Bernoulli, Bertrand and Boole. In
contrast with MOORE, who hoped to make
vague notions precise - in contrast with forced
regimentations sometimes in Russell - Keynes
explicitly valued the English of Hume. He
sought to avoid wet clouds of doubt, as he
termed them, in order to give his arguments a
chance, acknowledging a pretence to more con-
viction than sometimes felt. Few ended up
accepting Keynes's probability results, though
Russell acknowledged indebtedness and the
Treatise's original and clear presentation of the
logical relation probability theory, with a
valuable history and substantial historical bib-
liography, proved a stimulus to many. Ramsey,
reacting against Keynes's theory, gave birth to
subjective probability. Later Rudolph Carnap
defended a probability akin to Keynes's,
Carnap's probability also being an objective
logical concept. Paradoxically, Carnap
measures the confirmation degrees using ideas
from Ramsey's work critical of Keynes.
Keynes's work on probability was influenced
by Johnson, by way of some theorems,
concepts and notation. Curious as it might
seem, another influence was Moore's Principia
etbica, the bible of the Bloomsbury Group and
Cambridge Apostles (the well-known 'secret'
society). While accepting Moore's ideal - the
ideals of passionate contemplation of, and com-
munion with, beloved persons and objects of
beauty - Keynes rejected his scepticism of the
possibility of rational belief in any action being
even probably right, given that moral status
depended on unknown consequences. Moore's
demand for empirical evidence regarding the
probable future was seen as a mistaken demand
for causal certainty. Keynes argued that we
could have degrees of rational belief concerning
KEYNES
the future as common sense suggests - and his
Treatise set out to show this. While his spirit
was high in the Moorean abstract heavenly
ideal, his pen was scribbling out practical
examples of probable judgements - examples as
diverse as the reinsurance rates for the Waratah,
a vessel that sank in South African waters, the
probable loss to a lady beauty contestant who
missed the final viewing, and the legal tale of
Cyllene, a racehorse, who should have serviced
one of the plaintiff's brood mares: now what
was the probability of a resultant horse - and,
if such result there be, of its being a winner?
Logical entailment sets the scene: we can
perceive that certain conclusions logically
follow from sets of premises. So too, argues
Keynes, we can perceive unanalysable rela-
tionships between propositions weaker than
entailment, namely partial entailments or prob-
ability relationships. In this way Keynes
broadens logical relations to include probabil-
ity, establishing logical connections as the
proper matter of probability theory. The
limiting cases of these partial entailments are
one and zero, one, when conclusions logically
follow from the propositions taken as premises,
and zero, when they contradict the premises.
According to Moore, the intrinsically
valuable was open to direct inspection: he and
his disciples would, for example, try to see
whether a violent short love affair was better
than a longer tepid one. All this was considered
as scientific and rational as investigating the
material of our senses or seeing the validity of
modus ponendo ponens. Keynes proclaims
such a direct apprehension of some probability
relationships. These relationships objectively
hold, but probability judgements are subjec-
tive in that they depend upon which sets of
propositions the judgers know, sets upon which
to base their probable conclusions. Given the
known propositions as premises, judgers might
err over what they conclude probable, and to
what degree probable; their beliefs might hence
be irrational and akin to those based on invalid
arguments with true premises. A rational belief
in p as having a certain probability needs to be
512
grounded in knowledge of a set of proposi-
tions h and some secondary proposition q
asserting a probability relation between p and
h. Although Keynes equivocates a little between
perfect logical insight and rational human
insight, his prominent claim is that if the prob-
ability relation is of degree a, then the rational
belief in p is of degree a.
Thus it was that Keynes fitted probability
into Russell's and Moore's empiricism and
realism, showing how degrees of belief could be
rational and independent of the believer's psy-
chology. Keynes stresses, however, that prob-
ability relations between propositions with dif-
ferent subject-matter are rarely commensurable;
indeed, probability relations are often inca-
pable even in principle of any numerical mea-
surement at all. While it is true that under-
writers can be persuaded to give numerical
values for virtually any risk - values backed
with hard cash - the values often contain some
caprice. A problem appears (and remains) on
stage - of how the unmeasurable probability
relations help to identify degrees of rational
belief, if such rationality there be. Also arise
fundamental questions of the nature of the cor-
respondence even when some measure can be
given both to the probability relation and to,
given /7, the partial belief in p. Further, there is
the matter of the relationship between that
partial belief that p and the conditional belief
that if h, then p, David Lewis showing, decades
after Keynes, that, on reasonable assumptions,
a conditional probability typically lacks the
same value as the probability of the corre-
sponding conditional proposition's being true.
Measurement of probabilities is possible only
when we have sets of possibilities that are
mutually exclusive, equi-possible and collec-
tively exhaustive. Keynes, although mindful of
previous paradoxes, rehabilitates a Principle of
Indifference as the criterion for identifying equi-
possibles: the alternatives must fall under a
single determinable; they must have the same
degree of determinateness, with the evidence
being symmetrically related to all in every
relevant respect. Of course, there is now the dif-

ficulty of identifying what counts as 'same
degree' and 'relevance'; and, but for the rickety
rescue raft of Keynes's direct judgement, we
should end up explaining degrees of rational
belief in terms of partial entailments which are
explained in terms of equi-possibles which are
probably to be explained by degrees of rational
belief.
The main contemporary rival to Keynes's a
priori logical theory was the empirical fre-
quency theory, according to which an event's
probability is the proportion of instances of
relevantly similar events to some class of which
the event is a member. This theory has
problems even with the favoured cases of sta-
tistical hypotheses, though - as Keynes notes -
Venn, a leading proponent of the frequency
theory, does at least in the main restrict his
theory to the favoured statistical hypotheses.
Keynes himself seeks comprehensiveness; he
thus falls prey to the criticism that even if his
theory explains how some evidential probabil-
ities can justify degrees of rational belief, it
cannot account for those probabilities that
seem to be empirical facts, such as the 50 per
cent probability that a radium atom will disin-
tegrate within so many years.
Where induction is concerned - reasoning
from all observed cases of F being G to every-
thing F being G - Keynes stresses that the con-
clusions are not that things simply are so or
must be so, but that, relative to evidence, there
are probabilities in their favour. Such proba-
bility conclusions can be justified. That the
probable fails to occur need indicate no faulty
reasoning; and Keynes rejects the ridicule
heaped upon ruder races' reasonings, pointing
out that their probability assessments might
often have been justified given the known
evidence. Of course, it can be sensible to seek
further evidence. Suppose all observed instances
of F have been G: observing further instances
of F as also G can be inductively relevant ana-
logically, that is as a means of eliminating other
features that might be necessary for something
jF to be G. Further instances help positively to
support everything F being G only if certain
513
KEYNES
conditions hold, for example that the hypoth-
esis possesses a certain antecedent probability
prior to observation. This leads Keynes to pos-
tulate a finite a priori probability of some lim-
itation of independent variety. Postulate we
might indeed, but arguably we have no good
reason to do so. Keynes reminds us, though,
that experiences have increased the probability
of the limitation holding, and such a posteriori
support, he proposes, need not collapse because
of circularity. Keynes registers the doubt-raising
complexities of how we group characteristics
and the assumptions of underlying causal gen-
erators of those characteristics, complexities
given radical boost by Nelson Goodman's
'grue' discussions in the 1950s.
Ramsey, as perceptive an observer of logical
relations as any, confessed an inability to spot
the objective probability relations between
propositions - and also questioned Keynes's
justification of induction. Keynes seemingly
accepted Ramsey's demolition of his probabil-
ity theory, though debate continues concerning
the extent of Keynes's acceptance. There is also
debate over the extent to which Keynes's
approach to probability affected his economic
theorizing concerning risk, uncertainty and
expectations. What undoubtedly continued to
concern him was the justification, one way or
another, of the rationality of degrees of belief
and of resultant actions; he remained dissatis-
fied with justifications that rested solely on
their evolutionary success.
In contrast to Keynes's Treatise and his
writings in economics, Moore's ideal - a
timeless unworldly ecstasy - possessed, as
Keynes later quipped, less place for action than
the life of St Francis of Assisi, who at least
made collections for the birds. True, Moore
had written of social duties, but he and his dis-
ciples largely ignored them, feeling that they
interrupted engagement with their private ideal.
Keynes, however, lived in both the social world
of duty and the private ideal; he was not, so to
speak, merely the investment adviser to the
Bloomsbury Group and his college, but to the
world. His interventionist advice and cautious
KEYNES
advocacy of social reform, his promotion of the
arts and education - all being designed to
increase the quantity of valuable things in the
life of the nation - resulted from ethical springs,
As Keynes later wrote in 'My Early Beliefs',
he and the other Apostles were, at the turn of
the twentieth century, water-spiders gracefully
skimming a stream, in little contact with the
eddies and currents beneath. The Apostles'
values transcended mere Benthamite utilitar-
ian pleasures - though Keynes and others were
not immune to fleshing them out with the
carnal. Keynes emphasized the need for indi-
vidual judgement rather than rule following -
and held to this for himself and the educated
elite. He became increasingly aware that he
attributed an unreal rationality to human
nature, one as unreal as the meliorists'
ungrounded optimism. As his economic work
developed, he heeded human nature's under-
currents, supplementing his love of reason with
support for spontaneity, irrationality and life's
changing patterns. His economics began to deal
with such animal spirits, as he termed them,
recognizing how a few individuals' behaviour
could generate waves of group optimism and
pessimism.
Throughout his life Keynes was wayward
and considered something of a rebel: he dis-
missed religion as hocus-pocus and challenged
customary morality - yet he became so impor-
tant a national figure that his funeral service
was held in Westminster Abbey. He allowed his
thinking to evolve and, when criticized for his
mind's changes, responded, 'When the facts
change, I change my mind. What do you do,
sir?' A high value was placed on reason
throughout his life; and while he certainly
looked to consequences in assessing right and
wrong, he insisted, on rational grounds, that we
should be very chary of the moral risk in
making sacrifices now for uncertain distant
advantages. His assessments of what should
be done urged a reasoned disregard for much
of the long run - for, in his well-known
aphorism, in the long run we are all dead.
514
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Treatise on Probability (1921).
Two Memoirs (1949).
Other Relevant Works
Essays in Biography (1933; exp. edn, 1951).
(Intro, with P. Sraffa), David Hume, An
Abstract of K Treatise of Human Nature
[1740], repr. (Cambridge, 1938).
Further Reading
Carnap, Rudolph, Logical Foundations of
Probability (1950; 2nd edn 1962).
Lewis, David, Philosophical Papers II
(Oxford, 1986).
Ramsey, P.P., 'Mr Keynes on Probability',
British Journal for the Philosophy of
Science, vol. 40 (1989), pp. 219-22.
, Philosophical Papers, ed. D.H.
Mellor (1990).
Rundle, J. and S. Mizuhara (eds), The
Philosophy of'Keynes s Economics (2003).
Skidelsky, Robert, John Maynard Keynes, 3
vols (1983,1992,2000).'
Peter Cave
KEYNES, John Neville (1852-1949)
John Neville Keynes was born in Salisbury,
Wiltshire on 31 August 1852 and died in
Cambridge on 15 November 1949. The only
son of John Keynes and his wife, Anna
Maynard Neville, he was educated at
Amersham Hall School, University College
London and Pembroke College, Cambridge,
from which he graduated in 1875 with a first
class degree in the Moral Sciences Tripos. That
same year he was elected a fellow of University
College London, and then of Pembroke
College a year later. In 1884 he was appointed
university lecturer in moral science, a position
he held until 1911, when he resigned it to accept

the post of Registrary of Cambridge University.
Until his retirement in 1925 he solved the
problems students brought to him in an orderly
and sympathetic way, and thus earned both
their affection and their gratitude. His wife,
Florence Ada Brown, whom he married in
1882, served a term as mayor of Cambridge,
and their sons, John Maynard (KEYNES) and
Geoffrey, both had very distinguished careers.
He died in 1949 and the next year his wife
published a delightful memoir, Gathering up
the Threads: A Study in Family Biography. As
a schoolboy in 1864 Keynes began to keep a
diary and continued it until 1917. It has proved
a rich source for historians of the period, espe-
cially those interested in the history of eco-
nomics at Cambridge during Alfred Marshall's
tenure as professor from 1885 to 1908.
Henry Sidgwick (later Knightbridge Professor
of Moral Philosophy), who was one of his
teachers, had an important influence on both
his writing style and his philosophical method.
Both influences are plain to see in 'On the
Position of Formal Logic', which Keynes pub-
lished in 1879. It is a careful critique of the
positions taken by Archbishop Whately, Sir
William Hamilton, Henry Mansel, John Stuart
Mill, William Whewell, George Boole,
Augustus De Morgan, John Venn and William
Stanley Jevons on the question whether 'Formal
Logic is yet satisfactorily established on an intel-
ligible and independent basis' ('On the Position
of Formal Logic, p. 362). Their various answers
to the question are quoted and critically
examined, and from the residue Keynes for-
mulates 'provisionally' - in a very Sidgwickian
way - a definition of the term: 'Formal Logic is
the science which treats of the nature and con-
ditions of the conformity of symbolical with
positive thought, and which is therefore chiefly
concerned with the nature and conditions of the
conformity of the expression of thought in
ordinary language with thought itself (ibid., p.
370). He remarks that a systematic investigation
of this kind of thought-symbolism is likely to
prove useful. On the vexed question of the rela-
tionship between formal logic and psychology,
515
KEYNES
he argues that his conception of logic avoids
entangling the two: 'Logic treats of language in
entire subordination to mental processes and
mental laws which have been previously estab-
lished by Psychology' (ibid., p. 371). In the
course of his essay he distinguishes his view
from the empirical logic of Mill and his fol-
lowers and the symbolic logic of Boole and De
Morgan. The care shown in this essay, as well
as the respect accorded those whose views he is
examining, is typical of all of Keynes's work. He
was a panner of gold in the works of others,
rather than an original thinker.
In 1884 Keynes gave his position the full
treatment in Studies and Exercises in Formal
Logic, which he intended as a supplement to the
existing logic textbooks. Despite this limita-
tion, it proved to be popular, largely because it
was clearly written and avoided symbolism.
One of its most innovative parts is an extensive
discussion of the existential import of proposi-
tions, a topic then coming to the fore among
logicians. Between the first and the fourth
editions of the book the space devoted to this
topic expanded from thirteen to thirty-eight
pages. Throughout his discussion he defended
the view that the subject terms of universal
propositions do not imply the existence of what
they denote, but they do in particular proposi-
tions. The developers of quantification theory,
which includes syllogistic logic as an early
phase, adopted this solution to the problem.
The final part of his book goes beyond the syl-
logism to deal with arguments involving
complex propositions of the sort that Boole
and De Morgan used equations to solve. Keynes
uses everyday language in his treatment of these
arguments. John Venn, in his review of the
book, opined that Keynes avoided symbolism
by translating the discoveries of the symbolic
logicians into ordinary language:
I feel tolerably sure that Mr. Keynes himself
would not have worked out his scheme
unless he had been a thorough adept in the
more symbolic methods, and I rather doubt
if there are many of the adherents of the old
KEYNES
scheme who will be able, without his
training, adequately to appreciate these very
ingenious modifications of it.
(Venn, p. 304)
Keynes revised the book three times, the fourth
edition being published in 1906. The successive
editions of the book thus provide us with a
record of what was taught under the rubric
'logic' at Cambridge in the years before Alfred
North WHITEHEAD'S and Bertrand RUSSELL'S
great work altered logic forever.
Keynes is equally well known as the author
of The Scope and Method of Political
Economy (1891), a critical examination of the
logical problems inherent in that subject.
Keynes read widely in political economy and
then undertook to reconcile the two principal
methodological positions revealed in its liter-
ature. His task turned out to be the bridging of
the gap between two schools of economists,
one of which insisted that induction was the
proper method and the other of which insisted
on deduction. Writers on both sides sometimes
took rather extreme positions, arguing that
induction alone or deduction alone was all
that was required in their work. Keynes
showed that both sorts of logic were used by
the best authors of the competing sides and
that both were required: induction to establish
the premises of the subject, and deduction to
draw out the consequences of these premises.
As he did in his examination of the nature of
formal logic, his discussion of the literature of
political economy was both sympathetic and
critical, with his own conclusions clearly
stated. This book went through three editions
and was widely used by students.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'On the Position of Formal Logic', Mind,
vol. 4 (1879), pp. 362-75.
Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic,
Including a Generalization of Logical
Processes in their Application to Complex
Inferences (1884; 2nd enl. edn, 1887; 3rd
rewritten and enl. edn, 1894; 4th rewritten
516
and enl. edn, 1906).
The Scope and Method of Political Economy
(1891; 2nd rev. edn, 1897; 3rd rev. edn,
1904).
Other Relevant Works
Venn, John, Review of Studies and Exercises
in formal Logic, Mind, vol. 9 (1884), pp.
301-304.
'Dr J.N. Keynes: An Influential Thinker',
The Times, 16 November 1949.
Keynes, Florence Ada, Gathering up the
Threads: A Study in family Biography
(Cambridge, 1950).
John G. Slater
KNEALE, Martha (nee Hurst: 1909-2001)
Martha Hurst was born in Skipton, Yorkshire
on 14 August 1909 and died in Treshfield,
Yorkshire on 2 December 2001. She was
educated at Somerville College, Oxford, which
she entered in 1929. After taking a BA in 1933
she became Graham Kenan Fellow at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
from 1933 to 1934, and graduate fellow at
Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania from 1934
to 1936. She took an MA at Oxford in 1936.
At Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford she was tutor
in philosophy from 1936 to 1966, fellow from
1939 to 1966, and emeritus fellow from 1966
to 2001. She was one of the first women fellows
at Oxford to maintain the fellowship after
marriage. She was a member of the Aristotelian
Society, the Mind Association and the Society
for Psychical Research.
Kneale is best known for her significant con-
tribution to the seminal and expansive mono-
graph entitled The Development of Logic, pub-
lished in 1962. The book which Kneale co-
authored with her husband, the Oxford
logician William Calvert KISIEALE, is mostly his

work. Kneale herself wrote the part concerned
with ancient Greek logic - which is covered in
the initial three chapters - and advised William
about the rest of the material. The book traces
the growth of logic from its ancient Greek
beginnings to its state in the early 1960s. The
first eight chapters discuss the thought of the
major logicians from Aristotle to Frege, show
how it was shaped by the mathematical and
philosophical ideas of their period, and explain
the role of now less well-known figures in the
development of the field. Some of the material
incorporated in this part of the volume is not
easily accessible elsewhere. The last four
chapters deal with developments in, roughly,
the first six decades of the twentieth century.
Kneale had a significant interest in early
modern philosophy, particularly in the philos-
ophy of the so-called rationalists and the epis-
temological and metaphysical implications of
their thought. She also had a keen interest in
parapsychology and wrote papers on philo-
sophical issues related to the field. She edited
with useful introductions The Collected Works
of Henry H. Price, published in 1996. PRICE,
the Oxford Professor of Logic, shared Kneale's
main intellectual interests, namely logic, early
modern philosophy and the philosophical issues
related to parapsychology.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Is Psychical Research Relevant to
Philosophy?', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 24 (1950),
pp. 173-88.
Time and Psychical Research', Proceedings
of four conferences of parapsychological
studies (1957).
(with William Calvert Kneale), The
Development of Logic (Oxford, 1962).
'Eternity and Sempiternity', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 69 (1968-9),
pp. 223-38.
'Leibniz and Spinoza on Activity', in Harry
G. Frankfurt (ed.), Leibniz: A Collection of
Critical Essays (Garden City, New York,
1972).
517
KNEALE
(Ed. with intros), The Collected Works of
Henry H. Price, 4 vols (Bristol, 1996).
Other Relevant Works
'What is the Mind-Body Problem?',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
50 (1949-50), pp. 105-22.
'Our Knowledge of the Past and of the
Future', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 73 (1972-3), pp. 1-12.
Further Reading
Pleasants, Helene (ed.), Biographical
Dictionary of Parapsychology (New York,
1964).
'Martha Hurst Kneale', Encyclopedia of
Occultism and Parapsychology, 2 vols, 5th
edn (Detroit, 2001); reproduced in
Biography Resource Center (Farmington
Hills, Michigan, 2003), http://
www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC, accessed
October 2004.
Enrique Chavez-Arvizo
KNEALE, William Calvert (1906-90)
William Kneale was born in Liverpool on 22
June 1906 and died in Grassington on 24 June
1990. He was schooled at the Liverpool
Institute and won a classical scholarship to
Brasenose College, Oxford, where he gained
first class honours in Greats (1927). He went
on to Paris, where he attended lectures by the
psychologist Janet, and to Freiburg, where he
heard Husserl. A legacy of this was his subse-
quent interest in intentionality and in Husserl's
teacher, Brentano. He saw himself as primarily
a teacher, and believed in philosophy as a
training for public life, where 'the first step
must be an effort to get rid of confused
thinking. So long as we are muddled and uncer-
tain about our aims it is always possible that we
KNEALE
may fall into injustice or inefficiency - or, what
is more likely, both at once.' After holding
assistant lecturing posts at Aberdeen and
Newcastle, he returned to Oxford in 1932 to a
lectureship and fellowship at Exeter College.
He was far ahead of his time in his knowledge
and enthusiasm for modern logic, and was one
of the group of young turks who transformed
philosophy at Oxford in the 1930s. Their
leader was his friend Gilbert RYLE, though
Kneale kept his distance from the particular
programme associated with Ryle and J.L.
AUSTIN that came to be known as 'Oxford phi-
losophy'. In 1960 he became White's Professor
of Moral Philosophy. After six years, however,
he took early retirement, partly because of ill
health and partly to give more time to The
Instrument of Thought, a study of how lan-
guages came to have the structure we find in the
languages of civilization, but which he never
finished to his satisfaction. In retirement he
received honorary degrees from Aberdeen,
Durham and St Andrews. He had been elected
a fellow of the British Academy in 1950 and
was its Vice-President for 1971-2, and he was
a prime mover in its Medieval Logic Texts
project.
His first book, Probability and Induction
(1949), argued for an uncompromisingly realist
account of laws of nature. He rejected a
Humean account of natural laws as de facto
uniformities of conjunction. Rather, they are
principles of necessitation, that is to say they
impose limits on the possibilities of co-occur-
rence of attributes. Moreover, their necessity is
on a par with the necessity of logical laws,
though our knowledge of the two is acquired in
different ways. He took a similar approach to
probability, introducing the idea of the 'range'
of an attribute as the field of possibility - the
space of compossible worlds - that it leaves
open. Bringing in equi-possible alternatives
enables the comparative size of ranges to be
measured, and the probability of the attribute
is the measure of the size of its range. The sim-
ilarity of his treatment of natural laws and
probability is not surprising, since for him the
518
assertion of a law is just the assignment of the
value 1 to a relative probability.
It is a different matter when scientists assess
how far the observational data lend accept-
ability to the assertion of a law. That kind o.
inductive judgement is not open to any quan-
titative measure such as a probability function.
Instead, we consider a hypothesis to be more
acceptable the fewer gratuitous additions it
makes to the relevant field of possibility, and
the better it exploits any opportunities for
increased simplicity or precision. Induction is
therefore a policy of enquiry, not a mode of
argument. So the classical problem of induc-
tion, about how to justify arguments from
limited data to open-ended conclusions, can
be sidestepped.
These often unfashionable ideas were but-
tressed by powerful and ingenious arguments.
He showed, for instance, how high is the price
of treating natural laws as generalized truth-
functional conditionals, how the calculus of
chance can be considered applicable even to a
deterministic world, and how attempts to
justify induction by an inversion of Bernoulli's
theorem are bound to break down.
Kneale's monument is undoubtedly The
Development of Logic (1962), a classic in the
history of thought, which narrates the devel-
opment of the subject from its beginnings in
ancient Greece down to the present day. (H
wife Martha KNEALE is credited as joint author,
having taken over the rewriting of the chapters
on ancient logic in the later part of the book's
long gestation.) His philosophical work had
always been soaked in the history of the subject.
He believed that a proper appreciation of most
philosophical problems is impossible without
an understanding of their history, and in the
book his interest is in the logic rather than
history for history's sake. After asking himself
whether someone's work is interesting, he asks
himself 'is it true?', and where his author is in
error or confused he takes as long as he thinks
necessary to clear the matter up.
A work of this kind gets it character from the
author's conception of the subject and his own

qualities of mind. Logic for Kneale meant
formal logic, the study of valid principles of
inference applicable to every kind of topic. This
formal character gave the subject a mathemat-
ical side from the outset. Having an interest in
mathematics since boyhood, he was happy to
do justice to this, but his standpoint was fun-
damentally that of a philosopher. Hence, for
example, the way he manages to integrate the
development of logic over the previous hundred
years with the development of the philosophy
of mathematics over the same period. Hence
too the way De interpretatione and Aristotle's
ideas on modality each receive as much atten-
tion as the syllogism; and so on. His own philo-
sophical positions rarely obtrude. The one
exception is his doctrine of truth as a property
of propositions rather than sentences, which is
deployed both against Aristotle's treatment of
tomorrow's sea battle and against Tarski's
theory of truth.
Kneale's personality permeates the book. As
well as his phenomenal erudition and
command of languages, he brought to it his
marvellous sense of relative size and worth in
the intellectual realm. He never forgets that
'matters which are now perfectly plain were
very difficult when they were first thought of,
and there is not a person or a period for which
a reader will fail to come away with a height-
ened appreciation. He had a gift for systematic
elucidation that was (as a reviewer put it
apropos medieval logic) remarkable for
bringing order and sense into a complex mass
of material much of which would seem on the
surface to resist both. His scholarship is
deployed with the lightest of touches - no
lengthy footnotes or unnecessary technicalities.
The literary style is unpretentious but never
flat: on the contrary, it has an easy graceful flow
and liveliness, not so much humorous as
amused.
As well as these two books he wrote some
forty articles. Individual pieces deal with time,
substance, mind and body, and the responsi-
bility of criminals. Several are on perception,
including pieces on sense-data, verification, and
519
KNEALE
primary and secondary qualities. There is a
series of articles on the history of logic and
another on the philosophy of science, mostly
concerned with defending or elaborating the
themes of Probability and Induction. A dozen
articles deal with topics in philosophical logic,
among them necessity, propositions, indirect
speech and the paradoxes.
One of these items, The Province of Logic'
(1956), merits special mention. Kneale asks if
there is any way of defining the scope of logic
by marking off the logical constants. His
answer is that they are the words whose full
sense can be given by laying down rules of
inference for the propositions expressed with
their help. Thus the rules 'from A&B infer A',
'from A&B infer B' and 'from A, B infer A&F
give the whole sense of '&'. Trouble arises,
however, when we try to apply this idea to
'or'. The source of the trouble, says Kneale, is
the fact that although an inference can have
more than one premise it cannot have more
than one conclusion. He shows that by
allowing rules with several conclusions as well
as several premises we can cope with the trou-
blesome cases. At the same time he sees the
need for a generalized notion of proof. If one
thinks of a conventional proof set out like a tree
with the premises at the top and the conclusion
at the foot, then Kneale's proofs, or 'develop-
ments' as he called them, are similar except
that they can fork downwards as well as
upwards, corresponding to the application of a
rule with more than one conclusion. Naturally
he assumed that a development corresponding
to a series of steps can be obtained by joining
up the developments corresponding to each
step. Unfortunately, he overlooked the possi-
bility of the same proposition occurring several
times over as conclusion of one development
and also several times over as premise of
another. In such a case joining together one
copy of each development will deal with just
one pair of these dangling heads, and adding a
fresh copy to deal with one of the remainder
simply adds more of them, like a hydra. The
moral is that developments are too simple to
KNEALE
serve as the required generalization of proof.
One needs to consider more complex patterns
in which branches that have forked may rejoin,
creating closed circuits, and it takes quite
sophisticated mathematical investigation to dis-
tinguish the admissible patterns from the falla-
cious ones. His oversight, then, turned out to be
a felix culpa: the multiple-conclusion logic
which he pioneered turns out to have a life of
its own, and is very far from being a routine
extension of conventional logic.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Probability and Induction (Oxford, 1949).
(with Martha Kneale), The Development of
Logic (Oxford, 1962).
Other Relevant Works
'The Province of Logic', Contemporary
British Philosophy, Third Series, ed. H.D.
Lewis (1956), pp. 237-61
Further Reading
Conte, Amedeo, Storia della Logica (Turin,
1972). Includes a bibliography of Kneale's
writings.
Smiley, Timothy, 'William Calvert Kneale',
Proceedings of the British Academy, vol.
87 (1995), pp. 385-97.
Timothy Smiley
KNEEBONE, Geoffrey Thomas
(1918-2003)
Geoffrey Kneebone was born in Brentford,
Middlesex on 24 February 1918 and died in
London on 30 September 2003. He achieved
BSc in 1939, MSc in 1941 and PhD in 1943, al
at the University of London, and he taught at
the University of London throughout his career.
From 1943 to 1946 he was at Westfield Colleg
as an assistant lecturer, moving then to Bedford
520
College. There he became lecturer in 1947,
reader in foundations of mathematics in 1964
and reader in mathematics in 1976, retiring in
1983.
His PhD thesis, on 'The Foundations of
Mathematics: A Critical Examination of the
Foundations of the Mathematical Theory of
Probability and Statistics', was written under
the supervision of the geometer J.G. Semple. It
was a mathematical study, but a remark in the
Preface expressed a holistic view that stayed
with Kneebone through his later work on foun-
dations of mathematics: 'mathematics itself
cannot be regarded as something self-con-
tained, but must be treated as an integral part
of the whole body of possible knowledge' ('The
Foundations of Mathematics'1, p. iii). The thesis
also addressed the question of how an abstract
formalism can usefully be applied to the real
world. Much of his later work was a medita-
tion on this question. For example: 'we should
not ask simply whether a particular formal
theory applies to a certain body of experience,
but what idealization of the experience is nec-
essary in order that the theory may apply to it,
and how reasonable such idealization is in
relation to practical considerations' ('Proof,
Part IF, p. 45).
Kneebone developed his views in a series of
articles in philosophical journals, and in a lucid
and highly respected book (Mathematical Logic
and the Foundations of Mathematics, 1963)
on the history of foundations of mathematics
from Peano to the mid twentieth century. The
final section of the book presented Kneebone's
own views: all our thinking is shaped by our
experience and our cultural tradition. In pure
mathematics the contributions of experience
and tradition can be summed up in formal
rules, giving an illusion of timelessness and
objectivity. But where we apply a formalism to
situations in the real world, as in statistical
arguments, the role of active judgement
becomes more visible.
Kneebone's greatest gifts were as a teacher
and an expositor. His thesis supervisor, Semple,
published several successful textbooks of

geometry, two of them jointly with Kneebone
- though geometry was never Kneebone's main
interest. Kneebone also published a textbook of
set theory with Brian Rotman (1966). He gave
encouragement and support to the work of
other researchers on topics related to the history
of foundations. These included the studies of
Walter van Stigt on L.E.J. Brouwer and of Steve
Russ on Bernard Bolzano, as well as the theses
of Albert Leisenring and Tim Flannagan on
the Hilbert epsilon operator (the last two as
PhD students of Kneebone).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Foundations of Mathematics: A Critical
Examination of the Foundations of the
Mathematical Theory of Probability and
Statistics', unpublished PhD thesis,
University of London (1943).
'Philosophy and Mathematics', Philosophy,
vol. 22 (1947), pp. 231-9.
'Induction and Probability', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 50 (1949-50)
pp. 27-42.
'Mathematical Formalisms and their
Realizations', Philosophy, vol. 27 (1952)
pp. 138-47.
'Abstract Logic and Concrete Thought',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol
56 (1955-6), pp. 25-44.
'The Philosophical Basis of Mathematical
Rigour', Philosophical Quarterly, vol.
(1957/8), pp. 204-23.
Mathematical Logic and the Foundations of
Mathematics (1963).
'Proof, Part IF, Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 40 (1966)
pp. 39-46.
Other Relevant Works
(with J. G. Semple), Algebraic Protective
Geometry (1952; repr. 1998 in the Oxford
Classic Texts series),
(with Brian Rotman), The Theory of Sets and
Transfinite Numbers (1966).
Wilfred Hodges
521
KNOX
KNOX, Howard Vincente (1868-1960)
Howard Knox was born in Trinidad and died
in Oxford. Little is known about the life of
this British army officer and philosophical
writer, generally referred to as Captain Knox.
He is shown on membership lists of the Mind
Association in 1902 and 1903 as serving in the
Royal Garrison Regiment, Gibraltar; from
1904 to 1906, as living in London; from 1907
to 1909 as at Grindelwald, Switzerland; and in
1910 and later, as living in Oxford. His last
entry is for 1938. He was unmarried and an
avid climber and skier, suffering at least three
serious accidents in the Alps during the
1908-1909 season. In 1909 he sold his
Grindelwald house and moved to Oxford for
the study of geography. Years later, he held a
research fellowship in philosophy at
Manchester College, Oxford, the Unitarian
institution where in 1908 William James had
delivered the lectures which became A
Pluralistic Universe. James met Knox at that
time and described him as a 'militant "prag-
matist"' with an 'extremely acute' mind.
Knox entered philosophy by way of his
friendship with Ferdinand Canning Scott
SCHILLER, the polemically minded companion
of William James in the controversy over prag-
matism which raged in the early 1900s. Knox
met Schiller in 1901 or earlier - possibly in
Switzerland, where Schiller liked to vacation -
for Knox contributed mocking pieces, on T.H.
Green, Aristotle and others, to Schiller's Mind!,
a parody of Mind published in 1901.
Throughout the pragmatism controversy,
Knox insisted that the pragmatists offered the
only definition of truth applicable to concrete
human knowing, while the intellectualists
offered an abstraction, with no recognizable
instances of truth as they conceived it. While
after 1910 the philosophical world moved on
to other subjects, Knox remained a polemicist,
defending the cause of pragmatism against
intellectualism, abstractionism, absolutism.
His association with James resulted in a small
book, William James, consisting mostly of
KNOX
extracts from James's Principles of Psychology',
but presenting a distinctive and still valuable
interpretation. For Knox, James was the first
thinker to see the full significance of Darwinian
biology as fatal not only to the 'fixity of species'
and 'false Platonism' but also to the 'mecha-
nistic philosophy'. Darwinism emphasized the
emergence of genuine novelties and the impor-
tance of progress through individual variation.
Accordingly, at the heart of James's meta-
physics Knox finds an insistence upon genuine
novelties and upon individuals as the real
objects of knowledge. James was at fault,
however, in repudiating logic, which left him
open to accusations of irrationalism. Following
Schiller, Knox holds that logic must be
reformed but not rejected.
Knox's main work is The Will to Be Free, in
which he sees himself as following up leads
provided by James. The book is mostly an
attack upon the 'deterministic principle', said to
be a condition of intelligibility, that whatever is,
is necessary. Knox argues that this principle is
not only destructive of all ideas of personality
and selfhood, but when closely examined also
proves to be empty. Knox associated the prin-
ciple with traditional logic which in his view
must yield to Schiller's reformed logic.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Philosophy of William James (1914).
The Will to Be Free: A Critique of
Deterministic Theory and A Vindication of
Real Alternatives in Human Purpose
(1928).
The Evolution of Truth and Other Essays
(1930).
Other Relevant Works
Kaufman, Marjorie R., 'William James's
Letters to a Young Pragmatist', Journal of
the History of Ideas, vol. 24 (1963), pp.
413-21.
I.K. Skrupskelis
522
KNOX, Ronald Arbuthnott (1888-1957)
Ronald Knox was born in Kibworth,
Leicestershire on 17 February 1888 and died in
Mells, Somerset on 24 August 1957. He was
educated at Eton and entered Balliol College,
Oxford in 1906. Son of the Anglican Bishop of
Manchester, he was ordained in the Church of
England in 1910, and was chaplain and
honorary fellow of Trinity College, Oxford.
During World War I he served as a cryptogra-
pher. In 1914 he was received into the Roman
Catholic Church, a decision he explained in
his early autobiography A Spiritual Aeneid
(1918). To become a Catholic priest he pursued
two years of theological studies at St Edmund's,
Ware, where he then taught for seven years
until 1926. Appointed in that year as chaplain
to the Catholic students at Oxford for thirteen
years, he interacted with various academicians
including the Jesuits Martin D'ARCY and C.C.
Martindale. In 1939 he was commissioned by
the Catholic hierarchy in the United Kingdom
to produce a new translation of the Bible. He
resigned his chaplaincy in order to devote
himself to this task at Aldenham, Shopshire.
Rather than working from the original biblical
languages he used the Latin Vulgate as his text
(New Testament, 1944; Old Testament,
1949-50). In 1947 he moved to Mells,
Somerset, where he was a paying guest in the
home of the Asquith family for the last eleven
years of his life. His spiritual confidant, Hubert
van Zeller, OSB, resided in nearby Downside
Abbey. Knox did not travel widely, although he
took a Hellenic cruise in 1937, drove to
Germany in 1953, and in 1954 stayed briefly
with friends in Zanzibar and Rhodesia.
Knox was not a philosopher in the strict
academic sense. He might more correctly be
classified as a scholar of the Latin classics,
translator, satirist and apologist. Still, as he
wrote in his early autobiography: 'A first in
Greats left me neither a professional philoso-
pher nor a professional historian; but it left me
with a fierce love of sifting evidence and the
power of not being fascinated into acquies-

cence when superior persons talked philoso-
phy at me' (Spiritual Aeneid, p. 55). His work
Broadcast Minds (1932) showed evidence that
he had read widely the works of philosophers
such as H.G. WELLS, Julian HUXLEY, Bertrand
RUSSELL and H.L. Mencken. He was for his
time a renaissance man whose publications
from 1926 to 1937 even included six detective
stories. In 1939 he published Let Dons Delight,
a series of nine imaginary dialogues set from
1588 to 1938 which touch lightly on philo-
sophical themes. Subsequent to the bombings
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he published in
1945 an acclaimed ethical condemnation of
this destruction entitled God and the Atom.
His most ambitious book was Enthusiasm pub-
lished in 1950, an analysis of those heretical or
dubious versions of Christian faith that the
Germans call Schwdrmerei. The study is not
specifically original research, but draws upon
published studies such as Henri Bremond's
Histoire litteraire du sentiment religieux en
France. In a collection of Oxford conferences
entitled Hidden Stream (1953) Knox endeav-
oured to illustrate that: 'Not all the philosophies
of Oxford are philosophies of negation and
despair; she is fed by secret streams, not less
influential to her life or less native to her genius'
(p. vi).
Because of his elitist background and his
circle of friends, he was lionized by admiring
English-speaking Catholics as a sort of John
Henry Newman redivivus, a view promoted
by Evelyn Waugh's biography. In the 1940s
and 1950s his studies on worship, the Creed
and the gospel, explained 'in slow motion',
were widely read in Britain and North America,
partly because of the dearth of Catholic
writings at the time.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Spiritual Aeneid (1918).
Broadcast Minds (1932).
Let Dons Delight: Being Variations on a
Theme in an Oxford Common-Room
(1939).
God and the Atom (1945).
523
KNOX
Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of
Religion, with Special Reference to the
Xvii and Xviii Centuries (1950).
Hidden Stream (1953).
Other Relevant Works
Waugh, Evelyn, The Life of the Right
Reverend Ronald Knox (1959);
chronological list of Knox's chief published
works, pp. 336-8.
Corbishley, Thomas, and Speaight, Robert,
Ronald Knox: The Priest & The Writer
(1965).
Fitzgerald, Penelope, The Knox Brothers
(1977).
Michael A. Fahey, SJ
KNOX, Thomas Malcolm (1900-80)
Thomas Malcolm Knox was born in
Birkenhead, Cheshire on 28 November 1900
and died on 6 April 1980. The son of James
Knox and Isabella Russell Marshall, he
attended Bury Grammar School and the
Liverpool Institute, before gaining a first in
literae humaniores from Pembroke College,
Oxford. From 1923 to 1931 he held various
administrative posts at Lever Brothers Ltd,
which included the management of the
company's West African interests. In 1931
Knox returned to academic life, as a lecturer in
philosophy at Jesus College, Oxford, taking
on a fellowship and tutorship in 1933. He was
then lecturer in Greek at Queen's College,
Oxford from 1934 to 1936. In 1936 he became
Professor of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews
University, Scotland. In 1952, he took on the
position of Acting Principal of St Andrews, and
was confirmed as Principal in 1953, a position
that he held until 1966. In recognition of his
scholarship, he received an honorary fellowship
from Pembroke College, Oxford, Hon. LLDs
KNOX
from Edinburgh, Pennsylvania and Dundee
Universities, and an Hon. DLitt from Glasgow
University. He was elected a fellow of the Royal
Society of Edinburgh in 1955 and received a
knighthood in 1961. He also served on
numerous boards and councils, including as
Chairman of the Advisory Council on
Education in Scotland from 1957 to 1961. He
was the 1965-6 Gifford Lecturer at the
University of Aberdeen. He retired from uni-
versity administration in 1966, living in
Perthshire until his death.
Knox's main contribution to philosophy was
as the translator of the nineteenth-century
German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel. His most important translations include
Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1957), Hegel's
Political Writings (1964) and Aesthetics (1975).
For most of the twentieth century it was mainly
through Knox's translations that Hegel's phi-
losophy was available to English-speaking
students. Knox was also the leading pupil and
close friend of the English philosopher and his-
torian R.G. COLLINGWOOD, which led to his
editorial involvement in the posthumous pub-
lication of some of Collingwood's writings. He
made a somewhat controversial decision not to
publish parts of Collingwood's work, based
on what he believed were Collingwood's own
wishes. Knox acknowledged his enormous
intellectual debt to both Hegel and
Collingwood, as well as to the Scottish philoso-
pher John OMAN.
His Gifford Lectures, published in 1968 in a
revised version under the title Action, dealt
with the development and manifestations of
moral experience, and the religious faith which
can be derived from this. They show Knox's
interests and approach to be somewhat outside
the philosophical mainstream of the mid twen-
tieth century. Knox himself conceded that he
was intellectually old-fashioned, steeped as he
was in the ideas and literature of the nineteenth
century. In particular, he derided the modern
trend towards the reduction of philosophy to
linguistic analysis and his book was aimed at
general readers who had an interest in what he
524
termed 'the traditional problems of philoso-
phy and in the fundamentals of religious belief
(Action, p. 14). These two themes can also be
regarded as the main focus of Knox's career as
a moral philosopher.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1957).
Hegel's Political Writings (1964).
Action (1968).
Other Relevant Works
Boucher, David, The Significance of R. G.
Collingwood's Principles of History',
Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 58,
(1997), pp. 309-30.
Katrina Ford
KOESTLER, Arthur (1905-83)
Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest on 5
September 1905 and died in London in 1983,
reportedly on 3 March. He was educated at the
Vienna Polytechnical University, where he
studied engineering (1922-5) without com-
pleting his degree. From 1926 until he settled in
England, in 1940, he worked as a freelance
journalist, as foreign correspondent for German
newspapers in Jerusalem and Paris, and as war
correspondent for the London daily, News
Chronicle, in Spain. Disillusioned, after having
been a member of the German Communist
Party (1931-8), he became an influential
defender of civil rights. He also made significant
contributions to the philosophy of mind and
science.
Up to the end of the 1940s, in novels such as
the celebrated Darkness at Noon (1940) and
non-fictional essays, Koestler focused on the
political and existential issues of his time. After
what he called his Vocational change', which
occurred in his late forties, heralded by Insight

and Outlook (1949), he turned his attention to
philosophical, psychological and scientific
issues.
In The Sleepwalkers (1959) he examined the
process of discovery and theory change that
led from the cosmology of the Babylonians to
that of Newton. Koestler called attention to
the discontinuous and partly irrational nature
of this development. In The Act of Creation
(1964) he pursued the question of the nature of
human creativity. He propounded an elabo-
rate theory of creativity based on the notion
'bisociation' - an interaction between two inde-
pendent 'matrices' (patterns) of perception or
reasoning. Depending on the attitude of the
person, he argued, the interaction would have
a comic, intellectually synthetic or aesthetic
effect. In The Ghost in the Machine (1967)
and Janus (1978) he developed a theory of the
structure of physical, biological, social and
mental systems. The key notions of the theory
he named 'holon' and 'holarchy'. Each holon
(unit) in a holarchy (hierarchic system of
holons), Koestler explained, contains other
holons, and is itself contained in a larger holon;
and the coherence of a holon or holarchy is
maintained by a balance between the 'self-
assertive' and 'integrative' tendencies of the
constituent holons. For instance, atoms, cells,
organs, human individuals and societies are
holons. Ironically, he pointed out, as history has
shown, in human social holons the greatest
destructiveness is generally due not to a self-
assertive, but to an integrative tendency (the
unselfish loyalty) of its members. Koestler
further applied the holarchic approach to the
mind-body problem and proposed a 'serialis-
tic' hypothesis according to which 'mental'
(conscious attentive) or 'mechanical' (non-con-
scious physiological) processes dominate the
control of behaviour to various degrees at dif-
ferent levels of a mind-body holarchy.
In The Roots of Coincidence (1972) Koestler
explained why he considered modern parapsy-
chology to meet scientific standards and to be
an important field of research. When, afflicted
with Parkinson's disease and leukaemia, he
525
KOLAKOWSKI
died by his own hand, he had bequeathed funds
for founding a Chair of Parapsychology, which
was set up at Edinburgh University in 1984.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Darkness at Noon (1940).
Insight and Outlook: An Inquiry into the
Common Foundations of Science, Art and
Social Ethics (1949).
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's
Changing Vision of the Universe (1959).
The Act of Creation (1964).
The Ghost in the Machine (1967).
(Ed. with J. R. Smythies), Beyond
Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life
Sciences. The Alpbach Symposium 1968
(1969).
The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971).
The Roots of Coincidence (1972).
Janus: A Summing Up (1978).
Bricks to Babel (19W}.
Further Reading
Cesarani, David, Arthur Koestler: The
Homeless Mind (1998).
Hamilton, Iain, Koestler: A Biography
(1982).
Harris, Harold (ed.), Astride the Two
Cultures: Arthur Koestler at 70 (1975).
B.I.B. Lindahl
KOLAKOWSKI, Leszek (1927-)
Leszek Kolakowski was born in Radom,
Poland on 23 October 1927, the son of Lucyna
(formerly Pietrusiewicz) and Jersey
Kolakowski, a publicist. During the German
occupation of Poland in World War II he was
educated in the underground school system
and read extensively in his father's library.
When the war ended he enrolled in the Polish
Workers' Party. He became a member of the
KOLAKOWSKI
board of the weekly journal, Nowa Kultura,
and joined the staff of Po Prostu, another
weekly, run by young communists. In 1947 he
enrolled as a philosophy student at the
University of Lodz and in 1949 was appointed
assistant in logic there. He received a PhD in
1953 from the University of Warsaw, where he
duly became, first, an assistant professor, and
then, in 1959, docent. In 1964 he was
appointed Professor of the Section of the
History of Philosophy. Concurrently with this
appointment he worked in the Institute of
Philosophy at the Polish Academy of Sciences.
During those early postwar years
Kolakowski's trenchant criticisms of Stalinist
doctrine provoked severe disapproval from the
Polish government. As early as 1956 he had
been censured for his Marxist revisionism and
for his role in the activities that that led to the
'Polish Spring' of 1956. In 1966 he was for-
bidden to teach. Two years later he and his
family left Poland for Canada and the USA,
where he held a succession of professorships.
He became visiting professor in the Department
of Philosophy at McGill University, Montreal
(1968-9), and then at Berkeley, California
(1969-70). In 1975 he was a visiting professor
at Yale University and from 1981 to 1994 pro-
fessor on the Committee of Social Thought at
the University of Chicago. In 1970 he became
a senior research fellow at All Souls, Oxford.
He took official retirement in 1995, continuing
to write and lecture, and to live in Oxford.
Kolakowski's numerous awards and honours
include a fellowship of the British Academy
(1980), the Erasmus Prize (1983), the
McArthur Fellowship (1983) and the Jefferson
Award (1984). He is a fellow of the Academia
Europa, the Academic Universelle des Cultures,
and of the Bayerische Akademie der Kiinste, a
foreign fellow of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences and a member of the
International Institute of Philosophy, the Pen
Club, and of numerous other philosophical
and literary bodies worldwide. Honours
accorded him include the Jefferson Award
(19560), the Jurxzkowski Prize (1969), the
526
Friedenpreis des Deutschen Buchhandels
(1977), the Prix Europeen d'Essai (1981), the
Praemium Erasmianum (1982), the Prix
Tocqueville (1993) and the Premio Nonino
(1997). He has been awarded six honorary
doctorates. In 2003 he became the inaugural
winner of the John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime
Achievement in the Humanities and Social
Sciences. This award is worth one million US
dollars, and is intended to complement the
Nobel Prize.
The scope of Kolakowski's intellectual com-
petences is polymathic, encompassing many
branches of philosophy as well as the history of
philosophy, European culture and literature,
politics, sociology, mythology, ethics, theology
and religion. He is author of over thirty books,
numerous articles and papers, and some stories
and mythologies that provide accessible intro-
ductions to philosophical ideas and problems.
He has written in Polish, English and German,
and has made numerous translations from
European languages into English. After he left
Poland in 1968 he began work to produce his
Main Currents in Marxism (1978), a three-
volume history and critique of communism.
He developed his own form of Marxist
humanism in response to what he saw as the
profound material and spiritual desolation
resulting from the Stalinist system. His
overview of the communist movement begins
with Plotinus, whom he regards as a founder of
the dialectic process, and culminates in a study
of Mao Zedong and Marxist thought in the
1970s. In the Epilogue to the third volume he
wrote: 'At present Marxism neither interprets
the world nor changes it: it is merely a reper-
toire of slogans serving to organize various
interests, most of them completely remote from
those with which Marxism originally identi-
fied itself (Main Currents in Marxism, vol. 3,
p. 530). He sees the movement as having been
a rallying point for numerous, very different,
hostile forces.
Much of Kolakowski's thought is nourished
by his profound interest in problems accruing
from dualism and its legacy in European phi-

losophy, and from his related preoccupation
with the possibility of metaphysics and
religion. He has maintained that the
Enlightenment has been a powerfully influen-
tial factor, though not always a benign one, in
forming over the past two hundred years the
intellectual attitudes that eventually became
dominant in the twentieth century. His view is
that change, and what is seen as progress,
always carry costs, and that an ever-increasing
veneration for the methods and results of
science has resulted in an impoverishment of
human experience and spiritual capacity. In an
essay, 'The Idolatry of Polities' (in Modernity
on Endless Trial, pp. 146-61), written in 1986,
he identified three milestones on the road from
the Enlightenment to the present. The first
milestone he describes as 'a general relativism'
that has penetrated every aspect of human
mental life, that ridicules absolute values and
that often culminates in various forms of
nihilism. The second is the degradation of
human personality by 'the naturalistic world-
view' and this, he argues, has deprived human
beings of a sense of personal responsibility.
His third milestone marks humanity's loss of
historical self-awareness, and its loss of its
roots, the sources of which had always been
religious mythology. His claim here is that
these losses result in the absence of any sense
that the entire past is an active component in
the present lives of human beings.
In a similar vein, and illustrative of these
ideas, he has argued that philosophical posi-
tivism has ignored its own relativity and has
failed to recognize its dependence on specific
cultural values. It has sought to eliminate
genetic questions from epistemology, believing
that human thought can be 'neutralized' and
that the criteria of correctness of knowledge can
be independent of the cultural, psychological,
historical and biological conditions under
which it is acquired. He has further maintained
that positivism has endeavoured to adopt a
purely observational stance, and that in its
radical forms it reduces all knowledge to bio-
logical behaviour and abolishes necessary
527
KOLAKOWSKI
truths: non-analytic knowledge is regarded by
positivism as the sum total of individual expe-
riences, and the human desire for some kind of
metaphysical ground or certainty is seen as
error.
Kolakowski challenges the positivism he has
described by asking how such a stance can
account for the unflagging exercise and pursuit
of reason by human beings in their search for
metaphysical truth and certainty. Positivism, he
argues, would regard this pursuit as evidence of
intellectual degeneracy, but why, he asks, should
we not, in opposition, claim that it is evidence
that 'our biological life and our metaphysical
explorations spring from two incompatible and
even hostile sources' (The Alienation of Reason,
p. 218)? His point is that although positivism
may reject the human dedication to reason as
error, it cannot, from the observational stand-
point it has adopted, ignore the existence of this
dedicated pursuit. He concludes that the con-
temporary dilemma for philosophy is whether to
accept that metaphysics must renounce all claims
to 'scientific' status, or to consider in full seri-
ousness the possibility of a dualistic existence for
human beings.
Foundational to almost all Kolakowski's
wide-ranging critical enquiries are his concern
to explore the concept of the Absolute and his
claim that a rationalistic epistemology alone
can neither settle the question of the existence
of God, nor provide a satisfactory foundation
for morality. Latterly, he has worked to
produce a series of writings that examines the
questions that have been asked by great
philosophers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Priest and the Jester (1959).
Talk of the Devil (1965).
The Alienation of Reason: A History of
Positivist Thought, trans. Norbert
Guterman (New York, 1966); rev. as
Positivist Philosophy from Hume to the
Vienna Circle (1972).
Chretiens sans eglise [originally in Polish,
1958] (Paris, 1968).
KOLAKOWSKI
(Ed. with Stuart Hampshire), The Socialist
Idea (Indiana, 1974).
Husserl and the Search for Certainty
(Cambridge, Mass., 1975).
Main Currents in Marxism, 3 vols (Oxford,
1978).
Religion: If There is No God (1982).
Bergson (Oxford, 1985).
Metaphysical Horror (Oxford, 1988).
The Key to Heaven: Conversations with the
Devil (Chicago and London, 1989).
The Presence of Myth (Chicago and London,
1989).
Thirteen Tales from the Kingdom ofLailonia
(Chicago, 1989).
Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago, 1991).
God Owes us Nothing: A Brief Remark on
Pascal's Religion and the Spirit of
Jansenism (Chicago, 1995)
Freedom, Fame, Lying and Betrayal: Essays
on Everyday Life (1999).
Two Eyes of Spinoza and Other Essays on
Philosophers (2002).
My Correct Views on Everything (Indiana,
2004).
Other Relevant Works
Festschrift, Ohecnose [The Presence] (Lodz,
1993).
Mejbaum, Waclaw and Aleksandra
Zukrowska, 'Leszek Kolakowski's
Misinterpretation of Marxism', Dialectical
Humanism, vol. 7 (1980), pp. 107-88; vol
8 (1981), pp. 149-60.
Diane Collinson
KOLNAI, Aurel (or Aurel Stein: 1900-73)
Aurel Kolnai was born Aurel Stein in Budapest
on 5 December 1900 and died in London on 28
June 1973. Of Jewish origin, he attended
Budapest's Evangelical (Lutheran) Gymnasium,
528
which also graduated Nobel Prize winner
Eugene Wigner and mathematics genius John
von Neumann. The University of Vienna
awarded him a doctorate in philosophy in
1926, the year in which he was received into the
Church of Rome. He eked out a living as a
political journalist until 1937, when, with the
shadow of Nazism lengthening, he fled the old
imperial capital and for the next three years
moved between London, 2^urich, Bern and
Paris. From 1940 to 1945 he and his wife lived
in near poverty in New York and Boston. In
1945 he accepted a position on the faculty of
Laval University in Quebec. There he taught
until 1955, when he moved to England and,
from 1959 until his death, was visiting lecturer
in philosophy at Bedford College London.
Kolnai did his most important work in moral
philosophy. Having received his philosophical
training in Austria, not Germany, he always
distrusted systems of thought, including the
Thomism favoured at Laval. Even before he
made England his final destination, therefore,
he felt an affinity for Common Sense philoso-
phy. Moreover, he knew that G.E. MOORE, the
famous defender of common sense, admired
the work of Franz Brentano, who had taught in
Vienna and with whom 'most later anti-idealist
and anti-positivist, i.e. neo-objectivist, phe-
nomenological and intuitionist thought' had
originated (Ethics, Value and Reality, p. 193).
Thus he regarded Moore and the intuitionists
H.A. PRICHARD, W.D. Ross and E.F. CARROT
as adherents of the same broad tradition of
moral philosophy in which he himself had been
trained. Like Ross, he judged the duty of 'non-
maleficence' as thematically - theoretically and
existentially - primary. Conscience was afflicted
more by an evil done than by a good left
undone. To be sure, conscience might err and
had therefore always to remain in dialogue
with what Kolnai called the moral consensus of
humankind. In his view, there was far more
intercultural agreement concerning moral
norms than relativists led people to believe.
That agreement was particularly obvious when
one ignored bizarre and atypical moral claims

and systems and examined such important
moral compendia as the Code of Hammurabi,
the Decalogue, Egyptian ethical texts and the
Koran. Although the moral consensus was not
absolute in the sense of being immutable, it
was 'quasi absolute', or authoritative. Like con-
science, it was open to criticism and improve-
ment, but in the majority of cases modifications
were such as to establish new responsibilities;
in any event, the burden of proof always rested
with those lobbying for change.
Kolnai always insisted that political philoso-
phy, the other field to which he made a signif-
icant contribution, not be confused with moral
philosophy. He did not mean that those who
exercised political power were relieved of
ordinary moral responsibility; quite the
contrary. They could not justify immoral
actions by appealing to some vision of a perfect
world. The politician's first duty was to obey
the moral law. Morality, then, set limits to
political means, but it did not prescribe politi-
cal ends. Political purposes were practical in
nature and although they sometimes involved
moral issues, they related most often to non-
moral matters, including the mutual adjust-
ment of conflicting interests. Conflicts of
interest did present difficulties, but they con-
stituted an ineradicable part of an imperfect
reality. It was the refusal to tolerate imperfec-
tion or to accept the basic structure of reality
that typified the 'utopian mind', against which
Kolnai never ceased to inveigh. Utopians mis-
judged human imperfection as intolerable evil
and remained blind to the fact that moral
values were phenomenologically given in
reality. In the effort to achieve perfection, they
destroyed the many goods that made life worth
living. That was not, however, an argument
against criticism and political reform. Kolnai's
anti-utopian conservatism was to political phi-
losophy what British intuitionism and
Austrian/German material value ethics were to
moral philosophy. Like those approaches to
ethics, political conservatism, rightly under-
stood, regarded reality as good enough to bear
within it a vast array of moral values, but poor
529
KORNER
enough to require critical scrutiny and reform.
Differently put, true conservatives had first to
accept reality as the bearer of tradition, just as
moral intuitionists accepted the moral consensus
that crystallized the collective moral wisdom
and insight of people in all times and places. At
the same time, they had to subject tradition to
rational criticism just as intuitionists deployed
conscience against discreet aspects of the moral
consensus. The reciprocal relationship between
tradition and rational critique paralleled that
between moral consensus and conscience.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Thematic Primacy of Moral Evil',
Philosophical Quarterly', vol. 6, no. 22
(1956), pp. 27-42.
Ethics, Value and Reality: Selected Papers
(Indianapolis, 1978).
The Utopian Mind and Other Papers: A
Critical Study in Moral and Political
Philosophy (1995).
Political Memoirs (Lanham, Maryland,
1999).
Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in
Political Philosophy (Lanham, Maryland,
1999).
Lee Congdon
KORNER, Stephan (1913-2000)
Stephan Korner was born in Ostrava,
Czechoslovakia on 26 September 1913 and died
in Bristol on or before 18 August 2000. He was
educated at Charles University in Prague. When
the German army occupied Czechoslovakia in
1938, he fled the country and settled in Britain.
Later he joined the Czech resistance and fought
in France. Korner earned a doctorate from
Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he worked
under Richard BRAITHWAITE and was for a time
a pupil of WITTGENSTEIN. After the war he
KORNER
began teaching at the University of Bristol. The
university appointed him Chair of Philosophy
in 1952, a post he held until his retirement
from Bristol in 1979. Korner served as Dean of
the Faculty of Arts from 1965 to 1966, and as
Pro-Vice Chancellor of the university from
1968 to 1971. During this time, he helped guide
the University of Bristol through a difficult
period of student protests. He served as Chair
of the Philosophy Department at Yale
University from 1970 until 1984; he also held
a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Graz
in Austria. Upon his retirement, the University
of Bristol elected Korner professor emeritus,
and in 1986 it named him honorary fellow of
the university, one of its highest honours.
Stephan Korner was found dead with his wife
on 18 August 2000.
Korner's work was uncommonly wide-
ranging. His main interests were the philosophy
of language, epistemology and philosophy of
science, but he worked extensively in meta-
physics, ethics and the philosophy of mathe-
matics as well. Korner was in some ways an
orthodox analytic philosopher. He conceived of
philosophy as a combination of 'exhibition
analysis' (the attempt to identify the rules deter-
mining correct and incorrect uses of expres-
sions) and 'replacement analysis' (the attempt
to replace defective concepts with more
adequate ones) (What is Philosophy, p. 26).
Plato's Republic, for example, may be seen as
an exhibition analysis of the term 'justice', while
RUSSELL'S theory of types may be seen as a
replacement analysis of the concept 'class'.
Korner also maintained that traditional philo-
sophical problems are often best approached
with linguistic tools. The problem of the
external world, for example, is most fruitfully
understood as an inquiry into the extension of
the concept 'physical object' (Conceptual
Thinking, p. 186). Despite the centrality of lin-
guistic analysis to his work, however, Korner
never embraced analytic philosophy to the
exclusion of all other approaches. He did not
believe that all philosophical problems were
rooted in linguistic confusion, or that all such
530
problems could be dispelled through the proper
analysis of ordinary language. Korner remained
open to other philosophical methods, particu-
larly transcendental analysis. Not coinciden-
tally, he was far more interested in metaphysics
and ethics than were most of his peers, and far
more confident that philosophy could say
something informative about them.
Korner's breadth was largely due to the influ-
ence of Kant on his work. From his earliest
publications, Korner defended a metaphysical
standpoint strongly influenced by Kant's theory
of regulative ideas. Metaphysical propositions,
he claimed, are neither empirical nor logical
statements, but 'directives' (Conceptual
Thinking, p. 270) - that is, rules governing the
use of highly general concepts (such as 'cause')
to order our thinking. Korner's debt to Kant
was also evident in his work on the philosophy
of mathematics, which defended a modified
intuitionism greatly shaped by Kant's claim
that mathematics studies constructions in time.
Kant influenced Korner's work in epistemology
as well, sparking his interest in the role played
by conceptual schemes and categorical frame-
works in organizing experience. Despite these
debts, Korner was no slavish defender of Kant.
He criticized Kant for failing to see the funda-
mental distinction between empirical categories
and the categories of Newtonian science
(Experience and Theory, p. 176), and he con-
sidered the 'whole doctrine of synthetic a priori
propositions unsatisfactory' (Conceptual
Thinking, p. 280).
Korner first became well known in the mid
1950s as a result of two early works. Kant,
published in 1955, was a clear, accessible intro-
duction to the father of critical philosophy. It
argued for Kant's continuing relevance to con-
temporary philosophy, and it quickly became
a popular teaching text. Conceptual Thinking,
published the same year, sought to uncover the
implicit rules governing the use of concepts,
particularly those rules that are universally
accepted and that bear on philosophical
problems. Conceptual Thinking was particu-
larly innovative in its discussion of inexact

concepts - that is, concepts that allow 'neutral
candidates for class membership' (p. 36). The
notion of inexactness also played an impor-
tant role in Korner's other major works.
Experience and Theory (1966), his main con-
tribution to the philosophy of science, argued
that science is fully compatible with common
sense empirical discourse, since the former is an
'idealization' (Experience and Theory', p. 90) of
experience and is not directly connected with it.
Empirical discourse makes use of inexact pred-
icates, and demands that some propositions be
neutral (that is, neither true nor false). Scientific
theories, by contrast, ignore inexactness by
turning neutral propositions into true or false
ones. Science and common sense are both 'con-
ceptual nets thrown over experience', related
but independent, and 'no strand of deductive
relations leads from one to the other' (ibid., p.
182). This claim has important consequences
for our understanding of human nature, since
it implies that notions which fit poorly into
our best scientific theories - qualia and free
will, for example - are not for that reason ille-
gitimate. The scientific image and the manifest
image can co-exist.
Inexactness also played an important role in
one of Korner's last major works, Metaphysics:
Its Structure and Function (1984). This book
revised Korner's views on the status of meta-
physics. Whereas he had earlier seen all meta-
physical propositions as directive, Korner now
distinguished two kinds of metaphysical
systems, 'immanent' and 'transcendent'.
Immanent metaphysical systems regulate expe-
rience by laying down 'principles to which
every proposition about the public world must
conform'; transcendent metaphysical systems
consist of 'speculative conjectures' about 'the
world in itself (Metaphysics, p. 1). While
sharply critical of dogmatic attempts to extend
our knowledge beyond the objects of possible
experience, Korner maintained that transcen-
dent metaphysics is unavoidable. Even to say
that we cannot know anything about reality in
itself is to make a claim about reality in itself.
Korner's work was even more wide-ranging
531
KORNER
than his major books would suggest. He edited
several collections of essays from the annual
Bristol Conference on Critical Philosophy; he
wrote an introductory textbook and a number
of short monographs; he delivered the twenty-
fourth Eddington Lecture at Cambridge; and he
dabbled, particularly towards the end of his
career, in ethics. Despite his prolific publishing,
Korner is perhaps best remembered as a
popular and respected teacher. Even his pub-
lished work served an important pedagogical
function, and often tried to make difficult topics
- Kant's three Critiques, the philosophy of
mathematics - accessible to novices. Korner is
also remembered for bringing philosophy to a
wider public. He was highly visible in the
Bristol community because of his work as an
administrator, and he advised playwright Tom
Stoppard on the philosophical content of his
plays, particularly Jumpers. Perhaps Korner's
most significant contribution was to act as a
sort of ambassador. He helped to keep British
philosophy in touch with more traditional
values - a belief in the importance of meta-
physics, a respect for the history of philosophy
- during the heyday of analytic philosophy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Conceptual Thinking: A Logical Inquiry
(Cambridge, 1955).
Kant (1955).
The Philosophy of Mathematics: An
Introductory Essay (1960).
Experience and Theory: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Science (1966).
Kant's Conception of freedom (1967).
Categorial frameworks (Oxford, 1970).
Experience and Conduct (Cambridge, 1976).
Metaphysics: Its Structure and function
(Cambridge, 1984).
On the Logic of Practical Evaluation in
Logic and Ethics (Dordrecht, 1991).
Other Relevant Works
(Ed.), Observation and Interpretation: A
Symposium of Philosophers and Physicists
(1957).
KORNER
Abstraction in Science and Morals
(Cambridge, 1971).
What is Philosophy? One Philosopher's
Answer (1969); repr. as fundamental
Questions in Philosophy (1971).
(Ed.), Practical Reason: Papers and
Discussions (Oxford, 1974).
(Ed.), Explanation: Papers and Discussions
(Oxford, 1975).
(Ed.), Philosophy of Logic: Papers and
Discussions (Oxford, 1976).
Robert Piercey
KYDD, Rachel Mary (or May, nee Burton
Jones: 1918-2001)
Rachel Mary (or May) Burton Jones was born
in Rotherham on 15 November 1918 and died
in Grassington, North Yorkshire in May 2001.
Having studied philosophy at Oxford from the
late 1930s to the early 1940s, she served as
President of the Jowett Society in the mid 1940s
and was one of the founders of a philosophy
discussion group in Oxford known as the
Vicious Circle. Kydd moved in the late 1940s
and became involved with cattle and horse
breeding. Both Kydd and her husband Ronald
were well known in the Arab horse world and
were guests of the Shah of Bahrain on
numerous occasions. Kydd is reported to have
been approached by the Shah to compile a
series of books on Arab stud horses, which are
said to be quite lavish productions, though it is
unclear whether Kydd is acknowledged as the
actual author of those works. She did, however,
publish a book on long-distance horse riding
under her own name.
Kydd's only major work in philosophy is
Reason and Conduct in Hume's Treatise
(1946), one of the first in-depth treatments of
Hume's moral and practical philosophy in the
twentieth century. Kydd addresses the general
532
question of whether reason can influence
conduct, and she turns to Hurne for help on the
questions whether and how moral judgements
can motivate action. Kydd is careful to locate
Hume's own position within the general his-
torical context within which it was written,
summarizing the views of Clark, Hutcheson,
Grotius and Locke to aid in this. A central
point in Hume's practical philosophy, for
Kydd, is his distinction between the tightness
or virtuousness' of actions and their obligatory
force. Moral judgements properly called are
not concerned with the 'rightriess, goodness, or
virtuousness' of an act, but with 'an agent's
obligation to action', that is with the relation
between thought and will such that 'an agent is
prompted to do an action by the thought of it'
(Reason and Conduct in Hume's Treatise,
p. 54). Kydd challenges the accepted reading of
reason and will in Hume, and defends what she
calls the 'doctrine of reason as the "mediate" or
"oblique" cause of action' (ibid., p. 115). Kydd
argues that Hume's own analysis of the role of
reason in action was not concerned with the full
range and complexity of the many kinds of
judgement that can influence action.
Developing Hume's own position, Kydd claims
that reason is indeed 'a slave of the passions',
but a slave only to 'the passion to reason; all
particular passions reason can control' (ibid.,
p. 163). The 'affections and understanding'
thus become equally important in directing our
actions, for affections unaided by understand-
ing are 'blind'.
Kydd's Reason and Conduct in Hume's
Treatise still stands as a significant work in its
field and can be found in any respectable bib-
liography of Hume's work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reason and Conduct in Hume's Treatise
(1946; repr. Bristol, 1990).,
Philip Rose
 L
LACEY, Alan Robert (1926-)
A.R. Lacey was born in Birmingham on 17
May 1926. He was educated at St Edward's
School, Oxford (1939-44). Two years in the
army followed. He studied at St Catherine's
College, Cambridge (1946-52), obtaining a BA
in classics and English, and an MA and PhD in
moral sciences (philosophy) in 1953. A research
studentship at Manchester University was held
(1952-4). He lectured at Bedford College
London (1954; associate lectureship, 1956;
lecturer, 1973), and till retirement in 1991 was
a senior lecturer (transferring with the depart-
ment to King's College London in 1984).
A philosopher in the analytical tradition (yet
not purely so, as will soon be noted), Alan
Lacey has written on Aristotle's thesis on ousia
and form, critically investigated the philoso-
phy of time in the work of Bergson and,
latterly, produced an overview of the work of
the philosopher, Robert Nozick. He is also well
known in philosophy courses around the world
for his Dictionary of Philosophy (1976) and an
introduction to modern philosophy (1982).
The diversity of Lacey's thinking is well repre-
sented in the book on Nozick, for just as
Nozick's philosophy stretches from ethics, epis-
temology and philosophy of religion, but in no
way typical of dilettantism, so does Lacey's
philosophic investigation, indicating an extra-
ordinary breadth and thoroughness of knowl-
edge of his own. Indeed, the words Lacey used
to describe Nozick may be applied to himself:
'When he [Nozick] engages with a topic his
533
work is intense and penetrating and shows an
enviable ability to think through the hidden
implications of the view he is considering and
of alternatives to it' (Robert Nozick, p. 1).
Lacey's 1982 book, Modern Philosophy,
begins by introducing the reader to the purpose
of philosophic thought, and then discusses
problems from ten different areas, thus setting
up a situation whereby the inherent connection
of these parts of philosophy are recognized.
This strategy exposes a sense of interrelation-
ality that the aridness of analytical philosophy
often lacks. One of the observations of this
work is to note the increasing vitality of the
philosophic discipline from logical positivism.
More of a quick reference book, A
Dictionary of Philosophy gives a student a
valuable set of the commonest terms and
notions in current English-speaking philoso-
phy. Some entries on philosophers are also
provided, albeit minimally, with longer items
accompanied by annotated bibliographies.
The book on Henri Bergson surveys the ideas
of this philosopher from an analytical stand-
point, neither exaggerating, nor underestimat-
ing the strengths and weakness of his thought.
Bergson (1989) is not a history of ideas, nor an
academic genealogy of influences on the devel-
opment of his thought; it is rather a critical
examination of his key ideas: space and time
(including a brief note on Bergson's debate
with Einstein), free will, change and substance,
perception and memory, instinct and intelli-
gence and intuition, biology (including the elan
vital], the cosmos, morality and religion.
LACEY
Lacey has also published numerous articles in
various publications.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Dictionary of Philosophy (1976; 2nd edn,
lightly rev. and exp., 1986; 3rd edn, totally
rev. and further exp., 1996).
Modern Philosophy: An Introduction (1982).
Bergson (1989).
(Trans.), Book 2 of Philoponus's
Commentary on Aristotle's Physics (1993).
Robert Nozick (Chesham, 2001).
Elizabeth McCardell
LAING, Bertram Mitchell (1887-1960)
B.M. ('Bertie') Laing was born at Newton
Premnay, a farm near Aberdeen, on 24
November 1887 and died in Sheffield on 16
May 1960. He was a student at Aberdeen
University and received a DLitt in 1923. In the
meantime he had a commission in the army
during World War I, when he was awarded an
MC for gallantry. He was appointed lecturer in
philosophy at Sheffield in 1919 and promoted
to professor in 1945. He retired in 1949 and
was given the title of professor emeritus the
following year. A number of papers and man-
uscripts by Laing are held as one of the Special
Collections in the University of Sheffield
Library. The present entry was prepared after
consulting the Laing Collection, which includes
a complete manuscript, in Laing's own hand, of
his David Hume.
His main interests were in ethics and the
history of early modern philosophy. But above
all he was best known for his study of the
thought and life of Hume. In his David Hume
(1932) he offers a distinctive interpretation
according to which Hume's philosophy
attempts to overcome scepticism by using the
principles of association and the operation of
534
the imagination. In both the Treatise and the
first Enquiry Laing descries a dialectical pattern
of argumentation repeated on topic after topic
in which sceptical reasoning is first deployed to
show certain beliefs cannot be rationally justi-
fied, but then a constructive resolution is
advanced on empirical grounds. As RYLE put it
in his review, according to Laing, 'Hume
accompanies the wreckers as far as they go,
but he goes with them for the purpose of
salvage.'
While Laing's interpretation might sound
not so very dissimilar from the sceptical natu-
ralism often attributed to Hume, he was con-
cerned to defend Hume from the charge of
being any sort of sceptic, maintaining that he
was rather seeking a middle path between ratio-
nalism and scepticism. In part, this reading was
encouraged by a worry that taking Hume to be
endorsing sceptical arguments would diminish
his philosophical status, since Laing had shown,
by careful study of sources, how heavily
indebted Hume was in terms of sceptical rea-
soning to both Bayle and to a 1725 translation
of the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus. The
chief weakness of the interpretation is that,
although Laing claims 'the sceptical doctrines
which he states are those formulated by other
writers; and his own solution is sought by way
of empiricism' (David Hume., p. 262), he does
little to explain how any facts about human
nature, the association of ideas and the powers
of imagination can overcome or defeat scepti-
cal arguments against the justification of beliefs.
It might also be complained that the scepti-
cism Laing refers to is a doctrine which is liable
to vary significantly in content from one topic
to another. In the case of religion, for example,
it becomes either agnosticism or atheism.
Faithful to his general interpretive scheme,
Laing declares: 'in the Dialogues Cleanthes is
Hume trying to mediate between dogmatism
and scepticism' (op. cit., p. 179). This was a
thesis he subsequently developed in a paper on
the Dialogues (1937), which provoked a sharp
reply from Mossner, challenging the use Laing
had made of evidence from Hume's corre-

spondence. However, Laing's point that it
requires a highly artful reading of the text
remains troublesome to the view that it is Philo,
rather than Cleanthes, who is to be taken as
Hume's spokesperson.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Metaphysics of Nietzsche's
Immoralism', Philosophical Review, vol
24 (1915), pp. 386-418.
'Schopenhauer and Individuality', Mind, vol.
26 (1917), pp. 171-87.
A Study in Moral Problems (1922).
The Conception of Reality as a Whole',
Journal of Philosophical Studies
(Philosophy), vol. 6 (1931), pp. 3-17.
David Hume (1932).
The Problem of Justice in Plato's Republic',
Philosophy, vol. 8 (1933), pp. 412-21.
'On Value', Philosophy, vol. 10 (1935), pp.
40-52.
'Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion', Philosophy, vol. 12 (1937), pp.
175-90.
'Great Thinkers: (XII) David Hume',
Philosophy, vol. 12 (1937), pp. 395-412.
'Descartes on Material Things', Philosophy,
vol. 16 (1941), pp. 398-411.
The Nature of Philosophical Speculation
[inaugural address] (Sheffield, 1945).
Other Relevant Works
Ryle, G., 'Review of David Hume by B.M.
Laing', Philosophy, vol. 8 (1933), pp.
220-25.
Mossner, E.G., 'Hume's Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion: An Answer
to Dr. Laing', Philosophy, vol. 8 (1938),
pp. 84-6.
George Botterill
535
LAING
LAING, Ronald David (1927-89)
Ronald David Laing was born in Glasgow on
7 October 1927 and died in St Tropez on 23
August 1989. He was educated at a Glasgow
grammar school and then studied medicine at
Glasgow University. Specializing in psychiatry,
he worked with the British Army from 1951 to
1953, then for the Glasgow Royal Mental
Hospital in 1955, the University of Glasgow in
1956, and at the famous Tavistock Clinic from
1957 to 1961. Accepted for training as a psy
choanalyst by the Institute of Psychoanalysis, he
completed this in 1960, and set up a private
practice in London's Wimpole Street. From
1962 to 1965 he was Director of the Langham
Clinic in London, and started to have critical
and popular success with his books and to
appear on television. His tempestuous personal
life led to marriage breakdown in 1962, and the
first of his long-term affairs started. By the time
of his death he had fathered nine children. In
1965 he opened the Kingsley Hall project with
long-term collaborators Aaron Esterson, David
Cooper and others. An experimental, non-hier-
archical community, it was a space for schizo-
phrenics to deal with their psychoses without
the aid of harsh treatments such as electrocon-
vulsive therapy (ECT) or medication. After the
project closed in 1970 he travelled throughout
Asia, studying meditation and Sanskrit.
Returning to London in 1972, he became
involved in 'rebirthing' techniques and went
on a lecture tour of the USA. His autobiogra-
phy came out in 1985, and two years before his
death he was forced into resigning from the
medical register of the General Medical Council
for drunkenness.
Although he never developed a systematic
philosophy of his own, Laing read Nietzsche,
Marx and Freud at school and was later influ-
enced heavily by the existentialists, most
notably Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre.
Sartre, in fact, wrote the Introduction to Reason
and Violence (1964, co-authored with David
Cooper). His tempestuous life included a large
measure of critical and popular success,
LAING
however, beginning with The Divided Self
(1960), continuing with Self and Others (1961),
and reaching its peak in his most popular book,
The Politics of Experience and The Bird of
Paradise (1967). In these and other works his
writing style blended loose existential-phe-
nomenological insights with observations from
psychiatric case studies. His aim in this was to
reverse the psychiatric orthodoxy of the time,
which, after psychiatrist and philosopher Karl
Jaspers's General Psychopathology (1913),
characterized madness and delusion as
unworthy of consideration. Laing thought oth-
erwise, seeing problems in the definition of
schizophrenia, which he thought was a social
phenomenon involving the family and the
demands of society. Bleuler's original defini-
tion of schizophrenia, he argued, needed a
social context for diagnosis. Actively valuing
schizophrenic experience as a cathartic or trans-
formative experience, and eschewing normal-
izing treatments, he therefore became associ-
ated with the anti-psychiatry movement along
with David Cooper, Thomas Szaz and Michel
Foucault. While his earlier work was indebted
to the existential tradition and often referred to
Heidegger and Sartre, this was not conducted
in a rigorous or systematic way, and the text
remained readable by a non-specialist, indeed
typically counter-culture, audience. His later
work, exemplified by The Politics of
Experience, descended into pseudo-gnomic
utterances ('We require a history of phenom-
ena, not simply more phenomena of history',
p. 117), and the Bird of Paradise was a stream-
of-consciousness prose-poem, equally horrific
and amusing, often portentous and indulgent.
Yet here and elsewhere he offered heartbreak-
ing glimpses of his encounters in his medical
and psychiatric profession over the years, the
fund of experience from which he could then
hypothesize, sometimes with great ingenuity
and insight despite an over-willingness to
shock.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Divided Self: An Existential Study in
536
Sanity and Madness (Tavistock, 1960).
Self and Others (Tavistock, 1961).
(with A. Esterson), Sanity, Madness, and the
Family: Families of Schizophrenics
(Tavistock, 1964).
The Politics of Experience and the Bird of
Paradise (1967).
The Politics of the Family (1969).
Knots (1970).
The Voice of Experience (New York, 1982).
Other Relevant Works
Wisdom, Madness and Folly (1985).
Autobiography.
Further Reading
Clay, J.R.D., Laing: A Divided Self (1996).
Laing, A., R. D. Laing: A Life (1994).
Biography by his son.
Mark W. O. Paterson
LAIRD, John (1887-1946)
John Laird was born in Durris, Kincardineshire
on 7 May 1887 in the parish adjacent to the
original birthplace of Thomas Reid, and he
died in Aberdeen on 5 August 1946. In his
person and career he is characteristic of the
traditions of the north-east, as an area histori-
cally producing a number of important Scottish
philosophers. He was from a scholarly family
that customarily entered the Scottish Ministry
and there are references in his work to the
family influence. Among Laird's publications,
for example, there is a set of sermons given by
his grandfather.
Laird studied philosophy at Edinburgh under
Andrew Seth PaiNGLE-PATnsON and emerged as
the outstanding student in 1908 with the Shaw
Fellowship. He continued the study of philos-
ophy at Cambridge, again with distinction, and
followed this with short appointments at St

Andrews and then Dalhousie University in
Nova Scotia, before achieving the position of
Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Queen's
University, Belfast. Finally in 1924, following
an external year at the University of California,
he moved to Aberdeen to the post of Regius
Professor in Moral Philosophy. Laird was a
Gifford Lecturer and a prolific but forgotten
contributor to the wave of new realism in
which he was influenced by the older tradition
of Reid and, in his own time, by George
MOORE, and partly too by the Heraclitean
metaphysics of Samuel ALEXANDER. He was
literary executor of the latter's papers and his
comments on academic life in the ninety-six-
page Introduction to Samuel's Philosophical
Literary and Historical Pieces give a hint as to
the reasons why he preferred to pursue his
career in Scotland rather than at Cambridge,
not least in a transcription of a letter from A.C.
BRADLEY to Alexander in which the former
explains that outside Cambridge the 'ugliness
and philistinism are hard to bear'. An attitude
as conservative as this was not compatible with
Laird's Presbyterian background.
It was while he was at Belfast that Laird
composed his first book, subsequently pub-
lished as The Problems of the Self in 1917, in
which his career-long disagreement with Henri
Bergson and James makes the first of its
periodic appearances beside the similarly
abiding influence of Husserl and Moore. A
meditation on the reality of the self and the
continuity of personal identity, the book is in
some ways a manifesto statement of his devel-
oping philosophy and it also exhibits a major
feature of subsequent works in its prodigious
range of reference to historical and literary
texts. In this as in so much else Laird remains
firmly within the humanist tradition of the
Scottish Presbyterianism. The dedication of
Laird's second book (A Study in Realism, 1920)
to his brother, who was killed at the Somme in
1916, gives a hint of the pervasive disenchant-
ment of the postwar intellectual climate.
However, the text is worthy of study in its own
right as an assault on pragmatism and idealism
537
LAIRD
with repeated reference to Thomas Reid and
the Scottish tradition, including Hume and
Ferrier. What we in fact directly perceive, states
Laird, are sign-facts, and these sign-facts
discover an objectively independent external
reality. Its concluding statement, on keeping
one's philosophical feet on the ground, is repre-
sented as a parable about Thales, but it is of
course a repetition of Hume's famous caution
about common sense and nature. The argument
was repeated powerfully four years later in
Contemporary British Philosophy, while another
book on Recent Philosophy (1936) once more
demonstrated the range of his scholarship, this
time in his reading of Husserl and Heidegger in
conjunction with brief but powerful statements
on RUSSELL, WITTGENSTEIN, Carnap and POPPER.
Laird's correspondence shows that he was
well known to all the leading figures in the
philosophical world. Given recent discussions
of Thomas Reid in Scotism and analytical
Thomism, perhaps the most intriguing of these
connections may well have been with his
slightly younger contemporary, the neo-
Thomist Etienne Gilson, whose views on
Christian philosophy he much admired. Laird's
most powerful works of his mature years were
his Gifford Lectures of 1939, Theism and
Cosmology, and 1940, Mind and Deity, while
his insistence on further and more historically
aware scholarship of Hobbes presages subse-
quent developments. The increasing traditional
emphasis on philosophical theology was also
explicit in his Forwood Lectures on moral
responsibility, freedom, necessity and theism,
and were published posthumously in 1947 as
On Human Freedom. Laird was married in
Belfast in 1919 to Helen Ritchie. They had one
son who died in childhood.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Problems of the Self: An Essay Based on the
Shaw Lectures Given in the University of
Edinburgh, March 1914 (1917).
A Study in Realism (Cambridge, 1920).
The Idea of the Soul (1924).
Our Minds and their Bodies (1925).
LAIRD
A Study in Moral Theory (1926).
Modern Problems in Philosophy (1928).
The Idea of Value (Cambridge, 1929).
Knowledge, Belief and Opinion (New York,
1931).
Hume's Philosophy of Human Nature
(1932).
Hobbes (1934).
An Enquiry into Moral Notions (1935).
Recent Philosophy (1936).
Theism and Cosmology [Gifford Lectures
1939-40] (1940).
Mind and Deity [Gifford Lectures, 1939-40]
(1941).
On Human Freedom: Being the Norwood
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
Given in the University of Liverpool in
November, 1945 (1947).
Other Relevant Works
'How our Minds go beyond Themselves in
their Knowing', in J.H. Muirhead (ed.),
Contemporary British Philosophy, 1st ser.
(1924), pp. 214-30.
Morals and Western Religion: A Discussion
in Seven Dialogues (1931).
The Temper of British Ideals (Glasgow,
1943).
The Device of Government: An Essay on
Civil Polity (Cambridge, 1944).
Philosophical Incursions into English
Literature (Cambridge, 1946).
Further Reading
Broad, C.D., Critical Notice of Theism and
Cosmology, Mind, vol. 50 (1941), pp.
294-49.
, Critical Notice of Mind and Deity,
Mind, vol. 51 (1942), pp. 180-88.
Urquhart, W.S., Memorial Notice in
Proceedings of the British Academy, vol.
32 (1946), pp. 415-32.
Innes Kennedy
538
LAKATOS, Imre (or Liposchitz or Molnar:
1922-74)
Imre Lakatos was born as Imre Liposchitz in
Debrecen, Hungary on 9 November 1922 and
died in London on 2 February 1974. He was
educated at the University of Debrecen and
graduated in mathematics, physics and philos-
ophy in 1944. He changed his Jewish surname
to Molnar to avoid persecution. During the
year 1945-6 he joined the Eotvos Collegium,
University of Budapest, Hungary's most pres-
tigious academic institution. He changed his
name again, this time to Lakatos, since many of
his shirts and handkerchiefs were labelled *IL',
and because, in the economic climate of
postwar Hungary, it was easier to change one's
name than to acquire new shirts. From 1947 to
1950 he was a secretary in the Ministry of
Education and studied briefly at the University
of Moscow in 1949. He was imprisoned
between 1950 and 1953 for reasons that are
still not pellucid but which involve his strong
commitment to independence of thought. The
latter year saw the death of Stalin; Lakatos was
released and in 1954 found employment as a
translator in the Mathematical Research
Institute, Hungarian Academy of Science. Two
years later, after the crushing of the Hungarian
uprising, he fled to Vienna and thence to
Cambridge, where, influenced by POPPER and
Polya and supported by the Rockefeller
Foundation, he undertook a PhD in philoso-
phy, which he gained in 1961. Characteristic of
all his work, he took a case study - the
Euler-Descartes formula V-E + F = 2-as rev-
elatory of his more theoretical views. In 1960,
he became a lecturer at the London School of
Economics (LSE), where be became Professor
of Logic in 1969, and died, stateless, in post in
1974.
Lakatos is known for his original work in
two fields: philosophy of mathematics and phi-
losophy of science. The former comprised the
subject of his PhD: 'Essays on the Logic of
Mathematical Discovery'; the latter field he
focused on during his time at the LSE. A version

of the PhD was published in the British Journal
for the Philosophy of Science in four parts in
1963-4 under the title 'Proofs and Refutations'
(it was published posthumously as a book in
1976). The main thrust of his thought on the
philosophy of mathematics was that traditional
accounts of the history and the nature of math-
ematics are incorrect. Mathematics does not, as
usually viewed by philosophers and often by
mathematicians, consist of statements of eternal
verities, which are certain. Neither, relatedly, is
mathematics best seen as a deductive structure
with theorems being rigorously deduced from
indubitable axioms and postulates. Nor, con-
comitantly, is discovery of mathematical truth
to be understood as either totally rational
(deduction) or as blind guessing. For Lakatos,
the true history of mathematics, as evidenced in
case studies, displays the subject as quasi-empir-
ical and less than purely formal, and one for
which a fallibilist epistemology is appropriate.
Moreover, criticism of mathematical claims
may not comprise argument against a finished
deductive system but, rather, serve as helping to
articulate that system, perhaps by means of
'concept-stretching' or by finding 'counter-
examples' which do not stand as falsifications
of the system but as heuristic challenges to it.
An example of this which Lakatos provides is
the way that contemporaries viewed Euclid's
system, not as an attempt to reach infallible
foundations in geometry, but as a challenge to
Parmenides and Zeno, a challenge subject itself
to quasi-empirical criticism. All mathematics is
conjectural and 'the vehicle of progress is bold
speculations, criticism, controversy between
rival theories, problemshifts' (Philosophical
Papers, vol. 2, p. 30).
This account of what is required to provide a
more 'true' history of mathematics is not to be
taken as an endorsement of a purely empirical
rendering of progress in mathematics: perhaps
because of his Hegelian/Marxist background,
Lakatos in his work always had one eye on the
normative and, whilst he insisted on under-
standing mathematics as developing historically
and not deductively, this understanding, for him,
539
LAKATOS
was achieved by rational reconstruction rather
than by very close attention to actual 'messy'
events only; 'internal' rationally reconstructed
history is preferred to actual history, details of
which should be relegated to the footnotes
(Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, p. 120).
This framework of rational reconstruction he
carried over into the research he undertook in
the philosophy of science, for which he is
perhaps more widely known. The Popperian
influence at the LSE readily supported
Lakatos's inclination, within the overall aim
of identifying a single methodology of science,
to insist on both empirical and normative
elements as crucial for understanding science.
Holding fast to Popper's belief in a universal
criterion of scientific rationality (contrary to
the views of contemporaries Kuhn, Feyerabend
and POLANYI), he saw himself as developing
what, in his argot, would have been called the
Popperian methodological research programme
but with a greater emphasis on (rationally
reconstructed) history, using case studies. His
route to truth in this field as encompassing
both the empirical and the normative is neatly
encapsulated in his Kantian-style dictum:
'Philosophy of science without history of
science is empty; history of science without phi-
losophy of science is blind' (Philosophical
Papers, vol. 1, p. 102).
Probably Lakatos's most influential achieve-
ment in the philosophy of science resides in his
postulation of 'research programmes' as the
key to understanding the progress of (theoret-
ical) science. Herein, he exemplified his attempt
to make the Popperian approach more histor-
ically sensitive, whilst, at the same time,
avoiding what he saw as the methodological
errors of Kuhn. 'My concept of a "research
programme" may be construed as an objec-
tive, "third world" reconstruction of Kuhn's
socio-psychological concept of "paradigm"'
(ibid., p.91,n.2.).In contrast to Popper, who
thought particular theories were the focus for
falsification and, for whom, scientific change
was, broadly speaking, a matter of steady
progress based on such decisive falsifications,
LAKATOS
Lakatos held that research programmes
(embracing a series of theories), which con-
tained falsifiable and unfalsifiable parts, were a
better tool for simultaneously acknowledging
both the lastingness of scientific theories and the
rationality of their rejection. Popper's 'naive
falsificationism', as he dubbed it, failed on
several (related) counts: (1) it failed too much
to fit scientific history, particularly in regard to
the refusal of scientists to reject their doctrines,
even in the face of apparently clear falsification.
(2) it did not recognize the complexity of the
testing process, a phenomenon best exempli-
fied, perhaps, in the so-called Duhem-Quine
thesis, whereby it is claimed that one cannot test
individual hypotheses or theoretical principles
on their own, since any theory in fact has many
other claims attached to it - 'auxiliary hypothe-
ses' - and, in addition, there are the 'initial
conditions', the circumstances of the test-situ-
ation. Lakatos demanded a more holistic
approach to scientific testing than Popper's
methodology allowed. Falsification is not a
matter of applying modus tollens in a straight-
forward manner. 'Criticism does not - and
must not - kill as fast as Popper imagined.'
(Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, p. 92). (3)
Popper's purely normative approach would
make much scientific activity - Kuhn's 'normal
science' - non-scientific.
Lakatos's research programmes, which it is
easy to see as trying to combine the virtues -
and avoiding what he saw as the vices - of
Popper and Kuhn (he saw himself, in Hegelian
style, as providing the synthesis of the thesis and
antithesis, respectively, of Popper and Kuhn),
aimed to amend these failures: they fitted
history; they were complex entities, which per-
mitted significant changes in their subordinate
theories whilst preserving their own identity;
they made falsification difficult to achieve.
A research programme - taking Lakatos's
example of Newtonianism - comprises a 'hard
core' (the three Laws of Motion and the Law
of Gravitation), which is an unfalsifiable part
(whilst Newtonianism is accepted) to which
the 'negative heuristic' forbids challenge; a set
540
of 'problem-solving techniques' (mathematical
apparatus); and a 'protective belt' of auxiliary
hypotheses and initial conditions (geometrical
optics, theory of atmospheric refraction), which
is the part that is falsifiable. The 'positive
heuristic' directs a scientist to make progressive
modifications in the protective belt in the face
of negative results arising from testing. Theory,
not data, is primary in the formulation of
research programmes. The rationality in sci-
entific change arises in these ways: a research
programme is 'theoretically progressive' if in
response to counter-examples each new theory
in the programme has excess empirical content
over its predecessor, i.e. predicts some novel
fact; it is 'empirically progressive' if some of this
excess content is corroborated (Newton pre-
dicted the return of Halley's Comet). The ability
of a research programme to explain apparent
refutations is another important aspect of its
acceptability. If a research programme fails to
be progressive and its hard core is being
defended with difficulty and is producing at
best ad hoc explanations of recalcitrant facts, it
is said to be 'degenerate' and should be aban-
doned. In thus allowing for research pro-
gramme comparisons - and, moreover, in
allowing for the possibility that a scientist may
work in rival research programmes - Lakatos
strongly rejected the incommensurability thesis
that scientific theories cannot be rationally
compared because of meaning (and other) dif-
ferences between the theories, a view promoted
by Feyerabend and Kuhn. Indeed, Lakatos
holds that incommensurability and rationality
in theory change are incompatible: if theories
are incomparable and not inconsistent with
each other, how can one judge which is the
better? He not only allowed for work to be
going on simultaneously in rival research pro-
grammes, but encouraged it: 'The rivalry of
two research programmes is, of course, a pro-
tracted process during which it is rational to
work in either (or, if one can, in both)'
(Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, p. 112 n. 3, italics
in original). Paramount for Lakatos in both
science and mathematics is not falsification but

heuristic criticism leading to better theories: true
to his Hegelian background (albeit weakening in
influence once he went to London), the notion
that a theory was 'born refuted' (ibid., p. 5) was
viewed as unimportant.
Lakatos was a man whose influence on his
contemporaries was considerable: this influence
arose not just from his views but from the way
they were expressed and by the manner of his
involvement with colleagues and students. He
was a forceful person who enjoyed sometimes
ferocious academic debate and he also spent
considerable time with his students. His desire to
further the debate and test his own views is an
appropriate mirror-image of his views on scien-
tific methodology. In these ways, he resembled
a greater twentieth-century middle-European
philosopher, and perhaps they explain his reluc-
tance to publish other than in journals: books
would look too much like the finished article.
His works in book form all appeared posthu-
mously. Characteristically, his PhD was written
in the form of a polylogue. His doctrine of
research programmes remains influential: articles
are still written which use this notion as a frame-
work of inquiry and original research and, gen-
erally, the term 'research programme' is much
bandied around (sometimes, though less
extremely so, as incorrectly as Kuhn's term
'paradigm') in philosophical debate. Feyerabend,
amongst others, importantly criticized his
research programmes for being backward-
looking, but Lakatos regarded this criticism with
insouciance: 'my "methodology" ... only
appraises fully articulated theories (or research
programmes) but it presumes to give advice to
the scientist neither about how to arrive at good
theories nor even about which of two rival pro-
grammes he should work on' ('Replies to
Critics', Boston Studies in the Philosophy of
Science, vol. 8,1971, p. 174). They have become
valid currency in the philosophy of science.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Proof and Refutations: The Logic of
Mathematical Discovery, ed. J. Worrall
and E. Zahar (Cambridge, 1976).
541
LAKATOS
Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, The
Methodology of Scientific Research
Programmes, ed. J. Worrall and G. Currie
(Cambridge, 1978).
Philosophical Papers, vol 2, Mathematics,
Science and Epistemology, ed. J. Worrall
and G. Currie (Cambridge, 1978).
Other Relevant Works
(Ed.), Problems in the Philosophy of
Mathematics (Amsterdam, 1967).
'Changes in the Problem of Inductive Logic',
in I. Lakatos (ed.), The Problem of
Inductive Logic (Amsterdam, 1968).
'Falsification and the Methodology of
Scientific Research Programes', in I.
Lakatos and A. Musgrave, Criticism and
the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge,
1970).
Cohen, R., P. Feyerabend and M. Wartofsky
(eds), Essays in Memory oflmre Lakatos
(Dordrecht and Boston, 1976).
Radnitzky, G. and G. Andersson (eds),
Progress and Rationality in Science [Boston
Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol.
58] (Dordrecht and Boston, 1978).
(with P. Feyerabend), For and Against
Method, Including Lakatos's Lectures on
Scientific Method and the
Lakatos-Peyerahend Correspondence, ed.
M. Motterlini (Chicago, 1999).
further Reading
Howson, C. (ed), Method and Appraisal in
the Physical Sciences: The Critical
Background to Modern Science 1800 to
1905 (Cambridge, 1976).
Kampis G., G. Kvasz and M. Stoltzner (eds),
Appraising Lakatos: Mathematics,
Methodology and the Man (Dordrecht,
2002).
Urbach, P., 'Progress and Degeneration in the
"I.Q. Debate"', British Journal for the
Philosophy of Science, vol. 25 (1974), pp.
99-135,235-59.
Andrew Wright
LAMONT
LAMONT, William Dawson (1901-82)
W.D. Lamont was born on Prince Edward
Island on 3 February 1901 and died in Glasgow
on 9 November 1982. He married Anne Fraser
Christie. Graduating MA from the University
of Glasgow and DPhil from Oxford (Balliol), he
became lecturer in philosophy at Glasgow
(1929-42), Professor of Philosophy at Cairo
University (1942-5), Principal of Makerere
College, Uganda (1946-9) and finally reader in
philosophy at Glasgow. He received an
Honorary DLitt from the University of Uganda.
His interests included archaeology.
Introduction to Green's Moral Philosophy
(1934) argues that the appearances of a penny,
for instance, are fixed while one's relations to
them are alterable, not the reverse as for his
Balliol mentor T.H. Green. Lamont concludes
that 'terms' may be fixed while their relations
alter, not noticing that this could be true of
concepts without letting him characterize things
transcendentally as having 'substantiality'
(Introduction to Green's Moral Philosophy, p.
203). Green studies aside, The Principles of
Moral Judgement (1946) is cited most. A.C.
EwiNG, writing in Philosophy, found a 'refresh-
ing novelty' in the suggestion that 'as regards
content our value judgements are grounded in
our desiring and as regards order in our rational
nature' (Ewing, p. 267). Lamont, however,
neither substantiates the latter hint at a non-nat-
uralist theory of obligation, nor confronts
properly G.E. MOORE'S worry about a 'natu-
ralistic fallacy'. He also holds mistakenly that
if legal freedom to pursue interests is desirable,
the actions must be morally desirable. Yet, as
H. Barker wrote in Mind, Lamont 'tries to see
the subject freshly for himself (Barker, p. 278).
The Value Judgement (1955) treats the tasks of
organizing desires and legislating impartially
as economic. This faces problems: one's
purpose in organizing desires might not be 'pru-
dential' but, for instance, to cope with them, or
aesthetic, religious or moral; and Lamont
underestimates the dependence of legal impar-
tiality and indeed economic success on moral
542
imperatives. His technical economics is also
suspect, as J.W.N. Watkins noted in the
Philosophical Quarterly (p. 185).
Law and the Moral Order (1981) develops
these themes, permitting an overview of
Lamont's thought. He aimed 'to strengthen
moral philosophy's links with ... ordinary
thoughtful men and women' (p. i), and con-
tended that relations are foundational in ethics,
without the support Green sought from this
theory in metaphysics. Each of us is then a
system of non-moral interests recognizing like
systems and, given liberty and equal opportu-
nity, the common good is the collection of
bridges joining such interests, not unitary as for
Green. This 'order' is 'moral' as organic, that is,
as reconciling interests willed 'coherently' from
regard for the law as 'a system of universals
governing the relations of persons' (ibid., p.
64), so that rights and duties are correlative.
One difficulty, however, is that conciliation
can blur moral imperatives, which then chal-
lenge it. Further, neither reconciling interests in,
say, food or music nor willing them 'coher-
ently' makes them moral. Indeed not all rights
and duties are correlative. Moreover Lamont's
claim that persons, the 'terms' of social 'rela-
tions', lack 'absolute' value (ibid., p. 71)
suggests that these terms alter with the rela-
tionships concerned, contrary to his above view
of terms as 'fixed'. He also regards this 'order'
as an 'immanent transcendence', suggesting an
attitudinal belief (and 'degrees of truth') as well
as a collective object (and 'degrees of reality');
yet like the history of a people, for instance, this
'order' is neither universal like a belief nor par-
ticular like an object. And even if right action
implies such holism, this does not tell us what
actions best fit any given community; still less,
what we ought morally to do, or what it is to
be a moral agent.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Introduction to Green's Moral Philosophy
(1934).
The Principles of Moral Judgement (Oxford,
1946).

The Value Judgement (Edinburgh, 1955).
Law and the Moral Order (Aberdeen, 1981).
The Early History oflslay, 500-1726
(Dundee, 1966).
Ancient and Mediaeval Sculptured Stones of
Islay (Edinburgh, 1968; rev. edn, Glasgow,
1972).
Further Reading
Barker, H., Review of The Principles of
Moral judgement, Mind, vol. 55 (1946),
pp. 276-8.
Ewing, A.C., Review of The Principles of
Moral judgement, Philosophy, vol. 22
(1947), p. 267.
Watkins, J.W.N., Review of The Value
Judgement, Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 6
(1956), pp. 186f.
David Campbell
LANGLEY, George Harry (1881-1951)
G.H. Langley was born in Earley, Berkshire
on 14 July 1881 and died in Ovingdean, Sussex
on 14 February 1951. The son of a worker in
a biscuit factory, he studied at University
College, Reading (under William George DE
BURGH), receiving a BA (external) from the
University of London in 1907 and an M.A.
(with distinction) in 1909. He entered the
Indian Educational Service in 1913, serving as
Professor of Philosophy at Presidency College
in Calcutta in 1913 and at Dacca College (now
in Bangladesh) from 1913 to 1921. He joined
Dacca University as the founding Professor of
Philosophy in 1921, later becoming Acting
Vice-Chancellor (1925) and Vice-Chancellor
(1926-34). Not elected for a third term as Vice-
Chancellor, Langley returned to England. He
remained active in research and maintained an
interest in education in India, as Chair of the
National Indian Association (1942-8) and
543
LANGLEY
member of the Council of East India
Associations (England) (1949).
Langley did not explicitly embrace any philo-
sophical school, though he was strongly influ-
enced by Kant. In his 1913 essay, The
Metaphysical Method of Her barf, he offered
a qualified acceptance of Herbart's views
against Hegel. Herbart held that any meta-
physical description of reality must be
grounded in experience, not just in conscious-
ness, and should show genuine unity. Yet, fol-
lowing on A.S. PRINGLE-PATTISON'S criticism
of Hegel in Hegelianism and Personality,
Langley insisted that even Herbart needed to
take the unity of the diverse properties of things
more seriously.
By the mid 1920s Langley had begun to
publish regularly. One focus was the philoso-
phy of religion. In 'Interpretation of Religious
Experience' (1924), 'Values and Temporal
Existence' (1924-5) and The Temporal and the
Eternal' (1928) Langley wrestled with several
issues contested by realists and (later) by logical
empiricists - spiritual experience, the existence
of a supersensible reality, and the relation
between the material (or temporal) and the
spiritual (or eternal). On this latter topic,
Langley argued that, despite the apparent
antithesis, there was a necessary relation
between the two. The ideal or spiritual arises
out of a knowledge of facts, and transcends
the temporal situation in which it is appre-
hended.
Langley also wrote on ethics. In his earlier
essays, but also in 'Analysis of Moral
Consciousness' (1925) and 'Objectivity and
Change in Moral Values' (1934), he argued
that values possess a kind of objectivity and uni-
versality. While 'Ideals and values change
because they are temporal ... they have per-
manent significance so far as they are related to
the Supreme Spirit' (The Temporal and the
Eternal', The Monist, vol. 38, no. 3, 1928, p.
428).
A leading figure in philosophy and education
in Bengal, Langley was elected President of the
Indian Philosophical Congress in 1931. In his
LANGLEY
presidential address, The Eternal and the
Temporal', he again argued that there was no
real separation between the material and the
spiritual, and that humanity's task was 'to
create the conditions in which the forces of the
universe can carry on their work' (The Eternal
and the Temporal', 1996, p. 194).
After his return to England, Langley pub-
lished a number of essays dealing with the
application of practical reason. In 'Reason'
(1938-9), 'Personal Relations, and Some
Implications' (1941-2) and 'Reason and Law'
(1943) Langley argued not only for an experi-
ential but a social basis for cognition; relations
with others provide us not only with data, but
also with insight into values, human nature
and action. (This emphasis on insight is con-
sistent with the views of his contemporary,
Sarvepalli RADHAKRISHNAN.)
Although Langley's writing shows little trace
of his Indian experience, he contributed to a
volume of reproductions of Indian paintings
(Mystic India Through Art, 1937), and was
commissioned to prepare a book on Aurobindo
Ghose. In this sympathetic, though not uncrit-
ical, study Langley focuses on Aurobindo's
major work, The Life Divine, finding
Aurobindo's account of religious experience
and of the union of the individual and the
infinite relevant to contemporary efforts to
articulate a basis for world unity.
Unlike many of his British colleagues in
India, Langley was not a 'philosopher-mis-
sionary'. Like them, however, he contributed
significantly to the development of university
education, and his legacy lies in that area as well
as in philosophy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Metaphysical Method of Herbart',
Mind, vol. 22 (1913), pp. 62-75.
'Interpretation of Religious Experience',
Hibbert Journal, vol. 22 (1924), pp.
644-663.
The Eternal and the Temporal',
Philosophical Quarterly [India], vol. 8
(1932), pp. 1-20; repr. in S. Dubey (ed.),
544
Problems of Indian Philosophy (New
Delhi, 1996), pp. 178-95.
'Personal Relations, and Some Implications',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
42 (1941-2), pp. 25^4.
Sri Aurobindo, Indian Poet, Philosopher and
Mystic (1949).
William Sweet
LASLETT, Thomas Peter Ruffell
(1915-2001)
Peter Laslett was born on 18 December 1915
and died in Cambridge on 8 November 2001.
The son of a clergyman, he was educated at
Watford Grammar School and Peterhouse,
Cambridge, where he was a student of Herbert
Butterfield. Rather a polymath - if not a
maverick or even a renegade - among histori-
ans, he was trained in intellectual history,
moved on to what he termed the history of
population and social structure, co-founded
the Cambridge Group for the History of
Population and Social Structure in 1964,
worked closely with the founding organizers of
the Open University, and was one of the
founders of the University of the Third Age. In
the interim, he had become one of pioneers in
the use of computers to analyse historical data.
He was CBE and a fellow of the British
Academy.
The threads that united virtually all Laslett's
interests were continuing concerns with inter-
generational relationships, the ageing process
itself, and the vitality of the elderly. He lived
what he wrote about: the cover of his A Fresh
Map of Life (1989), something of a 'third age'
manifesto, was adorned with a photograph of
Laslett, then in his mid seventies, posing with
the bicycle that he still rode. His understanding
and appreciation of philosophy were unusual
among practising historians. A man of

numerous and immense accomplishments and
one of the truly original minds and distin-
guished presences of the Cambridge of his day,
Laslett was never awarded a professorship but
was eventually named to a special readership in
politics and the history of social structure, the
subject he had created.
Laslett devoted his early research to the then
relatively obscure royalist writer, Sir Robert
Filmer, some of whose manuscripts he had dis-
covered at the family home in East Sutton Park,
Kent. That research was interrupted by service
in navel intelligence from 1940 to 1945 and
subsequently by a brief career at the BBC,
where Laslett was one of founders of the Third
Program and helped pave the way for the
popular presentation of philosophy. One of his
earliest publications, in 1950, The Physical
Basis of Mind, was an edition of BBC broad-
casts by some of the most distinguished scien-
tists of the day followed by analyses by AJ.
AYER and Gilbert RYLE. The philosopher 'telly-
dons' of the latter years of the twentieth century
were Laslett's heirs.
By the time The Physical Basis of Mind had
appeared, Laslett's edition of Filmer, published
a year earlier, had already earned its editor a fel-
lowship at St John's, Cambridge. In 1953 he
was named to a fellowship at Trinity College
and appointed to a university lectureship in the
History Faculty, where he lectured on early-
modern political thought. In 1963 he switched
to his new chosen subject, the history of pop-
ulation and social structure. During that period,
the works for which Laslett is best known to
philosophers appeared, the first series of
Philosophy, Politics, and Society (1956, with
subsequent volumes published with varying co-
editors over the next forty years) and his edition
of John Locke's Two Treatises of Government
(1960). Outside the academic community, his
most successful and widely known work was
The World We Have Lost (1965, with subse-
quent editions in 1973 and 1984).
Ever the showman, Laslett's lectures and
student supervisions in the history of political
thought were dazzling performances. Even
545
LASLETT
though he stopped lecturing and writing on
that subject, he never lost interest in it, and
until the end of his life, he advised students
and visiting scholars, and entertained visitors
who were working on Filmer and Locke. The
accumulating volumes of Philosophy, Politics,
and Society continued to publish papers that
dealt with the central questions of social phi-
losophy. That series is a kind of anthropologi-
cal history of political theory and philosophy in
the second half of the twentieth century,
starting with Laslett's all too well known excla-
mation in the Introduction to the first of them
in 1956 that, Tor the moment, anyway, polit-
ical philosophy is dead' (Philosophy, Politics,
and Society, 1956, p. vii). This assertion
provoked Sir Isaiah BERLIN'S considerably less
famous rejoinder to the effect that political phi-
losophy can never die so long as people disagree
about the ends of life ('Does Political Theory
Still Exist?', Philosophy, Politics, and Society,
2nd ser., 1962). Subsequent numbers of the
series gave continuing evidence for the renewed
vitality of the subject.
Laslett's editions of Filmer and especially
Locke established him as a major interpreter of
the history of early-modern political thought.
The Filmer edition (1949) rescued Sir Robert
from the disregard in which he had been left by
the triumph of the contractual and consensual
political theorizing of Locke and his successors.
Filmer, who had written in the heat of the
English Civil War, was that unique political
writer, Laslett argued, the spokesperson for and
summarizer of the unconscious prejudices and
implicit understandings of the world shared by
his contemporaries, and he had the historical
misfortune to have been on the losing side of an
ideological and intellectual battle. Supplementing
what would today be seen as a crude anthropo-
logical argument with an appeal to the literal
truth of biblical history, Filmer had asserted that
the state was a natural and divinely ordained
outgrowth of the patriarchal family, that politics
retained that patriarchal quality, and that all
authority - social as well as political - was
derived from the power of fathers.
LASLETT
This view had been fundamental to Europe's
self-understanding and had found expression in
political theory since the time of Aristotle. But it
was Sir Robert who elevated these unconscious
beliefs to a full-blown political theory that stood
on its own, thereby providing a clear target for
the attacks of Locke and others in the 1680s and
after. The conceptual annihilation of the
Filmerian doctrine - by reasoned argument as
well as by ridicule - also meant that an entire tra-
dition of political discourse was lost, not only
depriving subsequent ages of full understand-
ings of the lives of their predecessors but making
it difficult if not impossible to comprehend what
was at stake in the philosophic and ideological
battles of the past. So despite his apparent irrel-
evance to contemporary concerns, it is to people
like Filmer, according to Laslett, that we must
look in order to grasp the currents of beliefs and
practices that hold societies together.
Laslett's edition of Locke's Two Treatises of
Government continued the process of rooting
early-modern British political thought in the
social conditions from which it had sprung and
thereby giving it new meaning. That edition
remains in print more than forty years after it
was published as the standard edition of the
Two Treatises. In its comprehensive interpre-
tive and historical annotations of the text, it is a
model for the editing of historical works as well
as a profound demonstration of the importance
of historical analysis to philosophy. The received
historical understandings of Locke's political
thought held that the work was composed as a
defence of the revolution of 1688 to 1689 and
that the target was Thomas Hobbes, not Sir
Robert Filmer. Filmer, it was claimed, had been
used by Locke as a stalking-horse for his
presumed ideological mentor; he was an easier
enemy to attack because his theories were less
profound. As a work of theory, the Two
Treatises was regarded as a major contribution
to political philosophy proper because of its
development of the notions of natural law and
the state of nature, its use of social contract and
consent theories, and its articulation of the basis
of the modern understanding of private property.
546
Hobbes, whose views were taken to be directly
opposed to those of Locke, w as interpreted with
the same theoretical abstracmess, and questions
about Locke's historical intentions and accom-
plishments, other than the destruction of
Hobbes, were hardly ever raised beyond per-
functory references to the Glorious Revolution.
Filmer was altogether missing from the philoso-
pher's purview.
Some years before the publication of his
edition, Laslett had discovered Locke's manu-
scripts and the remains of much of his library as
well as his corrected copy of the original printing
of the Two Treatises, all of which supported the
claim he had made in his 1949 edition of Filmer
that Sir Robert had been the conscious and
intended target throughout. Laslett's research
further revealed that the Two Treatises had been
written nearly ten years earlier than was gener-
ally supposed, and that its purpose was to
advocate the exclusion of James Duke of York
from the throne - by revolutionary means, if
need be - rather than to justify a revolution that
had already occurred. Thus, Filmer's doctrines,
far from deserving the characterizations 'obscure'
and 'absurd' that later ages - with the aid of
Locke and some of his anti-royalist contempo-
raries - had bestowed upon them, were taken
very seriously in the 1680s, when they were
regarded by supporters and enemies alike as
among the chief ideological and theoretical
supports of the monarchy.
Those readings of Locke, now in company
with the earlier work on Filmer, revitalized and
may have revolutionized the history of political
thought as an academic discipline. Although the
historicism was not universally adopted, for
many, Laslett's work changed the field from a
chronological 'intellectual history' primarily con-
cerned with identifying and analysing ideas and
tracing 'influence' as well, with apparent or
presumed borrowings, lineages and develop-
ments - all of which together were generally
called 'history' - into an endeavour that was
firmly rooted in the politics of the times in which
it was written. The well-known 'Cambridge
School,' as it has been termed, grew directly out

of Laslett's work; two of its best-known, early
practitioners, Quentin Skinner and John Dunn,
were among Laslett's students, and J.G.A.
Pocock, another important figure, has acknowl-
edged the importance of Laslett's influence on his
own work. But perhaps the most dramatic
evidence of Laslett's accomplishment is a change
made in the standard textbook in the history of
political thought, George H. Sabine's History
of Political Theory, the first edition of which
had been published in 1937. In the third edition
(1961), Sabine revised part of his discussion of
Locke to reflect Laslett's redating of the com-
position of the Two Treatises and added the
Exclusion Controversy to the Glorious
Revolution as the context, making one of the few
substantive alterations in his text since its original
publication.
In 1970 Laslett again combined his historical,
philosophic and demographic interests,
addressing the Royal Institute of Philosophy
on 'The Conversation between the
Generations'. In that essay (republished in
Philosophy, Politics, and Society, 5th ser.,
1979) Laslett asked about 'intergenerational
obligations' long before the importance of that
subject had achieved its widespread recogni-
tion. Casting doubts on the claims that repa-
rations were owed to the descendants of
African slaves and victims of the Nazi
Holocaust, he rejected the contractual expla-
nations of such disparate writers as Burke and
Rawls, questioned the notion of natural oblig-
ations that cut across generations, and without
denying either the existence or the significance
of such relationships, left the matter as an
important puzzle that, ironically perhaps, future
commentators would have to solve.
Laslett's historicism was intended as more
than a way of interpreting texts: it was equally
a theory of meaning, related to the 'ordinary
language' notion that 'meaning is use', in this
case historical use. To determine the meaning
of a historical text, it is necessary to examine
the meanings its words and concepts had when
the text was written. Laslett did not develop his
position into a full account of historical
547
LASLETT
meaning - that was left to Skinner and Dunn,
who emphasized authorial 'intention', and to
Pocock, who wrote about 'political languages'
- but had he done so, there can be little doubt
that he would have placed surrounding social
structures at the heart of his argument. That is
how he construed Filmer, inferring interpreta-
tions of the author's patriarchal conception of
political authority from the nature of the early-
modern English household. But he soon turned
his fascination with that household into his
primary area of concern, leaving others to work
out the implications of his claims. There was a
hint of what he would have been up to in his
'The Wrong Way through the Telescope'
(1976).
The genius of The World We Have Lost was
the demonstration that the relatively small,
nuclear household of parents and children was
the standard familial arrangement of pre-indus-
trial Europe. Laslett revealed as a demographic
myth the prevailing belief that urban industri-
alization had replaced multi-generational
households with their recognizably modern
counterparts. In subsequent work, he and his
colleagues repeatedly confirmed this discovery.
With very few exceptions, however, its impor-
tance to the history of political thought
remained unexamined; in fact, by the end of
Laslett's life, even at Cambridge the historical
study of political thought had already begun to
sever its ties with history per se and to revert to
its prior abstractness.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Ed.), Patriarcha and Other Political Works
of Sir Robert Filmer (Oxford, 1949).
(Ed.), The Physical Basis of Mind (Oxford,
1950).
(Ed.), Philosophy, Politics, and Society
(Oxford, 1956; 1960; 1962; 1967; 1979;
New Haven, 1992).
(Ed.), John Locke, Two Treatises of
Government (Cambridge, 1960; etc.).
The World We Have Lost (1965; etc.).
'The Conversation between Generations'
(1970); repr. in Philosophy, Politics, and
LASLETT
Society, 5th ser., ed. P. Laslett and James
Fishkin (Oxford, 1979).
(Ed. and contrib.), Household and Family in
Past Time (Cambridge, 1972).
The Wrong Way through the Telescope:
Literary Evidence in Sociology and in
Historical Sociology', British Journal of
Sociology, vol. 27 (1976), pp. 319-42.
Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier
Generations (Cambridge, 1977).
Other Relevant Works
(with John Harrison), The Library of John
Locke (Oxford, 1965).
A Fresh Map of Life (1989)
Further Reading
Bonfield, Lloyd, Richard M. Smith and Keith
Wrightson (eds), The World We Have
Gained: Histories of Population and Social
Structure: Essays Presented to Peter Laslett
on his Seventieth Birthday (Oxford, and
New York, 1986).
Schochet, Gordon, Patriarchalism in Political
Thought (Oxford and New York, 1975;
2nd edn, New Brunswick, 1988).
, The Significant Sounds of Silence:
The Absence of Women from the Political
Thought of Sir Robert Filmer and John
Locke (or, "Why Can't a Woman Be More
Like a Man?")', in Hilda Smith (ed.),
Political Writings, Political Women: Early-
Modern Britain in a European Context
(Cambridge, 1998), pp. 220-42.
Gordon Schochet
LATTA, Robert (1865-1932)
Robert Latta was born in Edinburgh on 15
June 1865 and died in Tonbridge on 18
February 1932. He was educated at the Royal
High School in Edinburgh (1875-81) and at
548
Edinburgh University, where he studied under
A.C. Fraser and took his MA in philosophy
with first class honours in 1886. He was
appointed as an assistant in logic and meta-
physics at St Andrews in 1892 and remained as
a lecturer there until 1898. In the same year he
was awarded a doctorate by Edinburgh for a
thesis on Leibniz and he took a lectureship in
logic and moral philosophy at University
College, Dundee. He was appointed to the
Chair of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen in
1900 and to the Chair of Logic and Rhetoric at
Glasgow in 1902. He was President of Glasgow
Liberal Council in 1914. After he retired in
1925, Glasgow made him an emeritus profes-
sor and conferred on him an honorary LL D.
Latta is best known for a relatively early
work, his heavily annotated edition of Leibniz's
writings: Leibniz: The Monadology and Other
Philosophical Writings (1898). This edition has
a lengthy Introduction in which Leibniz's mon-
adology is expounded and attention is paid to
its influence on later philosophers. A.E.
TAYLOR, in his review for Mind, particularly
praised the attention given to Leibniz's influ-
ence on Lotze and Herbart. Taylor's judge-
ment that Latta's edition was the most elabo-
rate and learned work on Leibniz in the English
language was sound enough at the time.
RUSSELL'S famous Critical Exposition of the
Philosophy of Leibniz^ which appeared two
years later, eventually eclipsed Latta's com-
mentary and displaced the Monadology from
its status as the definitive statement of Leibniz's
philosophy. Nonetheless, Latta's edition con-
tinued to be used through much of the twenti-
eth century. Nicholas Rescher, whose 1991
edition supplanted it as a student text, acknowl-
edged that he still found Latta's annotations
particularly useful.
Latta never published a system of his own.
But in his inaugural lecture at Glasgow he
defended the right and duty of philosophers to
produce systematic intellectual constructions
of their own in the light of their experience
and of the knowledge of their time. For Latta
'the system of philosophy is the fruit of the

concentrated experience of its age' (The Old
Mysticism and the New Pluralism, p. 15). He
admired those philosophers, such as Leibniz in
the past and his former colleague D.G. Ritchie
in his own time, who sought to produce this
kind of system. He attacked the 'lazy sophism'
of those such as mystics and pluralists (espe-
cially William James) who in different ways
rejected systematic thinking. He defended meta-
physics as an enterprise, offering clear hypo-
thetical solutions involving rigorous logical
thinking rather than mere speculation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Ed. and trans.), Leibniz: The Monadology
and Other Philosophical Writings (1898).
'On the Relationship between the Philosophy
of Spinoza and that of Leibniz', Mind, vol.
8 (1899), pp. 333-56.
The Old Mysticism and the New Pluralism:
An Inaugural Address Delivered in the
University of Glasgow on October 16th,
1902 (Glasgow, 1902).
Other Relevant Works
The Significance of the Sub-Conscious',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society', vol.
3 (1902-1903), pp. 187-208.
(Ed. with a memoir), D.G. Ritchie:
Philosophical Studies (1905).
'Purpose', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 8 (1907-1908), pp. 17-38.
(with Alexander MacBeath), The Elements of
Logic (1929).
Stuart Brown
LECLERC, Ivor (1915-99)
Ivor Leclerc was born in Dordrecht, South
Africa on 9 February 1915 and died in
Washington, DC on 16 May 1999. He gradu-
ated BA from the University of South Africa in
549
LECLERC
1941, MA from the University of Cape Town
in 1946 and was awarded the PhD from King's
College London in 1949. Leclerc served in the
South African Armed Forces (1941-5), rising to
the rank of captain. After a year as external
lecturer at the University of London (1949-50),
he was appointed lecturer at the University of
Glasgow (1950-62) and senior lecturer in logic
and metaphysics (1962-4). Following a year as
visiting professor at Emory University in
Atlanta Georgia (1963-4), he was named
Professor of Philosophy at Emory and subse-
quently Fuller E. Callaway Professor of
Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy (1980). He
retired from Emory in 1982. Leclerc served as
Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Bonn
University in 1961 and 1973. He suffered from
Alzheimer's disease and died in May 1999. He
is survived by his wife Joan Pirie, and one of
two children as well as five grandchildren from
a former marriage to philosopher Eva SCHAPER.
Leclerc was widely recognized as a leading
interpreter of WHITEHEAD and original con-
tributor to the examination of metaphysical
foundations in the second half of the twentieth
century. He was named President of both the
Metaphysical Society of America (1980-81)
and the International Society for Metaphysics
(1980-85). The former society awarded him
the Founders' Medal in 1989 for outstanding
work in metaphysics.
Leclerc's philosophical development, as he
tells us in The Metaphysical Quest and the
History of Philosophy' (1985), was stimulated
and shaped by two factors in twentieth-century
life and thought: the profound changes in the
political, economic, social, religious and moral
spheres which occurred in the wake of World
War I and the advance in scientific thought
which had begun in the late nineteenth century.
Following World War II Leclerc began his post-
graduate research with the intent of concen-
trating upon the social and political problems
with which he had begun his studies. He con-
cluded, however, that the basic problems in
these areas rested upon fundamental concep-
tions of persons and society which could not be
LECLERC
treated adequately apart from an understand-
ing of the nature of the universe as a whole.
Convinced that the modern individualistic con-
ception of human existence was intimately
bound up with the seventeenth-century con-
ception of the cosmos and that fundamental
changes in the conception of the cosmos were
bound to have a significant impact upon twen-
tieth-century conceptions of persons and
society, Leclerc concentrated his studies on
metaphysics and cosmology. He focused par-
ticularly upon the writings of Alfred North
Whitehead, who seemed to him to have most
successfully tackled the metaphysical and cos-
mological implications of recent scientific devel-
opments.
In his study of Whitehead, Leclerc concluded
that divergent metaphysical views are the result
of different conceptions of the metaphysical
problems, particularly as between different tra-
ditions, as well as different answers to the
problems. This led him to argue that there are
no absolute and neutral formulations of meta-
physical problems and that there is a reciprocal
and necessary interconnection between the con-
ceptions of and answers to the problems. This
need not lead in the direction of mere relativ-
ity, however, for when we study different con-
ceptions of the problem we discover that we
can attain a more adequate comprehension of
the problems than would be the case other-
wise. It is within this context that Leclerc
learned from and became committed to
Aristotle's view that one achieves the best view
of things when one studies them in the process
of their origin and development. In his own
studies of metaphysical problems Leclerc typi-
cally goes back to the beginnings in Greek phi-
losophy and investigates successive historical
efforts to define and solve these problems. This
insistence upon the mutual interdependence of
the history of philosophy and philosophy is
evident from the time of his first book,
Whitehead's Metaphysics (1958), which centres
on Whitehead's later thought, in particular
Process and Reality. Leclerc's study is consid-
ered by many to be the best systematic intro-
550
duction to Process and Reality, and is widely
recognized for its clarity, rigour and attention
to the historical development of Whitehead's
ideas. He argues for the centrality of the phi-
losophy of nature in Whitehead's work, traces
its origins and development in the history of
Western philosophy, and shows the continuity
between Aristotle's and Whitehead's under-
standing of nature.
Leclerc's original contributions to meta-
physics are found most importantly in The
Nature of Physical Existence (1972) and The
Philosophy of Nature (1986). In the first book,
which began as an effort to assess Whitehead's
cosmology, Leclerc examines the historical
roots of the fundamental philosophical
concepts that underlie scientific theories and
recent scientific thought. He focuses on the
debates between Aristotle and his Neoplatonic
and Christian critics, argues for the importance
of Aristotelianism for the beginnings of modern
thought, and makes a detailed analysis of the
seventeenth-century modern conception of the
physical as 'matter' and its implications leading
to metaphysical dualism. He argues that a
highly important process of critically evaluating
nature began in the seventeenth century and
that this process was essentially halted by the
positivistic temper of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, resulting in a significant loss of
appreciation of the fundamental problems per-
taining to the philosophy of nature.
In the final section of The Nature of Physical
Existence, Leclerc offers prolegomena to a new
concept of nature in which he calls for a healing
of the breach between philosophy and science,
and develops arguments connecting science,
reason and experience in order to get beyond
material atomism and more adequately to deal
with the depth and range of issues in contem-
porary scientific theory and philosophy. He
rejects the conception of material substance
associated with the modern period along with
all implications consequent upon it, including
in particular the conception of spiritual or
mental substance. Leclerc recognizes that recent
physicists have departed from this concept of

the physical, but he believes nevertheless that it
continues to influence the thinking of physicists
and philosophers alike. What is needed is a
theory of physical existence freed from the pre-
suppositions and implications of the conception
of physical existence as material, one that will
understand physical existent not as changeless
actuality but in process of becoming. This
brings us to the central argument of the book,
that we need to bring back the basic and
original meaning of the physical or the natural
and to conceive the physical existent as organic
by contrast with the mechanistic conception
of the modern period.
The physical existent ... must be an acting
entity, and the acting must essentially be a
relating, a relating both between existents
and within the existents or substances. This
accords with the Greek conception ofphysis,
of the physical, in a number of respects.
Clearly in the conception of the physical at
which we have arrived, the physical existent
is that which has the principle, the source, of
its kinesis in itself. Its kinesis is its process of
acting ... The acting of the substance is the
substance becoming actual. This clearly
implies a transition from potentiality to actu-
ality, on which Aristotle had also insisted in
respect of the physical existent.
(The Nature of Physical Existence, p. 315)
Leclerc recognizes that in The Nature of
Physical Existence he provides only a sketch of
his own philosophical view, but he returns to
the subject in his later book, The Philosophy of
Nature. Here he provides a systematic criti-
cism of the seventeenth-century philosophy of
nature, seeks an alternative to positivism and
idealism in its many forms, and again calls for
replacing mechanistic materialism with an
organic philosophy of nature. Although
indebted to Whitehead's philosophy of
organism, Leclerc argues that his philosophy of
nature is not in all respects free of atomism.
Whitehead, like Leibniz, is said to repudiate
the conception basic to materialistic atomism
551
LECLERC
that ultimate existents are changeless in their
nature and to revert to the Aristotelian view
that the being of the ultimate existents is in
their activity. But, also like Leibniz, Whitehead
is not able to free himself totally from materi-
alistic atomism. Whitehead's actual entities,
'the final things of which the real world is made
up', although related centres of activity, are in
the final analysis atomic. Organic bodies (soci-
eties) are aggregates of actual entities in much
the same way that seventeenth-century bodies
were aggregates of material atoms. This means
that a society cannot be its own reason, is not
self-sustaining and that it is derivative from the
being of its constituent actual entities.
Leclerc's proposed solution to the problem
mentioned in the paragraph above is more
Aristotelian than Whiteheadian, although he is
clear that he is not proposing a wholehearted
adoption of Aristotelianism as occurred in the
scholastic period. If, he argues, the constituents
of the compound are completely independent
actuals then the compound must necessarily
be a mere aggregate and can have no unity qua
compound. If, on the other hand, the
compound does have unity qua compound, the
compound itself must be an actuality. But how
do we account for the unity of the compound?
On Leclerc's account, the unity differs from
the unity of an aggregate in that it is an integral
unity, a unity that comes about by the integra-
tion of the constituents into a new whole. This
implies a unifying agent that transcends the
constituents and that must itself be emergent in
the unifying, a theory that has much in
common with Aristotle's view that actuality is
the outcome of a transition from potentiality.
Leclerc argues that the integrating agency arises
from the agency of the constituents, each being
taken up into an integrated agency and
becoming part of a new whole which is more
than the sum of its parts. In the example of the
compound 'atom', for example, there are indi-
vidual electronic, protonic, neutronic and other
characters of its constituents and there is the
integral atomic character of the whole. Thus the
character of the compound 'atom' is more than
LEGLERC
that which can be ascribed to it as a mere aggre-
gate. It is a true integral character of the
compound actuality which belongs to it by
virtue of its status as a fully actual being. There
can also be compound beings whose con-
stituents are other compound beings extended
to considerable complexity. This, Leclerc
argues, is 'precisely what the scientific evidence
presents us, in the so-called modern "atoms,"
in molecules, and especially in the complex
molecules of biochemistry, in cells, and in bio-
logical organisms', and he believes that only
such a theory of compound actual beings,
makes the concept of organism properly intel-
ligible (The Philosophy of Nature, p. 129).
Leclerc also believes that it is able to provide a
more adequate and coherent conception of the
human person than is possible in theories which
depend upon the presupposition of actual
beings as restricted to ultimate simples.
Leclerc's conclusions that the seventeenth-
century development in philosophy and science
was founded upon a presupposition of the
Neoplatonic conception of being and that this
ontology is a presupposition of much subse-
quent philosophy led him to investigate and
critically examine the entire problematic of
ontology. He refers in some of his later essays
to a book on the theory of being, which has not
been published. However, some of the later
essays do provide insights into his study of
being and the implications of his critique of
Neoplatonism for issues in philosophical
theology and the subjects of his earliest philo-
sophical interests, philosophical anthropology
and moral, social and political issues. In 'God
and the Problem of Being' (1988) Leclerc
provides a brief summary of the conclusions of
his study of theories of being in their origin
and development. In this essay and 'God and
the Issue of Being' (1984) he challenges the
idea of God as 'a being' and argues that it is
more adequate to think of God as the 'princi-
ple or source' of being. This might mean that
God is beyond knowledge were it not for
knowledge by analogy, but this also raises dif-
ficulties, he argues, because in the traditional
552
argument by analogy introduced by Aquinas,
the concept of God as 'a being' is tacitly intro-
duced. To conceive God as 'principle' of being,
he concludes, can be dealt with only in the
context of a complete metaphysical system.
In 'Individual and Society in Metaphysical
Perspective' (1988) Leclerc argues that
Neoplatonism with its conception of being as
changeless, permanent, static, reached its
fruition in seventeenth-century theories of
human existence and society. In John Locke,
for example, humans, metaphysically identi-
fied with mind, with body as its immediate
property, were conceived as 'individuals'. Mind
is an ontological ultimate, a substance, and this
substance is a self-complete entity which has no
requirements other than the moral one of
obeying God. Any additional needs pertain to
the body, the realm of physical nature. On this
view, Leclerc argues, society cannot be grounded
in the nature of human beings as a natural
requirement since human beings are complete
individuals not in need of a society. This leads to
the conclusion that a society must be a human
artifice, a construct by individuals for the
purpose of achieving their individual needs. A
consequence of this theory in Western societies,
in which the individualistic doctrine is primary,
is that societies, particularly such economic ones
as the business corporations and trade unions,
have grown in power in a way that puts them
beyond the effective control of the political
society which has the ends and needs of all
members of the community as its purpose.
The eighteenth century witnessed the devel-
opment of a more organic theory of society in
which individuals are understood as instru-
ments of the state and as dependent upon the
state as a supreme self-subsistent being. Leclerc
argues, however, that this theory is also
grounded upon modern Neoplatonist ontology
and that the practical consequences of both
theories make it obvious that we need a viable
alternative to both the individualist and organic
theories of persons in society. Supporters of
both theories of persons and society fail to rec-
ognize that the actual life of human beings is

consistently and coherently analysable in
neither individualist nor organic terms. Human
beings do not live in essential independence of
each other, and their interdependence is not
that of instruments functioning in dependence
upon a transcendent whole. From the interde-
pendence of human beings Leclerc infers that
relations be understood as 'real' and that
society be conceived as a real relationship
between individual human beings. An ontology
adequate to this has to be one in which the act
involved in being is necessarily a relational act
and that the relation be an actual connection
with another being. This means that there can
be no fully completed being anterior to the act
of relating. The act of being must be a process
of explication of what is implicit, the 'achieve-
ment of completeness, as Aristotle maintained
in his conception of ousia as energeia and ent-
elecbeia, i.e., as "in act" and as "achieving its
end"' ('Individual and Society in Metaphysical
Perspective' p. 45). On this theory the achieve-
ment or realization is not restricted to the self
in its essence as in Neoplatonic theory, but
includes what is presented by other beings in
the interaction between them. A society is a
whole constituted by the interacting and is not
adequately analysable as merely the arithmeti-
cal sum of the interacting subjects.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Whitehead's Metaphysics (1958); 2nd edn,
New York, 1965).
The Nature of Physical Existence (1972).
Whitehead's Philosophy: Between
Rationalism and Empiricism (Leuven,
1984).
The Philosophy of Nature (Washington, DC,
1986).
Other Relevant Works
The Nature of Metaphysics', The Review of
Metaphysics, vol. 11 (1958), pp. 426-40.
(Trans, with Eva Schaper), Gottfried Martin,
An Introduction to General Metaphysics
[Einleitung in die Allgemeine Metaphysik]
(1961).
553
LECLERC
(Ed.), The Relevance of Whitehead:
Philosophical Essays Commemorating the
Centenary of the Birth of Alfred North
Whitehead (1961).
The Problem of Metaphysics', International
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 8 (1968), pp.
276-90.
'Whitehead and the Problem of God', The
Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 7
(1969), pp. 447-55.
(Ed.), The Philosophy of Leibniz and the
Modern World (Nashville, 1973).
The Ontology of Descartes', The Review of
Metaphysics, vol. 34 (1980), pp. 135^9.
'God and the Issue of Being', Religious
Studies, Special Issue for H.D. Lewis, vol.
20 (1984), pp. 63-79.
The Metaphysics of the Good', in Jude P.
Dougherty (ed.), The Good Life and its
Pursuits (Washington, DC, 1984), pp.
51-71.
The Problem of God in Whitehead's System',
Process Studies, vol. 14 (1985), pp.
301-15.
The Metaphysical Quest and the History of
Philosophy', in Andre Mercier and Maja
Svilar (eds), Philosophers on their Own
Work (New York, 1985), pp. 171-83.
The Relation between Natural Science and
Metaphysics', in Richard F. Kitchener
(ed.), The World of Contemporary Physics
(New York, 1988), pp. 25-33.
'God and the Problem of Being', in George F.
McLean and Hugo Meynell (eds), Person
and God (Lanham, Maryland, 1988), pp.
3-13.
'Individual and Society in Metaphysical
Perspective', in George F. McLean and
Hugo Meynell (eds), Person and Society
(Lanham, Maryland, 1988), pp. 39-48.
The Issue of the Nature of Metaphysics', in
Stewart R. Sutherland and T.A. Roberts
(eds), Religion, Reason and the Self: Essays
in Honour ofHywel D. Lewis (Cardiff,
1989), pp. 91-101.
LECLERC
Further Reading
Bogaard, Paul A. and Gordon Treash (eds),
Metaphysics as Foundation: Essays in
Honor of Ivor Leclerc (New York, 1993).
Includes 'A Bibliography of the Published
Work of Ivor Leclerc'.
Eugene T. Long
LEE, Atkinson (1880-1955)
Atkinson Lee was born in Driffield, Yorkshire
and died in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in early
1955. He was the son of a Primitive Methodist
minister. After education at Cambridge, where
he was a scholar of Peterhouse, and a brief
period in a teacher training college, he became
a tutor at Hartley College, Manchester and
also a lecturer in the philosophy and psychol-
ogy of religion at Manchester University. He
played a key role in apologetics, utilizing both
the insights of the Wesleyan theological tradi-
tion and those of contemporary psychology,
philosophy and comparative religion.
He insisted on the reality and autonomy of
religious experience, emphasizing in the true
Wesleyan tradition its experimental nature. He
argued that Freud's denunciation of religious
experience as purely subjective was itself based
upon subjective assumptions. He upheld the
centrality of revelation, and argued that the
current discovery of discontinuity and indeter-
minacy in science rendered redundant alike the
earlier false opposition of science and religion
as well as invalidating Hume's argument
against miracles.
He argued strongly that the near universality
of religious experience and the discoveries of
comparative religion had strengthened the
authority of religion in general, even if they
had led to a questioning of the exclusive claims
of particular religions. General human consen-
sus and the experience of the saints were
554
powerful testimonies. 'Saints everywhere have
a family likeness, and are the plainest justifica-
tion of religion' ('Religious Experience', p. 130).
He averred that 'religious data have a degree of
authority and finality that is not found else-
where'(ibid., p. 121).
Despite his very Wesleyan emphasis upon
experience, Lee was not blind to the variability
of such experience and its modification by envi-
ronment, psychological, social or historical.
Though he stressed the 'immediate' element, he
also emphasized the importance of the mediate
('the communion of saints depends largely on
faithful historical representation', ibid., p. 126).
Lee's work contains a fine analysis of earlier
work on the nature of experience. He comple-
ments Schleiermacher's emphasis upon the
primacy of the feeling of absolute dependence
with an activist emphasis upon 'going out'
towards the divine (ibid., p. 122). He argues
that 'wonder is a great source of religion' and
that religious awe is a compound of 'admira-
tion and fear'. He argues, against any simplis-
tic liberal Protestantism, that the loss of a sense
of fear in religion would be a 'doubtful boon'
(ibid., p. 125). His Wesleyan reception of the
heart of Christianity can be seen in his state-
ment that worship issues in being lost in
'wonder, love and praise' (ibid., p. 126, citing
Charles Wesley). He saw a very close relation-
ship between art and religion, 'all art is praise'
and religion and the arts largely overlap. He
also argued in favour of the 'recent general
tendency to find deity in the grand values, truth,
beauty and righteousness' (ibid., p. 129), which
he regarded as objective disclosures of God,
not merely human ideals.
Lee argued that faith contained both a
'factual and an ideal element ... Such faith is
experimental, it goes beyond sight, yet is con-
firmed by trial'. He argued that faith led natu-
rally to hope and thence to love. Love was 'the
prime object of the Christian Church; yet love
regarded not as a mere passion, but as wide
embracing and dominating system which
moulds the whole personality' (ibid., p. 134-5).
He argued that the coherence of the higher

forms of religion was a mark of their 'sound
philosophy' (ibid., p. 128).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Groundwork of the Philosophy of Religion
(1946).
Other Relevant Works
'Religious Experience', in J.S. Lidgett and B.
Reed (eds), Methodism in the Modern
World (1929), pp. 119-38.
David Carter
LEE, Vernon (1856-1935)
Vernon Lee was born Violet Paget near
Boulogne in France on 14 October 1856 and
died in Florence on 13 February 1935. She
was the only child of Matilda Paget (nee
Adams) and her second husband Henry
Ferguson Paget. Lee spent much of her child-
hood travelling through Europe with her
family. Her parents employed governesses from
time to time, but she was largely self-taught.
Encouraged by her mother, who had literary
ambitions for her daughter, Lee embarked on
a course of reading which included studies of
archaeology and ancient sculpture, as well as
philosophy and literature. In 1873 she visited
Rome, exploring the city's antiquities under
the guidance of Mary Singer Sargeant, mother
of the painter, who fostered in her a lifelong
passion for Italy.
The family settled in Florence, buying a villa,
'II Palmerino', at Maiano near Fiesole in 1889,
where Lee lived intermittently until her death.
Florence was at that time home to a large expa-
triate community that included the art critic
Bernard Berenson, with whom Lee exchanged
views on art and aesthetics. She made regular
visits to London, where she met many of the
literary and artistic figures of the day. Lee knew
555
LEE
Henry James, Robert Browning and Walter
Pater, whom she regarded as a mentor, dedi-
cating Euphorion (1884), her collection of
essays on the Renaissance, to him.
Lee published over forty works, including
novels, volumes of essays and short stories.
Her first book, Studies of the Eighteenth
Century in Italy, was published in 1880. It
represents a significant contribution to the field
of cultural history. In a series of diverse essays
on the development of music, the history of
opera and the growth of the commedia del-
I'arte, Lee assesses the peculiar conditions that
gave rise to the extraordinary flowering of
artistic life in eighteenth-century Italy, and con-
siders its subsequent impact on European
culture. Studies of the Eighteenth Century in
Italy includes an important essay tracing the
development of music back to the composers
and musicians associated with Naples, the
influence of whom had previously been over-
looked.
In 1881 Vernon Lee published the first of her
works which dealt specifically with questions
of aesthetics. Belcaro consists of eight essays,
some of which had been previously published
in journals, concerning the philosophy of art.
These essays indicate Lee's awareness of the
ideas associated with the aesthetic movement in
England which insisted on the autonomy of art,
its freedom from social, religious or ethical
considerations. Like the exponents of aestheti-
cism, Lee rejected Ruskinian ideas about the
morality of art and the inseparability of form
and content. Releasing art from its responsi-
bilities to its subject, Lee proposes that its
importance lies in its formal construction: 'the
work of art itself exists in the lines, tints, lights
and shades of the picture or statue, in the mod-
ulations and harmonies of a composition'
(Belcaro, p. 65). Whatever else we see in the
work, she argues, 'is gratuitously added by
ourselves' (ibid., p. 65).
Although Lee's emphasis on the formal
beauties of art links her to aesthetic critics such
as Walter Pater, her novel Miss Brown (1884),
a satire on aestheticism, betrays her sceptical
LEE
attitude towards the more extreme and ridicu-
lous aspects of the movement. Her own
writings on aesthetics became increasingly con-
cerned with the relationship between art and
society. Two volumes of essays published in the
late 1880s, Baldwin and Juvenilia, exemplify
this new concern with the role of the artist in
society, revealing Lee's sense of social respon-
sibility. These works, which reject traditional
Christian concepts, also offer an account of
the development of art in terms of its formal
evolution.
In 1895 Lee returned to the history of art,
publishing Renaissance Fancies and Studies, a
second series of essays on the culture of the
Renaissance. Lee's contribution to the nine-
teenth-century debate about the Renaissance
lies in her insistence on the materiality of
Renaissance art. Lee emphasizes the impor-
tance of considering the socio-economic deter-
minants which helped to shape the art of that
period. Two years later, she published Limbo,
another volume of essays on aesthetics, which
contains an important account of impression-
ism. Around this time, Lee was also publishing
travel books, critical essays and collections of
short stories. She also published three historical
novels, Ottile (1883), Penelope Brandling
(1903) and Louis Norbert (1914).
In the latter part of her career, Vernon Lee
began to explore what she termed 'psycholog-
ical aesthetics'. Influenced by the theories of
William James, Lee became interested in the
possibility of observing and recording 'the par-
ticular group of mental activities and habits'
which art evokes. She conducted a series of
'experiments' with her long-time companion
and collaborator Clementina Anstruther-
Thomson, who lived with Lee at 'II Palmerino',
indexing and measuring her reactions to works
of art. In 1913 she published what many have
seen as her most significant work on aesthetics,
The Beautiful, in which she develops her
theories about our aesthetic awareness. Arguing
that the work of art cannot be considered in iso-
lation, Lee attempts to theorize the significance
of the perceiving subject's response to it. She
556
offers an account of the relationship between
aesthetic empathy and form which did much to
further debates about psychological processes as
well as aesthetics. Other important works pub-
lished by Lee in the twentieth century include
her essays on social issues, Gospels of Anarchy
(1908), and her essays on fiction, published
collectively as The Handling of Words in 1923.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy
(1880).
Belcaro: Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical
Questions (1881).
Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and
the Medieval in the Renaissance (1884).
Baldwin: Being Dialogues on Views and
Aspirations (1886).
Juvenilia: Being a Second Series of Essays on
Sundry Aesthetical Questions (1887).
Althea: A Second Book of Dialogues on
Aspirations and Duties (1894).
Renaissance Fancies and Studies: Being a
Sequel to Euphorion (1895).
Limbo, and Other Essays (1897).
(with Clementina Anstruther-Thomson),
Beauty and Ugliness, and Other Studies in
Psychological Aesthetics (1912).
The Beautiful: An Introduction to
Psychological Aesthetics (Cambridge,
1913).
Other Relevant Works
Miss Brown (Edinburgh, 1884).
Gospels of Anarchy, and Other
Contemporary Studies (1908).
Further Reading
Colby, Vineta, The Puritan Aesthete: Vernon
Lee', in The Singular Anomaly: Women
Novelists of the Nineteenth Century (New
York, 1970).
Gunn, Peter, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget,
1856-1935 (Oxford, 1964).
Markgraf, Carl, 'Vernon Lee: A Commentary
and Annotated Bibliography of Writings
about her', English Literature in

Transition, vol. 24, no. 4 (1983), pp.
268-312.
Schaffer, Talia, The Forgotten Female
Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-
Victorian England (Charlottesville and
London, 2000).
Katherine McGowran
LEJEWSKI, Czeskw(1913-2001)
Czeslaw Lejewski was born in Minsk in the
Russian Empire on 14 April 1913 and died in
Doncaster after a long illness on 9 July 2001.
In 1920 his family moved to Lublin in Poland,
where he attended Gimnazjum (classical
grammar school). From 1931 he studied
classics at Warsaw University, where he
obtained a master's degree in 1936 with a dis-
sertation on tropes in the sceptics. After military
service he returned to the university in 1937 to
study for a PhD in classics, concentrating on
ancient logic. This interest drew him to courses
and seminars on logic given by Jan Lukasiewicz
and Stanislaw Lesniewski and philosophy with
Tadeusz Kotarbiriski. His dissertation De
Aenesidemi studiis logicis was examined and
passed among others by Lukasiewicz, but he
was unable to take his degree due to the
outbreak of war, the graduation ceremony at
which all the graduands needed to do was say
three Latin words being scheduled for early
September 1939. Lejewski was taken prisoner
by the invading Soviets and spent two years in
terrible conditions in Soviet labour camps
before joining the Polish Army under General
Anders after the Nazi invasion of the USSR.
There followed in 1942 an odyssey by land
and sea from Russia to Britain via Iran, Iraq,
Egypt, South Africa, South America and the
USA. On arrival in Britain, Lejewski joined
Polish Military Intelligence in London, and was
parachuted into Eastern Europe several times.
557
LEJEWSKI
After the war he settled in London, teaching
English to Poles, and marrying an
Englishwoman in 1949. He became a British
citizen in 1955, and remarried in 1973 after the
death of his first wife. Even after the end of
communism, Lejewski never returned to his
native land.
Lejewski took up PhD studies again under
POPPER at the London School of Economics,
passing (with Lukasiewicz as examiner again)
with a dissertation Studies in the Logic of
Propositions in 1954. In 1956 he joined the
Philosophy Department at Manchester
University, where in 1966 he succeeded Arthur
PRIOR as professor, and where he remained
until his retirement in 1980. He was visiting
professor at Notre Dame University (USA) i
1960-61 and at the University of Salzburg
(Austria) in 1984.
Lejewski was one of the last members of the
prewar generation of the great Warsaw school
of logicians. He published no books, but
around sixty articles, almost all on logic. The
majority comment on, reconstruct and extend
the work of Lesniewski. His first article
appeared in 1953, when he was already forty.
He was one of the clearest of Lesniewski's
expositors and he did much to extend his
teacher's ideas.
His published articles fall into several groups.
One group expounds or simplifies Lesniewski's
major logical systems of mereology and
ontology. Several articles on mereology propose
simplifications or new axiomatizations based
on single axioms. One article discusses atomless
and atomistic extensions to mereology; another
shows that mereology is consistent relative to
protothetic, Lesniewski's extended system of
prepositional logic with quantifiers binding
prepositional and functorial variables. Lejewski
slightly modified Lesniewski's mereological ter-
minology to make it more understandable for
English speakers, replacing 'ingredient', 'part'
and 'class' respectively by 'part', 'proper part'
and 'complete collection'. The articles on
ontology are more innovative: the 1958 article
'On Lesniewski's Ontology' is by far the
LEJEWSKI
clearest exposition of this, Lesniewski's most
important logical system. Lejewski introduced
modified Euler diagrams (distinguishing
between singular and plural denotation) for
understanding the primitives, defining
numerous ontological functors and showing
that partial inclusion ('Some a are fc') can serve
as sole primitive functor. Lejewski showed that
Boolean algebra in the axiomatization of
Schroder could be understood as elementary
ontology (quantifying only nominal variables),
and with nominal definitions can be based on
a single axiom for weak inclusion ('Any a are
b'}. Lejewski also showed how to bridge the
gap between Aristotle's syllogistic in
Lukasiewicz's modernized form and the ele-
mentary ontology of Lesniewski.
A second group of articles offers alternatives
and extensions to Lesniewski's systems, usually
prompted, one suspects, by criticisms of the
artificiality of the latter. Whereas Lesniewski's
ontology treats all names, whether singular,
empty or plural, as belonging to a single
category, natural languages tend to use only
singular proper names, which may be empty.
Lejewski proposed a system of what he called
'non-reflexive identity', based on singular
identity sentences a - b which are only true if
both a and b exist and are the same individual.
Another and more radical innovation by
Lejewski followed an idea of Ajdukiewicz and
introduced a special category of names for
abstract classes, resulting in what Lejewski
called a bicategorial ontology. Lejewski offered
this system in an ecumenical and ontologically
neutral spirit, but himself denied that there are
abstract classes. In the 1982 article 'Ontology:
What Next?', Lejewski went beyond mereology
to chronology, an ontological theory of
temporal objects, based on two primitive
notions, one topological, an object's being
wholly earlier than another object, and one
metrical, an object's having a shorter duration
than another object.
A third group of articles reflect on the philo-
sophical implications of logic from a
Lesniewskian standpoint. A1954 article, 'Logic
558
and Existence', contrasted Lesniewski's 'unre-
stricted' understanding of nominal quantifiers
- allowing empty names as substituends in th.
standard inference rules - with the 'restricted'
interpretation of Quine and the tradition from
Frege and RUSSELL, where only designating
terms may be substituted. Despite this plea,
when so-called free logic was invented a little
later, it took quantification in Quine's way and
decoupled names from bound variables, mod-
ifying the inference rules accordingly. Lejewski
defended Lesniewski's views against all criti-
cisms, for example the criticism that an exten-
sional logic cannot handle belief and other
intensional contexts. His account of belief
contexts is close to that of Davidson's parat-
actic view. Lejewski also reflected on the rela-
tionship between natural language and the ide-
alized languages of Lesniewski and other logi-
cians: the clearest statement of his view that a
mutual give and take is required can be found
in the 1979 article 'Idealization of Ordinary
Language for the Purposes of Logic'.
Among Lejewski's other papers are two on
prepositional calculus derived from his London
dissertation, two on Theophrastus's concept
of prosleptic syllogisms, a short memoir on
Lesniewski and his systems, and an Arabic
paper on Lukasiewicz. Despite his origins,
nearly all of Lejewski's published papers are in
English or are translations therefrom.
Lejewski's work shows remarkable consis-
tency and while his views developed there is
little evidence that he changed his mind. A
remarkable example of his constancy is the link
between a 1958 paper (extracted from his
London dissertation), which shows how,
allowing definitions of an irnplicational form,
the whole of prepositional logic can be based
on material implication alone, and a 1989
paper showing how fully to formalize the 1958
system using Lesniewskian terminological
explanations.
Lejewski's papers are all extremely precise,
have a clear purpose and despite sometimes
formidable technical detail are in structure easy
to follow. A good example is his contribution

to the large Schilpp Library of Living
Philosophers collection on Popper, Topper's
Theory of Formal or Deductive Inference'
(1974), which sympathetically reconstructs and
gently but firmly corrects Popper's faulty
attempts to reform deductive logic. A particular
historical tour de force is the article 'Logic,
History of for the fifteenth edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, which gives evidence
of Lejewski's remarkable knowledge of the
history of logic. Lejewski saw the second edition
(1957) of Lukasiewicz's classic monograph
Aristotle's Syllogistic through the press after
Lukasiewicz became too ill to complete the
work.
In his university teaching outside logic
Lejewski stayed close to classical texts, particu-
larly Aristotle, but his ascetic brand of material-
istic reism did not appeal to a wide range of
students, who in the atmosphere of the 1960s to
1980s preferred more 'exciting' fare. Lejewski's
settled and quite extreme view on what there is
can be found in his 1976 article 'Outline of an
Ontology', which denies mereological atoms,
where Kotarbinski, whose views Lejewski closely
follows, had been agnostic about whether or
not all objects have proper parts. According to
Lejewski, all objects are bulky and indefinitely
divisible temporally extended material bodies,
and nothing else exists.
Because of the narrow scope of his interests,
Lejewski's influence has been largely confined
to a small circle of logicians interested in
Lesniewski, such as Boleslaw Sobocinski,
Arthur Prior and the medieval logic historian
Desmond HENRY. There is no secondary liter-
ature on his work, and he did not aspire to a
wide following, accepting with equanimity the
esoteric nature of his interests, but he inspired
respect among those who shared his interests,
strenuously (and correctly) defending the
importance of logical precision for philosophy.
Lejewski's scientific books and posthumous
papers are housed at the University of Leeds.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A website listing over sixty items and aspiring
559
LEJEWSKI
to completeness can be found at,
http://www.fmag.unict.it/~polphil/PolPhil/
Lejew/Lejew.html, accessed November
2004.
'Logic and Existence', British Journal for the
Philosophy of Science, vol. 5 (1954), pp.
1-16.
'On Implicational Definitions', Studia Logica,
vol. 8 (1958), pp. 189-211.
'On Lesniewski's Ontology', Ratio, vol. 1
(1958), pp. 150-76.
'Aristotle's Syllogistic and its Extensions',
Synthese, vol. 15 (1963), pp. 125-54.
'A Theory of Non-Reflexive Identity and its
Ontological Ramifications', in P.
Weingartner (ed.), Grundfragen der
Wissenschaften und ihre Wurzeln in der
Metaphysik (Salzburg, 1967), pp. 65-102.
'Consistency of Lesniewski's Mereology',
Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol. 34 (1969),
pp. 321-8.
'A System of Logic for Bicategorial
Ontology', Journal of Philosophical Logic,
vol. 3 (1974), pp. 265-83.
'Popper's Theory of Formal or Deductive
Inference', in P.A. Schilpp (ed.), The
Philosophy of Karl Popper (La Salle,
1974), pp. 632-70.
'Logic, History of, Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 15th edition (Chicago, 1974).
'Outline of an Ontology', Bulletin of the John
Rylands University Library of Manchester,
vol. 59 (1976), pp. 127-47.
'Systems of Lesniewski's Ontology with the
Functor of Weak Inclusion as the Only
Primitive Term', Studia Logica, vol. 36
(1977), pp. 323-49.
'Idealization of Ordinary Language for the
Purposes of Logic', in D. J. Alleton, E.
Carney and D. Holdcroft (eds), Function
and Context in Linguistic Analysis
(Cambridge, 1979), pp. 94-110.
'Ontology: What Next?', in W. Leinfellner et
al. (eds), Language and Ontology.
Proceedings of the 6th International
Wittgenstein Symposium (Vienna, 1982),
pp. 173-85.
LEJEWSKI
'Accommodating the Informal Notion of
Class within the Framework of
Lesniewski's Ontology', Dialectic^ vol. 39
(1985), pp. 217-41.
'Formalization of Functionally Complete
Propositional Calculus with the Functor of
Implication as the Only Primitive Term',
Studia Logica, vol. 48 (1989), pp. 479-94.
'Ricordando Stanislaw Lesniewski',
Quaderni del Centra Studi per la Filosofta
Mitteleuropea, vol. 1 (1989), pp. 1-46.
Peter Simons
LEVINE, Israel (1893-1988)
Israel Levine was born in Glasgow on 21
February 1893 and died in London. His parents
had immigrated from Russian Poland in the
1870s and his father was described variously as
a 'Reader' or 'Minister' at a Jewish Synagogue.
Israel, although the youngest of seven children,
attended Glasgow University, where he
obtained both his degrees. His DLitt thesis was
published in 1924 as Reason and Morals: An
Inquiry into the First Principles of Ethics. He
had already been appointed as a lecturer in
philosophy under Hector HETHERINGTON at
the new University College of the South-West
in Exeter in 1922. He was to remain as Head
and Professor of Philosophy at what eventually
became the University of Exeter until his retire-
ment in 1957.
In the Preface to Reason and Morals Levine
paid tribute to his teacher, Henry JONES,
claiming that his book 'vindicated the idealis-
tic interpretation of experience which he [Jones]
so persistently and brilliantly sustained
throughout his writings'. Levine's own thought,
however, diverged radically from his teacher's
and veers in the direction of a wholly deter-
ministic and naturalistic point of view within
which the preservation of any vestiges of
560
idealism is at best problematic. His ethical
theory was inspired by radical thinkers such as
Marx, Darwin and, especially Freud. It makes
use of the Freudian contrast between the
Reality Principle and the Pleasure Principle.
Levine's ultimate ethical value is the preserva-
tion of species. He himself summarized the
argument of his main book in these terms:
The theme of what follows is, in brief, (a)
that Reason may be regarded as the capacity
of an individual to adapt his behaviour to the
conditions of real life, (b) that at a certain
stage in the evolution of man real life consists
of group or common life, in which there is
invariably found a code of moral regulations,
and (c) that at this stage it is still reason
which marks the capacity of an individual to
observe these moral regulations, without
which group life itself is impossible.
(Reason and Morals, p. xv)
The 'conditions of real life' provide the basis for
ethics, and the Reality Principle working in
individual people enables them to recognize
what they ought to do. Levine identifies three
kinds of ethical principle, relating respectively
to 'security of life', 'regulation of sexual
impulses' and 'equality'.
Levine's interest in the unconscious had
perhaps been stimulated by another of his
teachers, Robert LATTA, and this was the topic
of his first book, which traced the philosophi-
cal antecedents from Leibniz on but was pri-
marily an introduction to Freudian psychol-
ogy. In this book he insists that psychic deter-
minism must be postulated by a science of
mental life. At the same time he allows that 'the
facts of moral life and moral consciousness
make it imperative to postulate moral freedom
in the interests of philosophy of metaphysics'
(The Unconscious, p. 180). He returned to this
problem in his Joint Session paper (1924),
where he admits that determinism might well
be true but, drawing on JOHNSON'S Logic, puts
forward a tentative 'dualistic hypothesis',
according to which experience is to be inter-

preted 'as the clash, or meeting, of a free
creative life-force or reason or spirit and a deter-
mined law-revealing matter' ('The Term "Law"
in Psychology', p. 83).
Levine offers a similar kind of 'dualistic' res-
olution to the problem of reconciling natural-
ism with admitting real values. In his paper on
'Naturalism and Values' (1925-6) he argues
that naturalism is limited in its application to
'the metrical aspect of reality' and should not
be extended to the 'spiritual or non-metrical'.
He was, however, by no means certain of this
dualism and may later have abandoned it. In his
last book he rejects Bergson's version of
dualism according to which 'life, or the Vital
Impulse', is set up side by side with Matter, or
Mechanism' (Faithful Rebels, p. 116). Levine,
who seems earlier to have been influenced by
Bergson's dualism, later compares it
unfavourably with Spinoza's monism.
In his last book he claims there was a tendency
in Jewish speculative thought from Spinoza to
Marx and Bergson to offer a 'revolutionary
quality' by adopting new ways of thinking but
adopting them more 'consistently and even ruth-
lessly' than others. This analysis may provide
some clue as to how Levine may have thought of
himself as a philosopher in the tradition of
Jewish speculative thought. He was tempted by
a radically mechanistic view of human nature
and accepted what was, in a broad sense, a nat-
uralistic ethics. In fact, however, though his
earlier thought of the 1920s was radical enough
to be disturbing to idealists, it was not expressed
'ruthlessly' enough to demand attention and
provoke attempts at refutation. He was not, i.
short, either faithful enough or rebellious
enough, at least in these earlier writings. He
seems thereafter largely and then completely to
have stopped publishing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reason and Morals: An Inquiry into the First
Principles of Ethics (1924).
The Term "Law" in Psychology: What are
its Implications', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 4 (1924)
561
LEWIS
pp. 76-85.
'Naturalism and Values', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 26 (1925-6), pp
171-88.
Faithful Rebels: A Study in Jewish
Speculative Thought (1936).
Other Relevant Works
The Unconscious: An Introduction to
Freudian Psychology (1923); trans, by
Anna Freud as Das Unbewusst (Leipzig,
1926).
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) (1925).
Stuart Brown
LEWIS, Clive Staples (1898-1963)
Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast,
Northern Ireland on 29 November 1898 and
died in Headington Quarry, Oxfordshire on
22 November 1963. He attended University
College, Oxford from 1917 to 1923, where he
received a first in Greats (classics and philoso-
phy) and a first in English literature, and also
won the Chancellor's English Essay Prize in
1921. C.S. Lewis began his teaching career a
a replacement philosophy tutor at University
College, Oxford, and in 1925 became a fellow
of English literature at Magdalen College,
Oxford. In 1941 Lewis was the founding
President of the Oxford Socratic Club, dedi-
cated to the philosophical and theological
exploration of Christianity. Lewis himself gave
several philosophical lectures at the Oxford
Socratic Club, and G.E.M. ANSCOMBE'S famous
critique of his epistemological argument against
naturalism there in 1948 had a big impact on
Lewis and caused him to rewrite his book
Miracles (although the notion that Anscombe's
critique caused Lewis to cease philosophizing
altogether is exaggerated, as Lewis subse-
quently engaged in philosophical lectures and
LEWIS
debates, and wrote and revised philosophical
essays and books). In 1954 Lewis accepted the
Professorship of Medieval and Renaissance
Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge,
where he taught until 1963. C.S. Lewis is pri-
marily known for his children's fantasy series,
The Chronicles ofNarnia (1950-56), his works
on English medieval and Renaissance literature,
and his theological works defending Christianity
(he was an Anglican). However, he also explored
philosophical topics in his works as well.
C.S. Lewis had been an atheist in his youth but
later reconverted to Christianity and his Miracles
(1947; 2nd edn, 1960) contains his famous
argument that naturalism is self-refuting. He
argues in his earlier edition that according to
naturalism the human mind results from and
operates according to deterministic non-rational
causes. Yet here thought would be mere cerebral
biochemistry and a flux of atoms, and the nat-
uralist is hard-pressed to explain how science can
know the world and how the notions of truth
and falsity or a compelling argument can arise.
In his later edition he stated that knowledge
cannot be merely due to cause/effect relationships
but must instead display ground-consequent
relationships in which one belief follows logically
from another. For knowledge must be deter-
mined by the object known in a mental act of
insight, and not by the non-rational laws of
nature operating in our brains. Lewis, as sug-
gested by the title of the book, also defends the
idea that belief in miracles is not irrational
against the charges of Hume.
Lewis, in his Abolition of Man (1943) and
Mere Christianity (1952), supports a natural
law theory of ethics. He argues that ethical ideals
originate from the rational perception of an
objective moral order and cannot be a mere
matter of taste or biological instinct as we would
have no reason to obey such tastes or instincts.
Moreover, the moral law judges which of our
instincts are good and ought to be followed,
and natural instincts could only give us a strong
desire to act in a certain way and not the feeling
that we ought to so act. Lewis also develops this
idea into his well-known moral argument for
562
God. He argues that only a religious worldview
can make sense of this objective moral law. For
when we grasp the moral law we find that we are
under a moral law not of our own making and
that someone or something wants us to act in a
certain way. Lewis asserts that this something
which urges us to do what is right operates more
like a mind than anything else we know and a
mind that is good. In The Problem of Pain
(1940) Lewis argues that this good God allows
evil in the world because the world is a Vale of
soul-making'. Pain, danger, resistance and trial
are a necessary part of a world in which souls
can meet and perfect themselves by engaging in
acts of heroism, self-sacrifice, kindness, courtesy,
compassion, mercy, fortitude, patience, grati-
tude and forgiveness.
In his The Four Loves (1960) Lewis distin-
guished the different types of love, such as affec-
tion, friendship, eros and charity, by drawing
upon a famous contrast between Need-love,
which is motivated by an egoistic need for
something, versus Gift-Love, which is other-
directed and desires the good of the beloved.
Lewis holds that humans have both need and
gift-loves for God and that both are proper.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Problem of Pain (1940).
The Abolition of Man (1943).
Miracles: A Preliminary Study (1947; 2nd
edn, 1960).
Mere Christianity (1952).
The Four Loves (I960).
Further Reading
Beversluis, John, C.S. Lewis and the Search
for Rational Religion (Grand Rapids,
Michigan, 1985).
Downing, David, The Most Reluctant
Convert: C.S. Lewis's Journey to the Faith
(Downers Grove, Illinois., 2002).
Reppert, Victor, C.S. Lewis's Dangerous
Idea: In Defense of the Argument from
Reason (Downers Grove, Illinois, 2003).
Alan Vincelette

LEWIS, Hywel David (1910-92)
Hywel David Lewis was born in Llandudno on
21 May 1910 and died in Guildford on 6 April
1992. He was the son of David John (the
Presbyterian minister of Waunfawr) and
Rebecca Da vies Lewis. He studied philosophy
at the University College of North Wales,
Bangor where he came under the influence of
Charles Arthur CAMPBELL, then Professor of
Philosophy at Bangor. After graduating BA
(with first class honours) 1932 and MA (with
distinction) 1933, Lewis went to Oxford
University where among his most influential
teachers were H.A. PaiCHARD, W.D. Ross and
H.H. PRICE. In 1936 Lewis cut short his post-
graduate studies at Oxford to return to a lec-
tureship in Bangor, where in 1947 he succeeded
to the chair that Campbell had occupied. In
1955 Lewis was appointed to the Chair of the
History and Philosophy of Religion at King's
College London, where he remained until his
retirement in 1977.
Fiercely independent and proud of his Welsh
heritage, Lewis, who was bilingual from an
early age, devoted himself to efforts to maintain
and extend Welsh culture. He himself pub-
lished many articles, books and poems in the
Welsh language. Yet in many ways Lewis was
also an international philosopher both intel-
lectually and in service to the profession. He
was recognized by his British peers in holding
the presidencies of the Mind Association, the
Aristotelian Society and the Society for the
Study of Theology. He was also elected
President of the International Society of
Metaphysics and delivered named lectures in
the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada
and India. Lewis was the founding editor
(1965-84) of Religious Studies, and was instru-
mental in making it a leading international
journal for the philosophy of religion.
Lewis's first two books in the English
language, Morals and the New Theology
(1947) and Morals and Revelation (1951),
reveal his deep-rooted concern with issues in
morality, the philosophy of religion and the
563
LEWIS
philosophy of mind, and set forth many of the
themes that he develops further in his most
widely known works, Our Experience of God
(1959) and his Gifford Lectures, delivered at the
University of Edinburgh (1966-8). He pub-
lished Our Experience of God in 1959, at a
time when many philosophers and theologians
were translating sentences referring to God into
sentences referring to self-understanding or
moral prescriptions, or were retreating into
silence or appeals to authority. Although not
unmindful of the contributions of the logical
analysis of religious language, Lewis's book
provided significant encouragement for those
devoted to a broader understanding of reason
and experience. He develops at length his
understanding of the relation between reason,
experience and belief in God, arguing that God
is not a constituent of the world and that reli-
gious beliefs cannot be established in ways that
we establish beliefs about entities within the
world. Emphasis upon the transcendence of
God, however, did not lead him to separate reli-
gious belief from rational justification. On the
contrary, he argues that religious belief requires
definite commitments and must be subject to
claims of truth and falsity in some ordinary
sense.
Lewis describes himself as a common sense
realist and he shares with COOK WILSON and
John BAILLIE belief in the intuitive sense of the
presence of God. He rejects, however, what he
believes to be Wilson's tendency to reduce
religion to an attitude and Baillie's tendency to
reduce religious insight to moral conscience.
Lewis seeks to provide a secure foundation for
religious belief in what he calls the elusive
insight or intuition into there having to be God.
This insight is of an irreducible, albeit positive
mystery that explains why things are rather
than are not. If, Lewis argues, we could clear
away the impediments to this insight, sceptics
and agnostics might also be led to see what is
meant by knowing God in this sense. He admits
that this insight, which we most often associate
with neo-Thomism, is very difficult to express,
but he finds an analogy for it in the mystery of
LEWIS
self-identity and uniqueness of other minds. In
the case of God, however, the mystery is even
more radical, for God is completely other and
we cannot know at all what it is to be God.
Because God is understood to be completely
other than persons or things in the world, we
cannot, according to Lewis, draw inferences
from the world to prove the existence of God.
This does not mean, however, that all forms of
argument are irrelevant. Lewis is more likely to
use such words as 'induce' and 'evoke', but it
is clear that while he does not believe that
there are strictly deductive or inductive argu-
ments for the existence of God, he does appeal
to an orderly procedure of presenting and re-
presenting the data in such a way as to help us
see or intuit the transcendence of God. Lewis
is aware that many philosophers do not feel a
need for this kind of explanation, but he also
believes that through inquiry into the nature of
things we often awaken in ourselves and others
a sense of their having to be some incompre-
hensible reality that accounts for things being
rather than not.
Intuition of a transcendent reality provides
for Lewis a foundation for religion, but for a
more positive knowledge of God we have to
rely upon the intrusion of God into our expe-
riences of persons and things in the form of
concrete religious experience. In religious expe-
rience the intuition that transcendent reality
exists is filled out through the impact that God
makes upon persons in the finite world. Here
again Lewis finds an analogy with our knowl-
edge of other minds. We do not know the other
person as she is in and for herself, but we do
have an indirect or mediated knowledge of the
other through our experience of her body and
activities. By analogy, we can have more
positive knowledge of God through clues
offered to us through our experiences of
persons and things in the world. Religious expe-
rience in this case is not something merely sub-
jective. It is something that individuals undergo,
but such experiences take place within a social
and historical context. Religious experience, as
Lewis understands it, does not refer to some
564
neutral feature of experience which may or
may not be given a religious interpretation,
and religious experience is not merely an exten-
sion of moral or aesthetic experience. It is a dis-
tinctive kind of experience that is incapable of
being reduced to non-religious terms. Lewis
speaks in this context of a certain toning of
occasions or situations in which our under-
standing is deepened or enhanced. For example,
while the ethical directives of a prophet may be
understood by all, in religious experience we
may be directed beyond the moral insight itself
to an apprehension of the transcendent as the
ground and source of the moral insight.
Religious experiences are distinctive in being
apprehensions of transcendence, but they take
place in the context of other experiences,
merging with and giving focus to them.
Persons may discover patterns of divine dis-
closure in religious experience that make up a
story leading to -a particular revelation in
history and the tenets of a particular faith tra-
dition, and persons who are particularly sensi-
tive to this process of the disclosure of God
give expression to it in vivid metaphors and
images which give concreteness and particu-
larity to it. These images are indispensable to
the articulation of the disclosure of God.
According to Lewis, however, they are of a dif-
ferent order from the experiences themselves
and do not directly mirror the nature of divine
activity. When images are taken independently
of their anchorage in experience, we tend,
argues Lewis, to lapse into dogmatism and
idolatry. This does not mean that images
merely provide us with a blik or a way of
looking at events. Rather, we are said to be
directed by images to become aware of the
peculiarities of some events leading us beyond
the surface and affording clues to the ways in
which the transcendent reality enters into
special relations with us. The true function of
religious language is to 'refer away from itself
and open out to God' ('The (Cognitive Factor in
Religious Experience', p. 65).
The expanded version of Lewis's Gifford
Lectures appeared in three volumes, The

Elusive Mind (1969), The Elusive Self (1982)
and Freedom and Alienation (1985). In the
first volume Lewis sets out to defend Cartesian
dualism against many contemporary critics at
a time when, as he says, 'So powerful has the
onslaught on the dualist position been of late
that many consider it to have been finally and
utterly demolished' (The Elusive Mind, p. 15).
His primary argument for the dualism of mind
and body consists of an appeal to conscious
experience. On his account, it is a plain fact of
common experience that we are directly aware
of our own mental processes as being different
in nature from other realities we encounter in
the world . He argues, 'we seem compelled to
recognize some reality which cannot itself be
described in physical terms, however close the
involvement may be with material conditions'
(The Elusive Self, p. 3). Lewis does not intend
to be eschewing argument as some have
claimed. He is arguing that the mind eludes
efforts at conceptualization, and that one
reaches a point at which one can do no other
than affirm what seems to be the case. This
need not mean, however, that mind and body
are isolatable entities, a misunderstanding that
he attributes to many critics of dualism.
Closely connected with the features of
dualism already discussed is the claim which is
developed further in The Elusive Self, that there
is a self which remains constant and is involved
in the flow of our mental states. The experience
of the self, according to Lewis, is a unique expe-
rience for which there are no adequate analo-
gies in the external world. Because of this, talk
of the self owning or not owning, having or not
having mental states is misleading. The self, on
Lewis's account, can be neither reduced to its
passing states nor envisaged as an entity entirely
apart from the experience to which it stands in
some special relation. Rejecting idealistic and
mystical monistic theories of the self as well as
efforts to reduce the self to the physical or the
behavioural, Lewis appeals to the unique way
in which an individual may be said to know
herself to be the individual being she is.
'Everyone will know who or what he is, in
565
LEWIS
being the person he is, and there is no more that
can be said' (ibid., p. 55). Here, as in the case
of the distinctiveness of mental events, we are
said to encounter a limit to explanation but,
argues Lewis, that is no reason to turn to an
explanation that ignores the experience of self.
How then do we account for the continued
identity of the self? In answering this question
Lewis appeals primarily to memory in the sense
of having experienced or witnessed events in
which we ourselves were involved. Without
ignoring cases in which we err in our memory,
Lewis insists that we do not merely recall what
went on in the past. We recall it as including
our past. It was the I, which I now find myself
to be, of which I was aware in past occurrences
and this, he argues, gives assurance of my con-
tinued identity over considerable stretches of
time. This concept of the identity of self
provides the foundation for Lewis's more
extended argument in The Self and Immortality
(1972) and Persons and Life After Death
(1978) for the reasonableness of belief that a
person can in some sense survive death.
In the third volume of his expanded Gifford
Lectures Lewis further develops the implica-
tions of his understanding of the self for dis-
cussions of free will, morality and religion. To
be responsible is to be the sort of being whose
conduct is open to unique distinctions of moral
worth and moral evil. According to Lewis, the
condemnation which is appropriate to moral
evil requires that my conduct be under my
control in a manner more absolute than deter-
minism or even soft determinism permits. Lewis
does not deny the role of formed character in
many of our decisions, but he insists that there
are cases of conflict between duty and interests
which may result in my acting contrary to all
expectations based on influence and charac-
ter. Here we confront 'a freedom without
parallel elsewhere, a totally new beginning, or
as it is sometimes put today, a "choice between
genuinely open alternatives" such that, granted
everything else in the situation, what was done
could have been other than it was' (Freedom
and Alienation, p. 37). Free choice in the moral
LEWIS
sense, Lewis argues, falls altogether outside
assessments based on aptitudes and disposi-
tions. He does not conclude from this, however,
that moral decisions are random or capricious.
Rather, they are centred in self-awareness and
the uniqueness of the self for which he has
argued. Lewis intends to help us see that moral
attainment is at the core of our existence. Moral
demands turn us away from ourselves in
response to demands that are not of our own
making and dispose us to be open to the impact
of reality upon us, including the wholly other
reality of God. This does not mean that there
is a necessary connection between morality and
religion or morality and piety. Rather, moral
awareness is understood to put us in a position
in which we may become more sensitive to reli-
gious reality.
Moral evil leads to alienation from the world,
other persons and ultimately the divine, but
the meaning and mode of salvation in religion
differs according to whether or not present
existence is accorded some genuine and distinct
reality on its own. Here we encounter what
Lewis calls the great divide. From his earliest
work he sought common ground among the
world religions and argued that there is a sense
of transcendent reality in all major world reli-
gions. He did not, however, ignore essential
differences. Lewis argues against monistic views
in which the distinctive reality of the self is lost,
and against Buddhist views in which present
experience is assigned the status of illusion. By
contrast, Christian thought, with its emphasis
upon the distinctiveness and reality of created
beings, is held to be compatible with his views
on persons and morality. In Christian belief, he
argues, God is a distinct reality that transcends
but does not eliminate persons. Rather, in
seeking fully to realize their existence, persons
may be brought into life-enhancing contacts
with a transcendent reality, where they may
be reclaimed, so to speak, within the world
from beyond the world. This relation, Lewis
argues, affects our social as well as our private
existence, leading to the health of both persons
and society.
566
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Morals and the New Theology (1947).
Morals and Revelation (1951).
The Cognitive Factor in Religious
Experience', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society', suppl. vol. 29 (1955),
pp. 59-84.
Our Experience of God (1959).
'God and Mystery', Prospect for
Metaphysics, ed. Ian Ramsey (1961), pp.
206-37.
Freedom and History (1962).
The Philosophy of Religion (1965).
World Religions, with R.L Slater (1966).
Dreaming and Experience (1968).
The Elusive Mind, Eased on the First Series
of the Gifford Lectures Delivered in the
University of Edinburgh, 1966-68 (1969).
The Self and Immortality (1973).
Persons and Life After Death: Essays by
Hywel D. Lewis and Some of his Critics
(1978).
Jesus in the Faith of Christians (1981).
The Elusive Self, Based on The Gifford
Lectures Delivered in the University of
Edinburgh, 1966-68 (Edinburgh, 1982).
Freedom and Alienation, the Third Volume
Based on The Gifford Lectures Delivered
in the University of Edinburgh 1966-68
(Edinburgh, 1985).
Other Relevant Works
(Ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy, 3rd
ser. (1956).
(Ed.), Clarity is not Enough (1963).
(Ed.), Philosophy East and West, Essays in
Honour of Dr. T.M.P. Mahadevan (1976).
(Ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy', 4th
ser. (1976).
Further Reading
Sutherland, Stewart R. and T.A. Roberts
(eds), Religion, Reason and the Self: Essays
in Honour of Hywel D. Lewis (Cardiff,
1989). Includes an extensive bibliography
of the writings of Hywel D. Lewis in Welsh
and English.

Bertocci, Peter, 'Does Elusive Becoming in
Fact Characterize H.D. Lewis' View of the
Mind', Religious Studies, vol. 15 (1979),
pp. 399--405.
, 'La conception du Moi, de son
identite et de 1'immortalite selon H.D.
Lewis', Archives de Philosophie, vol. 43,
no. 3 (1980), pp. 363-84.
Clarke, Norris, 'Our Experience of God',
International Philosophical Quarterly, vol.
1(1961), pp. 168-77.
Hartland-Swann, John, 'What is Theology? A
Reply to H.D. Lewis', Philosophy, vol. 29
(1954), pp. 54-64.
Knox, John, Jr, Review of The Self and
Immortality, Religious Studies, vol. 10
(1974), pp. 89-10.
Long, Eugene Thomas, 'Experience, raison et
croyance religieuse d'apres H.D. Lewis',
Archives de Philosophie, vol. 43, no. 3
(1980), pp. 385-410. Revised version in
English, 'Lewis on Experience, Reason and
Religious Belief, The Review of
Metaphysics, vol. 35, no. 1 (September
1981), pp. 87-109.
Merrill, Kenneth. R., 'Comments on
Professor H.D. Lewis' Self-Identity and
Memory', Southwestern Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 1 (1970), pp. 230-36.
Reck, Andrew J., 'Critical Remarks on H.D.
Lewis' Self-Identity and Memory',
Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 1
(1970), pp. 224-9.
Eugene T. Long
LEWY, Casimir (1919-91)
Casimir Lewy was born in Warsaw on 26
February 1919 and died in Cambridge on 8
February 1991. Born into a warm and talented
Polish family, the young Casimir attended a
fashionable private school, had gifted friends,
567
LEWY
and, through happening upon a magazine
article on Tadeusz Kotarbiriski, became
absorbed in philosophy, attending some uni-
versity lectures while still of school age. In 1936
Casimir came to England to learn English,
intending to return to his native land where he
would read philosophy; but, once in England,
he decided to combine tedious language
learning with the excitement - indeed, precoc-
ity - of studying philosophy in English. The
result was that he matriculated at the University
of Cambridge, obtained a first class honours
degree in 1939, a doctorate in 1943 - and a
marriage in 1945. His thesis was on some
philosophical considerations about the survival
of death.
Lewy attended lectures by MOORE and
WITTGENSTEIN, developed friendships with both
and, after lecturing at Liverpool University,
became their colleague, being appointed to a
moral sciences' university lectureship at
Cambridge in 1952 and, later, a fellowship of
Trinity College. Henceforth, Cambridge was
his home. Lewy became honorary fellow of the
Polish Society of Arts in 1968, reader at
Cambridge in 1972 and fellow of the British
Academy in 1980. He held various visiting pro-
fessorships in the United States in between.
Lewy retired in 1982, his colleagues presenting
him with a ceramic vixen, in recognition of the
vulpine example, derived from John WISDOM,
with which he wrestled throughout his career
and which makes frequent appearances in his
one book, Meaning and Modality (1976).
Lewy taught with a passion and intensity
that could overwhelm - yet he drew consider-
able affection and devotion from his many
students, students including Simon BLACKBURN,
Ian Hacking and Timothy SMILEY. Lewy was a
rigorous and inspiring teacher - and rigour and
inspiration are at the core of the legacy he
bequeathed. Although Lewy made his own
contributions to philosophy - he published
about twenty papers prior to his Meaning and
Modality - he devoted much time bringing to
publication C.D. BROAD'S lectures on Leibniz
and Kant and G.E. Moore's notebooks.
LEWY
Moore's bundles of papers, with amendments
and missing sheets, caused considerable edito-
rial work, but work which led to Moore's
Commonplace Book and Lectures on
Philosophy. Lewy also contributed to
Wittgensteinian scholarship, with an analysis of
Wittgenstein's corrections in Frank RAMSEY'S
copy of the Tractatus.
Philosophical logic, analysis and the theory of
meaning form the heart of Lewy's own work.
Although his presentation and detailed evalu-
ation of Moore's naturalistic fallacy, using an
incomplete second Preface to Moore's Principia
ethica, shows his interest in analysis, Lewy's
definitive contributions to philosophical logic
are to be found in his Meaning and Modality.
This is a tour de force, representing the results
of his philosophical logic lectures that spanned
the years from the 1940s to the 1970s - lectures
which grew out of his response to Wisdom's
1938 paper, 'Metaphysics and Verification'.
Meaning and Modality is a slender work; it
pays meticulous attention to use, mention and
necessity and, in so doing, seeks to identify
faults in the claims of Wisdom, Quine and
others. In sharp contrast to Quine, Lewy speaks
of propositions almost as close family friends,
readily identified as logically distinct from sen-
tences and statements. Lewy has no hesitation
in talking of concepts and meanings, of entail-
ments and de re and de dicto necessities; and he
resists all conventionalist attempts at analyses
of these in terms of linguistic rules.
At the centre of Lewy's Meaning and
Modality are three sentences derived from
Wisdom which, on a conventionalist approach,
are taken to make the same factual claim,
although maybe serving different purposes. The
sentences are '"Vixen" means the same as
"female fox"'; '"Vixen" means female fox' and
'A vixen may be defined as a female fox', this
last being read by Lewy as 'To be a vixen is to
be a female fox' taken as equivalent to The
concept of being a vixen is identical with the
concept of being a female fox'. Lewy argues
that there is no logical entailment either way
between, on the one hand, the propositions
568
expressed by the first two sentences and, on the
other hand, the proposition expressed by the
(assumed) equivalent third sentences. The first
two propositions are contingent: they entail
that 'vixen' has a meaning in the English
language. The third proposition is not contin-
gent and would be true, even if English failed
to exist. Translations of the sentences confirm
these results; and Lewy rejects criticisms of his
translation manoeuvres. Further, he argues that
although contingent propositions can entail
necessary propositions, necessary propositions
cannot entail contingent: were they so to do,
then, by contraposition, contingent proposi-
tions would entail impossible propositions,
paradoxically making those contingent propo-
sitions themselves impossible. So, the neces-
sary proposition that to be a vixen is to be a
female fox certainly does not entail any con-
tingent proposition about the English language
or any other language.
It is on the basis of such arguments that Lewy
upholds the distinction between talk of words
and talk of concepts and propositions expressed
by words - and so denies the suggestion that
necessity might be constituted by metalinguis-
tic facts. Thus it is that Lewy avoids paradoxes
such as those that involve the slide from a
proposition that p, to the proposition that the
sentence expressing the proposition that p is
true, to the conclusion that p entails that certain
English words are meaningful. Lewy insists on
the distinction between the meaning of 'the
proposition that ...' and the meaning of 'the
proposition expressed by the sentence "..."'.
This leads him to challenge Tarski's semantic
conception of truth: Lewy stresses that the
meaning of 'the proposition that ... is true'
differs from the meaning of 'the proposition
expressed by the sentence "..." is true'.
According to Lewy, the adequacy condition
for any correspondence theory of truth, even
one such as Tarski's, one that is concerned
solely with 'a materially adequate and formally
correct definition of "true sentence"', needs to
ensure, for example, that the proposition that
snow is white is true if and only if snow is

white. The condition is not set by a proposition
that Lewy derives from Tarski, namely that
the English sentence 'snow is white' is true if
and only if snow is white. The problem, as
Lewy sees it, is that the Tarskian proposition is
only contingently true. A moment's reflection
shows matters to be worse: securing truth,
albeit contingent, for the Tarskian proposition
needs the 'if and only if equivalence to be taken
materially, holding so long as the two con-
stituent propositions are both true or both false.
Once it is seen that a definition requires the
equivalence to be stronger, the Tarskian propo-
sition turns out to be necessarily false. Arguably
a necessary falsehood is no good requirement
for truth.
Lewy considers - only to reject - various
ways in which conventionalists might seek to
ground necessary truths in linguistic conven-
tions. He considers relationships such as 'ana-
lytically entails' and 'structurally entails'
between propositions expressed by Wisdom's
first two sentences and the third proposition,
but he allows no such suggestions to escape
from his mantra that one side of the putative
relationship makes reference to language, an
empirical matter, whereas the other does not.
There are, of course, responses to Lewy's over-
whelming insistence. Where are the arguments
to show that propositions, say the proposition
that to be a vixen is to be a female fox, can exist
without English or some other language?
Lewy's arguments themselves make use of
modality in their use of entailment; but con-
ventionalists would seek to argue that a con-
ventionalist account is implicitly being deployed
here - that it is a matter merely of our linguis-
tic conventions determining what we say that
accounts for the persuasiveness of his examples
involving entailment and translation. As for
those who, like Lewy, attack conventionalism,
yet who, unlike Lewy, see only obscurity in
modality and empirical/logical distinctions, they
remain unimpressed by Lewy's easy use of such
notions - indeed, their unhappiness can even
extend to his happy use of the concept of
proposition. Lewy's ready friendliness towards
569
LEWY
modal notions and related concepts thus sets
him apart from philosophers as divergent as
Quine and Wittgenstein.
To those philosophers who do understand
modalities in terms of symbol use, Lewy presses
home the charge that our locutions readily
manifest the distinction between talk of propo-
sitions and talk of sentences used to express
propositions. Some, for example, have argued
that it is necessary that a vixen is a female fox,
but that this is so is only contingently so, for it
is grounded in empirical linguistic facts. For
Lewy, claims such as these have at heart a con-
fusion: there is the proposition that a certain
sentence expresses a necessary truth and there
is the necessary truth itself. The former propo-
sition is indeed contingent - it depends upon the
language being used - but the latter is necessary.
Lewy builds on the distinctions mentioned in
order to handle familiar logical problems to
do with, for example, the paradox of analysis,
referential opacity and identity propositions.
Lewy argues that the necessary and sufficient
condition for an expression to be purely refer-
ential is not that its replacement by any term
having the same reference should preserve
truth, as things are, but that it must preserve
truth under all possibilities. This helps him to
hack through confusions which, he thinks, lead
to Quine's attacks on modality. Quine presents
the problem that, if modality is given a run for
its money, we should find that from nine's nec-
essarily having the property of being greater
than seven (a necessity de re) we should
conclude that, as nine is identical with the
number of planets, the number of planets is
necessarily greater than seven, yet this latter is
not true: the number of planets might have
been less than seven. Thus it is that Quine
grounds his distaste for necessities de re. For
Lewy such problems arise because of a failure
properly to use the distinction between the de
dicto and de re. Failure to grasp that the de
dicto, 'Necessarily Fa\ understood as ascribing
necessity to the proposition that Fa, does not
amount to the de re 'a is necessarily F leads to
a failure to see that de re propositions are ref-
LEWY
erentially transparent - names of identicals can
be substituted and truth preserved - in contrast
to de dicto. Nine is necessarily greater than
seven and so the number of planets, being nine,
is necessarily greater than seven; but it does
not follow that it is a necessary (de dicto) truth
that the number of planets is greater than seven
- indeed that is no truth at all. It is, however, a
de dicto necessary truth that nine is greater than
seven, and that does entail the de re truth that
nine is necessarily greater than seven. Such entail-
ments hold only if the relevant item is identified
by a name (such as a numeral) or by a definite
description that ascribes a necessary property
to that item. We cannot, however, move from
'Necessarily, there is a number which numbers
the planets' to 'There is a number such that it
necessarily numbers the planets'; we cannot
move from 'It is necessary that this box con-
taining square tiles contains tiles with equal sides'
to 'This box containing square tiles necessarily
contains tiles with equal sides.'
Lewy similarly invokes the de relde dicto dis-
tinction when resisting the claim that all
genuine identity statements are necessary. It is,
of course, true that Napoleon is necessarily
identical with Napoleon, that is necessarily
identical with himself - a de re necessity - and
if it is true, albeit contingently, that Napoleon
is the victor of Austerlitz, then, given that
Napoleon is necessarily identical with
Napoleon, he is necessarily identical with the
victor of Austerlitz. These are de re necessities,
but they go no way towards showing that it is
a necessary de dicto truth that Napoleon is
identical with the victor of Austerlitz. There is,
of course, the necessary de dicto truth that
Napoleon is identical with Napoleon, but that
is a necessity concerning a proposition about
Napoleon and there is no reason to suppose
that that necessity should transfer to another
distinct proposition, namely that Napoleon is
the victor of Austerlitz, making it a necessary de
dicto truth that Napoleon is the victor of
Austerlitz or making it a necessary (de re)
property of Napoleon that he secured such a
victory.
570
Lewy speaks freely of entailment, considers
various understandings of the relationship, and
suggests his own 'strict entailment'. For most of
his arguments he is expressly content to take
entailment as C.I. Lewis's strict implication,
where p strictly implies q if and only if it is nec-
essarily the case that either not p or q. Strict
implication is such that an impossible proposi-
tion strictly implies any proposition and a nec-
essarily true proposition is strictly implied by
any. If strict implication is meant to capture our
pre-formal intuitive concept of entailment, then
these results are paradoxical, though Lewy is
critical of Lewis's proofs of these results. For a
start, they at best prove the results with regard
only to tautologies and contradictions of the
propositional calculus, but logical necessity and
logical impossibility might extend beyond such.
Further, on Lewy's analysis, they fail to achieve
even this best, seeming to achieve it only
through suppressed premises open to challenge.
Lewy, however, generates his own paradoxes of
entailment as intuitively understood. For
example, consider the following: the proposi-
tion expressed by the English sentence 'There is
no brother who is not male' is the proposition
that there is no brother who is not male.
Paradoxically, that proposition can be shown
to entail that the proposition that there is no
brother who is not male is necessary. Lewy
reaches this result without recourse to principles
such as the principle that a proposition entails
a disjunctive proposition of itself with any other
proposition. Lewy rests content with his result
- though he defends a discontent with propos-
als, made by P.T. GEACH, P.P. STRAWSON and
G.H. von Wright, which place certain restric-
tions on entailment to avoid various paradox-
ical outcomes.
Lewy's contributions to philosophy were
dominated by the logical concerns and philo-
sophical language that he encountered in the
1940s and 1950s. Although logicians devel-
oped new languages and techniques - and
many lack the easy familiarity with proposi-
tions that characterizes Lewy's work - the
underlying problems with which Lewy

grappled are ever present. His work continues
to merit attention; his intellectual honesty and,
indeed, preparedness to change his mind
continue to merit respect.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'G.E. Moore on the Naturalistic Fallacy',
Proceedings of the British Academy, vol.
50 (1964), pp. 251-62.
Meaning and Modality (Cambridge, 1976).
Other Relevant Works
'Entailment', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 32 (1953), pp. 123-42.
'Entailment and Propositional Identity',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
64 (1963-4), pp. 107-22.
'A Note on the Text of the Tractatus\ Mind,
vol. 76 (1967), pp. 416-23.
Further Reading
Hacking, Ian (ed.), Exercises in Analysis:
Essays by Students of Casimir Lewy
(Cambridge, 1985).
Peter Cave
von LEYDEN, Wolfgang Marius
(1911-2004)
Wolfgang Marius von Leyden was born in Berlin
on 28 December 1911 and died in Durham on
4 September 2004. He attended gymnasia in
Potsdam, Berlin (Mommsen) and Dahlem
(Arndt). He studied at the universities of Berlin
and Gottingen (1931-3), where he read philos-
ophy, history, Italian, French, German litera-
ture and history of art. Forced out of Germany
in 1933 by the National Socialist assumption of
power, von Leyden continued studying in
Florence, obtaining his PhD in philosophy in
1936. His dissertation was entitled 'Montaigne
and the Philosophy of Stoicism and Scepticism'.
571
von LEYDEN
Von Leyden then assumed research positions in
Florence (1936-9) and, after a further forced
emigration to England (where he was for a time
interned), at University College London (1939)
and the Warburg Institute. At Oxford in 1944 he
completed a DPhil dissertation under R.G.
COLLINGWOOD. Von Leyden then moved to
Durham University, where he was appointed
lecturer (1946), senior lecturer (1956) and reader
(1962). In 1953 von Leyden married Iris
Sharwood-Smith, and they had two children.
After retiring in 1977 he accepted a one-year
appointment as 'Distinguished Visiting Scholar'
in the Department of Government at the London
School of Economics (LSE). His lectures on polit-
ical philosophy were immensely popular and his
tenure was extended until 1983.
Although he contributed to many areas of
philosophy, von Leyden is perhaps best known
for his research on John Locke, which began in
1942 at Oxford with work on the Lovelace
Collection of Locke's unpublished papers. Von
Leyden deciphered and transcribed Locke's
shorthand, identified many hitherto anonymous
correspondents (e.g., Lady Masham), and
indexed all the names and topics mentioned in
the collection's two thousand letters. Submission
of the resulting report to a University Committee
in 1946 was followed in 1947 by the Bodleian
Library's purchase of the Lovelace Collection.
The main fruit of von Leyden's investigations
was the publication in 1954 of Essays on the
Law of Nature: The Latin Text with a
Translation, Introduction and Notes, Together
with Transcripts of Locke's Shorthand in his
Journal for 1676 (Oxford), an edition subse-
quently deemed important enough for von
Leyden's transcripts of it to be deposited in the
Bodleian Library. The resources of this major
piece of scholarship opened up research on
Locke, particularly concerning the central
concept of natural law. Von Leyden himself
argued ('John Locke and Natural Law') that
Locke's remarks on natural law in the apparently
disparate inquiries of epistemology (the Essay)
and political philosophy (the Second Treatise)
had common origin in the early essays, where
von LEYDEN
Locke wrestled with the questions of how we
know the natural law and how that law binds.
Von Leyden's concern with political philoso-
phy extendsed beyond Locke and the issue of
natural law to broader questions on the nature
of law, freedom, rights and the basis of political
obligation generally. His largely historical inves-
tigations into these questions encompass
Aristotle and the ancient world, as well as key
figures, particularly Hobbes, in the early modern
period. Von Leyden also wrote on metaphysics
(especially on time and relativity) in the ancient
and modern periods, and on the epistemological
questions arising from those issues, for example
memory and personal identity. After retiring,
von Leyden published a culturally informative
sketch of his early years and intellectual devel-
opment under the Weimar Republic, as well as
a 1985 monograph issuing from his LSE tenure,
Aristotle on Equality and justice.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Ed., trans., notes and intro.), John Locke,
Essays on the Law of Nature: The Latin
Text with a Translation, Introduction and
Notes, Together with Transcripts of
Locke's Shorthand in his journal for 1676
(Oxford, 1954).
'John Locke and Natural Law', Philosophy,
vol. 31 (1956), pp. 23-35.
Hobbes and Locke: The Politics of Freedom
and Obligation (19%\).
Aristotle on Equality and Justice: His
Political Argument (1985).
Other Relevant Works
Remembering: A Philosophical Problem
(New York, 1961).
Seventeenth Century Metaphysics: An
Examination of Some Main Concepts and
Theories (1968).
Growing Up under the Weimar Republic,
1918-1933: Reflections on Personal
Identity and the Past (New York, 1984).
David Scott
572
LINDSAY, Alexander Dunlop, Baron
Lindsay of Birker (1879-1952)
A.D. Lindsay, known to his friends as 'Sandy',
was born in Glasgow on 14 May 1879 and
died in Keele on 18 March 1952. He was
educated at Glasgow Academy and at the
University of Glasgow, where he read classics
despite showing more promise in the philoso-
phy classes. After completing his MA in
Glasgow in 1899, he proceeded to Oxford
(University College), where he achieved a 'first'
in both classical 'Mods' and 'Greats'. Although
he had originally intended to follow his father
as a minister of the United Free Church and
spent the year after finishing at: Oxford studying
Hebrew and preparing himself for theological
college, he won the Shaw Fellowship in Moral
Philosophy at Edinburgh and thereafter
pursued an academic career. He was assistant
lecturer in philosophy at the Victoria University
of Manchester from 1904 to 1906, when he
was elected a fellow and tutor in philosophy at
Balliol College, Oxford.
He volunteered for the army in 1914 and
served in France with some distinction, achiev-
ing the rank of lieutenant-colonel. The war
changed Lindsay from an academic into a man
of affairs and strengthened his commitment to
radical causes. He returned to teaching but,
increasingly, he became an educationist, admin-
istrator and reformer. He became much
involved in university reform at Oxford and
was active in promoting the admission of
women to full membership of the university. He
also took a part in the introduction of a new
honours school of philosophy, politics and eco-
nomics ('PPE') in 1920. He taught in this school
until his appointment, in 1922, to the Chair of
Moral Philosophy at Glasgow. When in
Glasgow he was already much involved in adult
education and he took an active part in the
Workers' Educational Association after his
return to Balliol as Master in 1924. His com-
mitment as a Christian socialist to the ideals of
the Labour Party was rewarded by his elevation
to the peerage in 1945, when he was made

Baron Lindsay of Birker. In 1949 Lindsay
became Principal of the new University College
of North Staffordshire at Keele, which provided
him with an opportunity to put some of his
educational ideas into practice. He put his
stamp on the new institution but his health
declined soon after and he died from a stroke
at the age of seventy-two.
Lindsay's early interests were in the history
of philosophy. He particularly admired Plato,
of whose Republic he produced a translation in
1907 that was an influential teaching text and
of which further editions continued in print
into the 1990s. During his tenure of the Shaw
Fellowship he studied the philosophy of
Immanuel Kant, taking a particular interest in
The Critique of Judgement. He later wrote two
books on Kant, the later of which was praised
by HJ. PATON not least because his treatment
of The Critique of Judgement brought out 'the
unity and importance of that widely neglected
work' (Paton, p. 231). He thought the Kantian
critique of metaphysics was overly restrictive
and, in his Jowett Lectures at Oxford (pub-
lished in 1911 as The Philosophy of Bergson),
he found in Bergson's account of the life
sciences a broader view more sympathetic to
metaphysics. But H.W. CARR, in his review,
objected to the preoccupation with a Kantian
perspective that, to his mind, detracted from
Lindsay's account of Bergson.
After World War I, however, Lindsay seems
to have become impatient with academic ph-
losophy and, although he was a prolific and
influential writer, he was much more interested
in putting ideas into practice, even coming to
regard pure research as a kind of self-indul-
gence. He continued to be associated with texts
for student use, including one he was persuaded
to write on Kant for the Oxford 'Leaders of
Philosophy' series, and he wrote introductions
for student editions of works by canonical
philosophers such as Plato, Berkeley, Hume
and J.S. Mill. But his later writings were often
published lectures, sermons or broadcast talks.
Insofar as they are philosophical, they depart
from his earlier interests in epistemology and
573
LINDSAY
metaphysics, and are more focused on morality,
religion and especially politics.
Lindsay's most ambitious and perhaps his
best-known work is The Modern Democratic
State (1943). In this work he looked at the
emergence of modern democracies in Western
Europe, north America and the British domin-
ions in the nineteenth century and the then
contemporary reactions to it from fascists and
others. He was concerned that the state could
potentially undermine a true democracy and
stressed the importance of groups (perhaps the
congregations of the United Free Church were
a paradigm for him) formed by voluntary asso-
ciation. He published only the first of what he
intended to be two volumes, the second of
which would show how a state might foster a
society that was 'more truly a community'
(Modern Democratic State, p. 286).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Philosophy of Bergson (1911).
The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1913).
Kant (1934).
The Modern Democratic State (1943).
Other Relevant Works
(Intro, and trans.), The Republic of Plato
(1907 and many subsequent edns).
The Nature of Religious Truth [sermons
preached in Balliol College Chapel] (1927).
The Essentials of Democracy [William J.
Cooper Foundation Lectures] (1929).
Our Duty to God and to the State [broadcast
talks] (1940).
Religion, Science and Society in the Modern
World [Terry Lectures] (1943).
Further Reading
Carr, H.W., Critical Notice of The
Philosophy of Bergson, Mind, vol. 20
(1911), pp. 560-66.
Gallic, W.B., A New University. A.D.
Lindsay and the Keele Experiment (1960).
Maddox, G., 'The Christian Democracy of
A.D. Lindsay', Political Studies, vol. 34
(1986), pp. 441-55.
LINDSAY
Paton, H.J., Critical Notice of Kant, Mind,
vol. 44 (1935), pp. 230-35.
Scott Drusilla et al., A.D. Lindsay. A
Biography (Oxford, 1971).
Stuart Brown
LLEWELYN, John Edward (1928-)
John Llewelyn was born in Rogerstone, near
Newport, Monmouthshire on 1 February
1928. He attended the village primary school,
Bassaleg Secondary Grammar School and the
University College of Wales at Aberystwyth
(1945-8), graduating BA (Hons.) in languages
and literature with philosophy as a subsidiary
subject. During two years' National Service as
an officer in the Education Branch of the RAF,
the loan of a copy of AJ. AVER'S Language
Truth and Logic from a Cambridge graduate
colleague whetted an appetite. During his two
years of study for an Honours MA in philoso-
phy at the University of Edinburgh, Professors
John MACMURRAY and A.D. RITCHIE did not
cater to a taste for analytic philosophy engen-
dered by reading Ayer. Counterweighted by
A.M. Fairweather's classes on the Critique of
Pure Reason and BoSANQUET's Implication and
Linear Inference, there were however the tuto-
rials on necessity by Michael HINTON, with
whom Llewelyn resumed contact following a
year in France, when the award of the Ferguson
Scholarship by the Scottish universities helped
pay for two years at Trinity College, Oxford,
leading to a BLitt. Other Oxford teachers
Llewelyn found especially quickening were
John AUSTIN and Paul GRICE.
During two years as a language assistant in
a grammar school in Cologne Llewelyn was
reacquainted with a non-Oxonian style of phi-
losophy by Volkmann-Schluck's seminar on
Heidegger. Further opportunity to explore con-
temporary continental thought was scant
574
during eight years (1956-1964) as lecturer,
then senior lecturer at the University of New
England at Armidale, New South Wales. The
topic of the first of his more than sixty pub-
lished papers ('Conscientiousness', Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 38, 1960, pp.
218-24) has cropped up in sundry guises in
much of his later writing.
In 1964 Llewelyn returned to Edinburgh as
lecturer in philosophy. He had been promoted
to senior lecturer, then reader by the time of his
retirement in 1988. There he taught Kant and
Bergson and ran classes on phenomenology
and on Heidegger. His retirement has been a
very active one, with a succession of papers,
and books. He was visiting professor of phi-
losophy at Loyola University of Chicago
(1990-91) and at Memphis, Tennessee (1992,
1995).
In 1985 he published the first of a short series
of detailed book-length studies in continental
philosophy, which he differentiates (see bibli-
ography) from those works in which his own
case is discussed by a process of 'threading
through the works of not merely Emmanuel
Levinas - Llewelyn's accounts of Levinas have
been received with some acclaim - but Jacques
Derrida, a friend and associate, as well as Kant,
Schelling, Hegel (in relation to Kant), John
Sallis and a wide range of continental philoso-
phy.
While Peter STRAWSON was focusing on the
second edition of Kant's first Critique,
Heidegger's reading of Kant, heavily reliant on
the first edition, fired the thinking out of which
emerged in due course Llewelyn's The
HypoCritical Imagination (2000). Prior to
imaging and representation, imagination is the
impure and irreducibly two-faced 'common
root' of pure sensibility and pure reason. Its
ambiguity is not simply one of semantic sense.
It is an amphibology between the semantic
sense of something said and the broadly ethical
sense of face-to-face saying which Levinas
emphasizes.
Its twofoldness is analogous to that of the
distinction developed by Austin between the

constative and the performative forces of
language, except that it is what makes that dis-
tinction possible - and, as it was originally con-
ceived, beyond possibility. Austin himself came
to acknowledge that his distinction breaks
down. Derrida sees this breakdown as a
symptom of an inescapable disruption of
plenary presence and re-presentation.
Expressed grandly, it is the death of God where
the genitive is both subjective and objective.
Expressed graphically, it is the pool of dazzling
blank whiteness in which the word 'presents' is
spotlit on the back of Llewelyn's Seeing
Through God (2004).
A perceptual analogue of this depresencing of
presence (shekinah) is the unsurveyability of
one's line of vision; which led Maurice
Merleau-Ponty to remark that depth is the most
existential dimension. Not existential or ec-sis-
tential but 'in-sistential', not forwardly inten-
tional but at best reversedly intentional, this
depth of vision becomes in the philosophy of
Levinas the invisible because end-on dimen-
sion of address by another, where the primary
sense of otherness is that of the other human
being to whom I am beholden in his or her
beholding me.
Here responsibility is response to a singular
other human being, not to the universality of a
moral law which according to Kant is what
motivates our respect for a person, another or
oneself. According to Levinas, it is the singu-
larity of our rapport with another, separate in
his or her proximity, that, while inevitably rec-
ognizing the generality of language and justice,
prevents legality from becoming violence.
Llewelyn has come to argue that Levinas
does violence to the non-human and non-
divine. In The Middle Voice of Ecological
Conscience (1991) he begins to explore the
chances of coming across something like the
relation of facing, which is the relation of all
relations for Levinas, in regard to the non-
human and non-godly. He attempts to construe
this extended sense of responsibility through
something like what grammarians call the
middle voice.
575
LLEWELYN
This would be a reconstrual of that
Levinasian notion of a passivity more passive,
or more receptive, than the passivity classically
opposed to activity, for example by Kant.
Without being the activity of the freely willed
act as interpreted by Kant and German
idealism, this particular 'passivity' would be
more actively responsive than that willed act:
'In kissing do you render or receive?' It would
be the activity of the letting hinted at in
Heideggerian middle-voiced 'letting-be', but
where the ontological force of this letting-be is
crossed chiasmically by the ethical force of a
primary imagination, responsive and responsi-
ble, that is older than the opposition of sensi-
bility and understanding or reason.
Imagination would be more and less than
the power of synthesis, more than
Einbildungskraft construed as con-struing, In-
eins-bilding. It would be a deconstruing of even
the syntheses of apparent antitheses such as
are marked by antagonyms such as 'fast',
meaning speedy and fixed, or, of rather greater
philosophical significance, 'aufheben\ as
employed by Hegel with the meanings both of
to cancel and of to save.
The savings referred to in the subtitle of
Llewelyn's Quirks of Language, Quirks of
Love: Savings from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
(2005) are antagonymically economies and
rescues from the writings of the two named
commentators on Luther; and from subsequent
commentators on them, all responding to
Hegel's invitation to try to defy his system
without thereby being caught up in its meshes.
Likewise, Llewelyn is himself responding,
seeking at the same time a writing cure from the
'ontological claustrophobia' he imagines is
threatened by the ghost of Bosanquet surviving
from his classes with Fairweather.
In what Llewelyn refers to as the imadgina-
tion (sic), which is not separable from an at
least proto-Romantic madness (William Blake,
say), the power of synthesis would be disrupted
by being subject to the call of another that
(what or who) is separated from me in its prox-
imity: another human or non-human being
LLEWELYN
that, like the Aristotelian nous and the stranger
of Judaic ethics, comes in from outside. That
other calls for hospitality from me, even if it
cannot speak for itself and needs me to be its
advocate.
No doubt possession of or possession by a
psyche is a requirement for being an advocate,
for being the one hailed, arraisonne, called to
reason. This is not however required of what
does the hailing. The fact of a thing's or
person's existence is enough to require me to
make to it a responsible response. Ethical
regard is myopic and parochial if the attribu-
tion of a psyche to something is allowed to dis-
tinguish it as the kind of thing that merits
ethical regard, in contradistinction to what does
not.
A non-exclusive responsibility must be one
that is hypoCritical in the sense not of being
responsible to anything or anyone because only
of what or who it is, but first of all in consid-
eration solely of the impact of the fact that it is.
Further responsibilities may be determined in
the light of classification, but such qua-respon-
sibilities do not annul our 'prima facie' respon-
sibility to the entity in its sheer existence. The
existence of a thing (its hoti estin), whatever the
thing's what or who (its ti estin or tis estin), is
sufficient to call forth my responsibility not to
imperil its existence. Beyond the opposition of
good and evil, its existence is its good, enough
to entitle any creator it may have had to
exclaim of it that it is good. That it had a
creator may be a reason why it is good and
therefore not to be destroyed or damaged
without good reason, but it is good indepen-
dent of whether it had such a creator or did not.
Seeing Through God invites us to imagine
that there is no God and no other place, time,
'afterlife' or Platonic heaven, dreaming of
which may tempt us to conceal from ourselves
the responsibility owed to the singular occu-
pants of this-worldly space and time.
Llewelyn calls for the abstractions of
Platonism to be subordinated not just to a neo-
Aristotelianism, but to a variation on Scotism
in which haecceitas or what Gerard Manley
576
Hopkins calls inscape is a singular being's claim
upon our regard in both the optical and the
ethical senses of this word.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience:
A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in
the Neighbourhood of Levinas, Heidegger
and Others (1991).
The HypoCritical Imagination: Between
Kant and Levinas (2000).
Seeing Through God: A Geophenomenology,
(Bloomington, Indiana, 2004)
Quirks of Language, Quirks of Love: Savings
from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (2005).
Other Relevant Works
Beyond Metaphysics? The Hermeneutic
Circle in Contemporary Continental
Philosophy (1985).
Derrida on the Threshold of Sense (1986).
Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics
(1995).
Appositions - of Jacques Derrida and
Emmanuel Levinas (Bloomington, Indiana,
2002).
Robert R. Calder
LLOYD, Antony Charles (1916-94)
Antony Lloyd was born in Hampstead in
London on 15 July 1916 and died on 17
December 1994. His parents were part of the
Fabian circle that had formed around Sydney
and Beatrice WEBB and the Labour Parry. His
father, C. Mostyn Lloyd, was instrumental,
with the Webbs, Harold Laski, Kingsley Martin
and others, in starting up the London School of
Economics, and his family was later at the
fringes of the Bloomsbury Group. Lloyd
himself was educated first in Hampstead, at
The Hall, and later at Shrewsbury, where he

continued his training in classics. He then
entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he read
Greats. Though a man of strong political
beliefs, Lloyd worked in ancient philosophy
on logic and epistemology, not on moral and
political philosophy. In the late 1930s he was
appointed assistant lecturer in philosophy in the
Department of Logic at Edinburgh University,
and, after interruption for extended war service,
he returned there. Shortly upon return,
however, in 1946, he took up a lectureship in
the Department of Logic at St Andrews, where
he remained until 1957, when he was
appointed Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Liverpool. He held this post until
retirement. In 1992 he was made a senior
fellow of the British Academy.
Lloyd is best known for his work on the
Neoplatonists, on some relatively neglected
themes in Neoplatonist and, later, Stoic logic,
and, finally, on Aristotle. In the 1950s, he pub-
lished a number of pieces on the Neoplatonists,
including ones that compared and contrasted
Neoplatonist and Aristotelian logic, on the whole
to the detriment of the Neoplatonist camp. Lloyd
in part treats Porphyry very favourably just
because he departs from Neoplatonist patterns
of thought. Lloyd excels at taking up some theme
in Neoplatonist logic and showing just what its
implications are for metaphysics and epistemol-
ogy, and just why Aristotelian logic would not,
or need not, land one with those implications.
In the 1960s and 1970s Lloyd worked on
Stoic logic and, for him part of the same thing,
Stoic grammar. Here, too, he compared and
contrasted logic and epistemology with what
were available in Aristotle, but he seems much
more genuinely impressed with the materials of
the Stoics. Here also there was a fascination
with the implications of Stoic logic and grammar
for metaphysics and epistemology, but Lloyd is
much more positive about the results than he is
in the case of the Neoplatonists. The focus upon
grammar and upon the logic of expressions gives
this part of Lloyd's work a very modern feel
and separates it simply from history of philoso-
phy. Thus he writes about the distinction
577
LLOYD
between intuitive and discursive intellects, about
what exactly we might understand by an intu-
itive intellect, about how it might operate, about
the reliance of discursive intellects upon concepts
or predicates and logic, and about what limita-
tions such reliance might impose upon beings
capable only of discursive thought. He writes
about what it might mean for a being - man of
God - to grasp something whole. He explores all
sides of the issue. Can a kind of thinking take
place by means of images alone? Does one have
to be able to identify those images as images of
something? Does one need concepts in order to
do this? If so, could God think by means of
images?
Nearly everything that Lloyd published
touched upon Aristotle in some way, usually
Aristotelian logic. In 1981, however, in his
book Form and Universal in Aristotle, Lloyd
turned to two central notions in Aristotelian
epistemology, forms and universals, and gave
accounts of them that ran against the tide.
Forms were held to be individuals, universals
were held to be subjective.
In the main, Lloyd wrote on themes in logic,
philosophical logic and grammar in the
Neoplatonists and Stoics, but he most defi-
nitely had a modern grasp of these subjects.
There is, at the back of most of his work, not
merely the attempt to compare and contrast
previous thinkers on particular elements of
their thought, with Aristotle ultimately as the
end-point of the exercise, but also the attempt
to put the entire debate into a modern per-
spective and idiom. He had studied predicate
logic carefully, and he had read and studied the
later WITTGENSTEIN. Overall, his work is that of
an analytical philosopher using material from
Aristotle, the Stoics and the Neoplatonists in
order to make points in logic, philosophical
logic and epistemology.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Form and Universal in Aristotle (1981).
The Anatomy of Neoplatonism (1990).
R.G. Frey
LLOYD
LLOYD, Geoffrey Ernest Richard (1933-)
Geoffrey Lloyd was born in London on 25
January 1933. He was educated at King's
College Cambridge (BA, 1954; PhD, 1958),
where he remained as fellow (from 1957),
senior tutor (1969-73), university assistant
lecturer, lecturer and then reader in classics
(1965-7,1967-74,1974-87, respectively), and
was appointed Professor in Ancient Philosophy
and Science in 1987. In 1989 he assumed the
position of Master of Darwin College. He
retired from his positions as professor and
Head of college in 2000. Among many
academic distinctions one may mention the
Sarton Medal (1987), the Sather Lectures,
Berkeley (1984), the Isaiah Berlin Lectures,
Oxford (2000) and a number of honorary fel-
lowships and degrees at Cambridge and else-
where. He was knighted for 'services to the
history of thought' in 1987. He has made
Cambridge into the undisputed centre for
studies in the history of ancient science.
An extraordinarily prolific author, Lloyd
established his reputation with his first book,
Polarity and Analogy (1966). The book surveys
polarity and analogy as modes of thought in the
classical Greek world, their wide cultural begin-
nings, through their use by pre-Socratic philoso-
phers, and down to their systematization by
Plato and Aristotle. The following books
became classroom standards: an introduction
to Aristotle (Aristotle: The Growth and
Structure of his Thought, 1968) as well as a set
of two books on the history of ancient science
(Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle, 1970
and Greek Science After Aristotle, 1973). Two
thematically arranged collections of essays,
Magic, Reason and Explanation (1979) and
Science, Folklore and Ideology (1983), together
with the expanded Sather Lectures, The
Revolutions of Wisdom (1987), put together
Lloyd's overall picture of ancient science.
Among the themes running through these
works was the diversity of ancient scientific
practice, as well as its cultural location. Many
of Lloyd's more important articles up to the late
578
1980s got collected in Methods and Problems
in Greek Science (1991). Since the 1990s,
Lloyd's main attention has been focussed on the
cross-cultural comparative study of early
science, with special attention paid to early
Chinese science. Demystifying Mentalities
(1990) and Adversities and Authorities:
Investigations into Early Greek and Chinese
Science (1996) are among his publications in
this area. He has also continued to published
extensively on Greek science and philosophy
(e.g., Aristotelian Explorations, 1996 and In
the Grip of Disease: Studies in the Greek
Imagination, 2003).
While he is strictly speaking a historian of
science, Lloyd's work had significant impact on
the study of both ancient philosophy and the
philosophy of science. His central contribution
to ancient philosophy is the emphasis on early
intellectual life as a diverse, competitive field,
where the very terms of intellectual activity are
constantly debated by groups including not
only philosophers (as traditionally understood)
but also medical authors and other practition-
ers of knowledge. His works often point also at
the internal variety and even contradictions in
the works of even a single author, in particular
those of Aristotle, so that he was among the
scholars who helped to shake an earlier view
that Aristotle was ever a monolithic author in
possession of a single, coherent system. In the
philosophy of science, Lloyd's work was
instructive for a generation of philosophers
who have discovered the diversity of scientific
reasoning styles, as well as the role of rhetoric
in science. Such a broad outline does not do
justice, however, to Lloyd's specific contribu-
tions. Among many individual discoveries one
may mention, for example, Lloyd's observation
that early Greek astronomy, contrary to
Duhem, was not instrumentalist in character
removing the only purported example for
instrumentalism as motivating actual scientific
work.
In the most general terms one may say that
Lloyd's positioning of science in broad cultural
terms (most recently, cross-cultural terms) was

always related to the central contemporary
question in the philosophy of science: is it the
produce of subjective cultural forces or of
objective rationality? Lloyd's own approach to
the question is shaped by both British empiri-
cism as well as a more 'continental', historicist
approach. He ends up endorsing the funda-
mental rationality of scientific practice, as well
as its diversity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Polarity and Analogy (Cambridge, 1966).
Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of his
Thought (Cambridge, 1968).
Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle
(1970).
Greek Science after Aristotle (1973).
Magic, Reason and Explanation (Cambridge,
1979).
Science, Folklore and Ideology (Cambridge,
1983).
Science and Morality in Greco-Roman
Antiquity (Cambridge, 1985).
The Revolutions of Wisdom: Studies in the
Claims and Practice of Ancient Greek
Science [Sather Lectures] (Berkeley, 1987).
Demystifying Mentalities (Cambridge, 1990).
Methods and Problems in Greek Science
(1991).
Adversities and Authorities: Investigations
into Early Greek and Chinese Science
(Cambridge, 1996).
Aristotelian Explorations (Cambridge, 1996).
The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding
the World in Ancient Greece and China
(Cambridge, 2002).
The Way and the Word: Science and
Medicine in Early China and Greece (New
Haven, 2002).
In the Grip of Disease: Studies in the Greek
Imagination (2003).
Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections
(Oxford, 2004).
Reviel Netz
579
LLOYD THOMAS
LLOYD THOMAS, David Adrian (1932-)
David Lloyd Thomas was born in Australia. He
was educated at Box Hill High School and
Melbourne High School before reading phi-
losophy at Melbourne University. After holding
temporary posts at Melbourne and the
University of Western Australia, he was a
lecturer in philosophy at Victoria University,
Wellington, New Zealand from 1959 to 1964.
He was appointed to a lectureship in social
philosophy at Bedford College, London in 1965
and was there when Bedford merged with
King's College during a phase of restructuring
at the University of London. He was thereafter
a senior lecturer in philosophy at King's College
London, where he taught political philosophy,
Marxism and ethics until his retirement in
1996.
Lloyd Thomas's interests have focused on
social and political philosophy. He is a qualified
defender of liberalism, which he takes to
involve commitment to a 'neutral' framework
of legal and social requirements, that is not
biased towards any particular conception of
what is worthwhile. This framework he seeks
to defend by an 'experimental consequential-
ism' - which, as he explains, differs from con-
ventional consequentialism 'not only in that it
is non-maximizing, but also in that it does not
assume that we already know what is good:
what is good is something to be discovered'
(In Defence of Liberty', p. 36). Lloyd Thomas
suggests that the rights a liberal is concerned to
defend are rights of 'self-ownership' - rights of
control over one's own person - which, he
claims, will underpin the typical liberal
freedoms. The concept of self-ownership is con-
troversial and one reviewer of In Defence of
Liberty complained that, as it stands, it has
little content. Lloyd Thomas is not, of course,
the originator of the concept, which derives in
the literature from Locke's thought that each
person has a property in his own person,
though his own discussion of it is influenced by
his former colleague in London, G.A. COHEN.
But, unlike Locke and some contemporary
LLOYD THOMAS
liberals such as Nozick, Lloyd Thomas does not
think that to acknowledge rights of self-own-
ership is to be committed to a strong defence of
private property rights. Indeed, he holds that,
on the contrary, it is only consistent with a
weak defence of such rights. Nonetheless, he
maintains that 'upholding the liberal rights of
individuals is not compatible with the entire
abandonment of private-property rights' (ibid.,
p. 89).
Lloyd Thomas has written another book,
Locke on Government (1995), as part of a
series of guidebooks for philosophy students to
key texts, in this case the Second Treatise of
Government. With its emphasis on clear expo-
sition and evaluation of Locke's arguments, it
stands up as a philosophical monograph of
interest to students of Locke at every level. The
longest chapter is on The Social Contract and
the State', but the substantial chapters on
'Rebellion' and 'Property' are an interesting
feature. The book has been widely acclaimed as
an introduction to Locke's political philoso-
phy.
Lloyd Thomas has continued to pursue his
interests in political philosophy and is currently
working on a book on nationalism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Happiness', Philosophical Quarterly', vol. 18
(1968), pp. 97-113.
'Equality within the Limits of Reason Alone',
Mind, vol. 88 (1977), pp. 538-53.
'Liberty, Equality, Property', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society', suppl. vol. 55
(1981), pp. 177-91.
In Defence of Liberalism (1988).
Locke on Government (1995).
Other Relevant Works
'Hume on Intrinsic Value', Philosophy, vol.
65 (1990), pp. 419-37.
Further Reading
Cohen, G.A., Self-Ownership, Freedom and
Equality (1995).
Collier, Andrew, Review of In Defence of
580
Liberalism, Philosophical Books, vol. 30
(1989), pp. 52-5.
Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia
(New York, 1974).
Stuart Brown
LODGE, Oliver Joseph (1851-1940)
Oliver Joseph Lodge was born in Penkhull,
near Stoke-on-Trent on 12 June 1851, the
eldest son of Oliver Lodge and his wife Grace
Heath. He died at Lake, near Salisbury on 22
August 1940. Ancestors on both sides of the
family were schoolmasters and clergymen. By
contrast, his father departed from family tra-
dition and built up a profitable business sup-
plying materials to the pottery industry. When
Oliver was fourteen his father withdrew him
from Newport Grammar School, which he
had attended for six years, and required him to
join the business. For the next eight years
Oliver spent his days helping to manage the
business and, with the aid of one of his
maternal aunts, spent many of his evenings
attending lectures on various sciences at the
Royal Institution in London. A course of
lectures on heat given by John Tyndall decided
him on his life's work. At the age of twenty-
two he won an exhibition to attend University
College London and the Royal College of
Science and resumed his education. In 1877 he
was awarded a doctor of science degree. Even
before graduating he had begun to publish
papers on various aspects of electricity. In 1881
he was appointed Professor of Physics at the
new University College in Liverpool, and it
was there that he carried out the researches in
electrical systems and wireless telegraphy for
which the Royal Society awarded him its
Rumford Medal in 1898. He was elected a
fellow of the Royal Society in 1887 and
knighted in 1902. In the Preface to his Modern

Views of Electricity (1889) he wrote: Tew
things in physical science appear to me more
certain than that what has so long been called
electricity is a form, or rather a mode of man-
ifestation of the ether' (p. ix). It was a belief he
was to hold for the rest of his long life. When
the University of Birmingham was founded in
1900 Lodge was appointed its first Principal,
an office he held for the next nineteen years.
He is credited with setting the university on a
successful course by avoiding over-specializa-
tion in either the sciences or the humanities.
Lodge and his wife, Mary Marshall, whom he
married in 1877, were the parents of six sons
and six daughters.
Lodge is equally well known for his scientific
work and for his interest in spiritualism. As early
as 1883 he designed and carried out experiments
in thought transference, and in later years he
investigated the work of two famous mediums.
He was an early member of the Society for
Psychical Research, serving as its President for
three years, from 1901 to 1903. Unlike some of
its distinguished members, Henry Sidgwick, for
instance, Lodge believed in the existence of psy-
chical powers; he claimed that he had witnessed
mental telepathy in the case of one medium and
telekinesis in the case of another. His investiga-
tions of these matters led him to conclude that
the mind survives the dissolution of the body.
After his son Raymond was killed in World
War I, Lodge claimed to be in communication
with him, and published a book, Raymond, or,
Life and Death: With Examples of the Evidence
for Survival of Memory and Affection after
Death (1916), making his case. The book reports
several sittings with mediums during which the
etheric Raymond is alleged to be in conversation
with his parents and others. The book was a
best-seller, having been reprinted ten times by
1918. In his later years much of Lodge's energy
was devoted to the cause of spiritualism. He
was a popular speaker, drawing large audiences,
in part, as his anonymous obituarist in The
Times put it, because he 'was disposed to the
pragmatical heresy in argument, believing that if
a conclusion were of benefit to mankind state-
581
LODGE
ments supporting it were probably true'. Some
of the phenomena he claimed to have witnessed
strain credulity to the breaking point. Heavy
wooden tables do not rise from the floor and tilt
over of their own accord, nor do music boxes
wind themselves up.
Lodge's belief in the existence of the ether led
him to fashion a metaphysic in which ether was
the primordial stuff from which everything in the
universe is made and in terms of which every-
thing must ultimately be explained. To speak
metaphorically, the ether is a storehouse of
energy, nearly all of it potential. Matter is the
only part of it that affects our sense organs, and
thus is the only part that can be scientifically
studied. In the course of evolution matter is
affected by the ether in such a way as to create
forms of life, and in some of these forms of life
further ethereal bombardment led to the emer-
gence of minds and then of individual con-
sciousnesses. Lodge admitted that the process by
which the ether altered or guided matter lay
outside ordinary experience. Humans are
composed of an etheric mind or spirit and a
material body. The mind directs the matter of the
body in some way not yet understood, and since
it is composed of ether, it survives the death of
the material body. By arranging sittings with
mediums Lodge claimed to have established the
survival of spirits by communicating with named
individuals. However, he remained enough of a
scientist to admit that many were sceptical of his
views, for they went beyond what science had
established. Understanding of them had to come,
if it came at all, from philosophical arguments
which made use of the latest scientific discover-
ies. He himself suggested that wave mechanics
provided the clue to understanding life and mind;
their physical basis was due to waves of very high
frequency in the ether which somehow affected
matter when it was organized in certain ways.
Such waves could not be experienced, so his
suggestion cannot be tested. It remains an
untestable hypothesis. In reading Lodge's meta-
physical works one is forcibly reminded of the
doctrines of neutral monism, championed during
his lifetime by Ernst Mach, William James and
LODGE
Bertrand RUSSELL, although their writings had a
philosophical sophistication not found in
Lodge's writings.
Lodge wrote on a wide variety of topics,
from lightning rods to World War I. Many of
his books were intended for popular audi-
ences, and of these the majority expounded
some aspect of his theory of the ether. If ever
there was a man dominated by a single idea, it
was Lodge. He clung to the ether long after his
fellow physicists had discarded it as a relic of
an earlier scientific stage.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lightning Conductors and Lightning Guards
(1885).
Modern Views of Electricity (1889; 3rd rev.
edn, 1907).
Pioneers of Science (1893).
Man and the Universe: A Study of the
Influence of the Advance in Scientific
Knowledge upon our Understanding of
Christianity (1908; 17th edn, 1916).
The Ether of Space (New York, 1909).
Reason and Belief (1910).
Modern Problems (1912).
The War and After (1915).
Raymond, or, Life and Death: With
Examples of the Evidence for Survival of
Memory and Affection after Death
(1916).
Atoms and Rays: An Introduction to
Modern Views on Atomic Structure and
Radiation (1924).
Making of Man: A Study in Evolution
(1924).
Ether & Reality: A Series of Discourses on
the Many Functions of the Ether of Space
(1925).
Evolution and Creation (1926).
Past Years: An Autobiography (1931).
My Philosophy: Representing My Views on
the Many Functions of Ether of Space
(1933).
Further Reading
Gregory, R.A. and Allan Ferguson, 'Oliver
582
Joseph Lodge, 1851-1940', Obituary
Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society,
1941 (1941), pp. 1-24.
Jolly, W.P., Sir Oliver Lodge (Teaneck, New
Jersey, 1975).
'Sir Oliver Lodge: A Great Scientist', The
Times, 23 August 1940.
John G. Slater
LODGE, Rupert Clendon (1886-1961)
Rupert Clendon Lodge was born in
Manchester on 8 December 1886 and died in
St Petersburg, Florida on 1 March 1961. He
was a nephew of Sir Oliver LODGE, the physi-
cist and spiritualist. He received his MA from
Brasenose College, Oxford. He also studied at
Manchester University and at Berlin and
Marburg. After his arrival in Canada in 1913
Lodge held teaching posts at Dalhousie
University in Halifax and the University of
Alberta in Edmonton, as well as at the
University of Minnesota in the USA. In 1920 he
was appointed Professor of Logic and History
of Philosophy at the University of Manitoba,
Winnipeg, where he remained until 1947.
Lodge's reputation secured for him visiting lec-
tureships at Harvard (1928), New York (1938),
North Carolina (1948), Queen's University in
Kingston, Ontario (1948-9) and Long Island,
New York (1949-50).
Lodge was the most widely read philosopher
of his time in Canada. His books were popular
(his lucid writing made them accessible to a
wide reading public), and they frequently were
used at universities in Canada and the USA. He
began his publishing career as a proponent of
idealist theories (Introduction to Modern Logic,
1920) but soon pursued his own path, arguing
that all philosophical questions could be
answered from three perspectives: a realist, a
pragmatist and an idealist point of view. This

pluralism reflected a developing trend of 'philo-
sophical federalism' in Canada, a country in
which it was becoming increasingly evident
that no single philosophical vision could
accommodate the plurality of components of
any problem, social, political or philosophical.
For Lodge, the world could be viewed as a col-
lection of objects, as a system of experiences, or
as an indeterminate ground of making chosen
goals and agendas possible. The Questioning
Mind (1937) and the Philosophy of Education
(1937) developed the pluralism that Lodge
would promote throughout his career. One
needed to recognize which philosophical
position one's fellow citizen held. Profitable
dialogue depended on being able to do so. Here
we find the seeds of tolerance, and accommo-
dation, ideas frequently associated with
Canadian culture.
Lodge's Philosophy of Business (1945) initi-
ated the now prolific field of study at universi-
ties, applied philosophy. Applying Philosophy
(1950) followed, as he explored numerous
areas of public life through his philosophical tri-
chotomy.
The Great Thinkers (1949), perhaps his most
widely read book, made accessible to the public
an introduction to past philosophers. These
books were free from technical jargon, and
clearly demonstrated his belief that philosophy
was a continuing pursuit, and that history
would always shed light on the present. (Not
everyone agreed. G.S. Brett at the University of
Toronto took issue with Lodge's pluralism and
historical bent, though with characteristic
politeness.) Lodge ended his career with three
books on Plato.
He was a popular professor, known for his
contributions to the media and for his house
parties, designed to give venue to student musi-
cians, as well as to conversation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An Introduction to Modern Logic
(Minneapolis, 1920).
The Philosophy of Education (New York,
1937; 1947).
583
LORD
The Questioning Mind (New York, 1937).
The Philosophy of Business (Chicago, 1945).
The Great Thinkers (1949; 1964).
Applying Philosophy (Boston, 1950).
The Philosophy of Plato (1956).
Other Relevant Works
Armour, Leslie and Elizabeth Trott, The
Paces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy
and Culture in English Canada 1850-19'50
(Waterloo, Ontario, 1981), pp. 405-29.
Brett, George Sidney, The Classifying Mind',
University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 7
(October 1937), pp. 131-5.
Elizabeth Trott
LORD, Arthur Ritchie (1880-1941)
A.R. Lord was born in Chudleigh, Devon on 5
February 1880, and died in Grahamstown,
South Africa on 30 December 1941. He
attended Balliol College, Oxford (1898-1902;
first class literae humaniores, 1902) where he
studied with Edward Caird, H.H. JOACHIM,
W.G. Pogson Smith and J.A. SMITH. He
received his MA in 1909 and won the Green
Moral Philosophy Prize in 1911 for a disserta-
tion on the passions.
In 1902 Lord was appointed lecturer in polit-
ical science and assistant to the Professor of
Moral Philosophy, J.B. BAILLIE, at the
University of Aberdeen. In 1905 he was selected
Professor of Philosophy and History in the
newly founded Rhodes University College in
Grahamstown. There he taught philosophy (i.e.
logic, psychology and ethics) but also politics,
history, classics and law. Ill health forced him
to retire in 1940, and he died from cancer the
following year. Lord was an influential teacher,
but published little. Some of his work (e.g., a
book on logic; a translation and commentary
on Spinoza's Tractatus de intellectus emenda-
LORD
tione) has been lost, though his remaining
lectures and essays fill two lengthy volumes.
Lord was particularly influenced by the
idealist J.A. Smith, and is part of the 'third gen-
eration' of British idealism - one that was able
to flourish in 'the colonies'. Lord kept abreast
of developments abroad, but remained rela-
tively immune from the shift in Anglo-
American philosophy in the first third of the
twentieth century towards logical empiricism.
At Rhodes, Lord lectured on Plato - inspired
by R.L. Nettleship's approach - and on Bernard
BOSANQUET and T.H. Green's political philos-
ophy. Their influence is found in his 1918 essay
The Problem of Modern Democracy' and in
The Principles of Politics (1921). Lord's aim in
The Problem of Modern Democracy' is a call
to build democracy after the war, rather than
merely analyse it. The 'problems' were not
those described by Plato and repeated up to
Burke; they were quite the reverse. For
example, democracies are not 'anarchic', but
tend to respect authority, even tyrannical
authority. Lord also argued that democracy is
not a specific set of political institutions, but a
spirit consistent with many structures. Intended
as a student text to bridge the 'theoretical'
approach of Bosanquet and Frederick Pollock's
Introduction to the History of the Science of
Politics (1890), the Principles emphasizes two
topics more than Lord's idealist forebears:
democracy and freedom.
Lord's account of freedom parallels Green's.
Like Bosanquet, however, Lord holds that
while freedom is determined by an underlying
moral ideal, it exists only in the state 'as an
organic growth'. Lord identifies democracy
with 'popular sovereignty' or 'self-government',
but the key is 'representation'. Lord relates sov-
ereignty to 'the General Will5, 'which makes
and preserves the unity of the national charac-
ter'. But the General Will needs interpretation.
This is the task of representatives who are not
just 'delegates' of the people, but 'senators'.
Through the 1920s and 1930s Lord lectured
on a range of topics. In his five 'Lectures on the
Principles of Aesthetic Judgement' (1931) his
584
interest was 'not to lay down rules for the
creation or criticism of works of Art', but to
frame a conception of aesthetic judgement. His
six 'Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion'
(1924) reflect a Hegelian approach. Starting
with discussions of the problem of evil and the
relation of body and soul, he presents 'the
logical development of the religious conscious-
ness' through to 'Absolute Religion'. Lord's
lectures on 'History of Philosophy and the
Theory of Knowledge' begin with Descartes
and conclude with a lengthy treatment of Hegel
- which provides insight into how Hegel (and
Hegelianism) were received in the first third of
the twentieth century.
Lord's interests extended to ethics, history,
educational theory and literature - and a
number of short manuscripts remain. He had
a lively interest in the arts; he was an amateur
musician and a friend of the South African
poet, Francis Carey Slater, with whom he cor-
responded about poetry and current affairs.
In the early years of World War II, Lord
returned to political philosophy with a set of
essays on 'Freedom'. These three essays, written
in the months before his death, are a valuable
guide to the idealist approach to freedom at a
time when the issue had been called into
question by the rise of Hitler and Mussolini.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Principles of Politics: An Introduction to
the Study of the Evolution of Political
Ideas (Oxford, 1921).
Lectures and Philosophical Remains of
Arthur Ritchie Lord, ed. William Sweet
and Errol E. Harris, 3 vols (forthcoming).
William Sweet

LOVEDAY, Thomas (1875-1966)
Thomas Loveday was born in Williamscote,
Oxford on 16 August 1875 and died there on
4 March 1966. The son of J.E.T Loveday, JP,
he was educated at Magdalen College (first
class Classical Moderations, 1896; first class
literae humaniores, 1898; MA, 1901) under
Thomas CASE and C.C.J. WEBB, where he was
demy (1894-8), senior demy (1901-1903) and
John Locke Scholar (1900). Loveday also
attended classes at the University of Leipzig
(1900). He was made MA (ad eundem gradum)
at the University of the Cape of Good Hope in
1903, and later received honorary doctorates
from Bristol (1928) and Cape Town (1949).
In 1900, Loveday was appointed assistant
lecturer in English and philosophy at the
University College of North Wales in Bangor.
He moved to the South African College (Cape
Town) in 1903 as Professor of Philosophy, but
left - apparently owing to his wife's ill health - articles on local history.
in 1907, becoming Librarian (1907-11) and
later lecturer in philosophy at the University of philosophical education in South Africa, and
Sheffield (1911-14). He was appointed Professor
of Philosophy at Armstrong College (now the
University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne) and sub-
sequently Principal at the University College of
Southampton (1920-22) and Vice-Chancellor
of the University of Bristol (1922-44). He also
served as Chair of the committees on Veterinary
and on Higher Agricultural Education (1936-38;
1943-53), and as Chair of the Bristol Evening
Post (1950-60).
Loveday's earliest work was in the 'psycho-
logical' side of philosophy. After attending
lectures by Gustav Storring and Wilhelm
Wundt in Leipzig, Loveday became interested
in the study of mental processes and mental
activity. In articles and reviews - such as
'Perception of Change and Duration' (1900)
and 'Theories of Mental Activity' (1901) -
Loveday shows a broad sympathy to the work
of G.F. STOUT, but also to Wundt and to F.H.
BRADLEY'S criticisms of Stout.
Loveday's position at the South African
College left him little time to write, though,
585
LOVEDAY
shortly after his return to England, his transla-
tion of Storring's 1900 lectures, Mental
Pathology and its Relation to Normal
Psychology, appeared. A translation of some of
the minor works of Aristotle was published in
1913, but Loveday's interests remained in psy-
chology. He co-authored a psychology
textbook for teachers (1912), but a projected
book on the meaning of philosophy was never
completed. A thorough critical notice of the
third edition of Stout's A Manual of Psychology
appeared in 1914.
When Loveday took up the professorship at
Armstrong College in 1914 (in succession to
R.F.A. HOERNLE, who had succeeded him in the
professorship at the South African College), he
had virtually ceased to do academic writing
and, after his appointment as Principal at
Southampton in 1920, he devoted himself
almost entirely to administrative responsibili-
ties. In retirement, Langley wrote some short
Though he was one of the early figures in
among those British philosophers who became
part of the first generation of academic psy-
chologists, Loveday's lasting contribution was
in public life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Perception of Change and Duration - Some
Additional Notes', Mind, vol. 9 (1900), pp.
384-8.
'Theories of Mental Activity', Mind, vol. 10
(1901), pp. 455-78.
(Trans.), Gustav Storring, Mental Pathology
and its Relation to Normal Psychology
(1907).
'On Certain Objections to Psychology',
Mind, vol. 18 (1909), pp. 208-30.
(with John Alfred Green), An Introduction to
Psychology, More Especially for Teachers
(Oxford, 1912).
(Trans, with E.D. Forster), De Coloribus-, De
Audibilibus-, Physiognomonica, in The
Works of Aristotle, vol. 6 (Oxford, 1913).
Critical Notice of G.F. Stout, A Manual of
LOVEDAY
Psychology, Mind, vol. 23 (1914), pp.
570-87.
William Sweet
LUCAS, John Randolph (1929-)
John Randolph Lucas was born in London on
19 September 1929, the son of a clergyman
who became Archdeacon of Durham. He was
educated at Winchester and Balliol College,
Oxford. He is married, and has two daughters
and two sons. Apart from three years at Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge, and spells at
Princeton and at Leeds, his academic career
was based at Merton College, Oxford, where
from 1960 to 1996 he was fellow and tutor in
philosophy. He was appointed reader in phi-
losophy of Oxford University from 1990, and
has made major contributions to the philoso-
phies of action, mind, religion, science, mathe-
matics, logic, probability and economics, to
ancient philosophy and moral and political phi-
losophy. He also helped found the Oxford
Consumer Group.
In The Lesbian Rule' (1955) Lucas defends
there being singular reasons explaining the dis-
tinctive actions of human individuals, and the
distinctiveness of explanations in the humani-
ties. While explanations have to be implicitly
general, their sponsors need not formulate sup-
portive generalizations, as long as they can
rebut challenges to their own consistency. This
thesis is illustrated by entertaining dialogues
between dons. The themes of reasoning as
dialogue and of the distinctiveness of reasoning
in the humanities run through many of Lucas's
later works.
In The Soul' (published in Basil MITCHELL'S
1957 collection Faith and Logic) Lucas well
defends the soul against Gilbert RYLE'S reduc-
tive analysis. Like many of Lucas's subsequent
publications, this work helped initiate the
586
revival of the philosophy of religion in English-
speaking philosophy.
The Principles of Politics (1966) develops
Lucas's account of reasoning in the humanities,
applying it to the life of political communities.
Here, the positivist disdain towards the rele-
vance of reason to morals and to politics is
well rejected, the relations of morality to law
are well explored, and many valuable distinc-
tions are made in the course of an argument for
a version of Burkeian conservatism that simul-
taneously welcomed the liberalism of the recent
Wolfenden Report and rejected as unconstitu-
tional the recent Unilateral Declaration of
Independence of the white settlers of Rhodesia.
This work contributed to the revival of politi-
cal philosophy, well in advance of John Rawls's
A Theory of Justice.
In The Concept of Probability (1970) Lucas
defends objective probabilities and Bernoulli's
theorem in particular, and criticizes both the
subjective approach, the logical relation theory
and the frequency theory. In an obliging
Appendix (pp. 213-15), he also sets out the
merits and demerits, and the proponents and
critics, of the various principal theories in this
field.
Lucas also published in 1970 in The freedom
of the Will the fullest statement of his argument
for the metaphysical belief in human freedom,
and against mechanism and determinism. This
work is notable for its refutation of the wide-
spread objection to indeterminism, said to make
human action random. Since there are multiple
kinds of explanation (a Collingwoodian theme),
actions that are inexplicable (or random) in
terms of antecedent sufficient conditions may
still be explicable (and thus non-random) when
explained in terms of the agent's reasons for
action. But its tour de force is Lucas's Godelian
argument, which he had previously presented
in 'Mind, Machines and Godel' (1961). Godel's
theorem (which Lucas here expounds and
defends) tells us that in any system complex
enough to cope with natural numbers there are
knowable propositions that cannot be proved
or deduced within the system., But if determin-

ism were true, the life of a human being would
embody a system of such complexity, of which
all the states (belief-states included) would in
principle be provable and deducible, something
that Godel's theorem shows not to be the case.
Hence determinism and the irresistible
Godelian theorem are incompatible, and deter-
minism must be rejected. These and related
themes were developed in Lucas's Gifford
Lectures (dialogues themselves), published in
The Nature of Mind and The Development of
Mind. Over many years, Lucas has continued
to buttress the Godelian argument against all-
comers, as his website attests.
A Treatise on Time and Space (1973)
includes an argument from the concept of time
to that of space. Time is possible only if either
there are things that change or there is the pos-
sibility of communication. But both change
and communication require the concept of
entities qualitatively identical but numerically
distinct. Thus, unless we interpret this require-
ment as satisfied by Leibnizian monads, we
also require the concept of absolute space to
allow it to be satisfied. Lucas engagingly illus-
trates all this by depicting a world that is a
variant of Peter STRAWSON'S world of sounds,
a world of shifting wavelengths (a subject for
'wireless metaphysics'), interpretable either in a
Leibnizian or in a Newtonian manner. Time is
thus more fundamental than space, and accord-
ing to Lucas is a prerequisite of consciousness,
as space is not. Lucas proceeds to argue that if
persons are to be possible, there must be both
time, objects and space of a kind that would
ideally have Euclidean properties, and then to
consider why it is that space has to be three-
dimensional and space-time 3+1-dimensional.
He further argues that Augustine, Boethius and
Aquinas were wrong to represent God as
timeless. Along the way, fascinating insights
are presented linking memory and intention
on the one hand and identity and responsibil-
ity on the other.
In 1973 Lucas also published in Philosophy
'"Because You Are A Woman"', a critique of
feminist egalitarianism which opened with the
587
LUCAS
claim that Plato was the first feminist. Replying
to his feminist critics in 'The Alternative Sex'
(1984), Lucas admitted that he had been
'poking fun at the follies of feminism', and
remained prepared to defend pay differentials
between male and female workers; but upheld
his opposition to dehumanizing anyone of
whichever gender through stereotyping, or
through treating them as only female, only
male - or only a philosopher.
In Democracy and Participation (1976)
Lucas combines a shrewd critique of the British
political system with general arguments such as
that deriving the need for the state to be able to
use physical force as a last resort from the
autonomous nature of human agents (chapters
2 and 4). More recent developments such as the
inauguration of parliamentary Select
Committees could be held to correct for the
unnecessary powerlessness of members of
Parliament remarked in chapter 11. But the
lack of accountability of senior civil servants,
also lambasted here, remains to be rectified.
Freedom and Grace, a collection of essays
and sermons of 1976, includes a nice resolution
of the Augustine/Pelagius controversy, through
an (uncharacteristic) exercise in linguistic
analysis conducted upon the concept of 'cause'.
This resolution is developed in the ensuing
papers, which stress that grace, like personal
relationships, is granted by personal favour,
and not by merit. But the most striking of these
occasional pieces is 'Non Credo', of which the
opening paragraphs begin (respectively) with 'I
do not believe in phenomenalism or solipsism,
materialism, determinism, irrationalism, emo-
tivism, pragmatism, or subjectivism.' Objects of
non-belief mentioned in the succeeding para-
graphs include Marx, Freud, man, morality
(not very much, anyway), self-help or self-
improvement, demythologizing, and death as
the end of everything.
In On Justice (1980) Lucas criticizes both
utilitarianism and Rawlsianism (here dubbed a
form of egalitarianism). He takes Rawls to task
for pursuing a dialogue with the underdog but
none with the 'overdog', for wrongly assuming
LUCAS
that everyone would prefer a maximin strategy,
and for disregarding desert. Arguments for
taking desert seriously are presented (but are
such that a sophisticated consequentialist could
accommodate them). Rawls is also taken to task
for implying that successful people make no con-
tribution to their own success. (But this scarcely
requires that the achievements of a Duke of
Marlborough deserve to be recognized by the gift
of a Blenheim Palace.) At the same time, advo-
cates of laissez-faire are criticized for assuming
that the success of the successful is in no way due
to society. (But no mention is made of Rawls's
difficulties in coping with intergenerational,
international or inter-species justice.)
Space, Time and Causality (1984) presents a
series of lectures on the philosophy of science.
The chapter on causality well criticizes Hume's
account in terms of constant conjunction and of
contiguity, and at the same time builds on it in
a way that further develops the analysis of 'cause'
of Freedom and Grace. Causes construed as key
explanations need not be causes construed as
antecedent sufficient conditions, but both
concepts have their place, the former theoretical
and the latter practical. The requirement of con-
tinuity (or locality) that survives Hume's require-
ment of contiguity for causal theories is later
shown to favour field theory, which does not
involve action at a distance, over force theory,
which does.
In The Future: An Essay on God, Temporality
and Truth (1989) the view that God is timeless
is rejected as making him less than personal,
and divine omniscience is held not to include
knowledge of the future free acts of rational
creatures such as human beings, except in the
form of fallible, human-like foreknowledge. By
creating free, autonomous creatures, God freely
limits his infallible omniscience. (An unpalat-
able implication is that God's knowledge
changes and grows from moment to moment.)
Nevertheless, this work is well crafted to
expound for students issues relating to the modal
logic of knowledge and foreknowledge, and well
explores the modal differences between past,
present and future.
588
Responsibility (1993) supplies a synoptic
view of a broad field of topics (punishment,
reward, desert, free will, rationality, conse-
quentialism, political accountability, business
ethics and the Atonement) unified through their
links with responsibility, understood here as
answerability. The work concludes with
Lucas's 'Which? Guide to Theories of
Punishment' (pp. 280-85), prepared for essay-
ists who may be inclined to begin from some
standpoint other than that of the rest of the
book. Five theories are depicted (three utilitar-
ian and two retributivist), together with their
merits, demerits, advocates and critics; Lucas
also finds the best compromise accounts in
those of H.L.A. HART and C.L. Ten. Lucas's
humanity, wry humour and concern to under-
stand the point of view of the prisoner in the
dock come across in sample questions such as
'Why are you administering this particular form
of beastliness to me?'
The argument of Spacetime and
Electromagnetism (jointly published by Lucas
and P.E. Hodgson in 1990) defends a realist
interpretation of the special theory of relativity,
and is (in part) summarized and put into context
in Lucas's 'The Temporality of God' (1996).
There is nothing wrong with the concept of
absolute simultaneity, which can be reconciled
with the theories of relativity, electromagnetism
and quantum physics, and is indispensable for
our belief that, unlike the past, the future is gen-
uinely open (rather than comprising the past as
seen from a special perspective). If God is
temporal (which Lucas takes to be a condition
of his being understood as personal), God's
time-frame has priority over all others. God's
ability to hear our prayers and answer them is
held (in 'The Temporality of God') to require
temporal but omniscient knowledge (as opposed
to knowledge that is timeless), held simultane-
ously both with human prayers and with all
other events occurring throughout the universe
at the same time as they are offered. (Yet could
not a timeless creator provide for responses at
particular times to prayers if made at those
times?)

Ethical Economics (1996; with M.R.
Griffiths) well argues that business people have
responsibilities beyond those of making profits
for themselves or for shareholders, responsi-
bilities to customers, community and environ-
ment, grounded in the cooperative nature of
business. At the same time a jaundiced view is
taken of the possibilities for full employment,
for socialism or for distributive justice ever
becoming the basis of an economy, an unduly
limited scope is assigned to socially responsible
investment and a rather charitable view is taken
of downsizing (to cure 'overmanning') and of
the 'trickle-down effect'. Consequentialism is
too readily trounced in face of examples from
games-theory, without the case for rule conse-
quentialism being seriously considered.
In The Conceptual Roots of Mathematics
(1999) Lucas argues for a qualified or 'chas-
tened' logicism. Mathematical arguments are
not all deductive, and are best thought of as a
dialogue, yet mathematical concepts remain
grounded in logic. In a further Which? guide,
this time to geometry, Euclid's is recommended
as the Best Buy, as was previously argued on
different grounds in A Treatise on Space and
Time.
An Engagement with Plato's Republic (2003;
with Basil Mitchell) worthily adds to the liter-
ature on this pivotal work, not so much as
commentary, but more as critical guide and
companion. In 'Self, Sex and Power' (chapter
10) Lucas argues incisively that Plato's proposal
for the Guardians to have sexual partners and
children in common, devised to reduce their
sense of individuality and enhance that of com-
munity, ignores the crucial obstacle that those
expected to think for themselves about truth
cannot but care about whether their view of
truth is recognized and implemented, and thus
whether they have a say in the community's
decisions. It would be unwise to seek to
suppress such a sense of self.
Lucas's achievements include his pioneering
the Oxford Joint Honour Schools of
Mathematics and Philosophy, and of Physics
and Philosophy. Pre-eminent among the mul-
589
LUCAS
tiplicity of his philosophical contributions and
insights have been his seminal work on time (as
in A Treatise on Time and Space and in The
Future) and on realism (as in Spacetime and
Electromagnetism) and, more particularly, the
Godelian argument, which continues to be
widely debated. Central to all his work has
been the autonomy of persons.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Principles of Politics (Oxford, 1966).
The Concept of Probability (Oxford, 1970).
The Freedom of the Will (Oxford, 1970).
A Treatise on Time and Space (1973).
Democracy and Participation
(Harmondsworth, 1976).
Freedom and Grace: Essays (1976).
On Justice (1980).
Space, Time and Causality (Oxford, 1984).
The Future: An Essay on God, Temporality
and Truth (Oxford, 1989).
(with P.E. Hodgson), Spacetime and
Electromagnetism: An Essay on the
Philosophy of the Special Theory of
Relativity (Oxford, 1990).
Responsibility (Oxford, 1993).
(with M.R. Griffiths), Ethical Economics
(Basingstoke, 1996).
The Conceptual Roots of Mathematics
(1999).
(with B.C. Mitchell), An Engagement with
Plato's Republic (Aldershot, 2003).
Other Relevant Works
'The Lesbian Rule', Philosophy, vol. 30
(1955), pp. 195-213.
The Soul', in B.C. Mitchell (ed.), Faith and
Logic (1957), pp. 132-48.
'Mind, Machines and Godel', Philosophy,
vol. 36 (1961), pp. 112-27.
(with A.J.P. Kenny, H.C. Longuet-Higgins
and C.H. Waddington), The Nature of
Mind (Edinburgh, 1972).
(with A.J.P. Kenny, H.C. Longuet-Higgins
and C.H. Waddington), The Development
of Mind (Edinburgh, 1973).
'"Because You Are A Woman"', Philosophy,
LUCAS
vol. 48 (1973), pp. 161-71.
The Alternative Sex', Philosophy, vol. 59
(1984), pp. 111-15.
The Temporality of God', in Robert John
Randall, Nancey Murphy and C J. Isham
(eds), Quantum Cosmology and the Laws
of Nature: Scientific Perspectives on Divine
Action, 2nd edn. (Vatican City State and
Berkeley, California, 1996), pp. 235-46.
J.R. Lucas homepage, http://users.ox.ac.uk/
-jrlucas, accessed November 2004.
Further Reading
Jacquette, Dale, 'Metamathematical Criteria
for Minds and Machines', Erkenntnis, vol.
27 (1987), pp. 1-16.
Norris, Christopher, New Idols of the Cave
(Manchester and New York, 2001).
Penrose, Roger, The Emperor's New Mind
(Oxford, 1989).
, Shadow of the Mind (Oxford, 1994).
Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice
(Cambridge, Mass., 1971).
Webb, Judson C., Mechanism, Mentalism
and Metamathematics: An Essay on
Finitism (Dordrecht, 1980).
Robin Attfield
LUCE, Arthur Aston (1882-1977)
Arthur Aston Luce was born in Gloucester on
21 August 1882 and died in Dublin on 28 June
1977. The fourth son of the Revd John James
Luce and Alice Luce (nee Stubbs), he first was
educated at Lindley Lodge School and
Eastbourne College. Luce entered Trinity
College Dublin in 1901, receiving his BA
(1905), BD (1908), MA (1991), DD (1920)
and Litt D (1943). He was also awarded a
DLirt (honoris causa) by Queen's University,
Belfast in 1953. Luce served as a fellow of
Trinity College Dublin for a record sixty-five
590
years from 1912 until 1977 and held the posts
of Professor of Moral Philosophy (1934-49),
Vice-Provost (1946-52) and Berkeley Professor
of Metaphysics (1953-77). Luce was ordained
an Anglican priest on 21 December 1908, and
he served at St Patrick's Cathedral as canon
(1930-36), chancellor (1936-52) and precen-
tor (1952-73). Luce served with the 12th Royal
Irish Rifles in France (1915-18) and was dec-
orated with the Military Cross on 18 October
1917. An avid fisher, Luce also wrote the well-
regarded Fishing and Thinking (1959). He
married Lilian Mary Thompson on 21
December 1918 and his children were John
Victor, Arthur Frank and Alice Mary Kathleen.
He lost his wife and his daughter to a tragic
drowning accident in 1940. Luce himself died
tragically in a Dublin hospital two days fol-
lowing an assault.
Luce's most important work gained him
acclaim as the leading Berkeley scholar of his
day and his work has secured him a position as
the pre-eminent Berkeley scholar of at least the
first half of the twentieth century. Luce
(Berkeley's Immaterialism, p. vi) described
himself as an expositor of rather than a com-
mentator on Berkeley's Principles of Human
Knowledge. Indeed, he frankly acknowledged
his endorsement of immaterialism as well as
'naive realism'; and his own published philos-
ophy, Sense without Matter, or Direct
Perception (1954), consisted largely of a
defence of what he took to be Berkeley's core
views. Luce's editions of the Philosophical
Commentaries (1944) and The Works of
George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (co-edited
with T.E. JESSOP, 1948-57) remain withou
equal, and have been central in solidifying
Luce's importance to the study of Berkeley's
philosophy.
The nine-volume collection of Berkeley's
works (of which Luce edited volumes 1, 4, 7
and 8, and co-edited volume 9 with Jessop)
was unequivocally praised as an improvement
over A.C. Eraser's earlier editions. Aside from
the inclusion of additional writings - several
sermons, rediscovered editions of publications

and 150 new letters - especially noteworthy
was the use of a critical apparatus which
enabled readers to note systematically changes
made in Berkeley's work from his earlier
editions, as well as the useful editorial com-
mentary and editorial introductions. It remains
unsurpassed as the standard scholarly source of
Berkeley's writings.
As a whole, Luce's work embodied an
attempt to undo what he viewed as the mis-
representations of Berkeley as a philosopher at
odds with common sense and as a man with his
head in the clouds with little practical sensibil-
ities. His Life of George Berkeley (1949) was
an attempt to defend a picture of Berkeley as an
engaged man of the world. Especially note-
worthy was Luce's identification of the British
Plutarch's The Life of George Berkeley (1762)
as a chief source of misinformation and cari-
cature. Luce's work was by no means uncon-
troversial, particularly in its defence of the ill-
fated Bermuda project and the Bishop's cele-
bration of tar-water as panacea. Recently D.
Berman (1994) has argued on the basis of pre-
viously unavailable evidence that some of the
early representations of Berkeley may have been
more accurate than Luce had supposed.
Luce's account of Berkeley's philosophy
aimed to discredit representations of Berkeley
as an 'acosmitist' (one who denies the exis-
tence of body), a 'panpsychist' (one who affirms
only the reality of mind), as well as a 'subjec-
tive idealist'. He defended the view that under
the influence of Locke, Bayle and Malebranche,
Berkeley had originally developed an argument
for immaterialism which relied mainly on scep-
tical concerns. This earlier Berkeley, according
to Luce, was indeed both a panpsychist and an
acosmitist who, in particular, maintained the
view that ideas were modifications of the
person and bodies were mere powers in God to
produce those ideas. However, as Luce would
have it, Berkeley's early philosophical note-
books were actually an attempt to re-examine
his 'first arguings' for immaterialism as he
prepared to compose An Essay Towards a New
Theory of Vision and A Treatise Concerning
591
LUCE
the Principles of Human Knowledge. This
earlier position, argued Luce, was decisively
abandoned by Berkeley around entries 265-79
of Berkeley's early notebooks, upon the dis-
covery of the New Principle (esse est per dpi}.
The Principles, for Luce, constituted Berkeley's
complete and internally coherent development
and defence of an immaterialism which main-
tained the real existence of a publicly available
world of sense. From then on, argued Luce
pace Eraser, no significant changes in Berkeley's
philosophical outlook occurred.
Luce's first published book on Berkeley's
writings, Berkeley and Malebranche (1934),
was an attempt to argue against the leading
view (held by Eraser among others) that
Berkeley was largely the successor of Locke. On
the contrary, argued Luce, the philosophy of
Berkeley was equally dependent on that of
Malebranche. 'Locke taught him', wrote Luce,
'but Malebranche inspired him' (Berkeley and
Malebranche, p. 7). Especially noteworthy was
Luce's early attempt to represent Berkeley as
one who maintained the public, mind-inde-
pendent nature of ideas and the relevance of
Malebranche's doctrine of ideas to this thesis.
'Neglect of the Malebranche factor in
Berkeleyanism takes the heart out of it,
reducing its solid reality to flimsy dream ...',
Luce wrote (ibid., p. 5). While Luce's work in
documenting the influence of Malebranche
upon Berkeley has been superseded, not least by
C.J. McCracken's Malebranche and British
Philosophy (1983), it is notable for its pio-
neering efforts as well as for his preliminary
development of the controversial interpreta-
tion which had come to be known as Berkeley's
alleged 'common sense realism'.
Luce's earliest and perhaps most important
work of substance in Berkeley scholarship con-
cerned Add. M.S. 39305 of the British
Museum's 'Berkeley Papers', originally known
as Berkeley's Commonplace Book of
Occasional Metaphysical Thoughts. Two note-
books had been discovered and so named by
A.C. Eraser, who published the Commonplace
Book in both his 1871 and 1901 editions of
LUCE
The Works of George Berkeley. Subsequently,
T. Lorenz had argued in 1905 that the two
notebooks had been bound together in the
wrong order; and this was also argued by G.A.
JOHNSTON, who corrected the order in his
Berkeley's Commonplace Book of 1930.
In 1932 Luce published 'Berkeley's
Commonplace Book - its Date, Purpose,
Structure, and Marginal Signs', his first major
article on Berkeley. In this paper Luce further
supported the Lorenz-Johnston thesis with a
persuasive argument which relied on Berkeley's
inconsistent capitalization of the T in 'idea',
and he also argued that only the entries accom-
panied by Berkeley's marginal signs be admitted
as part of the Commonplace Book proper. This
enabled Luce to argue that, far from mere
'jottings', the Commonplace Book was more
purposeful in its design - indeed that it was a
preliminary stage in Berkeley's development of
his arguments in the New Theory of Vision
and the Principles.
In this article Luce also influentially sug-
gested that the puzzling sign (+) of Berkeley's
marginal apparatus served as an obelus to
indicate entries that Berkeley either came to
reject or regard as otherwise unfit for inclu-
sion in his published work, and that conse-
quently such entries constituted a 'black list' of
entries. Luce additionally defended the view
that the Commonplace Book was probably
started around June to July 1707 (against the
view that the beginning date was earlier) and
concluded in August 1708 (prior to Berkeley's
first draft of the Introduction to the Principles).
Both the obelus thesis as well as the dating of
the notebooks have subsequently been con-
tested in the literature. Although Luce's posi-
tions on these issues have not been refuted,
they also remain controversial.
Luce ('Development within Berkeley's
Commonplace Book\ 1940) subsequently
argued that the Commonplace Book reflected
an important volte-face in Berkeley's views, in
that Berkeley had originally adopted a 'panpsy-
chist' view, which he came to reject. Luce
(1943) then postulated an original argument for
592
immaterialism which reflected Berkeley's 'first
arguings' upon which the Commonplace Book
was to be viewed as a kind of commentary, and
in 1944 Luce published the Philosophical
Commentaries, Generally Called the
Commonplace Book, abandoning Eraser's title
in light of the fact that the notebooks no longer
seemed to reflect 'occasional metaphysical
reflections'.
This edition, described by Luce as an editio
diplomatica and of which only 400 copies were
printed, was praised for its detailed reproduc-
tion of Berkeley's notebooks. Each page of the
manuscript was transcribed verso as well as
recto, lineation was preserved, erasures, scored
words, as well as marginal signs were included,
and the ordering of certain entries adopted by
Eraser and Johnston was corrected.
Additionally, Luce included over 150 pages of
notes on the entries. In his review of this
edition, LAIRD (p. 277) regarded them 'a
triumph for Trinity College, Dublin, as well as
for Dr. Luce personally'. 'In range, precision
and economy of expression and of convenience
in cross-reference,' he wrote, 'it would be very
difficulty indeed to better them.' Far more con-
troversial were Luce's postulation of a prior
Berkeleyan argument for immaterialism, and
his choice of title designed to reflect the con-
troversial thesis. Luce developed this thesis
more thoroughly in his The Dialectic of
Immaterialism (1963), in which he argued that
the philosophical notebooks reflected a kind of
dialectical method where Berkeley voiced
possible objections to his 'first arguings'.
The thesis that Berkeley was a 'common
sense realist' (one who maintains that we imme-
diately sense perceive the real, non-mental
world without representational mediation) is
recognized as a hallmark of Luce's interpreta-
tion of Berkeley's philosophy. Yet the attribu-
tion of this view to Luce is by no means
uncomplicated. A.C. Eraser, for example, as
Luce himself recognized, had already empha-
sized the 'spiritual realism' of Berkeley's phi-
losophy much earlier. And not long after G.E.
MOORE'S famous 'Refutation of Idealism'

(1903), interpretations of Berkeley as a
'common sense realist' had surfaced in a fairly
timely way. Ironically, Luce himself, in both
Berkeley and Malebranche as well as Berkeley's
Immaterialism, distanced himself from the rep-
resentation of Berkeley as a clear-cut realist,
only explicitly affirming it later in The Dialectic
of Immaterialism.
What appears to have set Luce's interpreta-
tion apart from at least some of the other
'realist' interpretations was his insistence that
Berkeleyan ideas of sense were publicly avail-
able, existing independently of finite spirits.
Bodies, for Luce's Berkeley, were not divine
powers to produce ideas, but combinations of
publicly available sense-data. Luce read
Berkeley's thesis that ideas exist 'in the mind'
as the innocuous claim that they were directly
perceived by a mind; and he read Berkeley's
thesis that spirit and idea were 'entirely
distinct' as the claim that sensible ideas were
'not mental' (i.e. neither 'part of the mind' nor
'in the mind by way of mode').
The specifics of Luce's interpretation rested
mainly on the claim that, for Berkeley, the esse
est percipi principle is expandable to the prin-
ciple esse est percipi aut posse percipi.
Additionally, Luce claimed that sensory per-
ception for Berkeley involves mental activity
such that a distinction between act and object
of perception may be drawn. By allowing for an
expansion of the New Principle, Luce was
enabled to argue that Berkeleyan ideas of sense
are objects of either possible or actual sense
perception, and that they can therefore exist
independently of any actual particular percep-
tion of them.
There are several difficulties with the Luce
interpretation. In addition to the fact that the
expansion thesis appears to be contradicted by
several passages in Berkeley's writings, the view
that for Berkeley ideas of sense exist indepen-
dently of any perception by a finite mind
appears to deflate certain central Berkeleyan
tenets, such as the claim that spirits are sub-
stances which support ideas perceiving them.
Moreover, in the First Dialogue Philonous
593
LUCE
argues that an intense heat simply is a pain (he
claims that there is only one simple idea). Yet,
if this is so, it is hard to avoid viewing intense
heat as wholly dependent upon particular finite
minds. Indeed, ideas of sense begin to look
very much like the sort of mental items Luce
denied them to be.
While the Luce interpretation has generally
not been accepted by Berkeley commentators,
it also continues to be discussed in much of the
secondary literature on Berkeley, seventy years
after its initial formulation. This is a strong
sign of the continuing importance of the thesis,
at least in insofar as it forces a deeper exami-
nation of the major metaphysical and episte-
mological issues in Berkeley's philosophy.
Luce's long-lasting influence in centralizing par-
ticular exegetical and philosophical problems,
therefore, is certainly of a piece with his inar-
guably substantial biographical, bibliographical
and editorial contributions to the study of
Berkeley's philosophy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berkeley and Malebranche: A Study in the
Origins of Berkeley's Thought (1934; 2nd
edn, with additional Preface, 1967).
Philosophical Commentaries, Generally
Called the Commonplace Book [of]
George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne. An
editio diplomatica Transcribed and Edited
with an Introduction and Notes (1944);
rev. notes by Luce included in G.H.
Thomas's edition of the Philosophical
Commentaries (Ohio, 1976).
Berkeley's Immaterialism: A Commentary on
his (A Treatise Concerning the Principles
of Human Knowledge' (1945).
(Ed. with T.E. Jessop), The Works of George
Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (1948-57;
repr., 3 vols with suppl. to volume 1 by
Desiree Park, Milwood, 1979).
The Dialectic of Immaterialism: An Account
of the Making of Berkeley's Principles
(1963).
LUCE

Other Relevant Works Berman, David, George Berkeley: Idealism

'Berkeley's Commonplace Book - its Date,
Purpose, Structure and Marginal Signs',
Hermathena, vol. 47 (1932), pp. 99-131
'Development within Berkeley's
Commonplace Book', Mind, vol. 193
(1940), pp. 42-51.
The Life of George Berkeley, Bishop of
Cloyne (1949; repr. with a new Preface,
New York, 1968).
Sense without Matter, or Direct Perception
(1954; repr., New York, 1973).
Jessop, Thomas, A Bibliography of George
Berkeley, with Inventory of Berkeley's
Manuscript Remains by A. A. Luce (1934;
repr. The Hague, 1973).
Further Reading
Berman, David, 'A Bibliography of the
Published Writings of Dr. A.A. Luce',
Hermathena, vol. 128 (1977), pp. 11-18.
Belfrage, Bertil, 'A New Approach to
Berkeley's Philosophical Notebooks', in
Ernest Sosa (ed.), Essays on the Philosophy
of George Berkeley (Dordrecht, 1987), pp.
217-30.
and the Man (1994).
Laird, John, Review of Philosophical
Commentaries; Generally Called the
Commonplace Book: George Berkeley,
Bishop of Cloyne, Philosophy, vol. 20
(1945), pp. 276-7.
Luce, John, 'Arthur Aston Luce, Curriculum
vitae', Hermathena, vol. 128 (1977), p. 10.
, The Luce Perspective on Berkeley:
An Outline of the Intellectual
Development of Dr. A.A. Luce, in
Berkeley Studies, vol. 1 (1988).
Pappas, George, Berkeley's Thought (Ithaca,
2000).
Talia Mae Bettcher

594
 The Dictionary
of Twentieth-Century
British Philosophers

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BRITISH
PHILOSOPHERS

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 M
MABBOTT, John David (1898-1988)
John Mabbott was born on 18 November 1898
and died at St John's College, Oxford on 26
January 1988. He was educated at Berwickshire
High School, and then at Edinburgh University,
before war service as an officer in the Royal
Garrison Artillery. On the advice of his teachers
in Edinburgh, Mabbott then went to St John's
College, Oxford, where he was awarded an
exhibition and took a first in literae humaniores
in 1921. He stayed on for a BLitt, completing
a thesis on Plato. After spells at Reading
University and the University College of North
Wales, at Bangor, he returned to St John's as
John Locke Scholar, in succession to J.L.
STOCKS, and was a fellow of the college from
1924 to 1963. He remained at St John's as
tutor, senior tutor (1956-63) and as President
(1963-9). He was awarded the CMC (1946)
for his war service at the Foreign Office.
Mabbott retired from the presidency of St
John's in 1969, and lived out a productive
retirement.
In 'Punishment' (1939) Mabbott defends an
unorthodox retributive theory of punishment.
He denies the relevance of utilitarian consider-
ations to the justification of punishment and is
critical of any concessions (in terms of the
manner or extent of punishment) on the part of
retributivists to such considerations. Moreover,
he dissents from the standard retributivist
position (in Hegel, BRADLEY and Ross, for
example) that punishment is a response to
moral wrongdoing. Rather, for Mabbott, pun-
595
ishment is a purely legal rather than a moral
matter: 'punishment is a corollary of law-
breaking by a member of the society whose
law is broken' ('Punishment', pp. 160-61).
Mabbott's most significant work is probably
The State and the Citizen (1948), an introduc-
tion to political philosophy which nevertheless
manages to add to the field. The book contains
a detailed criticism of both T.H. Green and
BoSANQUET, to whom, however, Mabbott was
indebted. Indeed, Oakeshott's view was that
The State and the Citizen had 'qualities that
raise it above anything of its kind' since the
1899 publication of Bosanquet's The
Philosophical Theory of the State. Beginning
with a survey of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and
Hegel, Mabbott outlines a doctrine of the
Maximum city: wherein 'political authority
would require no further defence. Any law
which furthered the good of the State would be
self-evidently right ... a citizen could never
evade the claim of the State to his obedience,
nor could he even rightly pursue any object
other than the good of his community' (The
State and the Citizen, p. 55). Against this,
Mabbott outlines limits to the state's authority
and activity, in the form of 'non-social values in
moral action' - values such as truth, beauty
and religious worship. Furthermore, there are
right actions which are entirely out of the ambit
of the state, and neither derive from, or are due
to an association - keeping promises, paying
debts and saving lives are among these.
Mabbott's argument is more characteristi-
cally liberal and individualist than Green's
MABBOTT
account of political morality in terms of the
common good. Asserting that The state is no
ultimate or genuine unit and has no ultimate or
absolute value' (ibid., p. 161), he argues for a
limited series of justified functions, noting that
the state cannot successfully foster some virtues:
'sympathy or willing co-operation, wherever
they are found, are intrinsically good' (p. 95).
The State and the Citizen is a measured,
careful account, underpinned by a careful
methodological commitment to individualism
and opposition to hypostatizing abstractions
and jargon - 'society', 'community', 'group'
and 'state' are all subjected to consistent eluci-
dation and analysis. Indeed, Oakeshoot criti-
cized the work for its pervasive 'atomism'.
Nevertheless, the book did a considerable
amount to moderate the influence of T.H.
Green's and Bosanquet's idealism.
Mabbott published An Introduction to Ethics
in 1966 and John Locke after his retirement, in
1973, though neither volume had an equivalent
impact. In John Locke Mabbott argues that
Locke's moral theory shows the increasing
influence of his interest in social anthropology
and hedonistic psychology. The explanation of
Locke's political theory emphasizes the differ-
ent elements from which it was made up, and
the passage from an authoritarian to a liberal
standpoint, as illustrated in Locke's emergence
as a champion of religious toleration.
Perhaps more than his published work,
Mabbott's contribution was to the develop-
ment and professionalization of philosophy at
Oxford. Before World War II he organized
some of the younger philosophers at Oxford
including RYLE, H.H. PRICE, W.F.R. HARDIE
and C.S. LEWIS into a regular discussion group
known as the 'wee teas' (in contrast to the teas
organized by the older generation of H.W.B.
JOSEPH and H.A. PRICHARD). The war saw
service in the Research Department of the
Foreign Office, where he took responsibility
for preparing peace settlements in central
Europe in general and Romania in particular,
before taking over internal administration of the
department.
596
Back at Oxford, disappointment at his defeat
in an election for the presidency of St John's in
1947 was put aside. Mabbott took on a series
of students who were to become important
philosophers themselves, including A.N. FLEW,
J.L. ACKRHL and Colin Strang. Reflection on his
rather dissatisfying experience of studying for
the BLitt led Mabbott to take important steps
in the reform of philosophy at Oxford.
Together with Gilbert Ryle, he introduced the
BPhil degree, which provided an intensive but
structured training for professional philoso-
phers. It made Oxford a more attractive place
to study philosophy, and allowed the sub-
faculty to build up a substantial cohort, partic-
ularly of graduate students from the USA. The
BPhil was a major contribution to the mainte-
nance of the teaching reputation of Oxford phi-
losophy. Mabbott also contributed to university
administration, including a reform of the uni-
versity's tangled and inconsistent admissions
system.
Overall, Mabbott, made a significant contri-
bution to British philosophy, not only in his
published work, but also - and perhaps more so
- in his contribution to the organization of the
discipline at one of its most important centres.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Is Plato's Republic Utilitarian?', Mind, vol.
46, no. 184 (October 1937), pp. 468-74.
'Punishment', Mind, vol. 48., no. 190 (April
1939), pp. 152-67.
'Two Notes on Syllogism', Mind, vol. 48, no.
191 (July 1939), pp. 326-37.
The State and the Citizen: An Introduction to
Political Philosophy (1949).
'Our Direct Experience of Time', Mind, vol.
60, no. 238 (April 1951), pp. 153-67.
'Note on "The Oxford Political
Philosophers'", Philosophical Quarterly,
vol. 4, no. 16 (July 1954), pp. 258-61.
'The Specious Present', Mind, vol. 64, no.
255 (July 1955), pp. 376-83.
'Interpretations of Mill's "Utilitarianism"',
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 23
(April 1956), pp. 115-20.

An Introduction to Ethics (1966).
John Locke (1973).
Further Reading
Oxford Memories (1986).
Jon Pike
MACBEATH, Alexander (1888-1964)
Alexander Macbeath was born on the Applecross
peninsula, Wester Ross on 16 October 1888 and
died in Aberfeldy on 15 December 1964. He
attended Hutchesons' Boys Grammar School,
Glasgow and Glasgow University, graduating
MA in 1916, on leave from wartime military
service (1915-19). Secretary to the Glasgow
Council of Charity Organizations from 1919 to
1920, he was appointed lecturer in moral phi-
losophy at Glasgow in 1920, and in 1923 senior
lecturer in logic and metaphysics. Professor of
Logic and Metaphysics at Queen's University,
Belfast from 1925, he was notably concerned to
forestall prospects of that university being seen as,
and thus becoming, a Protestant enclave. After
retirement in 1954 he held temporary chairs in
Edinburgh (1958-9), Tasmania (1959-61) and
Auckland, New Zealand (1963). He held degrees
honoris causa from Glasgow, Dublin, Belfast
and Tasmania.
Of his early collaborations on classroom texts,
that in ethics gave preliminary statement to views
articulated in Experiments in Living, his 1948/9
Gifford Lectures at St Andrews, highlighted by
Alasdair MAC!NTYRE among that distinguished
series.
Macbeath deplored what he believed to be
the excessive abstractness of current ethical
theory. The sheer diversity of moralities ruled
out any founding of morality on alleged intu-
itive givens (W.D. Ross, notably) of right or
good or duty. Morality was a 'live' issue given
the extent of social change, and diametrically
597
MACBEATH
opposed possibly unwarrantable reactions to a
declining prestige of religious institutions.
Intrigued that anthropologists had neglected to
provide a specific account of morality in prim-
itive societies, and surmising possible bearings
on a more concrete consideration of current
moral issues, he attempted to extract one from
extensive close reading in fieldwork reports,
with critique of some of their principles of inter-
pretation The Relationship of Primitive
Morality and Religion, 1948).
Respective cultures are commensurable
insofar as each has its own pattern of distinc-
tions between right and wrong. Eschewing com-
parativist, Frazerian generalizing from masses of
data inevitably decontextualized, Macbeath
attempted detailed exposition from four among
the least questionable case studies: each rela-
tively recently completed and thoroughly exten-
sive, concerning a primitive society immune
hitherto to civilized intrusion which was geo-
graphically remote from the three others and
recognizably differing in cultural practices.
The term 'primitive' refers simply to mem-
bership of a society in which certain institu-
tions distinctive of modern civilization did not
come into being. Long histories of distinctive
environing factors determine differences
between the customs of any primitive society
and any other society. One society's operative
moral ideals can demand the killing of one of
every pair of twins born. This is not aberrant
from morality: it enacts a morality which that
society's internal dynamic of change and con-
tinuity have brought into being and sustain.
Infractions of the code portend disaster on a
scale with famine; determining sanctions are
social, not personal. Punishment, unwelcome to
the recipient, is like other ordinances performed
as integral to social order and social welfare.
Far from blind, primitive codes differentiate
in terms of the severity of respective infractions,
and specify circumstances in which punishment
is mitigated. In primitive as in civilized soci-
eties individual attitudes to morality range
between rigorism and, within limits, degrees of
tolerance and laxity.
MACBEATH
Morality applies only in the imperative to
perform it, not to the substance of any ritual.
Primitive morality is demonstrably
autonomous. In civilized societies religious ref-
erences may valuably deepen moral convic-
tions, but in Macbeath's analysis these convic-
tions are aspect of an autonomous, and social,
tradition of conduct. If in a civilization 'self-real-
ization' may well be a valid goal, Macbeath
argues, such self-realization, as a person among
persons, is very different from any individual-
ist cultivation of self-image. The moral self is
implied, realized and sustained by active
rational concern with what might be right and
what wrong in practice.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(with A.K. White), The Moral Self, its Nature
and Development (1923).
(with Robert Latta), The Elements of Logic
(1929; several reprs).
The Relationship of Primitive Morality and
Religion [Frazer Lecture] (Glasgow, 1948).
Experiments in Living (1952).
further Reading
Russell, Joseph J., Analysis and Dialectic (The
Hague, 1984), pp. 160-70.
Robert R. Calder
McCABE, John Ignatius Herbert
(1926-2001)
Herbert McCabe was born in Middlesbrough
on 2 August 1926 and died in Oxford on 28
June 2001. Educated at St Mary's College,
Middlesbrough, he went to the University of
Manchester in 1944 to read chemistry but
changed to philosophy. He was taught by
Dorothy EMMET. In 1949 he joined the
Dominican Order. Ordained in 1955, he
worked as a curate in an inner city parish in
598
Newcastle-upon-Tyne before evolving an itin-
erant teaching ministry, mostly to university
students. This bore fruit in two books, The
New Creation (1964, on the sacraments) and
Law, Love and Language (1968, on the basis of
ethics). In 1965, at the height of the Second
Vatican Council, he took over the editorship of
New Blackfriars, the monthly review of the
English Dominican friars devoted to theology,
philosophy and literature. In the February 1967
issue he published an editorial prompted by the
departure from the church of Father Charles
Davis, then the most distinguished of English
Roman Catholic theologians, arguing (contrary
to Davis) that the manifest corruption of the
church was no good reason for leaving. He was
dismissed as editor at the behest of Roman
authorities (see Simon Clements and Monica
Lawlor, The McCabe Affair, 1967). Reinstated
in 1970 he edited the journal until he resigned
in 1979. He was visiting lecturer at various uni-
versities; his home for the rest of his life was
Blackfriars, Oxford. He served as Subprior
from 1969 to 1975 and Novice Master from
1981 to 1988. His main concern throughout
these years was to keep the thought of Thomas
Aquinas on the agenda. He ran a regular
seminar with Anthony KENNY. In 1989 he was
made a Master of Sacred Theology, the Order's
highest academic honour.
McCabe disliked being referred to as a
Thomist'. He approached Aquinas in the
context of the work of anti-Cartesian philoso-
phers in the analytical tradition, especially
Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN and Gilbert RYLE, whom
he believed to be in many ways anticipated by
Aquinas. On the question of God, Aquinas
clearly emerges as a negative theologian - con-
cerned to stress what we do not know about
God, an emphasis McCabe learned from his
Dominican mentor Victor White. No conceiv-
able object alongside anything we can imagine,
God is better not pictured as a moral agent,
whether well or badly behaved. God is at work
even, and indeed especially, in human free
choices: The creative causal power of God does
not operate on me from outside, as an alterna-

tive to me; it is the creative causal power of God
that makes me me' (God Matters, p. 13). The
confusions in much modern theology, such as
talk about the 'suffering God', 'process'
theology, etc., are traceable to an idolatrous
tendency to forget the biblical God. Aquinas's
God, McCabe insists, with a touch of
Chestertonian paradox, is the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob, 'the God who is not a god',
contrary to much commentary on Aquinas.
The question of the esse of things, far from
being residual Greek metaphysics, is 'the typi-
cally Jewish (and thus Christian) question',
namely of creation ex nihilo.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The New Creation: Studies on Living in the
Church (1964).
Law, Love and Language (1968; repr. 1979,
2004).
God Matters (1987; repr. 1992,2000).
God Still Matters, ed. Brian Davies, OP
(2002).
God, Christ and Us, ed. Brian Davies, OP
(2004).
further Reading
Language, Meaning and God: Essays in
Honour of Herbert McCabe OP, ed. Brian
Davies, OP (1987).
Fergus Kerr
McCRACKEN, David John (1911-c. 1972)
DJ. McCracken was born in Northern Ireland
on 22 May 1911 and died near Oxford c. 1972.
He graduated BA at Queen's University, Belfast
in 1931 and won a studentship which took him
to Balliol College, Oxford from 1931 to 1935.
His higher degrees were, however, from Belfast:
MA in 1934, and PhD in 1936. From 1938 he
was lecturer in philosophy at the University of
599
McCRACKEN
St Andrews, until joining the RAF in 1941.
Invalided out in 1943, he found a temporary,
wartime post as substitute at Belfast. It had to
be vacated in 1945. In 1948 he was appointed
lecturer in the Department of Mental and
Moral Philosophy at the University of
Birmingham, and he remained there until in
1959 personal difficulties caused his departure
from academic life. He returned to Northern
Ireland for some years. An unhappy move to
Oxford c. 1970 preceded an obscure death.
Plainly at odds with the British philosophical
mainstream developing in his lifetime,
McCracken in his 1948 paper 'Ethical
Positivism' argued not for the emotivist doc-
trines beloved of logical positivism but rather
against them, on grounds that fact is derivative
of valuation. Philosophy's task was not least to
make explicit the universal human valuations.
Value, he told a section of the International
Congress of Philosophy the same year, is what
Kant spoke of as an a priori category of
thought.
His one book begins by deploring an almost
complete neglect in Britain of Dilthey's philos-
ophy of value (acquaintance with which he
might have owed, like H.A. HODGES, to A.D.
LINDSAY). The contemporary reference of a
book founded on his postgraduate thesis of
long before, and delayed by illness and personal
difficulties, was to the need to discuss ques-
tions of values and not either refer to clerical
authority or treat them simply as individualist
preferences, secondary and derivative. There
was more beyond and between emotivism and
theologism.
In subsequent chapters, which perplexed
some reviewers and delighted others,
McCracken resumes the reconsideration of
modern philosophy in its beginnings with
Descartes. Granting the soundness of
McCracken's criticisms of his own early Studies
in Cartesian Philosophy (1902), Norman KEMP
SMITH in his New Studies in the Philosophy of
Descartes (1954) cites appreciatively what is
the nub of McCracken's book (the concluding
chapters are on Spinoza and, very valuably, on
McCRACKEN
Arnold Geulincx). McCracken's thesis is that
Descartes's interests were not primarily physical
and mathematical. As Kemp Smith subse-
quently emphasized, Descartes's initial project
was severely modified when events brought
home to him the precariousness of even seeming
to touch on topics church powers believed
under the purview of their authority. In a dis-
tancing silence on the ethical and theological
topics which mattered as much to him as did the
rest of his work, says McCracken in his pio-
neering construal of mostly fragmentary
remains, Descartes was strictly the moral agent.
His silence represents not the diplomatic
prudence of the preoccupied investigation, but
a conviction that his scientific work was a
service of the good worth the sacrifice of other
concerns. Persecution would have deprived him
of opportunity to make any contribution.
Descartes was responsible heir to the
Renaissance's immense achievement, literary,
artistic and scientific. The diversification of
thinking which had proceeded apace with that
prodigious intellectual enterprise had 'cast all in
doubt'. Descartes's chosen task was to find
order, and subsequent efforts to found philos-
ophy on only the writings publishable in
Descartes's day misconceived what is involved
in philosophy. McCracken commends Kemp
Smith's 1941 Philosophy of David Hume as a
model consideration of 'the whole mind' of the
philosopher.
There is no trace of a Nachlass, or the study
of Leibniz projected or the translation of
Geulincx's Ethica promised in Thinking and
Valuing. This sometime prodigy's few and slight
other publications indicate a concern with aes-
thetics. His story is by all accounts a tragedy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Ethical Positivism', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 49 (1948-9), pp.
73-90.
'The Concept of Value as an a priori', W.
Beth, H.J. Pos and J.H.A. Hollak (eds),
Proceedings of the Tenth International
Congress of Philosophy, 1948
600
(Amsterdam, 1949), pp. 460-62.
Thinking and Valuing (1950).
'Motives and Causes', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 26 (1952),
pp. 163-78).
Robert R. Calder
MACDONALD, John (1888-1972)
John Macdonald was born in Killan, Perthshire
on 13 April 1888 and died in Edmonton,
Canada on 27 June 1972. He graduated from
the University of Edinburgh in 1911. After
holding teaching posts at the University of
Edinburgh and the University of St Andrews
(and serving in World War I) Macdonald joined
the faculty at the University of Edmonton,
Alberta in 1921. He was Dean of Arts and
Science (1945-52) and was Professor of
Philosophy during his career there.
Macdonald published books on social phi-
losophy and the philosophy of education, the
most important of which was Mind, School,
and Civilization (1952). Macdonald was not
convinced by John Dewey's promotion of
freedom and discovery in the classroom, or
Dewey's suggestions that schooling should
imitate life rather than restructure it.
Macdonald, in reaction to Dewey's theory of
progressive education, defended an educational
system that encompassed both the civilizing
virtues and the transmission of an inherited
culture. In Macdonald's view, Dewey was a
threat to the very aims and goals of public edu-
cation. Macdonald promoted practising the
habits of civility, but he did not sanction the
methods of enforced routines and corporal pun-
ishment. He rejected a 'return to a hard and
joyless Puritanism in education' (Mind, School,
and Civilization, p. 32). Instead, he urged a
classroom that focused on behaving with self-
discipline, 'a discipline that will put him [the

child] in the way of attaining the most deeply
satisfying of life's experiences' (ibid., p. 32).
One should remember the hard work of
problem solving and the subsequent joy of
success. But Macdonald was adamant that self-
discipline and a work ethic were not to be
imposed by religious dogma. Teaching religion
... may not be undertaken by the state ...' (ibid.,
p. 122). In the increasing clamour created by
devotees of John Dewey, Macdonald stood
alone as a disciplined but compassionate voice
in Canada.
Macdonald's publishing career did not end
with retirement in 1952. He wrote The History
of the University of Alberta (1958), three more
books on education (1962; 1965; 1966), and
conducted a major research project for the
Canadian Council for Research in Education
(1964).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Philosophy of Education (Glenview,
1965).
The Expanding Community (Toronto, 1944).
Mind, School, and Civilization (Chicago,
1952).
Other Relevant Works
Some Suggestions towards a Revised Theory
of Education [lecture given at the
University of London, Institute of
Education] (Oxford, 1938).
Further Reading
Dewey, John, Experience and Education
(New York, 1938).
Elizabeth Trott
MACDONALD, Margaret (1907-56)
Margaret Macdonald was born in London on
9 April 1907 and died in London on 7 January
601
MACDONALD
1956. She was educated at University College
London (1929-34), where she took her BA in
philosophy with first class honours in 1932
and was awarded a doctorate for research
supervised by Susan STEBBING in 1934.
Macdonald helped to found the journal
Analysis in collaboration with Stebbing, C.A.
MACE and Gilbert RYLE in 1933. The journal
aimed to publish 'short articles on limited and
precisely defined philosophical questions about
the elucidation of known facts, instead of long,
very general and abstract metaphysical specu-
lations about possible facts or about the world
as a whole'. She was a research fellow in moral
science at Girton College, Cambridge from
1934 to 1937 and a librarian at St Hilda's
College, Oxford from 1937 to 1941.
Macdonald was a temporary principal in the
Board of Trade during the war and took a lec-
tureship in philosophy at Bedford College
London in 1946. She was one of a very small
number of women philosophy teachers outside
Oxford University. Macdonald was recognized
as a University of London teacher in 1947 and
participated in an exchange programme with
Smith College, Massachusetts. She was a suc-
cessful editor of Analysis from 1948 to 1954,
and edited a selection of articles published in the
journal between 1933 and 1940 and 1947 and
1953 entitled Philosophy and Analysis. The
epigram for the collection was from
WITTGENSTEIN'S Tractatus logico-philosophi-
cus: 'The object of philosophy is the logical
clarification of thoughts' (sect. 4.112) and it
reflected her approach to philosophical
problems. Macdonald was appointed reader in
philosophy at Bedford College in 1955. Her
interests outside philosophy ranged widely and
included school governorship.
Macdonald was an exponent of analytic phi-
losophy. Her work attracted substantial atten-
tion in her day, with one indication of this being
the reprinting of 'The Philosopher's Use of
Analogy' and 'The Language of Political
Theory' in the once famous series Logic and
Language (1951). The selection criteria for
articles in the series included those of being rep-
MACDONALD
resentative of modern philosophical trends and
being constantly recommended by tutors to
students. In The Philosopher's Use of Analogy'
Macdonald endorsed the position that philo-
sophical propositions are verbal and not factual
in nature. The apparent plausibility, informative
quality, paradoxical elements of most philo-
sophical theories may not be attributable to
any noteworthy information garnered by
philosophers but rather to the practice of 'using
words by analogy without giving the analogy an
intelligible application' (The Philosopher's Use
of Analogy', p. 87). Theories in philosophy do
not augment the employment of ordinary
words but generally solely succeed in misusing
them. Problems in philosophy can only be
tackled by understanding how words are used
and the ways in which philosophers use and
misuse them. In philosophy words are
employed solely in order to state propositions
about their uses regardless of the extent to
which the propositions seem to resemble state-
ments of scientific fact. Philosophers notice par-
ticular differences in the employment of
ordinary words that appear to need a theoreti-
cal explanation about that to which the words
are deemed to refer, but possibly what is called
for is merely a description of the different uses
of those words and the criteria for these.
Examples should carefully demonstrate the par-
ticular character of philosophical propositions
and their differences from other kinds of propo-
sitions. No importance should be attached to
the comparisons and analogies which philoso-
phers misuse to provide pseudo-scientific expla-
nations of ordinary propositions. The claims
that it is provable that all ordinary language is
incorrect and every ordinary proposition is false
are unjustified if no account of how to under-
stand the improved language is given.
Macdonald was interested in political phi-
losophy. Her support for the position that
people are permitted to claim certain natural
rights in virtue of their shared humanity in
'Natural Rights' (1947) was a significant con-
tribution to the literature. Macdonald argued
that natural rights statements are neither ana-
602
lytical nor empirical fact nor existence state-
ments, which ensures that they are not verifi-
able. Statements of natural rights are actually
utterances of values about what should result
from the informed exercise of human choice,
and from deliberation about what is socially
desirable. The validity of natural rights state-
ments depends on the quality of the arguments
offered to defend them and the public response
to these notions. Natural rights more closely
resemble records of decisions than propositions,
and uttering a natural right is not fact-stating
but position-choosing. Macdonald observed
the similarity of her views about natural rights
to those of Karl POPPER in The Open Society. In
The Language of Political Theory' she investi-
gated how the employment of important polit-
ical theory words (and their embodied pictures
or analogies) are linked to the problems which
suggested them, and to ordinary linguistic usage
about political and social matters. It is some-
times valuable when examining philosophical
theories, and especially those of political phi-
losophy, to notice their marked dissimilarity
with scientific theories in a number of respects
and their kinship with poetic works in several
other aspects (namely, the lack of provision of
new information and the selective emphasis on
certain facts and experiences). Macdonald
applied this general analysis of political theories
to the specific case of political obligation. She
argued that the question of why one should
obey any law, acknowledge any state authority
or support any government is senseless, and
therefore any purported answers to it also are.
General metaphysical theories aim to reduce
all cases of political obligation to the application
of a particular formula. The value of political
theory lies not in overarching justifications of
this sort but in the skilful emphasis at a partic-
ular juncture of criteria which are prone to be
overlooked or rejected. Macdonald examined
the nature and status of moral judgements in
'Ethics and the Ceremonial Use of Language'
(1950). She maintained that most traditional
theories in philosophy, including moral ones,
have elevated some features of groups of sen-

tences and the ensuing attempt to render the
remaining features in terms of the philosophi-
cal model has resulted in either falsity or incom-
prehensible metaphysics. Philosophers should
simply describe and practise philosophical
analysis, which comprises disentangling
complex and confusing notions through various
differing comparisons but without identifying
with any individual one. Macdonald claimed
that moral behaviour is a specific kind of skill.
The impersonal, authoritative and practical
features of moral judgements, which are not
accounted for or misconstrued in other
analyses, may be exhibited by a comparison
with performatory and ceremonial language.
Moral values are not a collection of certain
objects and emotions but are 'the ceremonial
treatment of a wide variety of natural facts and
situations' ('Ethics and the Ceremonial Use of
Language', p. 228). Moral judgements are
neither objects, qualities, states or statements of
objective fact but are performances that involve
ceremonial language in which an object or
action is separated from others. These judge-
ments are not providing additional accounts of
the objects or actions and are instead treating
them ceremonially. This treatment endows
moral judgements with the authority to affect
action. Although moral judgements resemble
ceremonial language it is impossible to classify
the exact ceremonies in which they take place,
and actually they are impersonal verdicts of a
common moral ritual. The claim that moral
judgements are verdicts of this kind is not a
sociological generalization about them but an
assertion that they are common property. The
allegiance of all moral agents is claimed by
moral judgements, and agreement about these
judgements should be expected if moral terms
are correctly employed.
Macdonald was concerned with the question
of how it is possible to be certain that percep-
tions are not invariably mistaken in 'Linguistic
Philosophy and Perception' (1953). The realist,
dualist, phenomenalist and linguistic sorts of
traditional perception theories attempt to
respond to this issue. According to the linguis-
603
MACDONALD
tic theory, perception problems can be demon-
strated to be soluble either by more exacting
analysis of the language in which they are
phrased or through the creation of new termi-
nology. Macdonald argued that philosophers
should not inquire if perception theories are
true or false or what alternatives to them could
be propounded, but instead inquire about the
sense of the word 'theory' by virtue of which
they are called theories. More specifically, the
problem of the extent to which the criteria for
the uses of 'theory' as applied to empirical
science and studies of logic and mathematics
pertain to philosophical perception theories
requires investigation. Philosophers ought to
regard traditional perception theories as not
solely comprising linguistic misuse or recom-
mendation but as pictures embodying stories
which have social and individual causes, and
communicate emotional attitudes. These
pictures of perceptual facts have distinctive styl-
istic expressions, which direct attention towards
particular aspects of the familiar, and a cause of
philosophical disagreement is that there may be
utterly different pictures of the very same facts.
In 'Sleeping and Waking' (1953) Macdonald
examined the Cartesian problem of there being
no certain marks by which the state of waking
may be distinguished from that of sleep and its
implications for scepticism about the senses.
She objected to the position that there is a grad-
ually deteriorating series of perceptions ranging
from waking illusions to dreams that differ only
in the extent to which they deceive the senses
because the states of waking and sleep can be
distinguished if assertions about one state
become nonsensical when applied to the other.
Dreaming is not any sort of representation or
illusion of waking perception or experience
Macdonald worked upon aesthetic questions.
In 'What are the Distinctive Features of
Arguments Used in Art Criticism' (1949) she
investigated the criterion for assessing the
quality of aesthetic value judgements and
argued that these judgements should not be jus-
tified by reference to the concept of a work of
art which is free from all interpretation (because
MACDONALD
that would be misguided metaphysics). Critics
proffer a particular sort of explanation of a
work of art which aims to substantiate aes-
thetic judgements but these judgements cannot
be established by deduction through the use of
reason nor by inductive inference via empirical
evidential confirmation. There may be many
different reasons why a work of art has aes-
thetic merit, and the various diverse criteria for
this which critics recognize constitute an indef-
inite and growing family. In individual works of
art the exemplification of these criteria may be
identified and judged accordingly. For aesthetic
value judgements to be other than just arbi-
trary decisions, it is necessary for them to be
connected to the objects of judgement in ways
that command widespread assent. There may
be all kinds of reasons why some judgements
and critics are superior to others, and generally
trust is placed in critics who are more experi-
enced. Macdonald argued in 'Art and
Imagination' (1953) that aesthetic theories
which define all works of art as works of the
imagination and equate the latter with what is
mental or physically unreal do not adequately
explicate the employment of the term 'work of
art'. These theories confuse the fact that in the
composition of a work of art the artist's imag-
ination may exceed actual perception or recol-
lection with the inclusion of imaginary or ficti-
tious objects, and do not recognize that the
logical status of imaginary objects differs from
that of works of art. Macdonald criticized the
emphasis in realist aesthetic theories that works
of art are merely ways of finding out what
already exists in the artist's materials, nature or
human life because it puts too little stress on the
active role of the artist. The creation of a work
of art is not a better or inferior mode of
knowing, as it is not one at all. The usage of the
term 'work of art' is complex and governed by
many considerations whose separation has led
to the misconstruals of traditional aesthetic
theories. The object of modern linguistic aes-
thetics is the description and not the explanation
of complicated artistic and critical language.
The imposition of standard uses on critical
604
terms which are employed to elucidate aesthetic
discourse would assist this descriptive activity.
In 'Language in Fiction' (1.954) Macdonald
examined the logical nature of the expressions
of fictional language and described how their
operation contrasts with that of both state-
ments and emotive expressions. She called the
link between the expressions of fictional
language 'artistic plausibility'. Fiction contains
a range of credible connections which range
from pure naturalism to wild fantasy, and it is
this kind of connection that differentiates fic-
tional works from factual descriptions. These
connections are justified if they convince the
reader. The analysis of the various sorts of plau-
sibility exemplified is the role of the literary
critic. It is possible that no rules can be provided
for achieving any particular type of plausibility,
but this does not preclude the possibility of
stating what does or would make a work of
fiction implausible.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Natural Rights', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 47 (1946-7), pp.
225-50.
'What are the Distinctive Features of
Arguments Used in Art Criticism',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 23 (1949), pp. 183-94.
'Ethics and the Ceremonial Use of Language',
in Max Black (ed.), Philosophical Analysis:
A Collection of Essays (1950), pp. 211-29.
'The Language of Political Theory', in Antony
Flew (ed.), Logic and Language, 1st ser.
(Oxford, 1951), pp. 167-86.
'The Philosopher's Use of Analogy', in
Antony Flew (ed.), Logic and Language,
1st ser. (Oxford, 1951), pp. 85-106.
'Art and Imagination', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 53 (1952-3), pp.
205-26.
'Linguistic Philosophy and Perception',
Philosophy, vol. 28 (1953), pp. 311-24.
'Sleeping and Waking', Mind, vol. 62 (1953),
pp. 202-15.
'Language in Fiction: Part F, Proceedings of

the Aristotelian Society', suppl. vol. 28
(1954), pp. 165-84.
(Ed.), Philosophy and Analysis (Oxford,
1954).
Other Relevant Works
'Professor Ryle on The Concept of Mind',
Philosophical Review, vol. 60 (1951), pp.
80-90.
Wittgenstein's Lectures, Cambridge 1932-35,
ed. Alice Ambrose (Oxford, 1979).
(with Alice Ambrose), Lectures on
Metaphysics, 1934-1935 (New York,
1992).
Mark Addis
McDOWALL, Stewart Andrew (1882-1935)
Stewart McDowall was born in Bedford and
died in Winchester on 13 January 1935. The
son of Andrew McDowall and Ada Benson,
both school teachers, he was educated at St
Paul's School and University College, London,
before proceeding to Trinity College,
Cambridge, where he gained a first class degree
in natural science, graduating in 1904. He
served as a demonstrator in the zoological lab-
oratory of Cambridge, and was assistant super-
intendent of the university's Museum of
Zoology before going to Madras in 1905 to
serve as a Professor of Biology at the Christian
College. He returned to England in 1906 to
become an assistant master at Winchester
College, the prominent public school, where
he taught for the rest of his life, eventually
becoming senior science master. In 1908 he
was ordained in the Church of England, and he
became chaplain of the school in 1915.
McDowall gave the Hulsean Lectures at
Cambridge in 1923-4, published as Evolution,
Knowledge, and Revelation (1924). He was a
fellow of the Physical Society of London and the
605
McDOWALL
Cambridge Philosophical Society, and a
member of the British Population Committee.
McDowall wrote several works on the rela-
tionship between religion and science, present-
ing a non-materialistic, progressive view of evo-
lution as a help to understanding religious
belief. He argued that evolution ultimately
created freedom and personality and so was
consonant with the highest values of Christian
cosmology. McDowall was inspired by the
creative evolution of Henri Bergson and worked
to apply what he saw as the insights of science
to popular understanding of Christian doctrine.
He was also active in the British eugenics
movement, and his penultimate work, Biology
and Mankind (1931), is an attempt to present
inferences from biological laws as solutions to
political and social problems. He advocates the
sterilization of the feeble-minded and govern-
ment subsidies to encourage superior individu-
als to reproduce. He presents standard eugenic
theory of the period, arguing that 'unless you
have a sound germ-plasm you cannot have a
sound nation' (Biology and Mankind, p. 174).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Evolution and the Spiritual Life (1915).
Seven Doubts of a Biologist (1917).
Evolution and the Doctrine of the Trinity
(Cambridge, 1918).
Beauty and the Beast: An Essay in
Evolutionary Aesthetic (Cambridge, 1920).
Creative Personality and Evolution (1928).
Biology and Mankind (1931).
Is Sin our Fault? (1932).
Further Reading
Anon., The Times, 15 January 1935, p. 12.
Richard K. England
McDOWALL
McDOWELL, John Henry (1942-)
John McDowell was born in Boksburg, South
Africa on 7 March 1942 and educated at
University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland
and at New College, Oxford, where he held a
Rhodes Scholarship. He was a fellow in phi-
losophy at Oxford from 1966 to 1986. In 1986
he moved to America. He became Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh
where (in 2004) he remains.
He is most noted for Mind and World
(1994), the published version of his 1991 John
Locke Lectures. In the context of Anglo-
American philosophy this is a striking work
because of its unusual combination of three
elements. Firstly, it addresses the central
question of modern philosophy: what is the
relation between mind and world? It aims to
address assumptions that make the place of
mind in nature mysterious especially assump-
tions about the relation between norms and
nature. But the light is also shed on a number
of subsidiary issues which include: how inten-
tionality is possible; the nature of experience;
whether thought presupposes experience; and
the role of the natural sciences in describing
the limits of the natural world. In fact, for
reasons set out shortly, McDowell rejects bald
questions about how something is possible. His
aim is not to answer such questions directly
but rather probe the assumptions that make
them seem both pressing and difficult.
Secondly, there is a very substantial cast of
characters. It includes Aristotle, Kant, Hegel,
Frege, RUSSELL, WITTGENSTEIN, Sellars,
Davidson and EVANS. An Aristotelian account
of ethics is used to promote a broadly Kantian
or post-Kantian picture of the empirical world.
Kant's slogan Thoughts without content are
empty, intuitions without concepts are blind' is
combined with Sellars's attack on the Myth of
the Given. Davidson's coherentist account of
language and thought is contrasted with Evans's
work on object-dependent thought to suggest a
middle path. Wittgenstein's idea that thoughts
need not stop short of the very facts they
606
concern is reconciled with a neo-Fregean dis-
tinction between sense and reference. A number
of minor characters such as STRAWSON,
DUMMETT and Kripke from the analytic tradi-
tion but also Weber, Gadamer and even Marx
make appearances.
Thirdly, McDowell's philosophical method is
surprising given these first two points. Despite
the number of influences from the philosophi-
cal canon, his aim is not a piece of substantial
philosophical theory building. He does not aim
to bridge the gulf between mind and world but
to show that there is no gulf to be bridged. The
dualisms that seem to generate such philo-
sophical difficulty, and to call for speculative
philosophical theory to overcome them, are
instead dissolved away.
This approach to philosophy is demonstrated
in the precise way McDowell characterizes the
'transcendental empiricism' expressed in Mind
and World. Roughly, transcendental empiri-
cism is the view that intentionality presupposes
experience. Experience meets what Brandom
has described as the 'rational constraint con-
straint'. It allows the world to exert a rational
constraint on thought, and such a rational con-
straint is taken to be a precondition for inten-
tionality. (Brandom himself thinks that this con-
straint can be met in a way that does not invoke
experience, and thus is not a form of transcen-
dental empiricism.) But McDowell presents the
role of experience in his account in a nuanced
way. Providing one does not adopt a model of
experience in which the world's impact on
thought is precluded, acknowledging the role of
experience helps ease what he calls a 'transcen-
dental anxiety' which prompts the misguided
question: 'How is intentionality possible?' The
need to ask that question is removed.
Whilst the combination of elements in Mind
and World raised McDowell's profile within the
philosophical community, many of the threads
present there were developed earlier. While he
was based in Oxford much of his work drew on
Greek philosophy, on broadly analytic philos-
ophy of language and thought, and on
Wittgenstein. He translated Plato's Theatetus

and edited the late Gareth Evans's seminal work
Varieties of Reference, which defends a neo-
Fregean approach to singular, or object-depen-
dent, thoughts. This general neo-Fregean
approach is clearly present in Mind and World's
claim that 'thought and reality meet in the realm
of sense'.
His moral realism (or, more accurately, anti-
anti-realism) invokes Aristotle's claim that
moral principles apply only for the most part.
McDowell suggests that the truth of this claim
is sometimes obscured by a prejudice about the
nature of rationality but that prejudice can be
removed by a proper understanding of
Wittgenstein's discussion of rules, especially the
critique of Platonism. It is merely a prejudice
that acting in accordance with rationality must
be codifiable through a principle.
But if moral judgement is not governed by a
system of principles what, if anything, does dis-
cipline it? McDowell suggests that there is no
reason to doubt that moral features can them-
selves be a part of the fabric of the world and
thus moral judgements can aim to chart that
realm. Again, some philosophical work is
needed to disarm some objections to this idea.
The notion that the world contains features a
proper appreciation of which can motivate
actions by themselves rather than merely in
conjunction with a desire runs counter to some
deep-seated philosophical intuitions. But
McDowell's anti-anti-realism highlights that
these objections are themselves based on
assumptions that are not compulsory and that
discarding them better fits the phenomena.
Two further aspects of his philosophy from
his time in Oxford shed light on his approach
to philosophical method. Most important is his
interpretation of Wittgenstein's discussion of
rules and normativity. Whilst many commen-
tators take Wittgenstein to offer a radical and
revisionary view of meaning and mental
content, McDowell argued that we should take
seriously Wittgenstein's insistence that philos-
ophy leave everything as it is. Rather than
taking Wittgenstein's target to be meaning itself,
to leave a kind of 'meaning scepticism', he
607
McDOWALL
argued that Wittgenstein argued against a mis-
leading Cartesian assumption about the nature
of mind that made meaning merely seem mys-
terious. With that assumption rejected, the place
of meaning in our understanding of the natural
world and thus the relation of mind and world
become clearer.
A second aspect of McDowell's approach to
philosophy is apparent in another feature of
his discussion of meaning from this period.
Whilst most Wittgensteinians shun the project
of devising formal theories of meaning for lan-
guages, McDowell wrote several papers on
Donald Davidson's highly systematic approach.
These papers are effectively descriptions of the
best way to interpret what Davidson was
attempting and relate it to a neo-Fregean
approach to thought. The aim is clear: philo-
sophical problems about meaning can be eased
by attention to other philosophers even if they
themselves are systematic theory builders.
Since moving to Pittsburgh he has been
described, by Richard Rorty, as a member of
the 'Pittsburgh School of Neo-Hegelians'
(alongside Robert Brandom and John
Haugeland). Whilst one misleading connota-
tion of that label is to overemphasize the simi-
larity between McDowell's work and
Brandom's, it does capture the increasing influ-
ence of Kant and Hegel on McDowell's work
whilst he has been in the United States.
A second recent influence on his philosophy
is the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars
(already a strong influence on Brandom and
Rorty), who himself used Kant to try to develop
an account of intentionality. Sellars's views on
the importance of experience in understanding
how thought can be in connection with the
world whilst at the same time rejecting episte-
mological foundationalism are central to
McDowell's recent writing.
On his curriculum vitae, McDowell lists his
major interests as 'Greek philosophy (especially
the ethics of Plato and Aristotle); philosophy of
language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics;
ethics (especially the borderlines with meta-
physics and philosophy of mind)'. This broad
McDOWALL
range of subjects, as well as the number of dif-
ferent philosophers tackled, raises practical
problems for understanding McDowell. It is
difficult to see the relation between the differ-
ent debates: to see the continuity amongst the
diversity. This problem is exacerbated by
McDowell's writing style. Firstly, with the
exception of two longer lecture series (Mind
and World and the Woodbridge Lectures), his
philosophy is spread through a number of
discrete philosophical papers. Secondly, his
prose is dense and difficult. Papers lack sub-
headings and signposts to, or summaries of,
the argument. There is a minimum of repetition
or redundancy. Whilst this produces a kind of
austere elegance it makes no effort to spare the
reader the need for thought. Nevertheless, there
is reason to think that his ongoing work will
continue to reward detailed study and influ-
ence contemporary philosophy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
Meaning, Knowledge and Reality
(Cambridge, Mass., 1998).
Mind, Value and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.,
1998).
'Precis of Mind and World\ Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, vol. 58
(1998), pp. 365-8
'Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and
Intentionality' [Woodbridge Lectures],
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 95, pp. 431-91.
Other Relevant Works
Smith, N., Reading McDowell (2002).
Thornton, T., John McDowell (Chesham,
2004).
Willaschek, M. (ed.),M» McDowell:
Reasons and Nature (Munster, 1999).
Tim Thornton
608
MACE, Cecil Alec (1894-1971)
C.A. Mace was born in Norwich on 22 July
1894 and died in London on 7 June 1971. He
studied at Queen's College, Cambridge, taking
the Moral Sciences Tripos originally with the
intention of entering the church. In 1922 he
was appointed a lecturer in philosophy and
psychology at what was then University
College, Nottingham, where he introduced the
first courses in experimental psychology. In
1925 he became a lecturer at St Andrews, where
he established a laboratory and continued his
research into incentives. At that time he also
began his association with G.F. STOUT, then
Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at St
Andrews and author of a key textbook, A
Manual of Psychology, which Mace later
revised. In 1932 he was appointed reader in
psychology at Bedford College in the University
of London and, in 1944, Professor of
Psychology at Birkbeck College, where he
remained until 1961. After his retirement he
became Emeritus Professor of Psychology at
the University of London and, from 1963, he
was an honorary fellow of Birkbeck College.
Mace's academic appointments were all in
psychology and he was well known as editor of
the Pelican Psychology series. Moreover he was
a psychologist at a time when the subject was
being redefined in a way that was to break its
historical link with philosophy. At the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, as he saw it, there
was 'an all-but-established order' in psychology:
'dualistic, intellectualistic, sensationalistic,
atomistic and associationistic' ('Some Trends in
the Philosophy of Mind', p. 99). This estab-
lished order had, however, been largely over-
thrown and 'psychology had virtually to begin
all over again' (ibid., p. 101). The new psy-
chology was, in one way or another, behavi-
ouristic. Mace saw himself as an advocate of the
new psychology. But he sought to harmonize
the new order with the old.
Philosophy was also undergoing what some
regarded as a 'revolution'. Mace, instead of
turning entirely to experimental work, retained

his interest in the foundations of psychology
and its connections with the philosophy of
mind, pursuing philosophy also in a new way.
He was, in due course, President of the
Aristotelian Society (1948-9), to whose pro-
ceedings he was a regular contributor, as well
as President of the British Psychological
Association (1952-3). He was a founder of
Analysis and contributed to its first issue. He
edited and contributed to a volume of papers
representing British Philosophy in the Mid-
Century (1957).
The area in philosophy to which Mace par-
ticularly contributed was philosophical psy-
chology and the philosophy of mind. One of his
most distinguished pupils, Richard PETERS,
noted the 'constructiveness' of Mace's
approach, 'his attempt to reconcile conflicting
view-points and to see what they have in
common' (Carver, p. 70). This, according to
Peters, was obvious in all three areas of the
philosophy of mind to which he made a con-
tribution: his 'analytical behaviourism', his
'homeostasis' and his 'ethical naturalism' (ibid.,
p. 71). In each of these areas Mace sought to
reconcile differences that, for others, were insu-
perable.
Thus he embraced a form of behaviourism
but continued to take introspection seriously,
retaining some loyalty to the 'inner sense' tra-
dition with which Stout was associated. Indeed,
he claimed, pace RYLE, in 'Some Trends in the
Philosophy of Mind', that 'there is a ghost in the
machine after all'. This 'ghost', he explained, is
'the machine itself as it appears to itself ('Some
Trends in the Philosophy of Mind', p. 110).
Psychology, unlike biology, had to take cogni-
sance of the fact that humans are conscious of
what they do. Mace's way of reconciling behav-
iourism with introspection is the clue to his rec-
onciliation of mechanical and teleological expla-
nation. Teleological processes are explained in
terms of homeostasis and include cases where
an organism is not aware of the direction of its
activity as well as those special cases where an
organism can plan the means to achieve a par-
ticular end. Finally, Mace harmonized fact and
609
MACE
value, in his paper 'Homeostasis, Needs and
Values' (1953), by defining a person's good as
whatever would give satisfaction to their needs
on the whole and in the long run.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Belief, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 29 (1928-9), pp. 227-50.
'Faculties and Instincts', Mind, vol. 40
(1931), pp. 37-48.
'Some Implications of Analytical
Behaviourism' [presidential address],
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
49 (1948-9), pp. 1-16.
'Homeostatis, Needs and Values', an abstract
from the Presidential Address to the British
Psychological Society, published under the
title 'A Psychologist's Approach to the
Theory of Values', British Journal of
Psychology, vol. 44 (1953), pp. 200-10.
Other Relevant Works
The Principles of Logic: An Introductory
Survey (1933).
'Mechanical and Teleological Causation',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 14 (1935), pp. 22-45.
(Rev.), G.F. Stout, A Manual of Psychology
(1938).
'Some Trends in the Philosophy of Mind', in
C.A. Mace (ed.), British Philosophy in the
Mid-Century. A Cambridge Symposium
(1957), pp. 99-112.
C.A. Mace: Selected Papers, ed. Marjorie
Mace (1973). Includes bibliography.
Further Reading
Carver, Vida (ed.), C.A. Mace: A Symposium
(1962). Includes bibliography.
Peters, R.S., 'C. A. Mace's Contribution to
the Philosophy of Mind', in Carver (ed.),
C.A. Mace: A Symposium, pp. 68-83.
Wisdom, John, 'Mace, Moore and
Wittgenstein', in Carver (ed.), C.A. Mace:
A Symposium, pp. 97-124.
Stuart Brown
McGUINNESS
McGUINNESS, Bernard Francis (or Brian:
1927-}
Brian McGuinness was born in Wrexham on
22 October 1927. He was educated at Mount
St Mary's College (Sheffield) and went up to
Balliol College, Oxford in 1945. He achieved
first classes in Classical Honour Moderations as
well as in literae humaniores, graduating BA in
1949. He returned to Oxford in 1951, when he
won the John Locke Scholarship in Mental
Philosophy, and was awarded a BPhil in 1953.
He was junior research fellow at Queen's
College, Oxford from 1953 to 1954 and there-
after, until 1988, a fellow and tutor. He was a
university lecturer in philosophy from 1955 to
1988. From 1988 to 1990 he was fellow-in-res-
idence at the Netherlands Institute for
Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social
Sciences. In 1990 he was appointed Professore
Ordinario at the University of Sienna and from
1990 to 1993 was Direttore of the Department
of Philosophy and Social Sciences. He has been
a visiting professor at a number of universities
in America, China and continental Europe,
including Princeton, Peking and Graz.
McGuinness's philosophical interests have
been, to a large extent, centred on
WITTGENSTEIN, to whose Tractatus he had been
introduced while an undergraduate at Balliol
and whose thought he was able to discuss there
with David PEARS, with whom he later collab-
orated in a translation. He also attended RYLE'S
class on the Tractatus, then still the only pub-
lication by Wittgenstein available. The early
Wittgenstein has since occupied a good deal of
his attention though he counts himself amongst
those who stress the continuity between the
earlier and the later philosophy. In addition to
writing some early papers on fundamental ques-
tions regarding the interpretation of the
Tractatus, he considered other aspects of the
young Wittgenstein, such as his relations with
other philosophers, including Bertrand RUSSELL.
At some point he conceived the ambition to
write a biography on Wittgenstein and spent
many years on the project, which led him into
610
previously unexplored lines of investigation,
for instance into Wittgenstein's relations with
the Vienna Circle, on which he became a
foremost authority. The biography was delayed
by the very thoroughness of McGuinness's
approach and it was not until 1988 that a first
part was published: Wittgenstein: A Life, Young
Ludwig 1889-1921. Soon afterwards, however,
a full biography of Wittgenstein was published
by Ray Monk and the success of this other
work not only cast a shadow over what
McGuinness had achieved but probably dis-
couraged him from completing the project. At
all events the second part has not appeared.
McGuinness was persuaded some years later
to publish a collection of his papers, which
appeared under the title Approaches to
Wittgenstein in 2002. These papers include five
that expand his work on the Wittgenstein biog-
raphy, ten that are concerned with aspects of
the Tractatus and a wide-ranging group under
the title 'Philosophy Revisited' that include his
important papers on Wittgenstein and the
Vienna Circle. In this latter group also is
included his paper on 'Wittgenstein and Freud',
in which McGuinness tries to explain a remark
by Wittgenstein (Culture and Value, p. 36) in
which he likens himself to Freud.
Perhaps as important a part of his total con-
tribution is the work undertaken by
McGuinness as an editor. He has edited or co-
edited philosophical writings from philosophers
ranging from Friedrich Waissman, Felix
Kaufmann, Moritz Schlick and Hans Hahn to
Gottlob Frege and Michael DUMMETT. He has
also co-edited collections of letters between
Wittgenstein and a number of others, such as
Bertrand Russell, G.E. MOORE, J.M. KEYNES
and Paul Engelmann.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'The Mysticism of the Tractatus',
Philosophical Review, vol. 75 (1966), pp.
305-28.
'Philosophy of Science in the Tractatus',
Revue Internationale de Philosophie, vol.
23 (1969), pp. 155-64.

'Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein's
Notes on Logic', Revue Internationale de
Philosophie, vol. 26 (1972), pp. 444-60.
Wittgenstein: A Life, vol. 1, Young Ludwig
1889-1921 (1988).
Approaches to Wittgenstein: Collected Papers
(2002). This book contains twenty-four of
McGuinness's previously published papers,
six of them translated into English for the
first time.
Other Relevant Works
Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty
of Genius (1900).
Further Reading
Criss-Crossing a Philosophical Landscape:
Essays on Wittgensteinian Themes,
Dedicated to Brian McGuinness, ed.
Joachim Schulte and Goran Sundholm
(Graz, 1992). This book contains a bibliog-
raphy of McGuinnness's writings up to that
date, pp. 261-4.
Stuart Brown
MacINTYRE, Alasdair Chambers (1929-)
Alasdair Maclntyre was born on 12 January
1929 and educated at Epsom College, at the
University of London (Queen Mary College)
and at Manchester University. In 1951 he was
appointed lecturer in philosophy of religion at
Manchester University, where he remained until
1957, when he was appointed lecturer in phi-
losophy at the University of Leeds. Over the
next thirteen years, he held posts at Nuffield
College, Oxford, at Princeton University and at
the University of Essex, where he was Professor
of Sociology from 1966 to 1970. In 1970 he
moved to the United States, initially taking up
a post as Professor of the History of Ideas at
Brandeis, and subsequently holding positions at
611
MacINTYRE
Boston University, Wellesley College,
Vanderbilt University, the University of Notre
Dame and Duke University. He is currently
permanent senior research fellow at the
University of Notre Dame.
Maclntyre's philosophical career spans half a
century. His first book, Marxism: An
Interpretation, was published in 1953, and his
most recent book, Dependent Rational
Animals, was published in 1999. In the inter-
vening years he has published prolifically on a
wide range of topics in philosophy, sociology
and the history of ideas, but is probably best
known for the three books which together have
come to be known as 'the virtue trilogy'. They
are After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which
Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of
Moral Enquiry (1990). These three books, and
especially After Virtue, confirmed Maclntyre's
reputation as one of the most significant
modern moral and political philosophers of the
late twentieth century and one of the most
vociferous critics of modernity. The virtue
trilogy is the culmination of fifty years of reflec-
tion on the nature and methods of modern phi-
losophy and, although Maclntyre's views have
changed considerably since the early 1950s,
there are also some striking similarities and
continuities between his earliest work and his
most recent.
Prior to After Virtue Maclntyre had pub-
lished a number of books, but three are espe-
cially noteworthy. They are: Marxism: An
Interpretation, which was first published in
1953 and revised and reprinted in 1968 under
the title Marxism and Christianity: A Short
History of Ethics, published in 1967; and
Against the Self-Images of the Age, published in
1971. Each of these explores themes which
were to become central to Maclntyre's later
work. Marxism: An Interpretation opens with
the reflection that 'to divide the sacred from the
secular is to recognise God's action only within
the narrowest limits. A religion which recog-
nises such a division, as does our own, is one on
the point of dying' (pp. 9-10). Here, for the first
time, we see Maclntyre's anxiety about the dis-
MacINTYRE
enchantment of the modern world, and about
the fragmentation characteristic of modern life.
This anxiety would not diminish, but increase,
in the years leading up to the publication of
After Virtue.
Similarly, A Short History of Ethics is notable
for its denial 'that moral concepts [are] a
timeless, limited, unchanging species of concept
[that] can be examined and understood apart
from their history' (p. 1). On the contrary,
Maclntyre insists, 'moral concepts are
embodied in and are partially constitutive of
forms of social life' (ibid.). In the 1960s this
emphasis on the historical and the social was
very unfashionable amongst moral philoso-
phers but, again, it is a theme that was to recur
in Maclntyre's later work, where he sees the
malaises of modernity as springing, in some
part, from the ahistorical methods of modern
moral and political philosophy. Finally, in his
1971 collection of articles, Against the Self-
Images of the Age, Maclntyre emphasizes the
need for ideology, and simultaneously stresses
that, in his view, the dominant ideologies -
Marxism and Christianity - have failed.
These themes in his early work - the disen-
chantment and fragmentation of modern life;
the need for historical and social context in
moral philosophy; and the importance of
ideology - attain increasing prominence in the
three books which form the virtue trilogy, and
indeed they inform our understanding of
Maclntyre's mature philosophy in both its
negative and positive aspects.
After Virtue begins with a 'disquieting sug-
gestion', which is that our moral world and
our moral language are in a state of disorder
such that we no longer have any clear idea of
what moral terms mean, nor yet any idea of
what would count as settling a moral dispute.
This disorder, Maclntyre claims, is a result of
our having ignored or otherwise forgotten the
historical background against which moral
terms originally made sense and were coherent.
For Aristotle, 'man' was a functional concept
and it was possible to judge a man to be good
or bad depending on whether he fulfilled his
612
function well or badly; for religious believers,
moral judgements served as the expression of
God's commandments to us, and to act morally
well was to act in accordance with God's
commands. In the modern world, and especially
in modern moral philosophy, we continue to
use the language of morality, but we no longer
subscribe to the background beliefs (the belief in
God, or the belief that man has a distinctive
function) that made the language meaningful
and coherent. The result is that although we
believe our moral concepts are coherent, in fact
they are not, and although we believe our moral
arguments to be resolvable, in fact they are not.
In the modern world, moral terms can do
nothing other than express our own preferences
or emotional responses, and moral argument
can be nothing other than the interminable clash
of conflicting wills. We are, Maclntyre con-
cludes, 'betrayed' by our moral language.
Maclntyre traces the source of this condition
to what he terms 'the Enlightenment Project',
which has dominated philosophy for the past
three hundred years and which promised a con-
ception of rationality independent of historical
and social context, and independent of any
specific understanding of man's nature or
purpose. However, not only did this project
fail, it was, says Maclntyre, doomed to fail.
Moral judgements tell us what we ought to do,
but in the absence of any conception of what
our function, purpose or telos is, we can make
no sense of what we ought to do beyond what
will satisfy the preferences we happen to have.
Morality, when it makes sense, serves to direct
us towards our proper ends. When enlighten-
ment philosophers abandoned the conception
of man as having proper end (a telos), they
simultaneously abandoned the possibility of a
coherent morality.
Moreover, this rejection of the Aristotelian,
or functional, conception of man has political
implications which are evident in modern polit-
ical philosophy and especially in modern liber-
alism. At the political level., the reduction of
moral judgements to individual preferences
translates into individualism, and Maclntyre

argues that, for individualist liberals such as
John Rawls and Robert Nozick, 'it is as though
we had been shipwrecked on an uninhabited
island with a group of other individuals, each of
whom is a stranger to me and all the others.
What have to be worked out are rules which
will safeguard each one of us maximally in such
a situation' (After Virtue, p. 250).
Putting these considerations together, we can
see that, for Maclntyre, the modern world is
one in which our moral judgements can be
nothing other than expressions of personal pref-
erence, and the modern political world is one in
which our relationships with other people can
be nothing other than negotiations between
self-interested strangers. The enlightenment
project, its search for pure rationality indepen-
dent of context and history, and its denial that
there is any telos or purpose to man's existence,
has left us with an understanding of politics
that is individualistic and alienating. Modern
politics is, he concludes, 'civil war carried on by
other means'.
In short, then, the philosophical project of the
enlightenment has consequences for the way
we understand both ourselves and each other.
We now live in a world 'after virtue' and we do
so because the virtues themselves can only be
cultivated in societies which recognize a
common good and where individuals see them-
selves as making a contribution to that good.
Modern liberalism has rejected this picture of
society as a shared enterprise and therefore it
has also rejected the possibility of virtue. It is by
rejecting the beliefs that informed Aristotle's
ethics, and in particular by rejecting the under-
standing of man as having a function or telos
that the modern world and modern moral phi-
losophy have become incapable of accommo-
dating the virtues.
Maclntyre's insistence that virtue can only be
cultivated in contexts where people see them-
selves as contributing to a common enterprise
has prompted others to dub him a communi-
tarian. He has rejected this frequently and vig-
orously. In a 'Reply to Critics' he notes that:
613
MacINTYRE
where liberals have characteristically urged
that it is in the activities of subordinate vol-
untary associations, such as those constituted
by religious groups, that shared visions of
the good should be articulated, communi-
tarians have insisted that the nation itself
through the institutions of the nation-state
ought to be constituted to some significant
degree as a community.
(Horton and Mendus, p. 302)
And he goes on to state that, on this question,
'liberals have been consistently in the right'.
There is, for him, no prospect of reviving a
sense of a shared vision of the good at the level
of the modern nation-state and therefore, to
quote the final lines of After Virtue: 'what
matters at this stage is the construction of local
forms of community within which civility and
the intellectual and moral life can be sustained
through the new dark ages which are already
upon us' (p. 263). Our hope that the tradition
of the virtues may be revived lies not with the
large and unwieldy modern nation-state, but
with small and local forms of community, since
it is through these alone that people may escape
emotivism, and come to see other people not as
strangers, but as engaged in a common project.
Although Maclntyre's discontent with the
ahistorical methods of modern philosophy had
been evident in his early work, After Virtue
surprised readers with the extent of its pes-
simism about modernity. In that book
Maclntyre concludes that 'we still, in spite of the
efforts of three centuries of moral philosophy
and one of sociology, lack any coherent ratio-
nally defensible statement of a liberal individu-
alist point of view' (p. 259). However, he
couples this pessimism with a more optimistic,
promissory note to the effect that 'the
Aristotelian tradition can be restated in a way
that restores rationality and intelligibility to our
own moral and social attitudes' (ibid., p. 259).
Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, published
in 1988, is an attempt to deliver on the promise
by providing an account of rationality in general
and, in particular, an explanation of the way in
MacINTYRE
which the Aristotelian tradition can be restated
so as to give us hope of rationality even in the
modern world.
By 1988, however, the kind of Aristotelian
tradition to which Maclntyre was committed
was that developed by St Thomas Aquinas, and
the argument presented in Whose justice?
Which Rationality? is an argument for a
Thomistic understanding of rationality. He con-
cludes that
those who have thought their way through
the topics of justice and rationality, from the
standpoint constructed by and in the direc-
tion pointed out first by Aristotle and then by
Aquinas, have every reason at least so far to
hold that the rationality of their tradition has
been confirmed in its encounters with other
traditions.
(WhoseJustice? Which Rationality?',
p. 403)
Negatively, then, After Virtue demonstrates
that, through its rejection of tradition, liberal
individualism also rejected the possibility of
attaining rationality and coherence in the moral
and political world. Positively, Whose Justice?
Which Rationality? explains what is necessary
for rationality, and demonstrates the possibility
of our attaining rationality through a restate-
ment of the Aristotelian tradition.
Some of the practical implications of these
two claims are exemplified in Three Rival
Versions of Moral Enquiry. This book, pub-
lished in 1990, is the text of Maclntyre's Gifford
Lectures, which were originally delivered at the
University of Edinburgh in 1988. By consider-
ing and comparing three traditions of enquiry
- the encyclopedic, the genealogical, and the
Thomistic - Maclntyre aims to show both that
rationality is possible only within a tradition,
and that there may nevertheless be comparison
between traditions such that one may emerge as
more rational than another. It is noteworthy
that whereas After Virtue had presented liberal
individualism as involving the rejection of tra-
dition, the two later books construe liberalism
614
as itself a tradition, albeit one that is fatally
flawed in the sense that it cannot resolve its
own internal contradictions.
Maclntyre's claim that there can be no ratio-
nality independent of a tradition has done much
to foster the belief that he is, at heart, a con-
servative communitarian. Although he rejects
the communitarian label, his philosophy
remains vulnerable to the criticism that it is
conservative in the sense that it leaves no room
for an external vantage point from which to
criticize a tradition. If, as Maclntyre insists,
there is no rationality outside a tradition, then
it seems to follow that whatever is endorsed by
a stable and coherent tradition is beyond
reproach. Moreover, it seems to follow that
there is no possibility of declaring one tradition
to be superior to another. Maclntyre's views
seem vulnerable to the charge of conservatism
and also of relativism. Maclntyre denies that
these consequences follow and claims that it is
possible that
reason can only move towards being gen-
uinely universal and impersonal insofar as it
is neither neutral nor disinterested, that mem-
bership in a particular type of moral com-
munity, one from which fundamental dissent
has to be excluded, is a condition for gen-
uinely rational enquiry arid more especially
for moral and theological enquiry.
(Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry,
pp. 59-60)
In short, far from being opposed to progress,
traditions are, he claims, the only contexts
within which there can be progress.
What is noteworthy about this account is
Maclntyre's insistence that progress may be
secured in communities from which those with
heterodox views have been excluded, and he
exemplifies this claim by contrasting what he
sees as the bankruptcy of the modern liberal
university with the genuine progress that can
(and has) been made in small communities,
such as universities, where all the participants
agree about fundamentals. Many have thought

that this price is too high and that the restate-
ment of the Aristotelian tradition is one which
should be resisted.
Be that as it may, it is difficult to exaggerate
the significance of Maclntyre's work for our
understanding of modern philosophy and
indeed of the modern world. His insistence on
the importance of history and sociology, his
critique of the enlightenment project, and his
diagnosis of the ills of modernity all constitute
powerful attacks on the methodology and
assumptions, as well as the conclusions, of phi-
losophy since the seventeenth century. If his
own, positive proposals are found unattractive,
it is nonetheless for the critic to demonstrate
where, and in what respects, his complaints
against enlightenment philosophy and against
its political offspring - liberal individualism -
are mistaken.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Marxism: An Interpretation (1954).
A Short History of Ethics (1967).
Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971).
After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981;
rev. edn, 1985).
Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988).
Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry [1988
Gifford Lectures] (1990).
Dependent Rational Animals (1999).
Other Relevant Works
Secularisation and Moral Change (Oxford,
1967).
'Moral Rationality, Tradition and Aristotle:
A Reply to Onora O'Neill, Raymond Gaita
and Stephen Clark', Inquiry, vol. 26
(1983), pp. 447-66.
The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past',
in R. Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Q.
Skinner (eds), Philosophy in History
(Cambridge, 1984).
Knight, K. (ed.), A Maclntyre Reader (Notre
Dame, 1999).
Further Reading
Horton, J. and S. Mendus, After Maclntyre:
615
MacKAY
Critical Perspectives on the Work of
Alasdair Maclntyre (1994).
McMylor, P., Alasdair Maclntyre: Critic of
Modernity (1994).
Susan Mendus
MacKAY, Donald MacCrimmon (1922-87)
Donald MacKay was born in Lybster in the far
north of Scotland on 9 August 1922 and died
in Newcastle-under-Lyme on 6 February 1987.
His father was a minister of the Free Church
and he remained, as he was brought up, a con-
vinced evangelical Christian. He was educated
at Wick High School, at St Andrews (BSc
natural philosophy, 1943) and at London
University, where he was awarded a PhD in
1951 for a thesis on analogue computing. He
had worked for the Admiralty in radar research
from 1943 to 1946, when he was appointed as
a lecturer in the Physics Department at King's
College London, where he was promoted to
reader in 1959. He was appointed Granada
Professor of Communication and Neuroscience
at Keele from 1960 to 1982, when he retired as
an emeritus professor. He was considerably in
demand as a public lecturer and contributed to
a number of distinguished lecture series, includ-
ing the Gifford Lectures at Glasgow in 1986
(posthumously edited by his wife and published
as Behind the Eye, 1991). He was a fellow of
the Institute of Physicists and held an honorary
DSc from St Andrews.
MacKay's scientific interests ranged from
computing and information theory to experi-
mental psychology and neurophysiology. From
early on, however, he was interested in philo-
sophical problems to do with minds and
machines. These interests developed into a
concern about the place of free agents in a
mechanistic universe and, more broadly, with
reconciling the pursuit of scientific truth with
MacKAY
accepting Christian beliefs about humans and
their place in the scheme of things.
MacKay's approach to the reconciliation of
science and Christian beliefs developed over his
long career, but can be broadly characterized as
non-reductionist and as regarding science and
Christianity as complements rather than rivals.
The former characteristic is typified by his
attacks on 'nothing buttery' - on, for example,
the reductionist account of human beings as
nothing but machines. However, the justifica-
tion for this non-reductionism lies ultimately in
his understanding of the complementarity of
scientific and other, particularly religious,
descriptions. Such complementarity requires
not only that there are different and compatible
viewpoints of a situation, but also that such
viewpoints have the same reference of which
they describe different aspects.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
MacKay was a prolific writer, and a short
bibliography, even if restricted to his
philosophical writings, is bound to be
highly selective. Currently, the most
complete available bibliography is:
McDonald, Marvin, Donald MacCrimmon
MacKay (1992-1987) A Bibliography,
http://www.asa3 .org/ASA/articles/
MacKay_bib.html#fhO, accessed
November 2004.
'Complementary Descriptions', Mind, vol. 66,
no. 263 (July 1957), pp. 3909-4. (See also
papers by Peter Alexander in Further
Reading, below.)
The Clockwork Image: A Christian
Perspective on Science (1974).
Science, Chance and Providence (Oxford,
1978).
Brains, Machines, and Persons (1980).
(Ed. with Melvin Tinker), The Open Mind
and Other Essays (Leicester, 1988).
Behind the Eye, ed. Valerie MacKay (Oxford,
1991).
Further Reading
Alexander, Peter, 'Complementary
616
Descriptions', Mind, vol. 65, no. 258 (April
1956), pp. 145-65.
-, 'MacKay on Complementary
Descriptions', Mind, vol 67, no. 267 (July
1958), pp. 379-81.
Haas Jr, John W., 'Complementarity and
Christian Thought: An Assessment',
Journal of the American Scientific
Affiliation, vol. 35 (December 1983), pp.
203-209.
Rulon, Michael J., David A. Washburn et al.,
Papers from 1997 Symposium on Donald
MacKay at the Southern Society for
Philosophy and Psychology, Philosophical
Psychology, vol. 10, no. 4 (December
1997), pp. 471-521.
Stephen Watt
MACKENZIE, Hester Millicent (nee Hughes:
1863-1942)
Hester ('Hettie') Millicent Mackenzie died in
Brockweir, near Chepstow on 10 December
1942. The daughter of Walter William Hughes of
Bristol, she was educated in Clifton, Switzerland,
University College, Bristol and Cambridge
Teacher Training College. In 1892 University
College, Cardiff established a department for the
training of women as secondary school teachers
and she was appointed as its first Head. In 1898
she married the idealist philosopher J.S.
MACKENZIE. In 1904 she was made associate pro-
fessor of education and in 1910 full professor
(thereby making her the first woman professor in
the Britain), which position she held until her
retirement in 1915. She was one of the founders
of the Cardiff and District Women's Suffrage
Society, and in the 1918 General Election she
stood as a Labour Party candidate for the
University of Wales. (She was badly beaten by a
coalition candidate.) After her retirement she
went, together with her husband, on two lecture

tours, visiting India, Burma and Ceylon between
1920 and 1922, and Berkeley, California in 1923.
She contributed articles to various educational
periodicals. Her only book, Hegel's Educational
Theory and Practice^ which was published in
1909, is a notable early foray into a still much
neglected area. Admitting that Hegel wrote no
specific treatise on education, she nevertheless
argues that it is possible to piece together his phi-
losophy of education drawing on his general
philosophical writings, his letters and the addresses
which he delivered as Rector of the Niirnberg
Gymnasium (several of which are included as an
Appendix to the book). After a biographical
account of the philosopher, she argues that for
Hegel education was essential in the evolutionary
process whereby we come to a self-conscious real-
ization of our relation to the universe at large; a
breaking away of self-estrangement from our
purely natural life to a higher spiritual life; a losing
one's life in order to find it. The emphasis is on the
training of intellect and moral character rather
than the senses or the imagination, and for this
purpose, in the matter of curriculum, he argued
for the pre-eminent place of classics. The book is
basically exposition and somewhat shallow (it
was intended for teachers) but, although sup-
portive, it is not without an awareness of the dif-
ficulties of Hegel's position, such as his disparag-
ing view of women's education (women can be
trained only in 'picture thinking', unlike men who
can be trained in 'thought') and his overempha-
sis on the intellectual side of mind at the expense
of feeling. The book ends with a comparison
between Hegel and Froebel.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hegel's Educational Theory and Practice
(1909).
Other Relevant Works
'Moral Education: The Training of the
Teacher', International Journal of Ethics,
vol. 19 (1909), pp. 419-26
W.J.Mander
617
McKENZIE
McKENZIE, John (1883-1955)
John McKenzie was born in Turriff, Scotland
on 13 June 1883 and died in Edinburgh on 30
October 1955. He attended Gordon's College,
Aberdeen, and the University of Aberdeen (MA,
1904), where he studied under Robert LATTA
and J.B. BAILLIE. He also studied at New
College, Edinburgh, and at Tubingen, and was
ordained in the Church of Scotland in 1908.
McKenzie was appointed Professor of
Philosophy at Wilson College, Bombay (India)
in 1908, later becoming Principal of the College
(1921-44) and serving as Vice-Chancellor of
the University of Bombay (1931-3). He was
awarded an honorary DD (Aberdeen, 1934),
was Moderator of the United Church of
Northern India (1938-41), was made
Companion, Order of the Indian Empire, and
an honorary fellow of the Educational Institute
of Scotland. McKenzie returned to Scotland in
1944. He served as Moderator of the General
Assembly of the Church of Scotland (1946-7),
and gave the Croall Lectures in Edinburgh
(1948).
McKenzie's philosophical views were broadly
sympathetic to the personal idealism of A.S.
PRINGLE-PATTISON. His 1934 presidential
address to the Indian Philosophical Congress,
'The Calling of the Philosopher', drew on
idealist principles of duty, and his 1934
Principal Miller Lecture at Madras, 'Purpose
and Progress', followed Pringle-Pattison's belief
(against BRADLEY and BOSANQUET) in the pur-
posiveness in reality and in progress.
McKenzie is best known for his controversial
Hindu Ethics (1922), where he attempted to
present Hindu ethics on its own, independent of
religion. (This, he hoped, would serve both
Indian and Western students.) A survey - not a
history - of the traditions from the Rg Veda to
modern Indian thought, the volume focused on
the concepts of karma, transmigration and
asceticism, and concluded with a comparison of
Hindu and Christian ethics. McKenzie argued
that Hinduism makes a positive contribution to
ethical thought (e.g., dharma and the sense of
McKENZIE
vocation, relations to the community, the duty
towards all sentient beings), but that as a system
it falls short because it 'furnishes no satisfactory
basis for an ethic'.
McKenzie's view was far from idiosyncratic.
A.G. HOGG of Madras and W.S. URQUHART of
Calcutta had made many of the same claims.
Yet the book met with widespread criticism.
Scholars with experience of India, such as EJ.
Thomas of Cambridge and Alban WlDGERY
(for seven years professor at the College of
Baroda), judged it 'perfunctory and unsatisfac-
tory', challenging whether it made sense to
discuss Hindu ethics apart from its metaphysi-
cal and religious background.
In addition to his studies in ethics and social
philosophy, McKenzie published several essays
on missionary activity in India. His last work
(e.g., the Croall Lecture on Two Religions) con-
tinued the philosophical themes of his earliest
writings and, in 1950, he wrote a brief
Foreword to the 'remains' of the Indian idealist
philosopher J.C.P. d'Andrade.
While McKenzie was one of the first to work
in cross-cultural philosophy and religion in
India, his views are considered typical of -
though less nuanced than - many early twenti-
eth-century Western scholars of Indian philo-
sophical thought.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hindu Ethics: A Historical and Critical Essay
(1922).
(Ed.), The Christian Task in India (1929).
Two Religions: A Comparative Study of
Some Distinctive Ideas and Ideals in
Hinduism and Christianity (1950).
Other Relevant Work
'The Calling of the Philosopher', in S.P.
Dubey (ed.), The Philosophy of Life, Facets
of Recent Indian Philosophy, vol. 4 (New
Delhi, 1998), pp. 43-61.
William Sweet
618
MACKENZIE, John Stuart (1860-1935)
John Stuart Mackenzie was born in Glasgow on
29 February 1860 and died at his home in
Brockweir, overlooking Tintern Abbey, on 6
December 1935. His family emigrated in 1868
to Buenos Aires, but shortly afterwards both
parents died, and the children were brought
back to Scotland to be cared for by an aunt.
Mackenzie went in 1877 to Glasgow University
(where he studied under Edward Caird), and
then in 1886, encouraged by his friend and
contemporary W.R. SORLEY, to Trinity College,
Cambridge. It was here that he formed a close
friendship with McTAGGART which introduced
him to the philosophy of Hegel. After his
election in 1890 to a fellowship at Trinity, he
became (at the same time) assistant to Professor
Robert Adamson at Owens College,
Manchester until, in 1895, he succeeded Sorley
as Professor of Philosophy at University College
Cardiff, a post he held up to his retirement in
1915, at the relatively early age of fifty-five.
He married in 1898 and his wife, Millicent
MACKENZIE, became the first women professor
in the country, holding the Chair of Education
in Cardiff, and publishing (among other books)
Hegel's Educational Theory and Practice
(1914). They had no children, and his later
years were spent in his home at Brockweir.
In his very last work he said he was but 'a
humble follower of the line of idealistic specu-
lation in which I consider my earliest teacher,
Edward Caird, to have been on the whole, the
safest guide' (Cosmic Problems, p. vi), although
he admitted that he was never quite able to share
the whole-hearted optimism of Caird. He
allowed also that his view thai: 'the Universe can
best be interpreted by the postulation of a
supreme Intelligence, building up a system
through imperfection to perfection - this being
the necessary order of development' was closely
akin to that of another of his early teachers,
Henry JONES (Cosmic Problems, p. 34).
Regarding historical writers, he drew his main
inspiration from Plato and Hegel: 'if any system
of philosophy can be made ultimately satisfactory

and coherent, one on the general lines of the
Hegelian has probably the best chance of meeting
the necessary requirements' (Outlines of
Metaphysics, p. 154). He belonged to the later
phase of the British idealist movement, writing,
for the most part, in full light of the realist
reaction against it, and, as such, his work was
always receptive to new ideas and less rigorously
Hegelian than that of some of his predecessors.
On completing his degree at Glasgow,
Mackenzie was awarded a Shaw Fellowship.
The course of lectures which he gave in con-
nection with this were published in 1890 as An
Introduction to Social Philosophy. Social phi-
losophy he defines as 'the application of philo-
sophical principles to social questions' (An
Introduction to Social Philosophy, p. 1).
Writing from the overall viewpoint of post-
Kantian idealism, he accepted the general idea
of the 'social organism' from Spencer but
deepened it into a more general conception of
the development of man's social and rational
nature. The book stressed the value of the guild
system of organization and was prescient of
much social change that was to occur over the
next quarter of a century. During World
War I Mackenzie returned to social philosophy,
writing a wholly new introduction to the
subject, Outlines of Social Philosophy (1918).
The book is divided into three main sections:
the 'Foundations of Social Order', 'National
Order' and 'World Order'. Its principal interest
lies perhaps in the latter two, in which he
opposed any emphasis on the state as the exclu-
sive or main form of community, urging instead
the importance of international unity. However,
he was sceptical that any legal or political appa-
ratus, such as the League of Nations, could
ever bring this about, emphasizing instead that
the kind of unity at which we should aim, some-
thing like a single brotherhood embracing all
nations, needed in the end a religious basis.
Invited to write a text for the University
Corresponding College Tutorial System, in
1893 he published A Manual of Ethics. This
hugely successful introduction, which ran into
six editions, and is comparable to MUIRHEAD'S
619
MACKENZIE
Elements of Ethics (1892) or Dewey's Outlines
of a Critical Theory of Ethics (1891), was by its
nature largely a criticism of the views of others
and, even in its more positive parts, it followed
very closely Green's Prolegomena to Ethics. It
thus rejects Kant's ethical system as merely
formal, while hedonism, it argues, fails to see
that what we seek to satisfy is not our desires
but ourselves; that the value of the satisfaction
depends on the kind of self to which the satis-
faction is given. Spencer is given credit for
emphasizing the importance of development,
but in the last analysis Mackenzie follows Green
in holding that the end of action consists in
realization of the true self, which is both
rational and, since humans are essentially social
creatures, social. The moral imperative, or
'ought', we may understand as the law imposed
by the ideal self on the actual self. In later years
Mackenzie came to view the conception of self-
realization as too subjective a basis for ethics
and, when in 1924 he published a little book on
Ultimate Values, his ethical position advanced
beyond these Hegelian origins. Influenced by
G.E. MOORE and other contemporary ethicists,
he now considered the concept of beauty as
central, as he argued that the goqd life consists
essentially in the effort to create and conserve
what is beautiful.
Besides ethics and social philosophy, the
other focus of Mackenzie's work was meta-
physics, and in 1902 he published Outlines of
Metaphysics, a short introduction to the subject.
Metaphysics he understands as the attempt to
treat experience as a whole in systematic unity
and to be at bottom indistinguishable from
logic. He urges objective idealism, the view that
the whole system of reality is constituted by
thought-determinations, as 'the view that has
the best chance of proving ultimately satisfac-
tory' (Outlines of Metaphysics, p. 34). To
further fill out this basic position, he adopts a
genetic method, charting the development of
experience and its ideal construction, from its
least to its most developed phase, from the per-
ceptual through the scientific, ethical and aes-
thetic to the religious sphere.
MACKENZIE
This short work was intended as a kind of
sketch for a more thorough treatment, which,
much delayed, finally appeared in 1917, under
the title Elements of Constructive Philosophy
and constitutes his chief work in philosophy.
However, the book does not pretend to offer
and comes nowhere near providing a complete
system of metaphysics. Nevertheless, it does
give a general sketch of his overall position. He
begins by seeking to locate the most basic pre-
supposition of judgement and inference, which
he finds in the idea of order. Thus, he argues,
the work of philosophy is to locate the different
kinds of order and unity, and place them them-
selves in order; the ranking here being a matter
of their degree of comprehensiveness and
organic unity. As rational beings we cannot
help but search for order in the world we appre-
hend, but equally (he urges) it is difficult to
conceive of any intelligible order which does not
have intelligence at its centre. Hence idealism.
He then consider various orders, from subjec-
tive to objective, numerical and spatio-
temporal, through the causal, to that of con-
sciousness and value, leading finally to the con-
ception of the universe as a completely ordered
self-explanatory system, or cosmos. Since it is
only from the last or highest point of view that
the universe can be regarded as fully ordered,
the world we know must itself be regarded as
but a partial expression of that eternal process
through which the perfect whole unfolds itself,
and human life but the partial manifestation of
the life of an eternal spirit progressively reveal-
ing itself to us. Written at a time when idealist
thought was no longer dominant in the country,
one notable feature of the book is the way in
which it seeks to engage with other new
currents of thought, such as those represented
by Samuel ALEXANDER or Bertrand RUSSELL.
Mackenzie finds much to applaud in the new
realism, noting that it has done great service in
opposing subjectivism and that its view of uni-
versals brings it close to the idealism of Plato,
even - he dares to suggest - of a correctly inter-
preted Hegel. However, while recognizing that
there is some value in the pluralism that
620
commonly goes with it, he insists that in the end
thought cannot rest content with the lack of
ultimate order which such pluralism brings with
it, and that cosmic unity therefore remains its
ideal.
Mackenzie's thought never stood still and
Cosmic Problems (1931), which he describes as
a sequel to Elements of Constructive
Philosophy, discusses his metaphysical position
in the light of the most recent advances in sci-
entific and philosophical thinking. Recognizing
that the conception of a cosmos is difficult to
apply to the universe as we know it, on account
of the apparent contingency of some of its
aspects and the evil that seems to be contained
in others, he suggests that this difficulty might
in part be met by conceiving of the formation
of the universe on the analogy of the work of a
creative artist.
Mackenzie's work stands as an important
example of British idealist philosophy. He put
forward no fundamentally new theses, but he
demonstrated the extent to which the position
could accommodate itself to new ideas, raising
question as to why it ultimately fell out of
favour. His style was not for precise or rigid
argument, and he is always both tentative and
modest. Suggesting that 'in philosophy, every
dogma is a heresy', he argued that
[w]hat I am inclined to claim for philosophy
is not that it provides us with any ready made
doctrines ... but that it enables us to take a
general survey of the totality of our experi-
ence, and to see clearly ... that we have some
right to hope and a still more manifest duty
to strive.
(Elements of Constructive Philosophy,
p. 478)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An Introduction to Social Philosophy
(Glasgow, 1890).
A Manual of Ethics, Designed for the Use of
Students (1893).
Outlines of Metaphysics (1902).

Elements of Constructive Philosophy (1917).
Outlines of Social Philosophy (1918).
Cosmic Problems: An Essay on Speculative
Philosophy (1931).
Other Relevant Works
Lectures on Humanism with Special
Reference to its Bearing on Sociology
(1907).
Arrows of Desire: Essays on our National
Character and Outlook (1920).
Ultimate Value in the Light of Contemporary
Thought (1924).
Fundamental Problems of Life: An Essay on
Citizenship as Pursuit of Values (1928).
Further Reading
Mackenzie, M. (ed.),John Stuart Mackenzie
(1936).
W. J. Mander
MACKIE, John Leslie (1917-81)
John Mackie was born in Sydney on 25 August
1917 and died in Oxford on 12 December 1981.
His first degree was from the University of
Sydney, where he studied Greek, Latin and phi-
losophy. In 1938 he was awarded a scholarship
to study at Oriel College, Oxford; he graduated
with a first in literae humaniores in 1940. Still in
Oxford, Mackie began work on a doctoral
thesis; he soon abandoned this, however, to enter
service in World War II. Mackie returned to the
University of Sydney in 1946 as a lecturer in the
Department of Moral and Political Philosophy.
There followed three successive chairs in phi-
losophy: in Otago, Sydney and York. Mackie
returned to Oxford in 1967 as a fellow of
University College. In 1974 he was elected a
fellow of the British Academy
Mackie's philosophical interests are wide-
ranging. His main topics are ethics, the history
621
MACKIE
of philosophy (especially the British empiri-
cists), causation and the philosophy of religion.
But he also wrote on subjects as diverse as
philosophical logic, the philosophy of biology
and the philosophy of law. Mackie is best
known for his six books, all of which were
written while at University College. The first of
these, Truth, Probability and Paradox, was
published in 1973. The last, The Miracle of
Theism, appeared shortly after his death. He
also wrote over ninety philosophical papers;
some of these are collected together in the two
volumes Logic and Knowledge (1985) and
Persons and Value (1985). Mackie's writing is
characterized by his clear, concise style and his
willingness to pursue an argument to wherever
it may take him. Summing up Mackie's
approach to philosophy, John MCDOWELL
attributes to him 'a faith ... in the illuminating
power of plain, careful, reflective common
sense, conceived as what rationality essentially
is' ('John Leslie Mackie', p. 497).
It would be fair to describe Mackie as an
empiricist. But what emerges from his work is
empiricism of a moderate sort. He emphati-
cally rejects verificationism - the view that a
sentence is meaningful if and only if it can be
empirically verified. Neither would he insist
that all knowledge derives from experience.
Instead, Mackie's empiricism amounts to a
respect for science: the theories of the philoso-
pher must be compatible with a scientific
account of the world. Another distinctive
feature of Mackie's work is his cautious deploy-
ment of the process of conceptual analysis. If we
analyse, for instance, the concept cause, we will
find out what we mean when we talk about
causation. But there remains the question of
whether causes, as we conceive them, exist -
that is, the question of whether our concepts
have any application to the world. And this, for
Mackie, is the fundamental issue: 'the aim is to
make progress with substantive questions, to
apply our concepts to reality or to consider
how far they are applicable, not merely to
analyse or clarify those concepts themselves'
(Truth, Probability and Paradox, p. vii).
MACKIE
Both these themes are well illustrated by
Mackie's most influential book, Ethics:
Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). Here
Mackie argues that there do not exist objective
values. In his memorable phrase, Tightness and
wrongness are not part of 'the fabric of the
world' (Ethics, p. 15). He offers two arguments
in support of this claim. The first is the
argument from relativity. Moral codes vary
across time and across different cultural groups.
Some societies think that eating meat is wrong,
for instance, while others regard it as perfectly
acceptable. If there were objective moral values,
it would be hard to explain this phenomenon:
better to suppose that our moral beliefs arise
from, and reflect, our culture. The second is the
Argument from Queerness. Mackie writes, 'If
there were objective values, then they would be
qualities or relations of a very strange sort,
utterly different from anything else in the
universe' (ibid., p. 38). He continues: 'if we
were to be aware of them, it would have to be
by some special faculty of moral perception or
intuition, utterly different from our ordinary
ways of knowing about anything else' (ibid.).
Objective values, then, are both metaphysically
and epistemologically too peculiar to be
accepted - particularly given the materialist
picture of the world favoured by the empiricist.
How, then, should we understand morality?
Mackie rejects the subjectivist claim that moral
judgements are equivalent to reports of our
own emotions. Neither does he believe that
moral properties can be reduced to natural
ones. Instead, he offers his controversial 'error
theory' of moral discourse. Our moral judge-
ments include a 'claim to objectivity' (ibid., p.
35) - that is, our concepts of right and wrong
are concepts of objective, mind-independent
qualities. Since there is nothing in the world
that corresponds to these concepts, our talk
about morality is systematically erroneous. It is
comparable with talk about phlogiston or
about the yeti - it attempts to refer to something
that does not exist. This does not imply,
however, that moral discourse should be aban-
doned. Instead, Mackie argues, it is best
622
regarded as a useful device. A society will
function more smoothly if all its members
believe that it is objectively wrong to steal or to
break agreements. In general., moral beliefs serve
to counteract the pervasive human tendency
towards selfishness. As Mackie puts it, 'the
objectification of moral values is not only a
natural but a useful fiction' (ibid., p. 239).
Mackie wrote extensively on causation. Here
his major contribution is the notion of an INUS
condition. Suppose that it is claimed that a
short circuit in a house caused a fire. What is
meant by this? Not that the short circuit was
necessary for the fire - for plenty of fires have
occurred in the absence of short circuits. Neither
that the short circuit was sufficient for the fire
- for had there not been inflammable material
nearby, the fire would not have occurred.
Instead, Mackie asks us to consider the fol-
lowing set of conditions: the short circuit, the
presence of inflammable material and the
absence of a nearby sprinkler. These condi-
tions, we will suppose, are sufficient for the
occurrence of the fire. But they are not neces-
sary; a different set of conditions could have
brought about the same result;. The short circuit,
then, is an insufficient but necessary part of a
condition that is itself unnecessary but suffi-
cient for the result: an INUS condition. Can
we conclude, then, that our concept cause is the
concept of an INUS condition? Mackie stops
slightly short of this result. Instead, he offers a
more cautious conclusion: the notion of an
INUS condition is an important part of our
concept of causation.
In The Cement of the Universe (1974) these
ideas are developed into a complex theory.
Mackie begins by suggesting the following
counterfactual analysis of causation: A causes B
if and only if in the circumstances, if A had not
occurred, B would not have occurred. This he
takes to be equivalent to a claim about neces-
sity: in the circumstances, A is necessary for
the occurrence of B. There are two reasons,
however, why this will not quite suffice. The
first problem is that in the circumstances
described above, the presence of inflammable

material is necessary for the occurrence of the
fire - yet we would hardly say that the former
causes the latter. In order to deal with this sort
of counter-example, Mackie suggests that the
claim that A causes B presupposes a set of back-
ground conditions. He calls this the causal field.
If an event is assumed as part of the causal field
during our investigation of a certain effect, we
do not regard it as a cause. Second, it is often
the case that effects necessitate their causes. For
instance, the following counterfactual seems
true (if odd): in the circumstances, if there had
not been a fire there would not have been a
short circuit. Nonetheless, we maintain that the
fire causes the short circuit and not vice versa.
To deal with this sort of case, Mackie maintains
that a cause must be causally prior to its effect.
A is causally prior to B, he explains, if there is
a time at which A is 'fixed' but B is not: that is,
if there is a time at which it is causally deter-
mined that A will occur, but not that B will
occur.
This, then, is our concept of causation. But is
there anything in the world to which it corre-
sponds? At first glance, it appears not. All that
the mind-independent world contains is a
sequence of events following upon one another
in more or less regular succession. There is
nothing in the world that corresponds to the
necessity that we see as connecting cause and
effect. Noting this, Hume drew the conclusion
that our concept of causation is erroneous and
should be reformed. Mackie, however, follows
a different path: 'Regularity statements, if induc-
tively supported, will sustain the counterfactu-
als which our initial analysis of causal state-
ments brings to light' (The Cement of the
Universe, p. 60). Simplifying somewhat, his
idea is as follows. Suppose that we observe that
on various occasions the combination of a short
circuit, the presence of inflammable material
and the absence of a sprinkler is followed by a
fire, whereas the presence of the second two
events alone is not. Using inductive reasoning,
we infer that these connections between events
always hold. This generalization supports the
counterfactual: in the circumstances, if there
623
MACKIE
had not been a short circuit, there would not
have been a fire. And this in turn sustains the
causal claim: the short circuit caused the fire.
Mackie's proposal, then, is that our counter-
factual concept of a cause can be reconciled
with the Humean claim that causation itself
involves nothing but regularity.
Mackie frequently appeals to the work of
historical figures, especially Locke, Hume and
Kant. But his intention is never simply to under-
stand their ideas. Rather, Mackie draws upon
the history of philosophy with a view to solving
philosophical problems of contemporary
interest. This attitude is particularly evident in
Problems from Locke. Here Mackie discusses
a number of Lockean topics, including percep-
tion, identity, substance and innate knowledge.
While each chapter contains a careful account
of Locke's own position, Mackie stresses that
his aim is 'not to expound Locke's views ... but
to work towards solutions of the problems
themselves' (Problems from Locke, p. 2). Often
Mackie reaches the conclusion that Locke's
account of the matter contains more sense than
is commonly acknowledged. This is so, for
instance, in his discussion of the distinction
between primary and secondary qualities.
Primary qualities are properties such as size,
shape and position. Secondary qualities include
colour, taste, temperature and smell. Locke
notoriously claims that secondary qualities are
'nothing in the objects themselves but powers to
produce various sensations in us by means of
their primary properties' (Essay Concerning
Human Understanding, II.vii.10). Mackie
claims that this view, properly interpreted, is not
only defensible, but true. A red apple, for
instance, does not possess any property that
corresponds to redness as we perceive it. Rather,
the colour of an apple should be identified with
the apple's power, or capacity, to produce an
idea of redness - and this power can itself be
explained by appeal to the arrangement and
motion of the apple's particles.
On other occasions, however, Mackie is
rather less sympathetic towards the Lockean
stance. This is so, for instance, in his discussion
MACKIE
of personal identity. Two people who are out-
wardly very different can nonetheless be iden-
tical; the boy who stole apples from the orchard
is the same person as the gallant officer who,
twenty years later, captures the standard. What
constitutes this identity? Locke argues that
personal identity is neither a matter of sameness
of body, nor of sameness of soul. Instead, he
maintains that two people are identical if and
only if they are mutually aware of each other's
experiences. Personal identity, then, turns out to
be largely a matter of memory: the officer is the
same person as the boy because he can
remember 'from the inside' the experience of
robbing the orchard. Mackie argues that even
the most charitable interpretation of this view
cannot be right. Since the officer remembers
only a small portion of the boy's experiences,
Locke's theory identifies him with nothing but
a fragment of a person. In its place, he proposes
his own account of personhood. The term
person, he suggests, refers to 'whatever under-
lies and makes possible the co-consciousness
of experiences' (Problems from Locke, p. 200).
As a matter of empirical fact, this turns out to
be the structure of the central nervous system.
Mackie's final book, The Miracle of Theism,
discusses arguments both for and against the
existence of God. The title comes from Hume's
tongue-in-cheek remark that a theist is 'con-
scious of a continued miracle in his own person,
which subverts all the principles of his under-
standing' (An Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding, X, II). And Mackie is largely in
agreement. Since there are no persuasive argu-
ments for the existence of God and since there
are telling considerations against his existence,
the fact that many reasonable people persist in
theistic belief is, if not miraculous, at least
strange and surprising. Mackie discusses tradi-
tional 'proofs' of the existence of God - the
ontological argument, the cosmological
argument, and the argument from design - and
argues that none of these succeed. Neither do
supposed 'religious experiences', such as the
apparently divine voice heard by St Paul on the
road to Damascus, do anything to justify
624
theism. Mackie concludes by discussing the
implications of the atheism that he advocates.
Returning to an earlier theme, he argues that the
rejection of religion need not have the disastrous
moral consequences sometimes envisaged. Since
morality is a human construction, developed
through a process of biological and social evo-
lution, it is bound to survive the decline of
theistic belief.
Mackie is a cautious philosopher. He rarely
employs a philosophical term without examin-
ing its meaning, or adopts a philosophical
stance without carefully assessing the alterna-
tives. And his explicit conclusions often take a
tentative, qualified form. Nonetheless, the
picture that emerges from his work is a bold
one. The true account of the world is the mate-
rialistic one provided by science. Philosophical
posits must find a place within this picture - or
else be abandoned. Mackie's work on causa-
tion, the history of philosophy and philosophy
of religion continues to be influential. But his
greatest impact has been in meta-ethics. Few
have accepted Mackie's error theory of moral
discourse. But his claim that value is not part of
the 'fabric of the world' has given impetus to
ongoing attempts both to understand the nature
of objectivity and to provide a broadly empiri-
cist account of ethics.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Truth, Probability and Paradox (Oxford,
1973).
The Cement of the Universe: A Study of
Causation (Oxford, 1974).
Problems from Locke (Oxford, 1976).
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong
(Harmondsworth, 1977).
Hume's Moral Theory (1980).
The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and
against the Existence of God (Oxford,
1982).
Other Relevant Works
Logic and Knowledge: Selected Papers, VI,
ed. Joan Mackie and Penelope Mackie
(Oxford, 1985).

Persons and Values: Selected Papers, V2, ed.
Joan Mackie and Penelope Mackie
(Oxford, 1985).
further Reading
Honderich, Ted (ed.), Morality and
Objectivity: A Tribute to J.L. Mackie
(1985).
McDowell, J., 'John Leslie Mackie',
Proceedings of the British Academy, vol.
76 (1990), pp. 487-98
Anna Sherratt
MacKINNON, Donald MacKenzie
(1913-94)
Donald MacKinnon was born in Oban on 27
August 1913 and died in Aberdeen on 2 March
1994. He was educated at Cargilfield School in
Edinburgh, winning a scholarship to
Winchester in 1927, and thereafter to New
College, Oxford. His first academic appoint-
ment was as an assistant in moral philosophy to
A.E. TAYLOR at Edinburgh University (1936-7).
He then returned to Oxford as fellow and tutor
in philosophy at Keble College (1937-47),
during which period he was also responsible for
special elementary courses in philosophy for
Royal Navy and RAF cadets (1942-5). He was
also lecturer in philosophy at Balliol College
(1945-7) and Wilde Lecturer in Natural and
Comparative Religion (1945-7). In 1947 he
was appointed to the Regius Chair of Moral
Philosophy at Aberdeen University, where he
remained until 1960, when he was elected to the
Norris-Hulse Chair of Divinity at Cambridge,
also becoming a fellow of Corpus Christi
College. Outside the academic world, he was,
in the words of his Guardian obituary, 'a social-
ist of a confidently Wykehamist variety, a pas-
sionate Scot, an Episcopalian who tended to
treat the Church of England as an infuriating
625
MacKINNON
pantomime'. He retired from Cambridge in
1978 and returned to live in Aberdeen, where
he remained, continuing his writing, until his
death.
MacKinnon was unusual in the English-
speaking world in having contributed with dis-
tinction to the fields of both philosophy and
theology. Perhaps his main influence has been
in theology and less through his publications
than through his impact on those who studied
or worked with him. He has, for example, been
a major influence on Nicholas Lash and Rowan
Williams amongst theologians, and on Philippa
FOOT and Iris MURDOCH amongst philosophers.
His eccentricities were legendary and many
anecdotes have been circulated about tutorials
conducted from baths, from under tables and
from the tops of ladders. His stock among theo-
logians is currently rather greater than among
philosophers, perhaps in part due to the greater
influence on the former of continental post-
modernist thought, and a consequent greater
tolerance of the obscurities and incompleteness
which characterize MacKinnon's writings.
The centrality of MacKinnon's personal
influence is in keeping with the emphasis in his
work on an unending wrestling with problems,
rather than on the development of theoretical
solutions to them. In A Study in Ethical Theory
(1957) MacKinnon considers Various sorts of
conversation' (p. 6) between styles of ethical
theory. Dominating these conversations is that
between an 'ethics of consequence' (especially
utilitarianism) and an 'ethics of motive' (espe-
cially Kantianism). Although MacKinnon's
sympathies lie rather more with Kant than with
Bentham, it is in the examination of the tensions
and connections between these two systems
that the study chiefly proceeds, rather than in
any straightforward refutation of the utilitarian
position. Utilitarianism is attractive as a liber-
ation on two levels: as a practical philosophy,
it led to social reform; as a theory and method-
ology, it led to an emancipation from ancient
superstitions. (This interpenetration of practical
ethics and theory is a constant theme in A Study
in Ethical Theory and is clearly directed at the
MacKINNON
sharp separation of meta-ethics and applied
ethics characteristic of much Anglo-American
moral philosophy of the time.) However, in
utilitarianism's very language of liberation,
there is an unresolved tension: it was by use of
'religious language, language of bondage and
deliverance, darkness and light, etc., that it
weaved its way almost unnoticed into speech
and writing concerned to expose the nonsensi-
cal pretensions of supposedly religious author-
ity' (A Study in Ethical Theory, p. 234). Finally,
the very methodology of liberation leads to a
.'view of life which confined men's minds and
threatened in a terrifying way to limit the pos-
sibilities open to them' (ibid., p. 46).
Kantian ethics are interpreted not as a disin-
terested following of rules, but as a purification
of motive, a 'task to be done again and again'
(ibid., p. 99). As with utilitarianism, there is a
running together of theoretical and applied
ethics: 'Kant will not concede that logical dis-
entanglement is something carried out apart
from the subject's immediate presence to, and
involvement with, what is being disentangled'
(ibid., p. 122). Yet the emphasis on motive and
dismissal of consequences can lead to a sterility
and futility in Kantian ethics. Characteristically,
MacKinnon turns to a concrete situation to illus-
trate this tension between the two theories. The
attitude of pacifists in the years between the two
world wars stands 'condemned by its fruits; in the
world they helped to make, the road was clear
for the accomplishment of Hitler's merciless
purpose of aggression' (ibid., p. 227). But that
such fruits resulted from a '[d]eep concern with
the things of peace' (ibid.) indicates not the
complete bankruptcy of the attitude but rather
the inadequacy of any universal ethical principles.
The tensions between utilitarianism and
Kantianism lead MacKinnon to consider the
moral philosophy of Bishop Butler, whom he
praises as 'the enemy of the single formula'
(ibid., p. 181) but also because he refers the con-
flicts between the ethics of motive and the ethics
of consequence back to a complexity in our
actual human nature. As MacKinnon notes,
'The good for man can be no narrower than
626
human nature ...' (ibid., p. 244). But for Butler,
human nature is not something which can be
clearly described and from which moral prin-
ciples can be read off, but rather something to
be gradually discovered through a receptivity to
experience and to the authority of God. And it
is with this concept of receptivity that further
tensions arise. Opposed to the receptivity of
the religious ethicist, there is the autonomy of
Kant. From this receptivity, St Paul (standing
here for all believers) came to see himself as an
apostle with a particular and determinate
mission; against this, Kant regards the moral
existence of human beings 'as conforming to the
pattern of a single form which is the source of
its peculiar quality and authority' (ibid., p. 258).
Once more MacKinnon refuses to dissolve the
tensions by coming down straightforwardly on
one side or another: human lives have to be
lived out in a 'practical essay in the reconcilia-
tion of the religious temper of receptivity and
the characteristically moral temper that insists
that freedom is something never to be over-
ridden' (ibid., p. 275).
The closing words of A Study in Ethical
Theory refer to 'the possibility of metaphysics',
and it was under this title that MacKinnon pub-
lished the revised version of his Gifford Lectures
which carries forward many of the ethical
concerns of the earlier work. Although The
Problem of Metaphysics again exemplifies the
multilayeredness and incompleteness of
MacKinnon's writings, a major focus is on the
distinction between 'discovery' and 'invention'
(e.g., p. 74). Here MacKinnon is clear that to be
'metaphysically minded' (e.g., ibid., p. 17) is to
be engaged in discovery rather than invention,
but in a type of discovery that is directed at the
transcendent. His description of Kant's
approach to metaphysics may well stand for
MacKinnon's own, treating 'the metaphysical
as something going beyond the frontiers of intel-
ligible descriptive discourse, yet as something
that presses on us with a directness and imme-
diacy which requires no argument to convince
us of its reality' (ibid., p. 55). Such a transcen-
dent is, at least on a superficial level, rather dif-

ferent from, say, Plato's world of the Forms,
and MacKinnon discusses how it can be
encountered ethically in a number of ways, for
example in the parables. Taking the Parable of
the Good Samaritan, MacKinnon points out
that the priest and the Levite who pass by could
claim 'a proper sense of discipline, refraining
from any well-intentioned but possibly disas-
trous attempt to do for the injured man what
they could not do' (A Study in Ethical Theory,
p. 139). Such a claim embodies again the
tension of A Study in Ethical Theory between
the emphasis on consequences and effective-
ness of utilitarianism and the emphasis on
purity of motive of Kantianism. Anyone who
has been in a similar moral dilemma will rec-
ognize the general force of MacKinnon's point:
the parable brings to life the reality of the tran-
scendent which calls on us to get our decision
to help or not to help right, but which denies us
any certainty that we have in fact done so.
There would be considerable truth in
claiming that MacKinnon lived his philosophy
rather than wrote it down. (It is telling that, at
one point in The Possibility of Metaphysics, he
reinterprets the problem of metaphysics as that
of the metaphysician: 'What is the metaphysi-
cian about? What are his difficulties and his
temptations? What are the errors to which he
above all men is prone?', p. 111.) That said, his
influence in theological circles has now
extended beyond those who encountered him
personally. One reason for this has already been
suggested. His writings offer to those enthused
by postmodernism all the acceptance of com-
plexities and paradox characteristic of that
movement, whilst retaining a clear belief in a
transcendent reality. In more narrowly philo-
sophical circles, at least within the Anglo-
American analytical tradition, although
MacKinnon's suspicion of theory and emphasis
on the particular find their echoes in current
philosophical ethics, his overtly theological
concerns coupled with the 'highly personal,
dark, brooding, often hard to follow' (Walsh,
p. 138) nature of his writing seem likely to
restrict his influence.
627
MacKINNON
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Church of God (1940).
A Study in Ethical Theory (1957).
Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays
(1968).
The Stripping of the Altars (1969).
The Problem of Metaphysics (1974).
Explorations in Theology 5: Donald
MacKinnon (1979).
Themes in Theology (Edinburgh, 1987).
Other Relevant Works
The Church of God (1940).
God the Living and the True (1940).
(Ed.), Christian Faith and Communist Faith
(1953).
Further Reading
Wignall, Paul, 'Bibliography of Professor
MacKinnon's Published Writings
1937-1980', in Brian Hebblethwaite and
Stewart Sutherland (eds), The Philosophical
Frontiers of Christian Theology: Essays
Presented to D. M. MacKinnon,
(Cambridge, 1982).
Anon., The Times, 4 March 1994.
Conradi, Peter J., Iris Murdoch: A Life
(2001).
Ford, David F. (ed.), The Modern
Theologians (Oxford, 1997).
Johnsen, Bredo C., Review of The Problem of
Metaphysics, Philosophical Review, vol.
85, no 1 (January 1976), pp. 106-107.
Lash, Nicholas, The Guardian, 5 March
1994.
Murray, Paul D., 'Theology in the
Borderlands: Donald MacKinnon and
Contemporary Theology', Modern
Theology, vol. 14, 3 July 1998, pp.
355-76.
Sutherland, Stewart R., The Independent, 9
March 1994.
Walsh, W.H., Review of The Problem of
Metaphysics, Mind, vol. 85, no 337
(January 1976), pp. 136-8.
Stephen Watt
MACKINTOSH
MACKINTOSH, Robert (1858-1933)
Robert Mackintosh was born in Dunoon,
Argyllshire on 23 May 1858 and died in
Whaley Bridge, Derbyshire on 12 February
1933. On the death of his father, the Free
Church of Scotland minister Charles Calder
Mackintosh, the family moved to Glasgow.
Mackintosh won a scholarship to Oxford, but
his mother dissuaded him from taking it up.
Instead he went to Glasgow University
(1872-7), where he studied under Edward
Caird. He graduated with first class honours in
philosophy, and second class honours in
classics. He proceeded to New College,
Edinburgh, with a view to training for the
ministry of the Free Church. He found the
Old Testament Professor, A.B. Davidson,
inspiring, but received little help from the
Professor of Doctrine, James MacGregor,
whom he branded an arch Calvinist. He grad-
uated BD, and there followed a period of
study in Jena and Marburg; a missionary
assistantship to Dr Walter Smith; and a bout
of scarlet fever which led to a recuperative
voyage to New Zealand, during which he
worked on his first book, Christ and the
Jewish Law (1886). Mackintosh agonized
over the distance between the confessional
statements to which he was expected to assent,
and what he could actually believe. The fruit
of this turmoil included his pamphlet of 1888,
The Obsoleteness of the Westminster
Confession of Faith. In the same year he pub-
lished another provocative tract, The
Insufficiency of Revivalism as a Religious System
- though in later years he admitted that he owed
his conversion to the visit to Scotland of the
American evangelists Moody and Sankey. In
1889 his collection of Essays towards a New
Theology appeared; he was awarded the
Glasgow DD; and he went as assistant to
Benjamin Bell at Withington Presbyterian
Church, Manchester. Confessional difficulties
remained, however, and Mackintosh, to use his
own word, became a 'refugee' who found a home
in the broader waters of Congregationalism.
628
Mackintosh was ever sympathetic to those who
were religiously perplexed or consumed by
doubt: 'one would thankfully spend one's
whole life till one was spent out, for the privi-
lege of removing a single obstacle from the path
of hearts that are seeking God' (Albrecht
Ritschl, p. 4). Of all his works A First Primer of
Apologetics (1900) was the only one to achieve
a second edition. He was ordained and inducted
to the pastorate of Dumfries Congregational
Church on 11 December 1890, and there he
remained until 1894, when he succeeded J.M.
Hodgson at Lancashire Independent College,
Manchester. From its inception in 1904,
Mackintosh was a lecturer in the Faculty of
Theology of the University of Manchester. He
was Chairman of the Lancashire
Congregational Union in 1918. He retired,
having served under four principals, in 1930.
Mackintosh published books, articles and
reviews on a wide variety of themes, not exclud-
ing a biblical commentary on Thessalonians
and Corinthians (1909) and a biography of
Principal Rainy (1907). He wrote substantial
articles on 'Apologetics', 'Theism' and
'Theology' for the eleventh edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica. In addition to those
already mentioned, his main theological works
are Christianity and Sin (1913), Albrecht
Ritschl and his School (1915) and Historic
Theories of Atonement (1920). He also pub-
lished a handbook on Christian Ethics (1909),
and volumes on Values (1928) and Some
Central Things (1932). In what follows an
attempt is made to distil his philosophical posi-
tions from numerous writings.
Mackintosh ranged widely over the history of
philosophy, and was adept at assessing thinkers
in a telling, sometimes provocative, phrase.
Thus Locke is 'a double-minded or halfhearted
philosopher' because he allows the two sources
of knowledge, sensation and reflection. He can
thus propound a cosmological argument; but
such an argument should accompany an intu-
itionist not an empiricist doctrine of causality.
Again, in ethics Locke is a determinist, in polit-
ical theory he invokes natural law - but this is

an intuitionist, if not an idealistic, concept.
Berkeley's recourse, against materialism, to
immaterialism was equally unfortunate for, as
Hume showed, 'the inference to God is as pre-
carious as the inference to matter, and ... the
assertion of a continuous or immaterial mind in
man goes beyond the immediate facts'
(Theism', p. 753).
Mackintosh took up cudgels against the most
extreme form of empiricism under discussion in
his day, namely, the positivism of Comte.
Declining to be called an atheist or a material-
ist, Comte is an agnostic: 'He will neither say
"yes" nor "no." But he is filled with scorn for
those who say "yes," for he is perfectly and
dogmatically assured that we have no right to
dogmatise' (From Comte to Benjamin Kidd,
p. 21). Having rejected metaphysics as
outmoded, Comte advances his view of the
social organism; but this is nothing more than
'a moral dictum, picturesquely stated in terms
of popular science' (ibid., p. 29).
Though critical of particular empiricists,
Mackintosh is by no means wholly dismissive
of empiricism. On the contrary, he welcomes
the way in which religious phenomena and reli-
gious experience are being studied as never
before; and he values the emphasis which many
empiricists place upon personality. For all that,
intuitionism 'finds its chance in the misadven-
tures of empiricism' ('Theism', p. 747). Thus,
for example, Reid and his successors appealed
to the witness of conscience against perceived
Humean scepticism (Mackintosh is not quite
sure how serious or convinced a sceptic Hume
was). Intuitionists rightly appreciate the impor-
tance of the moral, but Mackintosh thinks that
they inhabit an unstable halfway house between
empiricism and idealism, for they can but assert
the primacy of the moral, they cannot justify it.
Moreover, for the intuitionist every percept is a
starting point for reliable inference - hence
Reid's 'long and random' lists of first principles.
Thus the question is raised whether idealism can
supply one overarching principle.
Kant, says Mackintosh, posits one system of
necessity in place of the many necessary truths
629
MACKINTOSH
or starting-points of intuitionism. But Kant's
idealism is incomplete:
On one side, the world we know by valid
processes of thinking cannot, we are told, be
the real world. Or, beginning from the other
side; neither the reality which ideal thought
reaches after, nor yet the reality which our
conscience postulates, is the valid world of
orderly thinking. The great critic of scepticism
has diverged from idealism again, or has
given his idealism a sceptical colour, miti-
gated - but only mitigated - by faith in the
moral consciousness.
('Theism', p. 749)
There is no such wavering in Hegel's bold phi-
losophy. The universe is rational; there is no
dualism of fact and principles; and things are as
they must be. Mackintosh is critical of the
details of Hegel's dialectical method, and his
overall judgement is that Hegel fails to maintain
the distinction between divine and human con-
sciousness, and pays insufficient heed to the
limitations of human knowledge and experi-
ence. In short, and regrettably, Hegelianism
'understands all mysteries' (Hegel and
Hegelianism^ p. 290). Indeed, 'A manual of the
Differential Calculus will appear a warm and
sentimental treatise when compared with the
merciless pages in which Hegel anatomises the
soul of man or the nature of the Blessed God'
(ibid., p. 5). Christians, however, 'know a love
which passes knowledge' (ibid.), and if idealists
deny this they are as misguided as those sceptics,
who have been put to flight by idealism, who
deny that we can know anything. In a few lines
Mackintosh pronounces upon a number of
prominent idealists:
in the name of ultimate reason - Professor
BRADLEY gives us a Pantheistic Absolute, and
no human immortality; and Dr. McTAGGART
gives us an eternal society of interrelated
spirits, and no absolute being as such; and
Professor Royce gives us God and immortal-
ity, but without mention of Christ; and
MACKINTOSH
Professor TAYLOR [whose later position was
significantly different from that here
described by Mackintosh] finds that Royce's
arguments are vitiated by reliance upon the
relational form of thought, and himself gives
us a fighting chance of immortality, and an
Absolute that cannot be called personal or a
self. Such differences do not prove that
idealism is barren; but surely they prove that
idealism is no case to claim a monopoly of
certainty. Dim movements of faith may be
wiser than this shrill logical debate.
('Recent Philosophy and Christian Doctrine',
p. 83)
Mackintosh felt that if the old theology vul-
garized God by explaining too much, the more
recent trend, under the impact of post-Hegelian
idealism, to play down the importance of the
historical record of the Gospels, was equally
worrying; and he held out against 'those mystics
or idealist philosophers who, with many kind
compliments, dissolve the personal Redeemer
into an abstract principle, once more betraying
the Son of Man - with a kiss' (The Authority
of the Cross', p. 215).
Mackintosh passes in review the traditional
arguments for the existence of God. He finds
that Kant's demolition of the ontological, cos-
mological and teleological arguments is suc-
cessful, and that Hegel's transformation of the
arguments into 'reflections of the course of
rational thought in man' (Essays Towards a
New Theology, p. 366) substitutes intellectual-
ism for the moral process which is Christianity.
As for miracles, while they may be signs to the
believer, they are not evidence capable of con-
vincing a sceptic. Nevertheless, we may not
dispense with natural theology altogether.
Though incomplete, it may lead people to the
threshold of revelation; if it does not yield
proofs, it may offer suggestions: there is a dim
and imperfect revelation of God in creation.
Indeed, 'If there were nothing in this world
which made it look like God's world, faith
would be too utterly a paradox' (Albrecht
Ritschl, p. 255). But in Christ God addresses us
630
personally. Christ is the heart of God's moral
revelation; 'But all moral revelation is twofold
- a revelation of grace and of duty; a revelation
of moral forces above us, and of moral obliga-
tions resting on us' (Essays Towards a New
Theology, p. 389).
Swift to challenge faulty argumentation, and
ever eager to explode fallacies, Mackintosh's
sharpness of intellect and sardonic humour
caused even some of his brighter students to
tremble in his presence. To some he appeared
aloof; certainly he was reserved. But under-
neath was a kindly spirit arid a childlike sim-
plicity. One of his students, who later occupied
Mackintosh's chair at Lancashire Independent
College, declared of his teacher that 'though
he was conversant with all the highways and
by-ways of philosophical doubt he lived and
died, as the lowliest of Christ's followers, simply
trusting in the redeeming mercy and grace
which we have in him' (Phillips, p. xi).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Essays towards a New Theology (Glasgow,
1889).
From Comte to Benjamin Kidd (1899).
A First Primer of Apologetics (1900; 2nd edn,
Glasgow, 1904).
Hegel and Hegelianism (Edinburgh, 1903).
'The Authority of the Cross', unpublished
paper (1906); published v/ith annotations
by P.T. Forsyth, Congregational Quarterly,
vol. 21 (1943), pp. 209-18.
'Recent Philosophy and Christian Doctrine',
Proceedings of the Third International
Congregational Council (1908), pp. 76-84.
'Theism', Encyclopaedia Bntannica, llth edn
(1910-11).
Albrecht Ritschl and his School (1915).
Further Reading
Congregational Year Book (1934), p. 269.
Phillips, G., 'Dr. Mackintosh', The
Congregational Monthly (March 1933),
p. xi.
Sell, A.P.F., Robert Mackintosh: Theologian
of Integrity (Bern, 1977).

-, Philosophical Idealism and Christian
Belief (Cardiff, 1995).
Alan P.P. Sell
MACLAGAN, William Gauld (1903-72)
William Maclagan was born in South China on
22 April 1903 and died in Aberfoyle on 14
December 1972. He was educated at the City of
London School and at Oxford (Exeter College)
where he took first class honours in Greats
(philosophy and classical history) followed by
a PhD at Edinburgh. For a year (1928-9) he
was assistant in logic and metaphysics at
Edinburgh University. Thereafter he was a
lecturer in philosophy at Oriel College, Oxford,
elected as fellow in 1931, until 1946. He was a
temporary civil servant (HM Treasury) from
1940 to 1946. In 1946 he became Professor of
Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University,
retiring in 1969. Birmingham University
appointed him Edward Cadbury Lecturer for
1955-6.
Maclagan's professional competence ranged
over at least epistemology, metaphysics and
political philosophy, in classical, medieval (his
PhD was on Aquinas) and modern writers, as
well as moral philosophy, which was by far his
principal concern and the field to which he con-
tributed most substantially. However, one of his
earliest publications is a symposium contribu-
tion given at the Joint Session of the Aristotelian
Society, the Scots Philosophical Club and the
Mind Association at Edinburgh in 1939. This
symposium was commissioned to address the
question: Are there a priori concepts? Maclagan
thought that it was first necessary to survey a
range of sorts of concept acquisition so as to
decide how a distinction between the a priori
and the empirical may be drawn, and without
assuming the a priori/empirical distinction to be
exhaustive. The desired roving survey is then
631
MACLAGAN
supplied: five sorts of concept possession/acqui-
sition are specified. Of these, the first sort of
concept is plainly and strictly empirical, while
the last two are 'a priori in the strictest sense'.
Maclagan invites J.L. AUSTIN, his fellow sym-
posiast, to show either that there are such
strictly a priori concepts (which Maclagan
rather doubts), or that there are no concepts
which are not empirical in the strict sense he has
identified (and Maclagan is sure that this is not
so). Austin largely declines the challenge.
At Oriel and, before that, at Edinburgh,
Maclagan taught outside the territory of ethics.
One testimony about this comes from Wilfrid
Sellars, who came as a Rhodes Scholar to Oriel
in 1934, receiving in due course a first class
degree in PPE. Philosophy was his major subject
and Maclagan was his tutor. Sellars had previ-
ously taken courses in the empiricists, MOORE,
the philosophy of logic, Kant and metaphysics
- especially the metaphysics of time, which was
the subject of his Master's thesis. In his
'Autobiographical Reflections' (in Castaneda,
1975) Sellars writes,
Once again, I had the opportunity for a new
beginning. I did an enormous amount of
reading on topics with which I was already
generally familiar, but in a far more critical
spirit. I learned to argue with books as I
learned, in tutorials, to be pushed to the limit
in discussion. My tutor in philosophy at Oriel
was W. G. Maclagan, now at Glasgow, who
did an admirable job of questioning my dog-
matisms and gently forcing me to clarify my
ideas and arguments. I had already come to
think of myself as having a system, and in a
sense I did. But I became increasingly aware
of how programmatic it was and of how
little it contained that was clear and distinct.
Maclagan's article 'How Important is Moral
Goodness?' (1955) considers moral goodness as
a quality of the will-in-action. It is 'an agent's
practical loyalty to his own conviction of right'
- i.e. his conviction about what is right.
Maclagan is drawn to what he calls the Stoic-
MACLAGAN
Kantian thesis, namely that such loyalty is so
important a good that nothing can, in any con-
ceivable circumstances, count for more. Yet, at
the same time, he confesses at least to feeling
sympathy with Sidgwick and CARRITT when
they present their counter examples. Still, in
accordance with the Stoic-Kantian thesis he
inclines to side with A.A. BOWMAN (his prede-
cessor but one in his chair) who as a prisoner of
war 'recognized that it might be his duty to kill
a sentry in order to escape; but he felt that he
must not bribe him'. Was Bowman being
ridiculous? Carritt by contrast said that he'd
have thought it his duty in March 1944 to bribe
a conscientious Nazi guard to betray his trust if,
by Carritt's succeeding in the bribery the
European war could have been brought to an
end then. Maclagan considers what can be said
against the Stoic-Kantian thesis and concludes
that although the counter-examples retain their
appearance of cogency, none of the accusations
of confusion, nor other arguments, against the
Stoic-Kantian thesis is successful and so he is not
sure on which side to come down; nor sure
even whether the rule that no action should
ever be entered upon which intends the cor-
ruption of another will must rest on the Stoic-
Kantian estimate of the importance of moral
goodness.
Alleged confusions supposedly giving rise to
the Stoic-Kantian thesis are as follows. Firstly,
one's moral goodness, the goodness of one's
own will, is not, in the making of some assess-
ment about what we ought to do, to be weighed
up with the other possible or likely goods whose
value we have to consider; the goodness of our
own will only comes into play, and can be an
issue, after these other goods have been
reviewed and valued, and a determination
reached about where duty lies. Only then can a
person either act in accordance with their own
conviction about what is right, or fail to do so.
The very fact that one's moral goodness does
not get weighed along (in comparison or com-
bination) with the other goods may have led
people to think - which does not follow from
its peculiar and distinct place in one's moral
632
decision making - that it is high above other
goods, trumping them.
Secondly, a libertarian, such as Maclagan,
thinks that our choosing, our 'directing of our
will', is in itself absolutely free (even if it is only
one of several causal factors determining what
we go on to do), the 'sole thing that is uncon-
ditionally in one's own power'. As such, moral
goodness has a unique status among goods.
Perhaps, then, it is psychologically understand-
able that we esteem it highly even though its
uniqueness is, properly, not of the sort that
actually entails high worth; and the Stoic-
Kantian may have been led to attach high worth
to it by some such slide. Even if so, the illegiti-
mateness of such a derivation of value from
unique status will not entail the Stoic-Kantian
thesis to be wrong: moral goodness may yet be
hugely or supremely important.
Could Carritt's counter-instance, whose plau-
sibility as a counter-instance Maclagan
acknowledges, be accommodated while leaving
the question of the importance of moral
goodness on one side by saying that nobody
can, on a libertarian view, make someone else
act either in accordance with what she reckons
to be good or contrary to it? I may attempt to
bribe someone to do what he holds to be wrong
but whether he does it is up, or down, to him.
Thus what I do here simply does not affect the
moral goodness of another, and Carritt's view
is not at odds with Stoic-Kantianism.
Maclagan's remark at this point exemplifies
his (something of the spiritual director's) aware-
ness of the twistiness of a self-justifying human
mind, his lofty, rather than lucid, prose and his
earnest moral tone. So, of this attempt to rec-
oncile the strength of Carritt's contention and
the Stoic-Kantian thesis, Maclagan says,
Stated thus explicitly, the argument perhaps
appears so patent a sophism as to seem
hardly worth stating at all. Yet, however
adverse our verdict on it may be, I think it is
worth stating: for I believe that even if it is a
sophism it none the less interprets how we
sometimes do lay a flattering unction to our

soul, with the surreptitiousness that is a con-
dition of success, when we engage in a policy
the effective prosecution of which depends on
the corruption of another's will.
('How Important is Moral Goodness?',
p. 217)
What is wrong with the attempted reconcilia-
tion is that the briber has to hope that his bribe
will succeed, and he must consider that that
outcome is to be preferred to, more highly
valued than, its alternatives. But that requires
that the moral goodness of the person bribed is
reckoned a small enough good for it to be out-
weighed by others.
Having insisted that his Stoic-Kantianism
need not be seen as a mere product of confu-
sion(s), and that it is in conflict with such a
view as Carritt's, Maclagan now offers argu-
mentative support for Bowman and Stoic-
Kantianism. Continuing with the guard-bribing
examples, it is all right (we can agree) to hope
that the guard may be persuaded, without
bribery, that what I want him to do is not
wrong and to do it. But if he is not so per-
suaded and I offer the bribe 'ought I not, from
a moral point of view, to heave a sigh of relief
if he proves himself incorruptible?' ('How
Important is Moral Goodness?', p. 219).
Maclagan argues that I ought:
It makes sense to say 'I ought to try to
persuade him that this is the right thing to do,
but if he is not persuaded he ought not to do
it'. But does it make sense to say 'I ought to
try to get him to do this though he still thinks
it wrong, but he of course ought not to do it'?
That is what I doubt. In the first case I can
without absurdity give my backing, as it
were, both to the other man and to myself: I
can properly say 'Go to it!' to both of us. In
the second case it seems that only a split per-
sonality could achieve this dual sympathy.
But if so, then unless I am prepared to say (as
I surely cannot) 'He ought to go against his
conscience' must I not surrender the position
that I ought to try to make him do so? And
633
MACLAGAN
what is this but to acknowledge that it is
better that anything should happen rather
than that the man's will should be corrupted?
('How Important is Moral Goodness?',
p. 219)
Maclagan sums up:
By way of conclusion to a very indecisive
discussion I would say this. If (on whatever
grounds) we were to hold that no action
should ever be taken that included in its inten-
tion the corruption of another will, or the
exploitation of an existing corruption, this
would seem to constitute the acceptance of a
moral rule that was neither manifestly purely
formal (like the rule that we should do our
duty) nor a disguised tautology (as the asser-
tion of the wrongness of murder, or stealing,
might be) not merely a statement of prima
fade obligation (like 'You oughtn't to kill,'
'You oughtn't to say what you know to be
false') but on the contrary was at once gen-
uinely instructive and binding in all situa-
tions. It would, perhaps, be the only moral
rule for which this could be claimed, and
conformity with it would be, I should say, at
least the 'hard core' of what is meant by
'showing a practical respect for persons' or
'treating persons as ends-in-themselves.'
What more might be involved in that con-
ception is not for exploration here.
('How Important is Moral Goodness?',
p. 224)
Nothing, then, is more important than moral
goodness. What, in Maclagan's view, should
the morally good will recognize as right (and,
being a good will, pursue)? In his writing he
particularly defends two principles.
First, there is altruism. He defends this on the
assumption that we have a duty to relieve
distress and promote the happiness of our
fellows, but he defines altruism negatively as
denying that a person has any moral obligation
or right to take account of her own pleasure,
happiness or distress, in determining what she
MACLAGAN
should do. Altruism then stands over against
views that a person has both some degree of
obligation or right to seek her own good and
some degree of obligation or right to aim at the
good of others. All others, with the agent herself
will call for such consideration: this is univer-
salism.
A duty of prudence might seem to undercut
altruism, but Maclagan regards prudence as a
sort of rationality and failures in prudence as a
kind of stupidity, rather than seeing prudence as
a duty to aim at our own happiness or failures
of prudence as failures in duty. If a moral
censure is fittingly present when a lack of
prudence is deplored, this is because we have a
duty to be sensible rather than silly.
But, Maclagan supposes a universalist to say,
if a person's happiness is a good, and if we
have an obligation to produce good, it will
surely not matter whose happiness it is: will
we not then each have an obligation to produce
the good which happiness is, in everyone or
anyone, ourselves not excluded? Maclagan
points out that this argument calls for the uni-
versalism of impartiality which is contrary to
'our moral perception in particular cases' ('Self
and Others', p. 112).
It is to a contention and a distinction, which
he applauds as he finds it in Grote, that he
attaches most weight: universalism is properly
a principle for us as we contemplate the ways
in which others treat one another, but is plainly
inapplicable to us as (first-person) moral agents
trying to determine for ourselves how we should
act. '[TJhis denial of all moral relevance to the
distinction between these two relationships
strikes me, as it obviously struck Grote, who
states the distinction in the most emphatic
terms, us utterly incredible' (ibid., p. 113).
No doubt it would be a very great achieve-
ment of a kind were a moral being even con-
sistently impartial as between himself and
others; yet it would deserve to be called only
quasi-moral. The positive immorality of
treating oneself as the center of the universe
of persons would indeed have been
634
overcome; but rather by a sort of feigning of
oneself to be outside it altogether than by
the recognition of one's proper place and
bearing within it. It is said that a local news-
paper once printed, as part of an obituary
notice, the words Tor over sixty years he
trod undeviatingly the narrow path that
divides vice from virtue'. Though sadly astray
from its intention in the context, this sentence
may perhaps be offered as a not inept descrip-
tion of the status of a life based on the tenets
of impartial Universalism.
('Self and Others', p. 114)
In two very different ways, this is perhaps
typical Maclagan. The weight of the argument
rests on what, in morality, seems to him, to his
moral perception or awareness, most certain.
And the gently humorous anecdote aims to
highlight his point. Whether we share
Maclagan's confident perception and so
whether the anecdote succeeds will determine
our attitude to this case for altruism.
The second principle particularly advocated
by Maclagan is that of respect for persons. In
his differentiating that principle from a princi-
ple of justice, he appeals to the principle of
altruism. A principle of justice as fairness, equal
consideration for all, fails to square with 'the
moral partiality towards the other that our
actual convictions exhibit ...' ('Respect for
Persons as a Moral Principle', p. 197).
Further, justice as impartiality is a 'negative
concept' (ibid.) - it would be consistent with this
justice to treat everyone to little, or to no, con-
sideration. But respect for persons requires that
we do give at least significant consideration to
all. If it is suggested that our giving ourselves
consideration can be taken for granted, so that
the principle of equal consideration for all can
take, as the standard for the degree or amount
of equal consideration to be given to everyone,
this consideration for ourselves, then altruism,
our moral 'bias in favour of others' (ibid., p.
198) will still not be accounted for; and, anyway,
our natural sense of our need for attention is not,
Maclagan thinks, a morally relevant insight.

Is our respect for persons due to the(ir) pos-
session of a rational will? It will be because the
possessing of a rational will is a necessary con-
dition for moral goodness, to which we attach
very high value, that we value rational will. But
not all persons exercise their rational will so as
to be good persons; yet the respect for persons
principle extends to them also. Moreover, if
we say that we value them for their rational will
which makes it yet possible for moral goodness
to belong to them, we seem committed to an
unacceptable implication, namely that a person
whose will is incurably corrupt may, for that
reason, be obliterated. In fact, our commitment
to respect for persons should lead us to hope
that no such incurable corruption will be found.
Considering Aristotelian friendship will better
lead us towards grounding our conviction that
persons are to be respected. Our attitude
towards our friend is not determined by a rel-
ativity (such as the equality of consideration
which determines justice) but by the impor-
tance of the person who is our friend. But
friendship (according to Aristotle) seems to be
affected by the worth of the one who is or has
been our friend, so that (though Aristotle thinks
we may do well to remain loyal even to an
erring friend) we need not retain a friendship
with a bad person. By contrast, an attitude of
respect for persons is not similarly contingent on
the other person's worth. Love which does not
alter when it alteration finds, and beyond
romantic love in its rationality, loves the other
simply as a person; this is the respect we are
looking for. The Greek biblical word for it, as
transliterated, is 'agape'. If that is what respect
is, what reason do we have for respecting?
Maclagan turns from attempted theological
justifications to appeal rather to our recognition
as we love: 'it is in Agape that we see the sig-
nificance of persons ...' (ibid., p. 208).
Maclagan maintains that agape is, for us, a fact
of experience, though not a universal and
unfailing feature of it: still, no more is 'the real
and vital sense of obligation; and that in no
way prevents our framing and using, as a fun-
damental element in our moral thinking, the
635
MACLAGAN
concept of the "categorical imperative"' (ibid.,
p. 209).
In an early paper ('Are There a priori
Concepts?', 1939), Maclagan wrote about pun-
ishment, particularly in its proper or merely
supposed relation to retribution. Retribution
requires that we can mete out a penalty which
is commensurate with guilt but there is no sense
which we can attach to the commensurability or
equivalence of a particular punishment vis-a-vis
moral guilt. It is moral guilt in the infringement
of a law, and not the infringement itself, which
will, properly, be matched by retribution. In
fact a person who deserves punishment at all
will have violated or set aside the general claim,
to consideration, which others possess, in
favour of 'I want'; such a person puts himself
outside membership of the realm of ends.
Accordingly, he cannot ask that he himself be
treated as a member of this mutuality. Given
that consideration, anything may be done to
him. A kind of mercy will limit our treatment
of him, and as we try to secure compliance with
our laws we shall set and impose penalties
according, for example, to the importance we
attach to the behaviour we prescribe.
In his book The Theological Frontiers of
Ethics (1961) Maclagan continues to appeal to
the facts of moral experience, as he takes them
to be; and he argues that a duty, in its being nec-
essary (i.e. for a moral agent in her circum-
stances), cannot depend on the contingent will
or command of anyone: any will, even God's,
is contingently what it is. Nevertheless, when we
experience duty as making a demand on us,
while we should not try to undergird the
demand as being obligatory by appeal to God's
will, we will find it suggestive, prompting per-
ceptions, to see the moral law as God. This
notwithstanding the problem of God's being
personal as the moral law is not. Although he
gives brief attention to doctrines of analogy,
Maclagan acknowledges that while he is led to
identify God and the moral law, the identifica-
tion is problematic. Perhaps attention to double
aspect theories about the mind/body problem,
or discussion of the compatibility of particle
MACLAGAN
and wave theories of light which were current
at the time could have helped here.
Maclagan's local influence, in Glasgow, was
not only on those students who came into
academic philosophical work themselves (such
as Maclagan's successor in the chair, R.S.
DOWNIE, who acknowledges (1969, p. 10) a
debt to Maclagan, or Neil MacCormick) but
also on the large numbers who took the first
level moral philosophy course, comprising one-
third of the work of an academic year. Most of
these students, like most arts degree students in
the Scottish universities of the time, were
required to take a philosophy course, and moral
philosophy was generally the largest class,
usually about two hundred strong. Before
Maclagan, Glasgow had had some moral phi-
losophy professors who not only introduced
their class to rudimentary philosophy about
morality, but recommended, and occasionally
fostered, moral seriousness. Glasgow's larger
undergraduate classes, notoriously, could be
rowdy; to talk about, let alone recommend,
moral seriousness required outstanding lectur-
ing. Maclagan did not offer the high-flown
uplift of some of his predecessors; often his
points were made in relation to humorously
familiar circumstances and by way of deft jokes;
the purpose was philosophical education rather
than moral inspiration; his courses were lucid
introductions to the subject; and a large pro-
portion of those from the west of Scotland who
took an arts degree in these years remembered
him and his lectures decades later. There was
moral seriousness in all this but it was implicit
rather than overt.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Are There a priori Concepts?', Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society', suppl. vol. 18
(1939), pp. 55-82.
'Punishment and Retribution', Philosophy',
vol. 14 (1939), pp. 281-98.
'On Being Sure of One's Duty', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 1, (1950), pp. 35-49.
'Self and Others: A Defence of Altruism',
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 4 (1954), pp.
636
109-27.
'How Important is Moral Goodness?', Mind,
vol. 64 (1955), pp. 213-25.
'Respect for Persons as a Moral Principle',
Philosophy, vol. 35 (1960), pp. 193-217,
289-305.
The Theological Frontiers of Ethics (1961)
Other Relevant Works
Castaneda, Hector-Neri (ed.),
'Autobiographical Reflections', in Action,
Knowledge and Reality: Critical Studies in
Honor of Wilfrid Sellars (Indianapolis,
1975).
Downie, R.S. and Elizabeth Telfer, Respect
for Persons (1969).
Joseph Houston
MACMURRAY, John (1891-1976)
John Macmurray was born in Maxwelton,
Kirkcudbrightshire on 16 February 1891 and
died in Edinburgh on 21 June 1976.
Macmurray grew up in a strict Calvinist house-
hold and was educated in Aberdeen at the
Grammar School and at Robert Gordon's
College. In 1913 he graduated with an MA in
classics and geology from Glasgow University.
Upon graduating he had already acquired a
place as Snell Exhibitioner and Newlands
Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, where he
was to study Greats under the tutelage of A.D.
LINDSAY. Macmurray's studies were interrupted
when war broke out and he enlisted as a
nursing orderly with the Royal Army Medical
Corps, later joining the Queen's Own Cameron
Highlanders as Lieutenant. He married
Elizabeth (Betty) Hyde Campbell, sister of an
old school friend, while on leave in 1916.
Macmurray survived the Battle of the Somme
and the Battle of Arras, and for his bravery he
received the Military Cross.

After the armistice Macmurray returned to
Balliol College to sit his postponed examina-
tions in Greats; he then began his philosophical
career as John Locke Scholar of Mental
Philosophy (1919). In the same year he obtained
a lectureship in philosophy at the University of
Manchester (1919-21). This was followed by a
professorship in philosophy at the University of
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (1921-2), where
Macmurray campaigned for improved housing
for impoverished black South Africans. He
returned to Balliol College, Oxford as fellow
and classical tutor and Jowett Lecturer
(1922-8), becoming an elected member of the
Aristotelian Society in 1924. Macmurray was
appointed to the post of Grote Professor of
Mind and Logic at University College London
(UCL, 1928-44), where he recruited A.R.C.
DUNCAN as a colleague. In 1936 Macmurray
was granted leave to give the Terry Lectures in
Yale and the Deems Lectures in New York.
During the 1930s he also made a number of
BBC radio broadcasts and contributed to the
efforts of the Christian left. Macmurray's
engagement with Marxism was influenced by
Karl POLANYI, who lodged temporarily with
him in 1940. When students and staff relocated
to Aberystwyth and Bangor, for the duration of
World War II, Macmurray remained in London
(with a home base in Jordans, a Quaker village
in Buckinghamshire) researching the possibili-
ties for Anglo-Soviet relations and assisting in
the foundation of the Common Wealth Party.
For some of this time Macmurray was called on
by the Academic Assistance Council to appraise
the philosophy of refugee scholars, one of
whom was Theodor Adorno. Around this time
he also enjoyed lengthy philosophical discus-
sions with Gabriel Marcel and Martin Buber. In
1944 he gave the Upton Lectures on The
Problem of Evil' in Manchester College, Oxford
before leaving UCL, where he was succeeded by
AJ. AYER. Macmurray succeeded A.E. TAYLOR
to the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh
University and later served as Dean of the
Faculty of Arts. It was here that he attracted
vast numbers of students to his lectures and
637
MACMURRAY
became firm friends with Norman KEMP SMITH.
In 1953 and 1954 Macmurray gave the Gifford
Lectures at Glasgow University, where an
honorary LL D was conferred on him. His time
in Edinburgh involved collaboration with his
friend Kenneth Barnes regarding holistic edu-
cation and the opening of the Wennington
School, Lancashire as well as a campaign to
reopen Newbattle Abbey, a college for mature
students.
On his retirement in 1958, Macmurray
returned to Jordans and officially joined the
Society of Friends. His retirement began with a
lecture tour of the USA, this time under the
auspices of the Danforth Foundation, and in
1960 he gave the Forwood Lectures at the
University of Liverpool. A few years later he
heard that the Gifford Lectures were to be pub-
lished in paperback and translated for a Spanish
edition. In 1970 he returned to Edinburgh to
nurse his elderly mother, who was 105 when
she died. Macmurray's health had been deteri-
orating for some time and he died three years
later at the age of eighty-five. After his crema-
tion in Edinburgh his wife returned his ashes to
Jordans.
An obituary in The Times noted that, while
Macmurray was a talented and remarkable
individual, he 'did not measure easily during his
lifetime' (Anon., p. 17), and so his philosophi-
cal contribution is difficult to appraise. He is
best known for his Gifford Lectures delivered
under the title 'The Form of the Personal' and
later published in two volumes as The Self as
Agent (1957) and Persons in Relation (1961).
These volumes represent the culmination of a
life's work and the elucidation of a thesis that
had taxed him since the 1920s. According to
Macmurray, philosophy is 'reflection in search
of an understanding of the wholeness of imme-
diate experience' (Interpreting the Universe,
p. 34).
The first few chapters of The Self as Agent are
concerned with the problems inherent in
Cartesian dualism and their persistence in
Western philosophy. With regard to addressing
these problems, Macmurray claims that Kant
MACMURRAY
heads in the right direction with his assertion
that reason is practical. Macmurray builds on
this, stating that 'we should substitute the "I
do" for the "I think" as our starting-point and
centre of reference' (The Self as Agent, p. 84).
The proper place for thought, Macmurray
contends, is as a necessary, secondary and deriv-
ative component of action; that is, there is an
inherent rhythm of withdrawal and return from
action into reflection and back into action. In
addition and in anticipation of G.E.M.
ANSCOMBE'S later work, Macmurray insists that
action is intentional in the sense of being goal-
directed and guided by reasons, in contrast with
an event that simply happens.
A further corollary of Macmurray's asser-
tion that action is primary is the assertion that
our emotions are crucial. Action requires moti-
vation and, according to Macmurray's earlier
work, 'all motives belong to our emotional life'
(Interpreting the Universe, p. 28). In his work
on the emotions Macmurray made a number of
claims which, at the time, were regarded as
contentious; interestingly, these claims are
accepted today. In particular, Macmurray's
effort to counter the traditional opposition
between reason and emotion evolves into an
account of the rationality of emotion, in terms
of its appropriateness to its object. In Reason
and Emotion (1935) Macmurray argues, in an
Aristotelian vein, for an emotional education.
Emotional knowledge, gained through educa-
tion, enables us to grasp the intrinsic worth of
an object, whereas intellectual knowledge
concerns the object's instrumental value. The
former makes it possible for the agent to select
a desirable outcome, while the latter permits the
agent to adopt an acceptable method. Both
method and outcome are chosen in order to
realize the agent's intention; so, according to
Macmurray, the agent's action is more likely to
realize her intention if both intellect and
emotions are educated.
Moreover, since to act is to act on some-
thing, the postulation of the Self as agent implies
the relation of the Self to something other-than-
the-Self. Macmurray's work in Persons in
638
Relation takes this idea forward, adding the
claim that to be a person is to be in relation with
other persons. In support of this, Macmurray
investigates the carer-infant relationship, stating
'the infant has a need which is not simply bio-
logical but personal, a need to be in touch with
the mother, and in conscious perceptual relation
with her' (Persons in Relation, p. 49). While the
human baby requires an adult for her survival,
the relationship between child and carer is more
than this; it is a relation of persons. A defining
characteristic of personal relations, for
Macmurray, is the impulse to communicate,
an impulse which child and carer share. As this
communication develops, rather than teaching
the child to be independent, the successful carer
equips the child for a life of interdependence. In
other words, the carer trains the child in ways
of relating to others and in behaviour deemed
appropriate by her society and/or community.
Macmurray's insistence that persons 'are con-
stituted by their mutual relation to one another'
(Persons in Relation, p. 24) leads him to dis-
tinguish between societies and communities and
to tease out the ethical implications of personal
relations. A society, he suggests, is a group of
people brought together for a specific purpose,
such as sports clubs and trade unions. In a com-
munity, however, the relation of persons is
regarded as an end itself. Society and commu-
nity are not mutually exclusive, since the former
will contain elements of the latter and vice versa.
Nonetheless, a primary distinguishing charac-
teristic is that, while persons in a society are
related to one another in terms of their func-
tions, in a community persons are related to one
another as persons. To relate to another person
as a person is to treat them as an equal, regard-
less of functional and/or biological inequalities,
and to respect their freedom to exercise their
agency. Macmurray's account of equality
includes material equality and in Constructive
Democracy (1943) the socialism informing this
principle conies to the fore. In another early
work, Macmurray states that the 'primary con-
dition of freedom, to which all other condi-
tions are related, lies in the character and quality

of human relations' (Conditions of Freedom,
p. 31). The freedom to exercise our agency,
then, is coupled with a responsibility not to
impinge upon another agent's freedom. For
Macmurray, actions that treat other persons
as objects are irrational, since, he states, 'I exist
as an individual only in personal relation to
other individuals' (Persons in Relation, p. 28).
In essence, it seems that his account of morality
is closely related to Kant's categorical impera-
tive (whereby others are to be treated as ends
and not as mere means); however, in contrast
to Kant, Macmurray is opposed to what he
sees as the burden of duty.
At the heart of Macmurray's moral philoso-
phy is the assertion that: 'a morally right action
is an action which intends community' (Persons
in Relation, p. 119). To intend community is to
act in such a way as to promote positive personal
relations. Macmurray defines such relations as
friendships, akin to Aristotle's perception of
perfect friendship. Macmurray argues that the
intention to create and sustain community is all-
inclusive, since community is based merely on
our common humanity. Moreover, religion, he
states boldly, 'is the only means by which this can
be achieved' (The Structure of Religious
Experience, p. 63). Here he calls for a radical
separation of religious belief and religious faith,
since the former implies assent to creeds and
dogma, whereas the latter is an attitude of trust
in and care for other persons. In this respect,
Macmurray's view of religion is one that accen-
tuates practical efficacy and emotional sincerity,
thus guarding against utopianism.
Even so, Macmurray's Calvinistic upbringing
does not entirely desert him. While he laments
the divisiveness of doctrinal distinctions and
criticizes institutionalized Christianity for being
overly individualistic and otherworldly, he
argues for a revitalized 'Christian' community.
Macmurray focuses on the reported life and
teachings of Jesus and claims that they contain
a unique insight into the significance of human
relations and the practical principles necessary
to sustain them. In particular, Macmurray high-
lights Jesus's sayings regarding faith, fear, for-
639
MACMURRAY
giveness and love. According to Macmurray,
faith is 'an attitude of mind, primarily though
not exclusively directly [sic] towards persons,
which is regularly contrasted with fear'
(Religion, Art and Science, p. 72). While fear
prevents mutuality and reciprocity, love creates
community, and forgiveness sustains it. Despite
Macmurray's claim to the contrary, it is not
evident that he is highlighting a unique vision in
Jesus's teaching on relationships. Moreover,
Macmurray's account of religion is rather
general and, while his promotion of a sort of
natural theology avoids the exclusiveness of
revelatory accounts, it is not clear that his philo-
sophical concept of the person requires religion.
Nevertheless, in the final chapter of The Self as
Agent, Macmurray argues that his emphasis
on action leads to the conjecture of a supreme
Agent, and, in the final chapter of Persons in
Relation, he argues that the intention towards
universal community entails the postulation of
a universal and personal Other. These attempts
to push the conclusions of his work in the direc-
tion of belief in God are the least convincing
aspects of his philosophy, although his con-
ception of God is sufficiently vague to allow for
a vast diversity of interpretations.
Macmurray's impact amongst his profes-
sional colleagues was greater in America and
Canada than in Britain. This was partly due to
the eclecticism of his writings and his popular
appeal, but also due to his resistance to logical
positivism and what he saw as an overempha-
sis on the philosophy of language. The broad
range of subject areas with which Macmurray's
work engages renders his concept of the person
accessible to a variety of fields, but it inevitably
leaves loose ends. The Gifford Lectures, for
instance, give the impression of presenting the
reader with a philosophical system: for
example, religion is contrasted with art and
science and the Hebrew consciousness is con-
trasted with the Greek and the Roman, but
these triads are strained. Similarly, Dorothy
EMMET'S review of The Self as Agent criticizes
Macmurray's imprecise use of the terms
'positive' and 'negative' when speaking of action
MACMURRAY
and thought. In its support, Macmurray refers to
his work as a 'pioneering venture' (The Self as
Agent, p. 13), and D.D. RAPHAEL'S review of
Persons in Relation praises its insightful and
comprehensive analysis of human interaction.
Macmurray states: 'the philosopher should
reveal himself ... as one who has grasped the
significance of human life and achieved the
ability ... to understand how it should be lived'
(Interpreting the Universe, p. 8). One testament
to his success here is his influence in psychology.
In the 1950s and 1960s an Aberdeen-based
reading group, which included Ronald Gregor
Smith and R.D. LAING, studied Macmurray's
books. Psychologists ranging from Harry
Guntrip in the 1960s to James Jones in the
1990s have borrowed from Macmurray's
analysis of the carer-child relationship. In
addition, current concentration on more inte-
grated concepts of personhood in Susan
Parsons's feminist theology, Frank Kirkpatrick's
work on community and Stanley Harrison's
philosophy has resulted in renewed interest in
Macmurray's work. Furthermore, British Prime
Minister Tony Blair claims that Macmurray's
writings have influenced him. While this has
prompted wider reading of Macmurray's
books, it is apparent that Blair's policies and
Macmurray's philosophy have little in
common. Macmurray's emphasis is socialist
and, while he speaks often of community, he is
concerned with universal equality rather than
excessive communitarianism. Moreover,
Macmurray maintains that community can be
served but not formed by politics; community
is a religious pursuit. For this reason A.R.C.
DUNCAN refers to Macmurray's work as a 'reli-
gious philosophy' (Duncan, pp. 118-19).
Notwithstanding the opacity of his conception
of 'real' religion, Macmurray's critique of ide-
alized religion and his emphasis on other-
centred action remain pertinent in today's
climate of global interdependence and religious
pluralism. The fundamental tenets of his philo-
sophical theory are incisive, and their promise
for understanding embodiment and the ethics of
personal relations is beginning to be recognized.
640
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Freedom in the Modern World (1932; repr.
with an Introduction by Harry Carson,
Atlantic Highlands, 1992).
Interpreting the Universe (1933; repr. with an
Introduction by A.R.C. Duncan, Atlantic
Highlands, 1996).
The Philosophy of Communism (1933).
Creative Society: A Study of the Relation of
Christianity to Communism (1935).
Reason and Emotion (1935; 2nd edn, 1962;
repr. with an Introduction by John E.
Costello SJ, Atlantic Highlands, 1992; repr.
1995).
The Structure of Religious Experience (1936).
The Clue to History (193S).
The Boundaries of Science: A Study in the
Philosophy of Psychology (1939).
A Challenge to the Churches (1941).
Constructive Democracy (1943).
Conditions of Freedom (1950; repr. with an
Introduction by Walter Jeffko, Atlantic
Highlands, 1993).
The Self as Agent (1957; repr. with an
Introduction by Stanley M. Harrison,
Atlantic Highlands, 1991; repr. 1995).
Persons in Relation (1961; repr. with an
Introduction by Frank G. Kirkpatrick,
Atlantic Highlands, 1991; repr. 1995).
Religion, Art and Science: A Study of the
Reflective Activities in Man (Liverpool,
1961).
Search for Reality in Religion (1965).
Other Relevant Works
'Is Art a Form of Apprehension or a Form of
Expression?', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 5 (1925),
pp. 173-89.
'Government by the People', Journal of
Philosophical Studies, vol. 2 (1927), pp.
532^43.
(with H.G. Wood), Christianity and
Communism (1934).
Christianity and the Social Revolution, ed. J.
Lewis (1935).
'The Dualism of Mind and Matter',

Philosophy, vol. 10 (1935), pp. 264-78.
Ye Are My Friends (1943; repr. 1972); repr.
with To Save From Fear (1979).
Idealism Against Religion (1944).
'Some Reflections on the Analysis of
Language', Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 1
(1951), pp. 319-37.
'Prolegomena to a Christian Ethic', Scottish
Journal of Theology, vol. 9 (1956), pp.
1-13.
To Save From Fear (1964); repr. with Ye Are
My Friends (1979).
The Philosophy of Jesus (1973; repr. 1977).
Further Reading
Anon., The Times, 23 June 1976, p. 17.
Costello, John E., John Macmurray: A
Biography (Edinburgh, 2002).
Duncan, A.R.C., On the Nature of Persons
(New York, 1990).
Emmet, Dorothy, Review of The Self as
Agent, Journal of Theological Studies, vol.
9 (1958), pp. 410-12.
Guntrip, Harry, Personality Structure and
Human Interaction (1961).
Harrison, Stanley M. (ed.), Philosophy and
Theology, vol. 6, no. 4 (1992).
Hood, Adam, Baillie, Oman and Macmurray:
Experience and Religious Belief (2003).
Jones, James W., Religion and Psychology in
Transition: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and
Theology (New Haven, 1996).
Kirkpatrick, Frank G., The Ethics of
Community (Oxford, 2001).
Lam, Elizabeth, 'Does Macmurray
Understand Marx?', Journal of Religion,
vol. 20 (1940), pp. 47-65.
Mclntosh, Esther, 'Reason versus Emotion:
Redressing the Balance', Practical
Philosophy, vol. 4, no. 2 (July 2001), pp.
28-32.
O'Connor, Daniel D., 'John Macmurray:
Primacy of the Personal', International
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 4 (1964), pp.
464-84.
Parsons, Susan, 'The Relevance of
Macmurray for a Feminist Theology of
641
McNABB
Action', in David Fergusson and Nigel
Dower (eds), John Macmurray: Critical
Perspectives (New York, 2002), pp.
141-58.
Raphael, D. D., Review of Persons in
Relation, Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 15
(1965), pp. 74-6.
Esther Mclntosh
MacNABB, Donald George Cecil (1905-91)
Donald George Cecil MacNabb was born in
Masnyo, Burma on 16 October 1905 and died
on 11 January 1991. His father was Lt Col.
Donald John Campbell MacNabb and his
mother was Winifred Pember. Donald
MacNabb began his education at Eton College
and was granted admittance into Trinity
College, Oxford in 1924. In 1926 he was
awarded a first class in Oxford's first public
examinations and in 1928 he was awarded an
upper second class in his finals. He took his MA
in philosophy at Oxford in 1933 and became
fellow and lecturer at Pembroke College in
1935, serving as senior tutor for many years
until his retirement in 1969. He served as
emeritus fellow from November of 1969 until
his death in 1991. MacNabb was a member of
the Aristotelian Society from 1937 to 1990.
MacNabb is best known for David Hume:
His Theory of Knowledge and Morality (1951)
and his article on 'Hume' in the Encyclopedia
of Philosophy (1967). He interprets Hume as
attempting to develop 'a truly experimental
science of human nature' through the
'Newtonian experimental method' ('David
Hume', p. 75). On this account, Hume's work
is limited by continuing the 'Platonic' tradition
of regarding ideas as non-material mental 'rep-
resentations' of things in the world. Hume's
work rests upon three principal 'tools' of
inquiry: (1) his 'microscope', (2) his 'razor' and
McNABB
(3) his 'fork'. His microscope directs us to find
an impression for every idea; his razor demands
that whenever an idea lacks an impression, it
has no meaning (functioning as a kind of posi-
tivist Verification principle'); and his fork asserts
that 'relations of ideas' and 'matters of fact...
exhaust the field of discoverable truth' (ibid.,
p. 79). For MacNabb, Hume misused his
microscope, for instead of conducting psycho-
logical experiments aimed at evoking the actual
experience of an impression, he ended up exam-
ining the experiences as ideas of ideas rather
than the impressions themselves.
MacNabb contends that Hume's scepticism
poses no serious threat to common sense, math-
ematics, morality or the experimental sciences.
It serves instead as a challenge to metaphysics,
and more particularly as an 'antidote to dog-
matism and overcertainty of every kind' (ibid.,
p. 83f.). Hume's theory of action is interpreted
as a theory of 'dispositions', i.e. 'tendencies'
towards certain kinds of action. This disposi-
tional reading helps explain how approval and
disapproval or praise and blame serve as
grounds for action. In his earlier work
MacNabb called these dispositional states 'atti-
tudes', a term that he later called a 'miscatego-
rization'. He also noted that Hume's emphasis
on 'conventions' rather than contracts as the
basis of justice anticipated AUSTIN'S work on
performatives. The principal lesson that Hume
tries to leave us, claims MacNabb, are 'undog-
matic moderation' and a calm acceptance of the
realities of common, everyday life.
D.G.C. MacNabb was widely regarded as
one of the leading analytic philosophers of his
day. He met regularly with Isaiah BERLIN, J.L.
Austin, A.J. AYER, Stuart HAMPSHIRE and
Donald MACKINNON in Berlin's rooms at All
Souls College. MacNabb is still regarded as an
authority on Hume, and his work is widely
cited.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Phenomenalism', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 41 (1940-^41), pp.
67-90.
642
The Causal Argument for Physical Objects,
Part IIP, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 19 (1945), pp. 77-100.
David Hume: His Theory of Knowledge and
Morality (1951; Hamden, Connecticut,
1966).
'Hume on Induction', Revue Internationale de
philosophie, vol. 6 (1952), pp. 184-98.
(Ed. and intro.), A Treatise of Human
Nature. Being an Attempt to Introduce the
Experimental Method of Reasoning into
Moral Subjects. Book I: Of the
Understanding (1962; repr. 1982).
'David Hume', in Paul Edwards (ed.),
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York,
1967), vol. 4, pp. 74-90.
Other Relevant Works
Hardie, W.F.R., The Paradox of
Phenomenalism', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 46 (1945-6), pp.
127-54.
Loeb, Louis, Stability and Justification in
Hume's Treatise (New York, 2002).
Penelhum, Terence, 'Hume's Theory of the
Self Revisited', Dialogue, vol. 14
(September 1975), pp. 389-409.
Philip Rose
McNEILLY, Francis Stewart (1926-86)
Francis Stewart McNeilly was born in Glasgow
on 12 December 1926 and died in Fife. He was
educated at Paisley Grammar School and the
University of Glasgow, where he took a prize in
ethics in 1946 and first class honours in phi-
losophy in 1948. From Glasgow McNeilly went
to Queen's College, Oxford, where, despite
losing two years to illness, he completed the
BPhil in 1953 prior to taking up a position as
lecturer in philosophy at the University of
Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. In 1957

McNeilly returned to Scotland for an appoint-
ment as lecturer in moral philosophy at St
Andrews. He was promoted to senior lecturer in
1965 in recognition of the importance of his
scholarship on Hobbes, and then to reader in
political philosophy in 1969. McNeilly remained
at St Andrews for the duration of his career,
serving as Chair of the Department of Philosophy
prior to his death from illness in 1986.
McNeilly is best known for his work on
Hobbes. His 1968 book Anatomy of Leviathan
was one of the first to apply the methods of
analytic philosophy to the interpretation of
Hobbes's Leviathan. In this, it is not only a
classic in its own right, but a direct ancestor of
the interpretive assumptions that currently
dominate Anglo-American philosophy, as rep-
resented in works such as Gregory Kavka's
Hobbesian Moral Theory and Jean Hampton's
Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition.
McNeilly argued that to understand
Hobbes's views on politics, one must first
understand his views on methodology. These in
turn require one to understand Hobbes's views
on the nature of language, mind and human
psychology - views which, according to
McNeilly, changed significantly between the
periods in which he wrote the Elements of Law
and De cive, on the one hand, and Leviathan,
on the other. According to McNeilly, the
Hobbes of Leviathan had come to espouse a
different view of truth and scientific method
than he had employed in De cive and Elements
of Law, and so had come to think in a differ-
ent way about politics and the elements of
human psychology. In particular, McNeilly
argued that by the time he wrote Leviathan
Hobbes had come to see politics as a deductive
system akin to geometry and most appropri-
ately investigated by the methods of mathe-
matics rather than those of observational
science. According to McNeilly, the Hobbes of
Leviathan, unlike the Hobbes of earlier works,
treats observations about human behaviour as
potentially confirming or disconfirming of the
concepts one develops for rational deduction,
but not as a source of conclusions in and of
643
McNEILLY
themselves. This developmental view led
McNeilly to his most controversial thesis: that
the argument of Leviathan (in contrast to that
of earlier works) does not rely on psychological
egoism (the assumption that every person's chief
end is his own well-being). McNeilly argued: (1)
that Hobbes did not assume psychological
egoism in constructing his argument for a
common power; and (2) that an assumption of
psychological egoism is not necessary for
Hobbes's argument. According to McNeilly,
close analysis of the argument Hobbes actually
develops in Leviathan shows that the argument
for a common power does not and need not rest
on an assumption of psychological egoism.
McNeilly argued that neither the impetus to a
Hobbesian social contract (the desire to avoid
a war of all against all) nor its content (an
exchange of all one's powers for a sovereign
common power) can be explained by reference
to anticipation of violence under conditions of
uncertainty without assuming psychological
egoism. Consequently, glory, unlimited wants
and natural bellicosity are argued to play a very
limited role in generating Hobbes's conclusions.
Instead, McNeilly emphasized uncertainty and
the limitations of reason in a context of diver-
gent meanings and values.
In a 1970 article David Gauthier argued that
McNeilly's argument for the rationality of non-
egoistic persons adopting violence towards one
another in a Hobbesian state of nature is
invalid. McNeilly conceded that as presented in
Anatomy of Leviathan the argument suffers
from the defects Gauthier identifies. However,
he argued that a non-egoistic argument for the
disposition to war can be reconstructed using
the concept of a pre-emptive opportunity. This
reconstruction does not yield the conclusion
that rational individuals will adopt violence,
but McNeilly insisted that it does yield the con-
clusion that non-egoistic individuals will tend
toward violence and this is all that is needed to
establish the inevitability of a war of all against
all within the state of nature.
The issue in the exchange between Gauthier
and McNeilly was whether it is possible to con-
McNEILLY
struct a valid argument from Hobbes's state of
nature to a war of all against all without resort-
ing to psychological egoism. The issue was not
whether, as a matter of interpretation, Hobbes
himself should be understood as endorsing the
egoistic or non-egoistic version. In contrast,
Gregory Kavka argued in a 1983 piece that it is
not plausible to argue that Hobbes endorsed the
views McNeilly attributed to him. Kavka's
worry centred not on the move from a state of
nature to a state of war (which he took McNeilly
to have broadly gotten right), but on the move
from a state of war to civil society.
According to Kavka, McNeilly's argument
for the necessity of a social contract allows too
much room for non-absolutist sovereigns. In
this, Kavka argued that McNeilly not only
ignored an important aspect of Hobbes's own
argument, but left the most central part of
Hobbes's conclusion - only an absolutist sover-
eign can serve the function assigned it by the
social contract - unsupported. In this criticism,
McNeilly's mistake is moving too quickly from
a state of nature to civil society. Kavka charged
that this underestimates the importance of the
state of war in establishing Hobbes's ultimate
aim, which is to show that only an absolutist sov-
ereign can remedy the problems of a state of
nature. However, it is not clear that McNeilly's
view underestimates the importance of the state
of war as opposed to simply focusing his atten-
tion on the stages of Hobbes's argument that he
took to have been most grievously misrepre-
sented in recent work: the degeneration of a
state of nature into a state of war.
McNeilly also made important contributions
in moral and legal philosophy. His views in these
areas are distinct from those he advocated in
his interpretation of Hobbes, although some
common themes can be observed. For example,
McNeilly argued in the context of the
Hart-Devlin debate that although it is possible
to separate out questions of what makes for a
good application of moral theory to law from
questions of what makes for a good moral
theory, such a separation can only clarify dis-
agreements about value, not eliminate them.
644
According to McNeilly, this is demonstrated by
Hart's own endorsement of the harm principle.
Although individuals might agree that the harm
principle is a good application of morality to law,
they will almost certainly disagree over what
constitutes harm if their preferred moral theories
diverge. Consequently, although distinguishing
between criteria for an application of moral
theory and criteria for a moral theory can help
to clarify what is at issue in disagreements over
the limits of law, the disagreements themselves
will remain.
In the context of debate over whether the
practice of promising implies the existence of
objective moral standards, McNeilly argued
that although it is essential to promises that
uttering them gives the utterer a reason to act as
promised, what that reason is, or how that
reason comes to motivate the utterer is not a
proper part of what makes for a promise. Here,
as in his Hobbes interpretation, McNeilly
focused on the structure of practical reason and
its relationship to linguistic practice on the one
hand, and beliefs about value on the other.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Egoism in Hobbes', Philosophical Quarterly,
vol. 16 (July 1966), pp. 193-206.
'Immorality and the Law', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 66 (1965-6), pp
167-82.
Anatomy of Leviathan (1968).
'Promises De-Moralized', Philosophical
Review, vol. 81 (1972), pp 63-81.
'The Enforceability of Law', Nous, vol. 2
(February 1968), pp. 47-64.
Other Relevant Works
'Competing Criteria', Mind, vol. 66 (July
1957), pp. 289-307.
'Pre-Moral Appraisals', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 8 (April 1958), pp. 97-111.
'Pre-Emptive Violence: A Reply to Gauthier',
Inquiry, vol. 15 (1972), pp. 330-41.
Further Reading
Cranston, Maurice, 'Hobbes Anatomized',

Times Literary Supplement, no. 3474, 26
September 1968, p 1073.
Dixon, Keith, 'On Teaching Moral
Procedures', British Journal of Educational
Studies, vol. 16 (February 1968), pp.
17-29.
Gauthier, David P., 'Yet Another Hobbes',
Inquiry, vol. 12 (1970), pp. 449-65.
Kavka, Gregory S., 'Hobbes's War of All
Against All', Ethics, vol. 93 (January
1983), pp. 291-310.
Mathie, William, 'Reason and Rhetoric in
Hobbes's "Leviathan"', Interpretation, vol.
14 (May-September 1986), pp. 281-98.
Orwin, Clifford, 'On the Sovereign
Authorization', Political Theory, vol. 3
(February 1975), pp. 26-44.
Robins, Michael, 'The Primacy of Promising',
Mind, vol. 85 (July 1976), pp. 321-40.
Cindy L. Holder
McPHERSON, Thomas Herdman (1925-)
Thomas McPherson was born in Dunedin,
New Zealand on 30 July 1925 and was
educated at Otago University (1942-8; BA,
1946, MA, with thesis on Butler, 1947) and
University College Oxford (1948-50; BPhil,
with thesis on God's existence, 1950). He has
worked at Bangor (assistant lecturer, 1951;
lecturer, 1953) and Cardiff (senior lecturer,
1963; reader, 1968; personal chair, 1971; early
retirement as emeritus professor, 1983).
McPherson has worked mainly in philosophy
of religion, where he has produced three books,
and also in social and political philosophy, pro-
ducing one book in each, together with a scat-
tering of articles in these subjects and in phi-
losophy of language, ethics and metaphysics.
His approach in his books is often avowedly
introductory, and this combines with the influ-
ence of mid-century linguistic philosophy to
645
McPHERSON
making him more interested in clarifying
concepts and arguments than in explicitly
drawing conclusions, and his work has been
praised for fairly presenting both sides of an
argument, but also criticized for sometimes sac-
rificing depth for breadth of coverage. His
outlook is summed up in The Philosophy of
Religion (p. 5): 'The interesting part of philos-
ophy - and the peculiarly philosophical part -
is the activity of getting things clear.'
A primary theme for McPherson has been the
place of reason in religion: the traditional argu-
ments for God's existence (the ontological
argument and those from a First Cause and
from design) as well as arguments from
morality and from religious experience get fairly
extended treatment. That from design in fact
gets a whole book to itself (and an article) in
which among other things he discusses the logic
of the argument in terms of a distinction
between 'design-A' (order) and 'design-B'
(purpose) (for a criticism of his treatment of
design-A, see SWINBURNE). All these arguments
he thinks are inadequate to convince an unbe-
liever, but might clarify or strengthen the belief
of a believer. This has been criticized (O.R.
JONES) for supposing an invalid argument could
strengthen a belief, but McPherson may mean
it is the premises, not the argument, that do the
strengthening; the complexity of the eye, say,
may not prove a designer exists, but may further
convince a believer of its designer's ingenuity or
beneficence. Claims to knowledge require
grounds, but mere beliefs do not, he thinks,
and he declines to go into what are the grounds
for religious belief. The influence of linguistic
philosophy is also seen when McPherson dis-
cusses the existence of God in the article so
named (1950). Finally in this general area he
has some interesting discussion of the relations
between science and the arts and science and
theology (Philosophy and Religious Belief, pp.
103-44; Argument from Design, pp. 63-8).
In an early elaborate two-part article
McPherson claims that apparent inconsistencies
in Butler's ethics can be largely avoided by
seeing a development from the Sermons to the
McPHERSON
more theological Analogy (and Dissertation on
Virtue), the main difference being that con-
science is equated with reason in the Sermons
but is God-given and known by immediate intu-
ition in the Analogy. In another ethical article
he brings out the importance of the moral
patient as against the moral agent and the
impartial spectator.
Social Philosophy (1970) begins by discussing
the relations between its subject and social
science, whose development alongside natural
science he thinks was inhibited by the individ-
ualism of philosophers like Hobbes and Locke.
Attributing conceptual clarification and
methodological analysis to social philosophy
McPherson treats some main examples,
claiming to raise questions rather than answer
them, and ends with a discussion of Marxism,
which he thinks is useful concerning particular
investigations but incoherent if taken as a
whole.
Political Obligation (1967) is more contro-
versial, for McPherson claims that the notion of
political obligation is dispensable. We can query
particular obligations, he thinks, such as that to
pay taxes, but there can be no general ground
for obeying the state, any more than for a club
member to obey the club's rules, which it
follows from his membership that he should
obey. But this analogy is hardly uncontroversial.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Philosophy of Religion (1965).
Political Obligation (1967).
Social Philosophy (1970).
The Argument from Design (1972).
Philosophy and Religious Belief'(1974).
Other Relevant Works
The Development of Bishop Butler's Ethics',
Philosophy, vol. 23 (1948), pp. 313-31;
vol. 24 (1949), pp. 3-22.
The Existence of God', Mind, vol. 59 (1950),
pp. 545-50.
'Positivism and Religion', Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, vol. 10
(1954), pp. 319-31.
646
'Philosophy and Language', The Church
Quarterly Review, vol. 156 (1955), pp.
158-69.
'Reason in Religion', The Twentieth Century,
vol. 161 (1957), pp. 155-67.
The Argument from Design', Philosophy,
vol. 32 (1957), pp. 219-28.
'Religion and Rationality', The Church
Quarterly Review, vol. 161 (I960), pp.
200-12.
'Punishment: Definition and Justification',
Analysis, vol. 28 (1967), pp. 21-7.
The Moral Patient', Philosophy, vol. 59
(1984), pp. 171-83.
Further Reading
Jones, O.R., Review of Philosophy and
Religious Belief, Religious Studies, vol. 11
(1975), pp. 487-9.
A. R. Lacey
MACQUARRffi, John (1919-)
John Macquarrie was born in Renfrew and
was educated at Paisley Grammar School and
the University of Glasgow. He was ordained
into the Church of Scotland, and worked as an
army chaplain and parish minister before
returning to Glasgow to undertake doctoral
research into the influence of the philosophy of
Heidegger upon the German Lutheran theolo-
gian Rudolf Bultmann. He was a lecturer in
theology at Glasgow (1953-62), and then
Professor of Systematic Theology at Union
Theological Seminary, New York from 1962 to
1970. In 1965 he became an Anglican priest,
and from 1970 to 1986 was Lady Margaret
Professor of Divinity at the University of
Oxford. He was made an FBA in 1984. He
was a prolific author and his publications range
very widely in the fields of systematic and philo-
sophical theology, as well as in ethics, spiritu-

ality and the history of modern religious
thought. He was one of the English translators
of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit.
Macquarrie's earlier work was concerned
with theological reception of existential
thought, and in particular with the possibilities
afforded to theology by the philosophy of
Heidegger. His first two books, An
Existentialist Theology (1955) and The Scope
of Demythologising (1960), examine Bultmann
as a test case for theological appropriation of
existentialism. Although Macquarrie hesitates
over Bultmann's resistance to talk of divine
action, insisting that a greater measure of the-
ological realism is required to avoid the perils of
subjectivism, he accepts in broad outline the
use of Heideggerian anthropology and meta-
physics to reinterpret the New Testament.
Macquarrie's reception of Heidegger has a dis-
tinctive character, however. Unlike some
German Protestant theologians, whose annex-
ation of Heidegger was much influenced by the
'dialectical' theology of Kierkegaard and the
early theology of Karl Earth, Macquarrie does
not focus on using existentialist categories to
restate a Christian theology of sin and salvation.
His concern is more with the development of a
comprehensive natural theology, using existen-
tialist phenomenology and ontology to ground
and elucidate theological doctrine. As a result,
his existentialism is less kerygmatic and more
metaphysical in character, a feature it shares
with the work of the Jesuit theologian Karl
Rahner. This reflects Macquarrie's more
Catholic theological preferences, and his unease
with the sharp distinctions between God and
the world sometimes found in modern
Protestant dogmatics.
In 1966 Macquarrie published a substantial
work of philosophical and systematic theology,
Principles of Christian Theology, which remains
one of the most distinguished complete English-
language accounts of Christian doctrine from
the second half of the twentieth century. In this
work Macquarrie prefaces a reinterpretation
of major topics in Christian doctrine (what he
calls 'symbolical theology') with an account of
647
MACQUARRIE
natural or philosophical theology. The task of
such theology is not to provide proofs of the
truths of faith by rational demonstration:
Macquarrie has little interest in evidentialist
apologetics. Rather, natural theology develops
a phenomenology of human existence in the
world, showing how questions about God are
raised by consideration of the structures of
human being, and offering a set of categories
through which the meaningfulness of religious
belief can be displayed. Natural theology thus
raises the question of faith in God by a descrip-
tive anthropology centred on the possibilities
and disorders of human existence in time.
Principles of Christian Theology is also
Macquarrie's first substantial attempt to move
beyond the categories of classical theism in both
its theological and philosophical forms. The
term 'God' functions for Macquarrie in a very
similar way to the term 'Being' in Heidegger's
metaphysics: often, indeed, 'Being' and 'God'
are virtually interchangeable in his work.
Macquarrie rejects a notion of God as a super-
sensible entity (echoing Heidegger's critique of
the 'forgetfulness of Being' in modern ontothe-
ology) or as intervening agent over against the
world. Rather, as 'holy Being', God is that by
which all things are, and can therefore be
described as 'letting-be'. Like Paul Tillich (a
philosophical theologian with whose work
Macquarrie's thought is very companionable),
he is hesitant to speak of God's 'existence': in
the case of God, the word 'exist' is used only in
an analogical sense. God's relation to the world
is not that of an independent divine substance
over against finite substances, acting upon them
at a distance. Rather, God is that which enables
beings to be and which is present and manifest
in them.
After Principles of Christian Theology
Macquarrie's most substantial works in philo-
sophical theology are the first two volumes of
what was originally intended as a trilogy: In
Search of Humanity (1982) and In Search of
Deity (1984) - the third volume, Jesus Christ in
Modern Thought (1990), has a different char-
acter, containing a history of Christian doctrine
MACQUARRIE
and then its rearticulation in modern categories.
In Search of Humanity takes further many of
the themes of his earlier existential anthropol-
ogy, in which aspects of human existence
('having', 'sociality', 'commitment', 'art', 'suf-
fering' and so forth) are clustered together the-
matically and then interpreted in such a way as
to indicate the possibilities for transition from
talk of human existence to talk of Being or
God. In Search of Deity, based on Macquarrie's
Gifford Lectures, offers a philosophy of God
concerned above all to replace the contrastive
accounts of the relation of God and the world
which have dominated Western theism by what
he calls 'dialectical theism'. 'Dialectical' here
does not indicate an account of God which
maximizes divine transcendence, but rather a
philosophical theology which seeks to hold
together polarities (transcendent/immanent,
eternal/temporal, one/many, impassibility/pas-
sibility). In effect, dialectical theism is largely
equivalent to panentheism. The work contains
accounts of some of Macquarrie's philosophi-
cal antecedents - the Neoplatonists, Eriugena,
Cusa, Leibniz, Hegel, and WHITEHEAD and
Heidegger among the moderns - as well as
sketches of the connections between dialectical
theism and the Trinitarian and incarnational
teaching of Christian theology.
Macquarrie is a synthetic thinker, troubled by
polarities and eager to trace correlations. His
best work, written in a characteristically calm
and even-handed style, surveys large topics in
philosophy and theology in the search for a
mediating position which will draw out and
bring together what he regards as valid in
apparently contradictory views. Though exis-
tential phenomenology no longer enjoys the
prestige which it had in the middle of the twen-
tieth century, Macquarrie's deployment of it in
a philosophical theology offers an alternative to
both dramatic, action-oriented accounts of
Christian faith and to analytical 'perfect being'
philosophical theology. Like its antecedents in
the religious thought of earlier twentieth-
century philosophical idealism, Macquarrie's
work correlates well with a sacramental or
648
symbolic interpretation of the Christian faith,
though it is rather less effective in addressing
concerns with the relation of the Absolute to
historical particulars.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An Existentialist Theology: A Comparison of
Heidegger and Bultmann (1955).
The Scope of Demythologising: Bultmann
and his Critics (1960).
Twentieth-Century Religious Thought (1963;
2001).
Principles of Christian Theology (1966;
1977).
Studies in Christian Existentialism (1966).
God-Talk: An Examination of the Language
and Logic of Theology (1967).
Existentialism (1972).
Thinking about God (1975).
In Search of Humanity. A Theological and
Philosophical Approach (1982).
In Search of Deity. An Essay in Dialectical
Theism (1984).
Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (1990).
Heidegger and Christianity (1994).
Other Relevant Works
God and Secularity (1967).
Three Issues in Ethics (1970).
The Faith of the People of God: A Lay
Theology (1972).
Paths in Spirituality (1972).
The Concept of Peace (1973).
Christian Unity and Christian Diversity
(1975).
Christian Hope (1978).
Theology, Church and Ministry (1986).
The Mediators (1995).
A Guide to the Sacraments (1997).
Christology Revisited (1998).
On Being a Theologian: Reflections at Eighty
(1999).
Further Reading
Cummings, O., John Macquarrie: A Master
of Theology (New York, 2002).
Hendrikson, M.L., Behold the Man! An

Anthropological Comparison of the
Christologies of John Macquarrie and
Wolfhart Pannenberg (Lanham, Maryland,
1998).
Jenkins, D., The Scope and Limits of John
Macquarrie's Existential Theology
(Uppsala, 1987).
Long, E.T., Existence, Being and God: An
Introduction to the Philosophical Theology
of John Macquarrie (New York, 1985).
Morley, G., John Macquarrie's Natural
Theology: The Grace of Being (Aldershot,
2003).
John Webster
McTAGGART, John McTaggart Ellis
(1866-1925)
John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart ('Jack' to his
family and friends) was born in London on 3
September 1866 and died there after a brief
illness on 18 January 1925. McTaggart's
family, the Ellises - 'McTaggart' was added
because of a bequest of a childless in-law - had
been farmers in the eighteenth century but were
chiefly associated with the law in McTaggart's
time. McTaggart' s father died in 1870 when he
was four, and the family moved to Weybridge,
Surrey. He went to a preparatory school in
Weybridge, then to a school in Caterham, and
finally to Clifton, where, as an awkward unath-
letic child whose strange gait was caused by a
spinal problem, he suffered considerably. But he
developed a lifelong affection for the school. He
matriculated at Trinity College in 1885, and in
1888 was the sole candidate placed in the first
class in moral sciences at Cambridge. Three
years later he became a fellow of Trinity. He
remained at Trinity and Cambridge for the
whole of his working life, becoming Henry
Sidgwick Lecturer in 1914. In 1897 he married
Margaret Elizabeth 'Daisy' Bird, a nurse he met
649
McTAGGART
on a visit to New Zealand and with whom he
fell in love at first sight. He was deeply attached
to college life and, apart from his marriage -
said by his friends to be nearly perfect - the
centre of his life was his many close male friend-
ships.
His philosophy centred on a small cluster of
propositions in whose truth he believed pas-
sionately and for which he produced some cel-
ebrated arguments. He believed that the world
is composed of timeless, loving spirits. Such
spirits are immortal and have always existed.
Time is unreal. Reality is rational and reflects
basic structures which we are able to grasp
through logical analysis. Everything real apart
from qualities and relations is an actual existent
and consists of one or more substances and their
characteristics. Love is a relation between spirits
such that they are permanently tied to one
another and reflect one another's true natures in
a way which makes for perpetual happiness.
Christianity is largely a false religion and is gen-
erally misleading when it is not false, for no God
exists and no revelation is necessary to establish
our immortality or to instruct us in ethics.
Some of these propositions do not turn out to
mean quite what first sight suggests. Time in the
sense in which we usually take it - the time of
past, present and future, in which events are
arranged in an earlier to later sequence - is
unreal, but there is a real counterpart which
McTaggart calls the 'C series. Each of us has a
past and a future which contain very different
experiences from any we are now aware of.
There is no God, but the timeless spirits in their
full conscious self-awareness are much like the
Christian Trinity greatly expanded. The
universe has an eternal and determinate struc-
ture, but not everything in our lives need be
determined
These metaphysical views were combined
with an array of political and moral opinions
which, in combination, are surprising. His
vision of the universe is egalitarian. He was a
champion of women's rights, especially in edu-
cation and in the university milieu. Reforms to
make the universities more effective were a
McTAGGART
passion of his. As an undergraduate he wrote an
essay defending the rights of homosexuals. But
he was a strong defender of institutions he
wanted reformed, including, unsurprisingly,
Cambridge and Trinity College and, surpris-
ingly, he defended the establishment of the
Church of England.
It was sometimes said that this was because
he thought Anglicanism took people's minds off
religion. In a celebrated speech at the
Cambridge Union, however, he argued that a
state church makes for freedom of speech
because it must be inclusive and because its
rules are ultimately determined by secular
lawyers. In addition, its relations with outside
dissenters make it difficult to persecute non-
Christians. He was forced to leave his first
preparatory school shortly after arrival because
he argued against the Apostles' Creed. As a
young fellow of Trinity he wrote to his friend
Basil Williams saying that he didn't like Jesus
much. 'Would you like a man or a girl who
really imitated Christ?' (21 October 1893,
Trinity College Library). Yet the perfected
timeless loving spirits are a Whiggish reform of
the Trinity, a club where all souls are equal
and much like gods. McTaggart adds pre-exis-
tence to the Christian immortality because the
spirits are all timeless.
His convictions about human rights and
social justice are in fact not far from the 'social
gospel' which developed in his time, and his
defence of the Church of England would have
been understood by Ralph Cudworth.
His metaphysical system implies the complete
determination of ultimate reality. But the expe-
rienced life through seeming time need not be
and indeed cannot be determined in the same
way, for the reason that, though important,
life's journey is not 'ultimately real'.
He was a strong patriot and worked in a
munitions factory during World War I, but he
found disliking the Germans emotionally
draining. When he was approached after the
war to subscribe to the White Russian cause
against the Bolsheviks he reportedly said that he
had already exhausted what little capacity for
650
hatred he had. His view was in a sense Hegelian
- opposing forces have to work themselves out
in a continuous historical process. A better
society is possible but not through revolution or
short-term tinkering
McTaggart's preoccupation with metaphys-
ical and religious subjects began with his 1893
essay 'The Further Determination of the
Absolute' (reprinted in Philosophical Studies,
1934) and his three books on Hegel. His ideas
appear, too, in the more popularly written Some
Dogmas of Religion (1906). But it is in his final
work, the two-volume Nature of Existence
(1921), that they are laid out as a system.
While writing the Nature of Existence,
McTaggart gave up Hegelian logic and
produced a work in form much like Spinoza's
ethics. A quotation from Spinoza, 'Homo liber
de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat; et eius
sapientia non mortis, sed vitae meditatio est'
(The free man thinks of death least of all things,
and his wisdom is a meditation not of death,
but of life) appears on his memorial plaque in
the ante-chapel of Trinity College.
Most of McTaggart's effort went into the
production of precise but often difficult
argument. At the time that he was writing, his
metaphysical beliefs were seen mainly as a
critique - from a 'pluralist' and 'personalist'
point of view - of Oxford 'absolute' idealism.
Interest now is mainly in the details of his
positive arguments.
The first volume of the Nature of Existence
is devoted entirely to truths that, apart from two
premises, can be known without experience.
The second volume introduces other empirical
concerns. One empirical premise is that some-
thing appears to exist. If something appears to
exist then something exists. If we deny that
something exists then the denial exists. If we say
that it is only an illusion that the denial exists,
then the illusion exists. McTaggart concedes
that there might be an infinite regress of such
claims and counter-claims. We can say that it is
only an illusion that the illusion exists and so
on. But this is evidently a pointless regress for
it has an answer at each stage.

McTaggart insists that whatever exists must
be a substance with some qualities. All such
entities are complex or differentiated, and
McTaggart says that this can be demonstrated
empirically by any datum of perception (the
second empirical premise). As for substances, it
has been argued that a substance is nothing
more than the sum of its characteristics, but
McTaggart denies that the qualities of a thing
can be predicated of each other. (If bears are
hairy, noisy and playful, it is not their hairiness
that is noisy, nor their playfulness that is hairy.)
McTaggart's arguments depend on logical
realism. His propositions about things in the
world seem modelled on propositional forms
recommended by RUSSELL and others. The
standard forms of Russellian universal and par-
ticular propositions are expressions such as Tor
any jc, if x is /", then x is g' and 'there is an x such
that x is /and x is g'. The xs are McTaggart's
substances - in fact subjects of predication, for
McTaggart defined a substance as whatever
has qualities and relations and is not itself a
quality or a relation. His 'characteristics' are the
/s and gs of propositions of this form.
In the end all the substances are either selves
or characterizable features of selves. But what
it is to be a self or person is simply to possess
certain characteristics, essentially those of spir-
ituality. This conclusion depends on the next leg
of the argument.
McTaggart's claim was that any existent
must have two sorts of descriptions which meet
certain logical conditions. One is that they must
be distinct, that is they must have what he called
'exclusive descriptions'. These are really what
Russell called 'definite descriptions'. That is,
nothing could exist if it did not have a descrip-
tion which distinguished it from other things.
This is the doctrine that Peter GEACH has called
'ontological determinateness' (pp. 55ff.).
McTaggart did not accept the doctrine of the
identity of indiscernibles, but he did accept a
doctrine logically related to it — the doctrine of
the dissimilarity of the diverse. If two things are
different, they must be dissimilar in some
respect.
651
McTAGGART
It was not enough for McTaggart that sub-
stances should have exclusive descriptions. If
they are really distinct, they must have what he
called sufficient descriptions, i.e. descriptions
which do not have among their components a
mention of other undescribed substances. The
expression 'fattest man in the room' is an exclu-
sive description, but it involves another (unde-
scribed) substance, 'the room'. There could be
an infinite regress of such descriptions.
If one supposes that everything in the world
is determinate - i.e. nothing is inherently fuzzy
and incapable of exact description - this seems
a natural conclusion. But McTaggart claimed
that given the nature of substance, the demand
for exclusive descriptions creates an apparent
contradiction.
The seeming contradiction arises from the
fact that all substances are, in his view, infinitely
divisible in at least one dimension. His
argument amounts to this: First of all, there
are no uni-propertied entities. Generally, par-
ticular instantiations require both quantity and
quality. Nothing is just red. To be red is to
occupy space - and exhibit some quantity of it.
But there are more general reasons for the asser-
tion of complexity. All qualities are determi-
nates of some determinable, and it requires
some second quality to specify the determi-
nateness. It appears to be an unstated but defen-
sible assumption of McTaggart's philosophy
that what exists can be talked about in princi-
ple even if not in practice. To deny this princi-
ple is to agree that circumstances could arise in
which it would be legitimate to say things like
'I know that x does or could exist, but I don't
know anything about %.'
We get expressions into discourse by assign-
ing some properties to them and withholding
others. If we want to say something about
anything, we must say something about it
which relates it to other things. This is true
even if the 'thing' being talked about is itself a
property. If it had only one property, we could
not do this.
If a substance is whatever has qualities and
relations without being either, then each
McTAGGART
quality-situation (each quality and its deter-
mining conditions) is itself a substance. This in
turn cannot be uni-propertied. In this sense a
'dimension' is simply a chain of properties
which meets this condition. A series of this kind
goes on ad infinitum.
McTaggart believed that infinite divisibility
undermines the possibility of sufficient descrip-
tions for things which we know to exist. Wholes
depend for their existence on the existence of
their parts. Sufficient (as opposed to exclusive)
descriptions of wholes must imply sufficient
descriptions of the parts if the parts really exist.
When we have an infinite series we generally
cannot determine all its properties from a finite
description. Thus, simply from a description of
a finite set of integers, one cannot determine the
distribution of prime numbers within it, though
it may be possible to do this if the system has
certain properties. But it would be unlikely that
all the properties of such a system could be
deduced from any finite description. If we
cannot, then there will be parts whose 'presup-
positions' cannot be determined, and which
seem, if every whole depends on the existence
of all its parts, to create a situation in which
what McTaggart called a 'total ultimate pre-
supposition' does not exist.
Thus the infinite divisibility claim and the
claim about descriptions form a contradiction.
Whatever is real must overcome this contra-
diction. That is, what is real must be something
that in fact does have a finite description that
presupposes the descriptions of an infinite set of
parts.
Two things follow from this. One, in
McTaggart's view, is the conclusion that
material objects are not real. McTaggart
thought material objects have parts within parts
within parts to infinity, and no sufficient
descriptions of the complete set of parts is avail-
able. This is close to Leibniz's argument from
the Monadology - that material wholes depend
on parts which occupy space, that this cannot
go on forever and that, therefore, at bottom
there must be things which occupy no space.
The things which occupy no space are non-
652
material things of the sort which McTaggart
calls 'perceptions'.
The chief initial difference between
McTaggart and Leibniz is that McTaggart gives
a reason for his objection to an infinite regress.
The infinite regresses arise because whatever
occupies space has parts which have no suffi-
cient descriptions. This is tied to the interesting
argument that bits of space must be identified
by non-spatial qualities so that they do not, in
fact, have their own sufficient descriptions. If
space is actually a kind of thing (and not simply
relational) then, since it must be true that one
bit of space is just like another (otherwise
physics would be different in Sheffield and
Vancouver), bits of space must be identified by
something else. If space is a relation, the point
is surely given.
The other claim is that whatever does resolve
the contradiction between infinite divisibility
and the necessity of sufficient description can in
fact be the true description of reality, and, if it
is the only possible description, it must be true.
McTaggart offers both a technical description
of the state of affairs and an example of a state
of affairs that overcomes the contradiction. An
arrangement which overcomes the contradic-
tion is called a 'determining correspondence
hierarchy'. Suppose we have a whole with a set
of parts, A, B and C. In fact the number of
parts can be any number finite or infinite.
Suppose, too, that A has a set of parts and that
B and C have sets of parts which exactly cor-
respond to A's parts. Then let the correspon-
dence between the two be such that the nature
of the parts of the parts is always determined by
the original parts. This system can be extended
to infinity in such a way that descriptions of one
set of parts will determine descriptions of all the
others. McTaggart's example is the following
situation: Imagine that there are in the universe
three observers, A, B and C. A perceives B's per-
ceptions. B perceives A's perceptions. A per-
ceives B's perceptions of A's perceptions. B per-
ceives A's perceptions of B's perceptions.
Equally, A and B perceive C's perceptions, C
perceives A's perceptions and B's perceptions -

and so on for any combination of perceivers.
This relation is continued to infinity.
There are problems about how this is to be
understood, but the example meets important
conditions. A perception is unique. You and I
cannot have the same perceptions even if we
have perceptions which have the same contents,
for a perception is a content from a point of
view. A perception of a perception, if such a
thing exists, then, will be just like the original
perception except that it will have a different
place in a certain order. It will therefore turn out
that a description of the original perception
together with a rule for generating the order of
the perceptions of perceptions will, in fact,
succeed in generating a description of the whole
of the infinite series postulated. Thus we have
a substance infinitely divisible in at least one
dimension which nevertheless has a sufficient
description.
The example's strength is that only percep-
tions of perceptions seem to be related so as to
form the required infinite series. If nothing else
is so related, McTaggart's basic metaphysics
would be demonstrated. If so, this would leave
only the problem of time and the problem of
love to complete his basic system.
McTaggart did speak of the 'unreality' of
time and did deny the ultimate reality of change,
if change means that one and the same thing has
different properties at successive moments. This
position is consistent through the drafts and
the published version of the Nature of
Existence. For if the ultimately real is eternal or
atemporal then there can be no change in the
ultimately real.
McTaggart used the word 'time' to denote
certain serial orders conceptualized as divided
into two mutually incompatible series 'A' and
'B5: past, present and future, and earlier-later.
Such concepts could have no application in
reality. He believed that the past-present-future
series was necessary to time. For nothing changes
in the earlier-later series. If Caesar ever crossed
the Rubicon before Attlee became Prime
Minister of England, it is true at all times that this
is the order of things. The past-present-future
653
McTAGGART
series involves changes because events have a
succession of distinct temporal properties, but it
involves a contradiction since these properties
must exclude one another, and yet every event
must have all three of them. It does not help to
say that the events have them 'at different times',
since this starts an infinite regress in which we
make no progress.
Even if this argument fails, McTaggart has
available to him another: Temporal events are
not susceptible to ordering into determining cor-
respondence hierarchies. That is, if events are
actually in time (as opposed to merely appearing
to be in time) then each will have a distinct
temporal characteristic. Perceptions of percep-
tions will not be identical to the original per-
ceptions, and an infinite series of perceptions
will be stretched over an infinitely long time.
The differences between them will be very large.
McTaggart insisted, however, that besides
past-present-future and earlier-later there must
be two other series, 'C and 'D', which have
certain properties usually associated with time.
He did not think that it did not matter whether
the train stopped first at Manchester and then at
Glasgow, or first at Glasgow and then at
Manchester; and he did believe that there was an
orderly sequence in life in which breakfast
preceded lunch.
Images of a frozen eternity naturally jump to
the mind, but McTaggart's world is not without
activity. Even if all activity consists of the tran-
sition on which McTaggart dwells - the passage
from illusion to veridical perception - there
would still be change, though not in the ulti-
mately real. But McTaggart insists on 'the action
of knowledge' ('The Further Determination of
the Absolute', Philosophical Studies, p. 237).
Action must involve change. McTaggart did
not think that what is ultimately real changes,
but rather that the consciousnesses of various
people changes. Most awareness now is mis-
perception, for we do not perceive the world as
a set of timeless loving spirits.
He says there must be a real series, the 'C'
series. It is a series in which each successive
'moment' contains all its predecessors and is
McTAGGART
contained by its successors. The 'C' series is an
'inclusion' series and not an 'exclusion series'.
(Past, present and future exclude one another
but two 'Cs', C33 and C34, are so arranged
that C34 includes C33.) There remains a way
of talking about some properties associated
with time which is acceptable.
What the 'C series consists of are the actual
perceptions of selves. Thus, if seen clearly it
would be seen as permitting the whole range of
legitimate interpretations, the final truth and all
our ordinary 'life experience' on the way to it.
McTaggart speaks of the 'C' series as a series of
elements of intensive magnitudes as opposed to
extensive magnitudes. This terminology is con-
fusing, but what he says can be understood. If
the distance from London to Leeds is 199 miles
and that from London to Manchester is 206
miles, the difference between the two 'distances'
(not the difference in the distances of the cities
from one another) is seven miles. Seven miles is
another distance - something of the same order
and distinctly conceivable. It is an extensive
magnitude. But the difference he says, between
a felt temperature of 50 degrees and one of 70
degrees is not a temperature of 20 degrees. You
cannot add what it feels like when it is 20
degrees to what it feels like when it is 50 degrees
and get what it feels like when it is 70 degrees.
It is an intensive magnitude. Now the difference
between one understood awareness and another
- where 'understood awareness' means 'con-
ceptualized experience' - is like the second and
not like the first, so that what McTaggart says
about the 'C' series makes sense. Perceptions
will be ordered by their intensity and clarity.
They will be different but not exclude one
another.
There is another series which is represented
by the actual differences in the awarenesses
considered as distinct experiences. This is the
'D' series. The 'D' series is a series of 'extensive
increments' corresponding to the 'intensive
increments' of the 'C' series. It is a series of
partial representations and interpretations - the
series of experiential differences between
elements of the 'C' series.
654
When we say something has changed we are
referring to two things - two or more successive
phases of the 'C' series and two or more
elements of the 'D' series. The 'D' series really
does undergo additions, for there are new mis-
perceptions, whereas members of the 'C' series
differ only in intensity. Given this analysis we
can say what it is for someone to perceive an
elephant or Clement Attlee: it is to add some-
thing to the 'D' series which is a partial repre-
sentation of a state of affairs in the 'C' series.
But the 'D' series is not really a temporal order.
It consists of perceptions which seem to be in
time, but are not. 'Temporality' does have a real
counterpart, however, because the 'C' series
really does have an order of its own. Our occa-
sional perceptions of parts of it are not neces-
sarily ordered so that over time we perceive
more clearly. Sometimes, however, we may
perceive more clearly as the series in apparent
time unfolds.
Thus we can know what it is to be 'timeless'
and yet also be somehow 'on the way' to the
final perfected state. The final perfected state is
a state of love. But that, too, is a classically
uncertain notion.
McTaggart believed that in the very long run
the consciousness of each individual would
consist of the perfect awareness of itself and
certain other selves, though at present there are
apparently individuals who are not 'conscious'
at all.
McTaggart's system depends on the notion
that reality somehow generates illusions and
provides a way of escaping from illusion.
McTaggart's preoccupation with this question
dates back at least to the further Determination
of the Absolute and the effort to avoid the
empty unity of Hegel's Absolute. For the
Absolute to be graspable, there needs to be a
unity of knowledge and volition. McTaggart
sees this unity as attained by emotion, and love
as the principal emotion involved.
This connection between love and knowl-
edge runs all through McTaggart's philosophy.
While in our present lives love can be triggered
by trivial causes, it is a sign of an interrelation

between individuals in which they are at rest
because they have complete knowledge, and
therefore there is no change. They are tied
closely to one another by the kind of mutual
knowledge that, if it does not provoke a desire
for change, must provoke a state of love. For
love is at least a state of being filled with satis-
faction as one contemplates another. If we had
the knowledge of one another that is presup-
posed in the ultimate arrangements of percep-
tions between individuals, we would bask in
eternal love.
McTaggart seems to suppose that the series
of misperceptions must be finite and that there-
fore we all get there 'in the end' - i.e. in the
fullness of the 'C series. It is not clear why the
series should not be infinite. His conviction
remains more a matter of faith than of logic.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic (Cambridge,
1896).
Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (Cambridge,
1901).
Some Dogmas of Religion (1906; repr. with
an Introduction by C.D. Broad and a list of
McTaggart's emendations, 1930).
Commentary on Hegel's Logic (Cambridge,
1910).
The Nature of Existence, vol. 1 (Cambridge,
1921; vol. 2, ed. C.D. Broad, Cambridge,
1927).
Philosophical Studies, ed. S.V. Keeling
(1934). Contains nearly all McTaggart's
minor writings.
There is a collection of letters and manu-
scripts including some important drafts of
the Nature of Existence at Trinity College
Library, Cambridge. They also hold a large
file of 'college stories' which the college has
declined to release for publication.
Further Reading
Broad, C.D., Examination of McTaggart's
Philosophy, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1933; vol.
2, pts 1 and 2, Cambridge, 1938).
Geach, P.T., Truth, Love, and Immortality,
655
MAGEE
an Introduction to McTaggart's
Philosophy (1979).
Rochelle, Gerald, The Life and Philosophy of
J. McT. E. McTaggart, 1866-1925
(Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter,
1991).
, Behind Time, The Incoherence of
Time and McTaggart's Atemporal
Replacement (Aldershot, 1998).
Leslie Armour
MAGEE, Bryan (1930-)
Bryan Magee was born on 12 April 1930 of
working-class parents in Hoxton. During
World War II he served in the Army Intelligence
Corp. After demobilization he obtained a schol-
arship at Keble College, Oxford, where he read
history and philosophy. He started a PhD dis-
sertation at Oxford under Peter STRAWSON
which he never completed, moving to Yale
instead. He enjoyed Yale philosophy more than
Oxford, being especially impressed by F.S.C.
Northrop, Arthur Pap and Brand Blanshard,
from whom he first learned of the American
pragmatists Pierce, James and Dewey. He
returned to Britain in 1958, where he ran unsuc-
cessfully as a Labour Party candidate in 1959.
Then he took a job on the BBC current affairs
television programme This Week. He did many
documentary programmes about contentious
social issues - prostitution, abortion and homo-
sexuality. In 1970 he returned to academe,
Balliol College, Oxford, where he taught for
four years before successfully running as Labour
MP for Ley ton. He found himself unhappy
with the leftward trend of Michael Foot's gov-
ernment, however, and was one of the founders
in 1981 of the Social Democratic Party. He lost
his seat in 1983 and returned to writing and
broadcasting (which he had continued during
his parliamentary career).
MAGEE
Magee has written numerous books starting
in the early 1960s on variegated themes -
politics, homosexuality, the history of philoso-
phy, the music of Wagner and the philosophies
of Arthur Schopenhauer and Karl POPPER, as
well as a novel, Facing Death (1977). Some of
his books are based on interviews with well-
known philosophers and academics. In the past
decade he has written two different types of
autobiography: first, Confessions of a
Philosopher in 1997 and second, Clouds of
Glory: A Childhood in Hoxton (2003). The
former autobiography was the subject of a libel
suit due to Magee's repeating the rumour that
Ralph Schoenman was a CIA agent planted to
discredit Bertrand RUSSELL. Magee lost the case.
The latter has had a happier outcome for
Magee, winning the J.R. Ackerley Prize for
Autobiography in 2004.
Two books, Men of Ideas (1978) and
Modern British Philosophy (1971), grew out of
his TV series. They were both path-breaking
media events surprising in the interest in philo-
sophical ideas they stimulated (or uncovered).
Popper (in the Fontana Modern Masters series)
is the third book that helped establish his rep-
utation as a popularizer of philosophy. It
appeared in 1973 and is perhaps his best known
book. It was the book in that series that became
and still is its best-seller.
Men of Ideas is a more general book than
either of the other two, involving conversations
with philosophers such as AYER, QUINTON,
Bernard WILLIAMS, R.M HARE, Quine, Putnam,
Searle, Iris MURDOCH, Ernest GELLNER and
other academics whose ideas have impacted on
philosophy: Chomsky, Marcuse and DWORKIN.
Some were discussing their own ideas, others
those of a recognized prominent 'ism':
Marxism, existentialism, logical positivism and
linguistic philosophy. The ideas of Heidegger
and Wittgenstein were discussed by BARRETT
and Quinton.
Magee is thought of by many as either a
politician and/or popularizer of philosophy
rather than a philosopher in his own right.
Consequently, he may seem to be a derivative,
656
unoriginal, and (less charitably) parasitic philo-
sophical thinker. However, this assumption is
a mistake. The underestimation of his philoso-
phy may be due to his very eclectic approach to
philosophy, combining thinkers as apparently
disparate as Popper, Kant, Schopenhauer and
Wagner. The last named is connected to the
most unique aspect of his philosophy: the influ-
ence of art (in the very broad sense of music,
drama and fine arts) on his philosophical
approach.
Magee attributes his interest in philosophy to
problems he encountered in his own experi-
ences as a young boy long before attending uni-
versity: Space, Time, infinity, free will. When he
did attend Oxford University he was both sur-
prised and disappointed in his study of philos-
ophy. This made him especially critical of
logical positivism and linguistic philosophy
since they either dissolve or dismiss traditional
philosophical problems. He was most
impressed by early modern philosophers,
Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant and
Schopenhauer. Among twentieth-century
philosophers, Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper,
Susanne Langer, Northrop and WITTGENSTEIN
(the author of the Tractatus not The
Philosophical Investigations) are his most
favoured philosophical thinkers.
Magee's approach to philosophy is notable
for its unique combination of C.P. Snow's 'two
cultures'. He admired the great philosophers
of the past because they took: science and math-
ematics seriously (unlike the Oxford philoso-
phers) but without the logical positivist agenda
to eliminate metaphysics. He also criticizes
language philosophy because it assumes a
relation between experience and language that
cannot exist: a one-to-one correspondence
between any experience and a word or phrase
to describe that experience. He claims that is not
the case but that nonetheless experience can be
illuminated by a work of art.
Magee's greatest contribution to philosophy
may consist in vigorously arguing for the
respectability of traditional metaphysics, espe-
cially as it culminated in the systems of Kant

and Schopenhauer. The argument is interesting
since it starts from epistemological problems
and, by showing the limits of one particular
theory of knowledge, empiricism, creates a need
on purely logical grounds for an unknowable
reality about which we can draw some conclu-
sions.
There are two key arguments, one based on
purely philosophical analysis; the other on the
growth of scientific knowledge over the last
four centuries, allegedly the paradigm case of
empirical knowledge. Magee argues that
modern science subverts both empiricism and
its indispensable ally, common sense. This is
because its ontology is totally counter-intuitive
and contrary to common sense, especially in the
most revolutionary theories of twentieth-
century physics, relativity and quantum physics.
Aside from these reasons, we have no basis for
believing experience adequately mirrors reality
and good reasons to think that it does not. This
is because all we ever encounter in direct expe-
rience is experience, which is subject-depen-
dent, hence not objective.
This is what ultimately leads to the Kantian
noumena/phenomena distinction. Magee thinks
that only Schopenhauer has advanced Kant's
distinction by arguing that the noumenon, since
it is not phenomenal, must be non-empirical in
its qualities: timeless, non-spatial, undifferenti-
ated, impersonal, much like the ultimate reality
in traditional Hinduism and Buddhism. We can
never have direct knowledge of this ultimate
reality, which manifests itself to us as the dif-
ferentiated phenomenal world of material
objects in space and time. This is similar not
only to Hinduism and Buddhism but also to the
traditional monotheistic concept of God in
Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Magee is con-
cerned to discredit standard misinterpretation of
Schopenhauer, and argues that it was not Asian
philosophy that influenced his metaphysics but
his metaphysics that created an interest in
Buddhism and Hinduism. Magee also claims
that Schopenhauer is the first overtly atheistic
modern philosopher. Magee sees an advantage
for both Asian religions over monotheism since
657
MAGEE
neither posits personality of ultimate reality.
Here he follows Schopenhauer's view that
attributing knowledge and personality to the
noumena or to an immortal non-material soul
is incoherent. But Magee remains sceptical
rather than dogmatically atheistic or material-
istic perhaps because this might contradict the
view that we can know nothing of the
noumena. If we can know that there cannot be
a God or an immortal soul, that would entail
that we know quite a bit. It bothers Magee
greatly that we cannot know the truth about
these matters.
Magee was brought up in a completely non-
religious home environment and has never felt
either personal or intellectual reasons to take
religious claims seriously. The same is true not
only of God but also of personal immortality as
well, although, like Descartes and Kant, he
developed arguments for an immaterial self.
While sceptical about religious beliefs, he
decided in middle age to give serious consider-
ation to religious doctrines with an open mind,
partly as a result of his TV series Argument. It
explored the main tenets of Judaism,
Christianity and Buddhism. This led him to
study medieval philosophy. Of all the major
religions he says that Judaism is least worthy of
respect and Buddhism most worthy. His
primary critique of religious creeds is that they
propose assertions made without evidence.
Thus he reproduces the standard
positivist/empiricist critique of religion.
On Kant's third major problem of meta-
physics, free will, he comes down on the liber-
tarian side. It is this interest (or obsession) with
metaphysical problems that he has had since a
child that immunized him against most main-
stream views in twentieth-century philosophy:
logical positivism, linguistic philosophy and
continental philosophy. Even his apparent guru,
Popper is inadequate here due to his tolerant
(but disinterested) permissiveness in this area. In
many ways Magee is a much deeper thinker on
these issues than any British philosopher since
McTAGGART and A.E. TAYLOR in the 1920s.
Unlike most modern philosophers, he accepts
MAGEE
the Kantian paradox that reason sets itself
problems that it cannot answer and yet also
cannot help asking and speculating about. He
rejects both the dogmatism and fideism of most
Western religious traditions but also the equally
dogmatic materialism and pragmatism that
either gives a shallow answer or rules them out
of court. This led him to a major change of
attitude towards thought systems. So-called
practical people, those focused on political,
social or historical levels, tend to treat surfaces
as foundations because it seems obvious that the
metaphysical, personal and interpersonal
dimensions of things are of secondary impor-
tance compared with the social and political.
This philosophical change, in turn, had an inter-
esting pragmatic consequence. It meant that
the subject-matter of his TV programmes
changed from emphasis on political crises to
personal life crises such as adultery, abortion,
alcoholism, suicide, prostitution and crime. This
had an unexpected philosophical consequence
as he discovered that the world is governed by
false values. Yet he never shows twentieth-
century philosophy, the concern with applied
ethics. This leads to the most serious lacunae in
his philosophy.
When he wrote his Popper book his main dif-
ference with Popper, in an otherwise extremely
sympathetic account, was that he was a social-
ist unlike Popper (who had also been a socialist
in his youth). Magee described his youth as being
one of an impassioned schoolboy socialist but
now describes himself as having moved from
being a liberal socialist to a non-socialist liberal,
by which he means making personal freedom the
main goal of politics. While he is no longer a
socialist, he is still a defender of the welfare state.
He describes his position as Thatcherism plus
the welfare state'.
Many of his books illustrate the standard
'Whig' view of history as one of mostly contin-
uous (albeit not inevitable) progress. (Towards
2000, 1965, The Story of Philosophy, 1998,
The New Radicalism, 1962, and The
Democratic Revolution, 1964, especially).
Humanity, on this view, has made amazing
658
progress during the past four or five centuries in
scientific knowledge, literacy, education,
freedom, equality, human welfare and humani-
tarian advances (such as abolition of slavery,
rights for women, gays and minorities). Magee,
however, offers no philosophical ground other
than what can be called, ironically, a common
sense morality. He agrees with Schopenhauer's
critique of Kant's rationalistic meta-ethics and
recognizes the challenge of Nietzsche to tradi-
tional morality stripped of its theological under-
pinnings including the egalitarian ethic of moder-
nity that he prefers, but he seems to feel (without
arguing) that offering reasons rather than
opinions is not possible. He never devoted the
same intense thought to moral and political phi-
losophy at the meta-theoretical level that he
devoted to metaphysics, epistemology or art. It
is not just that his moral and political views lack
a foundation, but that his attitude to them seems
to be in striking contrast with his views on
common sense elsewhere, conflicting with what
he says about Nietzsche's persuasive (in his
opinion) attack on traditional morality without
its traditional religious basis. It also seems in
conflict with what he says about political debates
in which he has engaged with non-liberals such
as Marxists, conservatives and libertarians. He
says he felt confident in debates with the first two
but admits he was unprepared for how cogent
the arguments for libertarianism were.
Magee has interesting and provocative
opinions on various areas of interest to both
philosophers and ordinary citizens. He rebukes
philosophers for ignoring what he thinks is an
obvious topic of interest staring them in the face,
i.e. the metaphysics of sex. He has a surpris-
ingly positive analysis of Heidegger but less so of
Sartre.
Magee's most controversial opinions come
out in his discussion of the popularization (as
opposed to the professionalization) of philoso-
phy, in his arguments against: the importance of
arguments in philosophy and in his disinterest in
(or ambivalence towards) moral philosophy.
The problem of professionalism afflicts all the
humanities since academic life in the humanities

is bedevilled by secondary literature, and, in the
case of philosophy, the need to keep up with sec-
ondary literature leads to a permanent immer-
sion in ephemeral trivia. He asserts that keeping
up with what is going on is a pointless waste of
time. In addition, he regards it as self-contradic-
tory to treat philosophy as an academic subject.
Not being a professional philosopher has
allowed him to spend more time than profes-
sional philosophers on studying philosophers.
Where the most notable tension exists in his
thought is in his attitude to philosophical argu-
ments. He agrees with Isaiah BERLIN'S comment
about philosophy that 'argument, logical power
are, as a rule, a matter of attack and defence not
part of the central vision itself (Confessions of
a Philosopher, p. 353). Yet he himself seems to
think there are very good arguments in philos-
ophy ranging from definitive (Kant,
Schopenhauer, Popper, Hume) to very strong
(against solipsism, against common sense). He
says of Schopenhauer that no philosopher has
richer arguments. He argues that most of what
we take for granted is difficult or impossible to
validate, mostly due to the standard infinite
regress problem. No argument can prove the
truth of its conclusion since none can establish
the truth of its premises.
Magee is unhappy about the two main alter-
natives in twentieth-century philosophy:
analytic and continental philosophy. Both make
strikingly similar mistakes. Philosophy's tragedy
in the mid twentieth century was that it took its
lead from Wittgenstein rather than Popper. The
main mistake of analytic philosophy was the
exclusion of philosophy's most valuable
activity: the production of explanatory theories.
Similarly, continental philosophy abandons phi-
losophy's main task and is parochially con-
cerned with human affairs. Like Plato, Magee
thinks philosophy should not choose between
the pre-Socratic interest in natural philosophy
and Socrates' desire to bring 'philosophy down
from the clouds'. It should try to do both, as
most great philosophers from Plato to Popper
have tried to do.
659
MANSER
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The New Radicalism (1962).
The Democratic Revolution (1964).
Towards 2000: The World We Make (1965).
Aspects of Wagner (1968; 2nd edn, 1988).
One in Twenty: A Study of Homosexuality in
Men and Women (1968).
Modern British Philosophy (1971).
Popper (1973).
Facing Death (1977).
Men of Ideas: Some Creators of
Contemporary Philosophy (New York,
1978).
The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (1983; rev.
edn, 1997).
Philosophy and the Real World: An
Introduction to Karl Popper (La Salle,
1985).
The Great Philosophers: An Introduction to
Western Philosophy (1987).
Misunderstanding Schopenhauer (1990).
On Blindness: Letters between Bryan Magee
and Martin Milligan (1995).
Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal
Journey through Western Philosophy (New
York, 1997).
The Story of Philosophy (1998).
The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy
(2000).
Talking Philosophy: Dialogues with Fifteen
Leading Philosophers (2001).
Clouds of Glory: A Childhood in Hoxton
(2003).
Calvin Hayes
MANSER, Anthony Richards (1924-95)
Anthony Richards Manser was born in
Wandsworth on 24 June 1924 and died in
Southampton. After World War II he went up
to Oxford University, where he gained his MA
and subsequently his BPhil. Apart from under-
MANSER
taking several visiting professorships in the
United States, he spent the whole of his
academic career at Southampton University,
being appointed assistant lecturer in 1950,
lecturer in 1952, senior lecturer in 1964 and
finally Professor of Philosophy in 1970.
Manser was one of a number of philoso-
phers who sought to promote greater interest in
existentialism, and in Manser's case particu-
larly in Sartre, amongst a British audience. His
book Sartre: A Philosophic Study (1966) gives
a comprehensive overview, and attempts to
correct some misinterpretations then current in
the English-speaking world, of Sartre's thought.
The first chapter of the book is devoted to
Sartre's most philosophical literary work, the
novel La Nausee. Manser notes that philosophy
and literature were assumed to be mutually
exclusive: the task of literature was thought to
be representative, and that of philosophy to be
argumentation. However, in La Nausee Sartre
explicitly puts across several of his key ideas. He
rejects Descartes's view that the mind has
primacy over the body, and Husserl's similar
but more elaborate view that the objects of
consciousness are phenomenal, not real, and
the world can thus be 'bracketed off or ignored
when we examine what constitutes the con-
sciousness, or 'transcendental ego'. By contrast,
Sartre asserts through the famous philosophical
example of Roquentin, the hero of La Nausee,
contemplating the brute existence of the tree
root, that we inevitably live and have contact
with things in the world, and our only means of
doing so is through our bodies. Manser also
draws attention to the fact that Sartre's search
for what can account for the unity of our con-
sciousness is very similar to that of Hume: both
philosophers in searching for that unity can
find only our experiences, from which Sartre
concludes that the T is merely a grammatical,
not a real or substantial, subject of experiences.
Sartre, through Roquentin, makes the explicit
philosophical point that the existence of things
is contingent: as Roquentin states, 'I want to say
that existence is the opposite of necessity by
definition. To exist is simply to be there; existing
660
things appear, are met with, but they can never
be deduced' (Sartre, p. 14).
Manser finds Sartre's publication
Ulmaginaire to be a precursor to L'Etre et le
Neant. The issue of whether or not the object
of the imagination is a visual image is philo-
sophically irrelevant, and lies within the domain
of psychology. The imagination points to
nothing, in the respect that its object does not
exist (for instance, if I imagine my brother, he
is not at that time present as an object of expe-
rience). For there to be nothing, we must have
linguistic expressions of negation, and the pos-
sibility of denying the existence of something
depends on our ability to imagine it. Manser
thus dismisses the criticism of AVER, that Sartre
is using 'nothing' as the name of a shadowy
'something', as a trite and obvious mistake.
For Sartre, there are two ways of being, the
en-soi (usually translated as the 'in-itself'),
which constitutes the existence of purely
physical objects determined by laws of nature,
and the pour-soi (or 'for-itself'), which consti-
tutes the existence of free, conscious human
beings. The for-itself brings nothingness into
the world, as human beings are the only entities
who can understand and express negation. As
we are not predetermined by causal laws, our
futures are 'nothing', or empty, leaving us to
choose what we are to become. Nothing stands
in the way of our choices, but if we think of our-
selves as en-soi, we are living inauthentically, or
in bad faith. The desire to escape into living in
bad faith is natural but reprehensible, and bad
faith itself can take one of several forms: there
is the refusal to face making a choice; the refusal
to take responsibility for our past actions by
accepting them as our own, and the desire to be
both conscious and to exist as a non-conscious
being determined by causal laws.
In moving on to ethics, Manser rejects
Sartre's publication Existentialism and
Humanism, at the time his most widely read
work in the English-speaking world, as being
shallow and unrepresentative of Sartre's true
thought, as it concentrates on an excessively
private morality. Sartre himself seems to have

admitted this point, as Existentialism and
Humanism was based on a lecture which he
later declared to have been mistaken. Manser
takes the work Saint Genet to be the most
important for the exposition of Sartre's views
on ethics. For Sartre, there are no fixed,
unchanging ethical rules for us to follow. To
believe that there is such a set of rules or values
is to take it that there is transcendentalism in
ethics, but as we are beings of this world, even
if there were transcendental values, they would
have nothing to do with us. Any set of moral
rules is conventional, not natural, like causal
laws, and anyone who follows conventional
moral rules is 'serious-minded' and thus 'inau-
thentic'. To live an 'authentic' life, we must use
our freedom to make choices in the full aware-
ness of that freedom, but in maximizing our
freedom we at the same time impose limits on
the freedom of others. Manser comments that
Sartre sets out how we are to make moral deci-
sions, but gives us no guidance on the content
of those decisions, which results in the reduction
of morality to arbitrary choice. It was Sartre's
awareness of this dilemma that led him to
conclude that ethics is necessary to, but at the
same time impossible in, human existence.
Finally, Manser expounds Sartre's views on
freedom and commitment in literature. He says
that, for Sartre, the freedom of the author
includes his not being constrained by any set of
conventional rules about how a work of litera-
ture is to be written. On Sartre's view, the com-
mitted, or authentic, writer is not primarily
concerned with the political content of his
work, but with the issue of a human being's
place in the universe, which is transcultural, or
of relevance to everyone. As a writer must take
responsibility for his literary work, in that as the
reader freely gives himself up to reading, any
piece of literature must be worthy of its readers'
attention. The reader 'lends' his emotions to
the characters in the work: Raskolnikov is
repulsive because those who read Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment feel repulsion towards
him. A work of literature does not have a 'fixed
nature' or essence: it is taken as reality only
661
MANSER
during the time in which it is being read. Being
an author is not necessarily the most valuable
task in life: literature should be reserved for
relatively affluent cultures, whereas an able
person from an underdeveloped country would
be more usefully employed in teaching.
Manser concludes his influential work on
Sartre by commenting that his most valuable
contribution to philosophy lies in his raising of
particular and concrete moral dilemmas. Sartre
does not solve these moral problems, the chief
function of which is to develop the reader's
moral sensitivity.
Later in his career, Manser was one of a
number of philosophers who helped to stimu-
late interest in nineteenth-century British
idealism, and particularly in one of the leading
members of the movement, F.H. BRADLEY. In a
lengthy introduction to Bradley s Logic (1982)
Manser states that the focus on meaning which
dominated much of British philosophy through-
out the twentieth century began, not with
RUSSELL and MOORE, but fifty years earlier with
Bradley and other British idealists. To substan-
tiate his thesis, Manser says that Bradley's
primary interest lay not in metaphysics, but in
formal and philosophical logic, and he thus
wishes to give prominence to Bradley's hitherto
neglected work, the Principles of Logic. In this
major work Bradley developed traditional logic
in several areas. Perhaps his most contentious
point was concerned with meaning. Here he
said, against empiricists such as Hume, that the
issue of whether or not ideas are mental images
is a psychological one, and irrelevant as far as
logic is concerned. All ideas used in logic are
symbols; all symbols are facts, and all facts rep-
resent something outside themselves. Bradley
uses the example of the Victorian 'language of
flowers' to illustrate this point (Bradley's Logic,
p. 49): a flower can be appreciated for its colour
or smell, in which case it is not a symbol and
does not mean anything, or it can be taken as
a symbol representing hope or love. In the latter
case, the particularity of the flower is of no
interest: its meaning is carried by all flowers of
that species, and in this respect the function of
MANSER
the flower as a symbol is a universal one.
In opposition to Mill, whose teachings on
induction in his System of Logic were widely
accepted at the time, Bradley maintained that
new knowledge cannot be obtained by enu-
meration, or adding a further particular to other
particulars. It is legitimate to add particulars
only if it is thought that they share some char-
acteristic in common, and this common char-
acteristic is the universal of which the particu-
lars are particulars.
Bradley's other developments in formal logic
are now regarded as standard features of the
discipline. He criticized the traditional logic of
his day for being inadequate, as it did not incor-
porate relations, such as 'more than', less than',
'larger than' or 'smaller than'. He maintained
that universal statements were not to be
regarded as categorical, but as hypothetical, as
they carried no implications about the exis-
tence of their contents. Further, he said that
the logical form of a statement can differ from
its grammatical form: the grammatical form
'all that glitters is not gold' requires the logical
form 'some things which glitter are not gold'.
Interest in the British idealists is still flour-
ishing in contemporary philosophy, and after an
eclipse towards the end of the twentieth century,
existentialism is once more regarded as an
important area for teaching and discussion in
the English-speaking world. Manser's solid con-
tribution to philosophy is to be found in these
two very dissimilar areas.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Dreams', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 56 (1955-6), pp. 208-28.
'Sartre et le Neant', Philosophy, vol. 46 (July
1961), pp. 177-87.
'Existence and Ethics', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 63 (1962-3), pp.
11-26.
Sartre: A Philosophic Study (1966).
Bradley's Logic (Oxford, 1982).
'Unfair to Waiters?', Philosophy, vol. 58
(1983), pp. 102-106.
'Russell's Criticism of Frege', Philosophical
662
Investigations, vol. 8 (1985), pp. 269-86.
'Sartre on Temporality', Journal of the British
Society for Phenomenology, vol. 20 (1989),
pp. 23-32.
'Bradley's Theory of Descriptions', Bradley
Studies, vol. 8 (2002), pp. 114-29.
Other Relevant Works
The End of Philosophy: Marx and
Wittgenstein (Southampton, 1973).
The Philosophy ofF. H. Bradley, ed.
Anthony Manser and Guy Stock (Oxford,
1984).
Kathryn Plant
MASCALL, Eric Lionel (1905-93)
Eric Lionel Mascall was born in London on 12
December 1905 and died there on 14 February
1993. He was educated at; Latymer Upper
School and won a scholarship to Pembroke
College, Cambridge, where he graduated with
a BA in 1927. He was a senior mathematics
master at Coventry from 1928 to 1931. After
taking holy orders in the Church of England in
1933, he served as a curate in London before
becoming sub-warden of Lincoln Theological
College in 1937. In 1945 he was offered a stu-
dentship at Christ Church, where he remained
until 1962 lecturing on the philosophy of
religion. He occupied the Chair of Historical
Theology at King's College London from 1962
until his retirement in 1973.. He delivered the
Bampton (1956), Boyle (1965) and Gifford
lectures (1970-71). As a recognized authority
on Thomas Aquinas, this respected Anglo-
Catholic became visiting professor at the
Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome after
his retirement. He also gave the Charles H.
Hart Memorial Lecture at the Catholic
University of America. He was elected a fellow
of the British Academy.

Mascall was a neo-Thomist by conviction.
He held that the natural theology of Thomas
Aquinas was a classic and perennial formula-
tion of the relationship between faith and
reason. In common with other neo-Thomists,
Mascall was concerned with applying the phi-
losophy of Aquinas to contemporary questions
and concerns. Like Gilson and Maritain, he
saw Thomism as a living philosophical school.
In particular, the Thomistic position of
moderate realism, which Mascall expounded in
He Who Is (1943) and Existence and Analogy
(1949), was seen as providing a basis for solving
philosophical and theological problems.
Mascall rejected the then fashionable exis-
tentialism. He was a critic of Barthianism within
the Reformed tradition, and he defended the
doctrine of the analogy of being so disapproved
of by Barth and his followers. He also had a
dislike of theological affectation which he so
wittily satirized in a series of poems published
under the title of Pi in the High (1959).
In the 'Introductory Essay' to the 1966
edition of He Who Is Mascall stated that his
purpose in writing that book together with
Existence and Analogy was to provide an
answer to the Violent onslaught on the very
possibility of natural theology' by such writers
as A.J. AYER. He acknowledged that his
approach had a good deal in common with
contemporary British writers such as A.M.
FARRER, Mark Pontifex and Illtyd TRETHOWAN,
as well as with the project of Bernard Lonergan
as presented in Insight (1957). In particular,
he acknowledged his debt to Gilson and the
latter's insistence on the primacy of existence
over essence, as presented in UEtre et I'Essence.
This led Mascall also to defend Thomistic exis-
tentialism against that of the Heideggerians.
Mascall in his writings argued the case for
natural theology in its traditional Christian and
Thomistic form. When faced with the objection
that consensus is not something which has been
achieved historically regarding natural theology,
Mascall accepted that not everyone will reach
the same conclusions and that, in a certain
sense, a variety of different attitudes will
663
MASCALL
emerge. This lack of agreement is not, however,
of necessity the case. If one is open and atten-
tive to the arguments put forward, and accepts
that certain conclusions necessarily follow, then
people will, he maintained, accept the argu-
ments put forward by traditional theism. That
the arguments of natural theology are not easily
accepted or understood in contemporary
culture was acknowledged by Mascall, but this
does not per se invalidate the arguments, he
argued. Clearly, the proponent of natural
theology has to communicate his arguments in
a way which is intelligible to her audience, but
one also has to point out a certain responsibil-
ity of openness on the side of the latter.
Obstacles to openness and attentiveness are
indifference, habit, prejudice, blindness and
laziness (Existence and Analogy, p. 90).
Against the criticism commonly levelled at
scholasticism that it rests upon revelation and
so is not, strictly speaking, philosophy, Mascall
replied that one can indeed speak of a Christian
natural theology. Great achievements were
recorded in medieval philosophy, especially
when it was pursued in a Christian context.
The Christian background of such thinkers con-
tributed to the kind of question they put to the
philosophical tradition, and in this way their
natural theology differs from that of, say, Plato,
Aristotle or Plotinus. Nonetheless, the answers
which they gave are intelligible to those who do
not accept Christian revelation. The natural
theology of Aquinas is made up of philosophi-
cal arguments and must be judged as such.
When this is done, Mascall argued, the natural
theology of Aquinas will be shown to be true.
Protestant theologians objected that the use
of reason regarding religion is a distortion of
revelation. Mascall accepted that while natural
theology does not adequately satisfy
humankind's religious needs, nonetheless what
is shown to be the case by reason is completed
by revelation, not destroyed by it (He Who /s,
p. 82). Reason is necessary when speaking
about God, since one cannot engage in theo-
logical discourse without first of all being able
to explain and agree as to what we mean by
MASCALL
God. For revelation to make sense to someone,
it must first of all speak to what the person
already knows (albeit often only in an implicit
manner). Faith, Mascall argued, builds upon
knowledge - it cannot do otherwise.
For many Protestant believers, the knowl-
edge of God's nature and existence is given in
religious experience, not by rational argument;
in themselves the arguments of natural theology
are unconvincing and, where there is religious
experience, such arguments are superfluous.
Mascall did not deny the existence of religious
experience, but nonetheless he held that this
was not the normal or general way that people
come to believe in God. Hence, religious expe-
rience cannot replace natural theology in every
case.
Further criticisms of the Thomistic position
coming from Protestant thinkers centred on the
notion of sola scriptura. It is objected that the
best way to know God is directly to study his
self-revelation in scripture. Why should the
Bible be interpreted by either natural theology
or tradition? Mascall's answer was that if
reason and tradition are not used as guides,
then the Bible is open to an indefinite number
of systematic positions, none of which can be
said to be privileged or definitive.
Following St Thomas, Mascall held that the
existence of God is not self-evident and so has
to be shown through rational argumentation.
He realized that the traditional arguments as
put forward in the Five Ways were the subject
of much contemporary criticism and so had to
be considerably developed in order to be pre-
sented to the modern mind. At the heart of the
Five Ways, Mascall argued, there lies a central
argument (a position he derived from
Garrigou-Lagrange) which lay in the recogni-
tion of the finitude of every being which we
encounter. This, for Mascall, was the central
contribution of Christian thought to the phi-
losophy of religion, namely the recognition of
the radical finitude of existents - a notion which
is not to be found in ancient thought. The fact
that nothing which we encounter is ultimately
self-sufficient or self-explanatory leads to the
664
recognition that things must have the source of
their being in a Being which is existence itself
(Ipsum Esse).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
He Who Is. A Study in Traditional Theism
(1943).
Existence and Analogy: A Sequel to 'He Who
Is' (1949).
Other Relevant Works
The Openness of Being; Natural Theology
Today (1971).
Further Reading
Saraband: The Memoirs ofE.L. Mascall
(Leominster, 1992).
Michael Dunne
MASTERMAN, Margaret (1910-86)
Margaret Masterman was born in London on
4 May 1910 and died in Cambridge on 1 April
1986. She was educated at Hamilton House in
Tunbridge Wells, the Institut Brittany in Paris,
and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she
studied medieval and modern languages, and
moral science. Masterman married Richard
Bevan BRAITHWAITE, fellow of King's College
(and later Knightbridge Professor of Moral
Philosophy) at Cambridge University in 1932.
She was a founder member of the 'Epiphany
Philosophers' group in 1950, which comprised
scientists and philosophers interested in the
links between their disciplines and religion, and
started the journal Theoria to Theory. In 1956
Masterman created the Cambridge Language
Research Unit which was active for over twenty
years and whose work stemmed from her view
that machine translation was a feasible objective
due to developments in computing. She was a
founding fellow, Vice-President, Pro-President

and trustee of the Lucy Cavendish Foundation
and in 1965 Cambridge University recognized
it as an approved women graduate society.
Masterman was an exponent of analytic phi-
losophy and a number of her critical articles,
especially The Nature of a Paradigm (1970),
attracted substantial attention. In The Nature of
a Paradigm, she argued that Thomas Kuhn's
influential ideas about scientific development
through paradigms contained a considerable
number of different usages of the term
'paradigm' and also several distinct sorts of
paradigm. The focus of Masterman's research
and that of the Cambridge Language Research
Unit was theories of language structure and
processing, especially machine translation, and
an emphasis was placed upon the basic
semantic problems involved in understanding
language. In the late 1950s to early 1960s she
designed semantics nets for machine transla-
tion. She believed that language processing
programs should have a strong philosophical
basis and in Semantic Language Games, or
Philosophy by Computer (1968) she claimed
that considerably deeper philosophical imagi-
nation about language would be required to
produce sufficient knowledge to create a true
science of language. Masterman had hoped that
the Cambridge Language Research Unit's work
would generate research into the very nature of
language, but this never happened. Many of
her language processing and structure theories
were rejected when she propounded them but
they are now commonly accepted ideas in the
areas of artificial intelligence and machine trans-
lation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Psychology of Levels of Will',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
48 (1947-8), pp. 75-110.
'Causal Laws in Psychology', Proceedings of
The Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 23
(1949), pp. 45-60.
'Words', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 54 (1953-4), pp. 209-32.
Translation: Part 1', Proceedings of the
665
MATILAL
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 35 (1961),
pp. 169-216.
Semantic Language Games, or Philosophy by
Computer (Cambridge, 1968).
The Nature of a Paradigm', in Imre Lakatos
and Alan Musgrave (eds), Criticism and the
Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge, 1970),
pp. 58-89.
'Falling Through the Grid or What Has
Happened to the Scarce Women
Academics: An Analysis Constructed by
Playing the Paroramix Game', Journal for
the Theory of Social Behaviour, vol. 4
(1974), pp. 97-107.
'Reiterative Semantic Analysis of a Simile:
Part IIP, Theoria to Theory, vol. 12 (1978),
pp. 123-34.
'Reiterative Semantic Analysis of a Simile:
Part IV, Theoria to Theory, vol. 12 (1978),
pp. 191-204.
Other Relevant Works
The Justification of Analysis', Analysis, vol. 1
(1933), pp. 28-30.
(with Alice Ambrose), The Yellow Book', in
Alice Ambrose (ed.), Wittgenstein's
Lectures, Cambridge 1932-35 (Oxford,
1979), pp. 43-77.
'Braithwaite and Kuhn: Analogy Clusters
Within and Without Hypothetico-
Deductive Systems in Science', in David
Mellor (ed.), Science, Belief and Behaviour:
Essays in Honour ofR. B. Braithwaite
(Cambridge, 1980), pp. 61-86.
Mark Addis
MATILAL, Bimal Krishna (1935-91)
Bimal Matilal was born in Joynagar, West
Bengal, India and died in Oxford in June 1991.
He was educated at Islamia College and
Sanskrit College, and then at the University of
MATILAL
Calcutta, where he gained the traditional
Tarkatirtha, 'Master of Dialectic', degree. He
was appointed lecturer in Sanskrit at Presidency
College, Calcutta in 1957. From 1962 to 1965
he was at Harvard University, where he was
awarded his PhD. He was Professor of Sanskrit
at the University of Toronto from 1965 to
1976. During this professorship he held visiting
appointments at the University of Pennsylvania,
and the School of Oriental and African Studies
at the University of London. He became
founder editor of the Journal of Indian
Philosophy in 1970. In 1976 he was appointed
Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and
Ethics in the University of Oxford, and fellow
of All Souls.
Matilal was a leading exponent of Indian
logic and epistemology, and of the role of phi-
losophy in classical Indian society. Other
concerns of his were the deconstruction of
Western perceptions of Indian philosophy and
an examination of the thinking that had
informed Indian intellectuals such as
RADHAKRISHNAN. His philosophy drew on
grammatical literature, the epics, dharmasas-
tras, medical literature, poetics and literary crit-
icism. His Ethics and Epics (2000) sought to
uncover the moral theorizing implicit in the
epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
Matilal's eclecticism had methodological
motivations. He held that only through a com-
prehensive study of literature can one discover
the mechanisms of the internal criticism to
which a dynamic culture necessarily subjects
itself. Indian philosophy had been misconstrued
as predominantly spiritual, mystical and intu-
itive, and Matilal's method, in counteraction to
the Orientalists, was to examine the relationship
between contemporary and classical philoso-
phy. Subsequently, he was criticized for over-
dependence on contemporary Anglo-American
philosophy. However, he saw his work as a
necessary corrective to the view of Indian
philosophers as irrational mystics (Perception,
pp. 4,5). More importantly, he believed that by
relating current thinking to tradition, new
insights could be developed from the epistemes
666
of the indigenous systems. An example of this
is the epistemology of testimony, where the
Indian discussions have a real prospect of
informing contemporary debates. A co-edited
book, Knowing from Words, and writings of
his students on Sabda-Pramana are impressive
illustrations of the sort of philosophical 'inter-
connecting' Matilal sought.
Another example is his defence of a form of
direct realism in his Perception (1986). The
common sense realism of the Nyaya philoso-
phers asserts that we do indeed see the objects
we take ourselves to see, that those objects exist
by having parts without being merely the sum
of their parts, and that they fall into objective,
natural categories, by dint of the disclosure of
real universals inherent in their constitution.
Thus, we see a 'red patch' (substantial ground)
and thence relate qualias of 'hotness', 'round-
ness', 'pepperness' to it. The resultant percept is
non-partite, meaning the whole is greater than
the all the parts. Matilal's defence of this theory
is anchored on the unique formulation of objec-
tivity. To be objective is to be independent of
minds. Being 'mind-dependent', however, need
not mean being a private, intentional object in
the way that sense-data and other purely phe-
nomenal entities are. It can mean simply having
a mental event as a causal condition, an event
on whose continuing existence the object
depends. Although illusory, for instance, the
blueness of the sky and the ellipticality of the
disc are objective in the sense that they are not
purely private objects of sensation, but are
produced and shared by the perception of any
observer located in the appropriate position.
This is a softer realism than that to which
sceptics are committed, according to which
objects can exist independently of anyone's
capacity to know they exist.
Matilal was a rare kind of thinker, a philoso-
pher of sensibility who embodi ed East and West
in balanced proportions and who demonstrated
that Indian thought, even in its most meta-
physical and soteriological concerns, was rig-
orously analytical and logical as well as discur-
sive. His work has found broad endorsement

and inspired lively debate not only among many
contemporary Indian philosophers and
Indologists, but also in international philo-
sophical circles.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Navya-Nydya Doctrine of Negation
(Harvard, 1968).
Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian
Philosophical Analysis (The Hague, 1971).
The Logical Illumination of Indian Mysticism
(Calcutta, 1978).
Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian
Theories of Knowledge (Oxford, 1986;
2nd edn, 1991).
Nyaya-Vaisesika [A Historical Survey], vol. 6,
A History of Indian Literature (Wiesbaden,
1977).
The Central Philosophy ofjainism
(Anekanta-vada) (Ahemedabad, 1981).
Confrontation of Culture [Sakharama
Deuskar Lecture] (Calcutta, 1988).
The Word and the World: India's
Contribution to the Study of Language
(Delhi and Oxford, 1990).
The Development of Logic in India (Albany,
1999).
Philosophy, Culture and Religion: Collected
Papers o f B K Matilal, ed. J. Ganeri, vol. 1,
Ethics and Epics (Delhi, 2000).
Purushottama Bilimoria, with Jonardon
Ganeri and J.N. Mohanty
MATTHEWS, Walter Robert (1881-1973)
Walter Robert Matthews was born in London
on 22 September 1881 and died there on 5
December 1973. He was educated at Wilson's
Grammar School, Camberwell and King's
College London. A DD and DLitt of London
University, he held a number of honorary doc-
torates and civil honours. Following brief
667
MATTHEWS
church appointments he became lecturer in phi-
losophy of religion at King's (1908-18) and in
dogmatic theology (1909-18), and then Dean
and Professor of Philosophy of Religion
(1918-32). He was Dean of Exeter (1931-4)
and of St Paul's Cathedral (1934-67). He held
a number of prestigious lectureships and pub-
lished widely on philosophical and theological
subjects. Throughout his writings, whether
formal treatises, sermons or popular broadcast
talks, there runs the conviction that the
Christian faith is grounded in reason.
The objective of his Boyle Lectures, Studies in
Christian Philosophy (1920), is to show that
'Christian doctrine rests upon a few simple
affirmations of a philosophical character, and to
indicate a line of thought which seems to lead
to the conclusion that these affirmations are
rational' (p. vii). He contends that there is a
Christian view of the world; that ethical theism
is viable; that belief in the personality of the
divine is a necessity of Christian thought, and
that the concept of creation is essential to
Christian theism.
The Psychological Approach to Religion
(1925) includes Matthews's argument that since
psychology is an empirical science which
supplies data, it 'cannot possess the last word on
the question of the nature of reality and the
significance of life' (p. 5). He stoutly opposes
Otto's description of the object of religious rev-
erence as non-rational.
In his most frequently reprinted book, God
in Christian Thought and Experience (1930),
Matthews emphasizes the importance of reli-
gious experience for constructive Christian
apologetics. He discusses the theological con-
ception of God in relation to monism, realism
and idealism, the concept of transcendence, the
personality of God, creation, love and evil, and
time and providence.
Matthews's Essays in Construction (1933)
are lucid and popular treatments of such topics
as supernatural religion, proving God, evolu-
tion, and evil and immortality, while in The
Purpose of God (1935) he discusses the tradi-
tional theistic arguments, according a special
MATTHEWS
place to teleological considerations which he
construes in terms of 'the idea of the Kingdom
of God as the goal of history and of the devel-
opment of persons' (p. 166). His Dr Williams
Library Lecture on The Religious Philosophy of
Dean Mansel (1956) is a particularly illumi-
nating smaller work.
In the interests of a changeless Creator,
Matthews opposed the pantheizing tendencies
of Hegelianism and process thought, but he
never departed from the Christian idealist con-
viction that all that is worthy in philosophy
will find its ultimate synthesis in Christianity as
supremely revelatory of God.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Studies in Christian Philosophy [Boyle
Lectures] (1920).
The Psychological Approach to Religion
(1925).
God in Christian Thought and Experience
(1930).
Essays in Construction (1933).
The Purpose of God (1935).
The Religious Philosophy of Dean Mansel
(1956).
Other Relevant Works
Memories and Meanings (1969).
Further Reading
Owen, H.P., W. R. Matthews: Philosopher
and Theologian (1976).
Alan P.F. Sell
MAUND, Constance Alice Macartney
(1912-99)
Constance Maund (maiden name unknown)
was born on 15 March 1912 and died in
Chichester. She was a student at Bedford
College London and was taught by Susan
668
STEBBING. She was elected a member of the
Aristotelian Society in 1933 and was always
referred to as 'Mrs Maund' in their lists even
after she was awarded a PhD from the
University of London in 1936.
Maund is best known for the book she pub-
lished from her thesis, Hume's Theory of
Knowledge: A Critical Examination (1937).
While her writings focus upon the work of
Hume, she herself claimed that philosophy
should be the study of problems, and not of
philosophers or their works. Contrary to the
commonly held view of the day, Maund did not
think that epistemology was philosophically
prior to questions about the world (metaphys-
ical or scientific).
Maund argued that Hume was one of the
first to extend epistemology Ibeyond the mere
study of what is certain, to the study of all
forms of cognition. According to Maund,
Hume's own work was strictly epistemological
in focus, not metaphysical or psychological.
Central to Maund's reading of Hume is her
distinction between 'object-propositions' and
'perception-propositions'. Object-propositions
refer to objects as independent of and external
to the mind while perception-propositions are
'accusative', i.e. they refer to objects that are
indisputably given as phenomenal elements of
one's immediate perceptual experience (and
hence they are not, strictly speaking, indepen-
dent of or external to the mind). Maund claims
that Hume's treatment of objects (including
space, time, etc.) ought to be read in the
accusative sense as part of an epistemological
investigation, not an ontological one. Thus,
when speaking of Hume we need to distinguish
between two types of scepticism: (1) with regard
to the senses, and (2) with regard to reason.
Hume's scepticism applies only to the appre-
hension of objects in the non-accusative or
object-propositional sense, not to perceptions or
objects in the accusative sense (which are
known with certainty). Object-propositions that
purport to carry us beyond the evidence of the
senses are 'accusatives of believing', not of
knowing.

When Hume's Theory of Knowledge was
first published, it was significant enough to
deserve a review by Isaiah BERLIN. Although
Maund's work is cited far less today, the recent
reprint of her book (1972) is a testament to its
continued relevance to Hume scholarship and
to epistemology in general.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Hume's Treatment of Simples', Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 35
(1934-5), pp. 209-28.
Hume's Theory of Knowledge: A Critical
Examination (1937; repr. New York,
1972).
'The Nature and Significance of Hume's
Skepticism', Revue Internationale de
philosophie, vol. 6 (1952), pp. 168-83.
Other Relevant Works
Berlin, Isaiah, 'Hume's Theory of Knowledge:
A Review', Oxford Magazine, vol. 57
(1938-9), pp. 224-5.
Philip Rose
MAYO, Bernard (1920-2000)
Bernard Mayo was born in Leicester and died
on 14 February 2000. He went up to Oxford in
1940, but his university education was inter-
rupted by World War II, during which he
served in the Royal Signals, being promoted to
captain at an early stage. He returned to Oxford
at the end of the war and graduated in 1947
with first class honours in literae humaniores.
Among his teachers was R.M. HARE, author of
The Language of Morals, with whom he
remained in contact for the rest of his academic
career.
In a progression that not long after would
have been impossible, Mayo went straight from
a general undergraduate education to a lec-
669
MAYO
tureship in philosophy at the University of
Birmingham. At Birmingham he was promoted
to reader in 1962 and served as Sub-Dean of the
Faculty from 1966 to 1968. Among his col-
leagues he numbered Peter GEACH, with whom
for a period he shared an office. Towards the
end of his time at Birmingham, he became
external examiner at the University of St
Andrews, and it was this connection that led to
his being offered the Chair of Moral Philosophy
in succession to A.D. WOOZLEY, which he held
from 1968 to 1983. At St Andrews he served as
Head of Department for the whole of the fifteen
years he was there, and gave three years of
service to the Faculty of Arts as Associate Dean
of Postgraduate Studies. He took early retire-
ment from the chair in 1983, but remained in
St Andrews until his death. An avid (and highly
creative) gardener and keen hill walker, he was
married with four daughters, one of whom pre-
deceased him.
Though he occupied a chair of moral philos-
ophy, Mayo was a generalist with interests
ranging widely across the whole of philosophy.
Though philosophically educated by those who
forged the severely analytic school of 'Oxford
philosophy', Mayo's abiding interest in Plato
and Aristotle gave his own philosophical work
a wider humanistic perspective than that of
mere 'linguistic analysis' while at the same
retaining the intellectual virtues of clarity and
rigour.
He was the author of three books. The Logic
of Personality (1952), Ethics and the Moral
Life (1958) and The Philosophy of Right and
Wrong (1986). He published over fifty journal
articles in a wide variety of subjects, from
ancient philosophy to the philosophy of space
and time. His writing style belied his manner. In
person he was reserved, almost retiring, but in
print he was forthright and incisive.
In The Logic of Personality Mayo under-
took to examine what he himself saw to be a
central philosophical problem that is rarely
expressly addressed - namely, the nature of
personal knowledge. What is the nature of the
knowledge that we have when, in addition to
MAYO
knowing a lot about someone, we know him
personally? In a wide-ranging discussion he
argued that there is no essence of 'the personal'
but that analytical discrimination can enable us
to detect different conceptions in different
spheres, and so to understand importantly con-
trasting aspects of human existence - art and
science, for example, and the practical and the
moral.
Despite its considerable insight and original-
ity, The Logic of Personality seems to have had
little lasting impact. His second book, Ethics
and the Moral Life, was more directly related to
contemporary philosophical discussion at the
time it was written. In it he expounds a version
of Kantian prescriptivism according to which
the mark of morality is commitment to univer-
salizable principles, and argues in favour of this
conception over a more naturalistic morality of
the virtues. The book is written with charac-
teristic lucidity, though it does not have
anything very original to add to the prescrip-
tivism current at the time.
Some years later, Mayo reviewed for Mind
Julius Kovesi's Moral Notions, a book that sub-
jected prescriptivism to searching criticism. He
described it as 'thoroughly disturbing', and con-
cluded that it would occasion 'agonising reap-
praisals'. In his last book The Philosophy of
Right and Wrong, however, there was no
radical change to his view, and he continued to
defend prescriptivism in moral philosophy.
Written in retirement, this was commissioned as
a textbook, but he used the occasion to formu-
late some replies to prescriptivism's critics.
Mayo's books did not remain very long in
print and none of his articles became the sort of
locus classicus to which subsequent generations
of philosophers constantly refer. His principal
contribution to the subject and its improve-
ment lay in the commitment he had to the
practice of philosophy and its continuance.
First, he was an exemplary and influential
journal editor - of Analysis in its early days, and
then of the Philosophical Quarterly. It was
during his time as editor that Analysis pub-
lished the original piece by Edmund Gettier,
670
whose examples of deviant causal chains to
paths to knowledge provided the subject-matter
of epistemology for many years. With respect to
both journals, his editorial judgement and his
careful work on scripts greatly benefited writers
no less than readers. Second, he was a regular
and sought-after book reviewer, partly because
of his reliable efficiency with respect to length
and deadline, but also because his reviews were
models of criticism without any of the negative
overtones that the term sometimes implies.
Third, he was a committed participant in the life
of philosophical associations and their confer-
ences, hardly ever missing the Joint Session or
meetings of the Scots Philosophical Club, and
often reading a paper or taking the chair.
In these ways, Mayo embodied the recogni-
tion that to engage in philosophy is, first and
foremost, to participate in an activity, and that
with that participation come obligations to the
philosophical community.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Facts, Feelings and Attitudes', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 51 (1950-51),
pp. 105-28.
The Logic of Personality (1952).
'Art, Language and Philosophy in Croce',
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 5 (1955), pp.
245-60.
'A Logical Limit on Determinism',
Philosophy, vol. 33 (1958), pp. 50-55.
The Open Future', Mind, vol. 71 (1962), pp.
1-14.
'A Correspondence Theory of Value',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
73 (1972-3), pp. 181-92.
'Justice, Truth and Nozick', Analysis, vol. 40
(1980), pp. 119-23.
The Philosophy of Right and Wrong (1986).
Gordon Graham

MAYS, Wolfe (fl. 1950-)
Wolfe Mays (birth date withheld from pub-
lication by wishes of W. Mays) attended
WITTGENSTEIN'S lectures at Cambridge
University, though never becoming his
disciple. Earlier he had attended the lectures
of Gilbert RYLE, R.G. COLLINGWOOD and
W.C. KNEALE at Oxford. Mays's first
teaching post was at Edinburgh University in
the Department of Logic and Metaphysics.
Later, at Manchester University, he gave
courses on the history and philosophy of
science and lectured on the philosophy of
time. Mays is an influential figure in the twen-
tieth-century history of phenomenology. He
was assistant to Jean Piaget and translated
Piaget's Logic and Psychology (1953),
making Piaget's thought available to the
English-speaking world. With Piaget, philoso-
pher Leo Apostel and mathematician Benoit
Mandelbrot (of fractal fame), Mays helped
establish the International Centre of Genetic
Epistemology in Geneva in 1952. Genetic
epistemology is the study of the development
of concepts as contrasted with their norma-
tive study. In the 1930s Mays corresponded
with Michael POLANYI, who, as a Hungarian
Jew in exile, had taken a chair in chemistry at
Manchester University. Mays was also instru-
mental in inviting the French phenomenolo-
gist Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Manchester in
the late 1950s. Wolfe Mays is a founding
member of the British Society for
Phenomenology and editor of its journal. He
is currently (2004) Visiting Professor of
Philosophy at the Manchester Metropolitan
University.
Through his work with The British Society
for the Philosophy of Science Mays got to
know Karl POPPER, Imre LAKATOS and J.H.
WOODGER, among others. He became co-sec-
retary of a committee for the establishment of
a museum of science and technology in
Manchester (see Nature, 14 May 1955), but
this did not get off the ground, although such
a museum was established at a later date.
671
MAYS
An interesting aspect to the development of
Mays's ideas arose when writing about the
Nachlass of W.S. Jevons, the economist and
logician. Jevons's early mechanical logic
machine led Mays not only to become inter-
ested in such devices, but with the aid of the
electronics company Ferranti, he also con-
structed an electrical logic machine, reported in
Nature (5 February 1950). His interest in arti-
ficial intelligence led him to critique Alan
Mathison TURING'S test for intelligence. Turing
held that computers would in time be pro-
grammed to acquire abilities rivalling human
intelligence. In a 1952 paper published in the
journal Philosophy (vol. 36, pp. 112-27) Mays
questioned the fact that a machine designed to
perform logical operations could actually
capture 'our intuitive, often vague and imprecise
thought processes'. Could the tacit domain (cf.
Michael Polanyi) be captured by a machine?
Wolfe Mays was particularly interested in
the work of Jean Piaget, the Geneva psycholo-
gist and genetic epistemologist, as was Polanyi,
Mays had reviewed Piaget's Introduction a
I'Epistemologie Genetique for the journal Mind.
In 1952 Piaget was invited by Polanyi to give a
series of lectures on logic and psychology. Mays
helped translate and edit the resultant volume
(1953), making Piaget's thought available to
the English-speaking world.
On his return from Geneva as Piaget's assis-
tant in 1956 Mays completed a book on
WHITEHEAD, and undertook empirical studies
using questionnaires on the concepts of change
and uncertainty. Mays also worked on the
teaching of logic to socially deprived school
children to see if it would improve their grasp
of abstract ideas. Wolfe Mays then spent some
time in the United States of America, first
working on research at the Worcester State
Hospital near Boston. Later he was visiting pro-
fessor at Northwestern, Purdue and Wisconsin
universities.
Most critical, though, in Mays' career was his
exposure to continental thought in Geneva which
led to him developing an interest in phenome-
nology, and, on his return from the USA, he
MAYS
helped establish the British Society for
Phenomenology in 1967 and its journal, The
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology,
in 1970 with Mays as its editor.
Wolfe Mays was also interested in seeing if
the gap between analytical philosophy and con-
tinental philosophy could be closed. In collab-
oration with The Royal Institute of Philosophy,
this question was explored through a volume of
essays.
In 1981 Mays was awarded an Emeritus
Leverhulme Fellowship to continue with his
Piaget researches. Later he became Director of
the Intellectual Skills project based at
Manchester Polytechnic and funded by the EEC
Social Fund. He continues his studies in genetic
epistemology and phenomenology.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Philosophy of Whitehead (1959).
Arthur Koestler (Valley Forge, Pennsylvania,
1973).
Whitehead's Philosophy of Science and
Metaphysics: An Introduction to his
Thought (The Hague, 1977).
Piaget and Freud (Manchester, 1982).
Other Relevant Works
(Ed. with S.C. Brown), Linguistic Analysis
and Phenomenology (1972).
(Trans.), Jean Piaget, Insights and Illusions of
Philosophy (1977).
(with Bernard Curtis), Phenomenology and
Education: Self-Consciousness and its
Development (1978).
Wolfe Mays has published numerous journal
articles.
Elizabeth McCardell
672
MEAGER, Ruby Lilian (1916-92)
Ruby Meager was born in the Marylebone
district of London on 23 September 1916 and
died in Wandsworth. She read PPE at Somerville
College, Oxford, where she graduated in 1950,
after a shortened course for war service candi-
dates, and where she took the BPhil in 1953. She
spent most of her career teaching at Birkbeck
College, London, where she became a reader of
the university until her retirement in 1981. She
was a visiting professor at Carlton College,
Minnesota, in 1968. The Birkbeck Philosophy
Department honoured her memory by naming
its Philosophy Library the Ruby Meager Library.
Although Ruby Meager was not a prolific
publisher, she was highly regarded in the con-
temporary philosophical world, and was an
imposing figure both as a teacher and as a
researcher in the University of London. Her
main interest was aesthetics, and she con-
tributed to debates about such topics as aes-
thetic expertise, the development of creativity
and the imagination in young children, and the
ontological status of works of art.
With regard to the plastic arts, Meager holds
that an original painting or sculpture is both a
particular spatio-temporal object and a model-
universal of which faithful copies or reproduc-
tions can be made. By contrast, any work from
the performance arts is not and cannot be a
model-universal, but functions as a set of spec-
ifications or a framework which allows multiple
actual or possible interpretations. Each work of
art must be appraised individually in order to
determine whether it has positive aesthetic qual-
ities: it is not the case that there are any uni-
versal rules for judging works of art.
Meager contended that the case for there
being 'connoisseurs' of art was mistaken. She
observed that alleged 'connoisseurship' is
limited to the plastic arts, and that it is claimed
that superior knowledge of such works of art is
knowledge by acquaintance, like our knowl-
edge of other people. Such 'knowledge' is
impressionistic, subjective and untestable, and
therefore not real knowledge at all.

For Meager, the assumption of much primary
education since the 1960s, that children can
spontaneously be imaginative and creative
without learning anything of the techniques
and traditions of the artistic disciplines, rests on
a mistake. In order to flourish, the imagination
needs to be disciplined by a child's critical
ability, which can develop only through tradi-
tional learning.
In her several articles, Meager was obviously
sympathetic to the Kantian approach to aes-
thetics, which she took and developed. She also
made a contribution to the ontology of art, an
issue which is still of major importance, and all
of her articles were written with lucidity and
elegance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Heterologicality and the Liar', Analysis, vol.
16 (1956), pp. 131-7.
The Uniqueness of a Work of Art',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
59 (1958-9), pp. 49-70; repr. in Cyril
Barrett (ed.), Collected Papers on
Aesthetics (1965).
'Aesthetic Concepts', British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 9 (1970), pp. 13-28.
'The Dangers of Aestheticism in Schooling',
Journal of the Philosophy of Education,
vol. 15 (1981), pp. 23-31.
'Connoisseurship', British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 25 (1985), pp. 137-52.
Kathryn L. Plant
MEDAWAR, Peter Brian (1915-87)
Peter Medawar was born in Rio de Janeiro on
28 February 1915 and died in London on 2
October 1987 after the last of a series of strokes
that began in 1969. The son of a
Lebanese/Brazilian father and a British mother,
he received a first class degree in zoology from
673
MEDAWAR
Magdalen College, Oxford in 1935 and a DSc
in 1947, and held a number of academic posi-
tions: Mason Professor of Zoology at the
University of Birmingham (1947-51); Jordell
Professor of Zoology and Comparative
Anatomy at University College London
(1951-62); Director of the National Institute
for Medical Research (1962-71); and Head of
the Transplantation Section of the Medical
Research Council's Clinical Research Centre
(1971-86). In 1960 he was jointly awarded the
Nobel Prize for Medicine for his discovery of
immunological tolerance. He was elected FRS
in 1949, awarded a CBE in 1958, a knight-
hood in 1965, a CH in 1972 and an OM in
1981.
Medawar's scientific studies not only encom-
passed immunology, but also the fields of
growth, morphogenesis and embryonic induc-
tion. A number of his early papers examined
D'Arcy THOMPSON'S analyses of growth and
applied them to human problems. As Mitchison
(1990) notes, 'Medawar's contribution was one
of critically assimilating an extensive literature,
clarifying its mathematics, and summarizing it
on various occasions in a form which is readily
accessible to biologists, or treated at greated
depth' (p. 286). In addition, he was one of the
few who attempted to utilize - albeit unsuc-
cessfully - Thompson's method of transformed
coordinates, though he rejected Thompson's
anti-evolutionary underpinnings.
While clearly a distinguished scientist,
Medawar also spent a significant amount of
time communicating his views on scientific
method to fellow scientists and the public, and
in all published ten books and about two
hundred reviews and articles. A significant pro-
portion of these writings are collected in The
Hope of Progress (1972), Plato's Republic
(1982) and The Threat and the Glory (1990).
Influenced by T.D. WELDON, AJ. AYER and K.
POPPER, Medawar was particularly interested in
seeing science as a deductive enterprise which
was not restricted to the examination of scien-
tific problems. While experiment and testing
were important, Medawar saw the true mark of
MEDAWAR
science to be the creative act in which a new
idea was generated. Following on from Popper,
he held that these ideas could never formally be
proven true.
Medawar's interest in the theory of biology
and the hierarchical nature of scientific enquiry
is nicely illustrated in his 1974 paper presenting
'A Geometric Model of Reduction and
Emergence'. In this short piece he notes that
biology contains 'contextually distinctive
notions' at the level of the organism that are
'peculiar to and distinctive of that level and are
thus 'not obviously reducible to the notions of
the level immediately above [ecology] or higher
still [chemistry and physics]' (p. 57). These
notions include 'heredity', 'infection',
'immunity', 'sexuality' and 'fear'. He goes on to
provide a thought-provoking discussion of 'the
sense of diminishment' that results from 'ana-
lytical reduction' (ibid., p. 62).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Uniqueness of the Individual (1957).
The Hope of Progress (1972).
'A Geometric Model of Reduction and
Emergence', in FJ. Ayala and T.
Dobzhansky (eds), Studies in the
Philosophy of Biology: Reduction and
Related Problems (Berkeley, 1974), pp.
57-63.
Advice to a Young Scientist (1980).
Pluto's Republic (1982).
The Limits of Science (1984).
The Threat and the Glory (1990).
Other Relevant Works
Memoir of a Thinking Radish (1986).
Further Reading
Mitchison, N.A., 'Peter Brian Medawar',
Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the
Royal Society of London, vol. 35 (1990),
pp. 283-301.
John M. Lynch
674
MELLONE, Sydney Herbert: (1869-1956)
Sydney Herbert Mellone was born of British
parents in Toldedo, Ohio, LISA in May 1869
and died in Woodford Green, Essex on 18 July
1956. Educated at London University (BA,
1890) and Manchester College, Oxford
(1890-93), Mellone proceeded, with a Hibbert
Trust Scholarship, to Edinburgh University,
where in 1897 he was awarded a DSc for a
thesis published as Studies in Philosophical
Criticism and Construction: A Summary of the
Problems of Philosophy (1897). Mellone's
calling was that of a scholar-minister in the
Unitarian tradition, first at Holywood, County
Down, from 1898 to 1909, and then as assis-
tant to his father-in-law, Robert Drummond, at
Edinburgh (1909-11). He was also a prolific
writer. Early on, in 1905, Blackwood's pub-
lished his Introductory Textbook on Logic with
Numerous Examples and Exercises which
reached its twentieth edition in 1945, by which
time Aristotelian logic had largely given way to
the symbolic logic of RUSSELL and WHITEHEAD.
Then, while in Edinburgh, Mellone collabo-
rated with his sister-in-law, Margaret
Drummond, a Moray House education
lecturer, in writing Elements of Psychology
(1907), a textbook for teachers.
He pursued his academic career alongside
his ministry. In 1900 he had returned to the
USA and lectured on J.H. Newman, Comte,
James Martineau, Spencer and Robert
Browning at Meadville Theological School in
Penny sivania. These lectures were published in
1902 as Leaders of Religious Thought in the
19th Century. In addition, from 1899 and for
almost sixty years, Mellone was, at different
times, external examiner in either philosophy or
psychology for the universities of St Andrews,
Edinburgh and London.
He also wrote articles in Encyclopaedia
Britannica (14th edn), for which he was a philo-
sophic adviser, and for Hastings's
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, to which
he contributed articles on scholasticism and
immortality. His 'scholasticism' article was

expanded in The Message of the Middle Ages.
To the Modern World (1929) and Western
Christian Thought in the Middle Ages: An
Essay in Interpretation (1935). The article on
immortality, in which Mellone contends that
God as love could not permit the destruction of
unused human potential at the time of physical
death, he expanded in The Immortal Hope:
Present Aspects of the Problem of Immortality
(1910) and Eternal Life Here and Hereafter
(1916).
From 1911 to 1921 Mellone was Principal of
the Unitarian College, Manchester and Lecturer
in Christian Doctrine at Manchester University.
This career move took him into other areas of
scholarship, as is shown by his books The New
Testament and Modern Life (1921), The
Apocrypha: Its Story and its Messages (1927)
and Leaders of Early Christian Thought (1954).
In this post he was also able to recover his
earlier interest in psychology, writing Bearings
of Psychology on Religion (1939). From 1920
to 1921 he lectured in the psychology of religion
at his Oxford alma mater.
In 1921 Mellone became Secretary of the
British and Foreign Unitarian Association, a
post he held until the formation of the Unitarian
General Assembly in 1928. In this post
Mellone's writings were largely apologetic for
liberal and modernist interpretations of
Christianity: Modern Churchmen and
Unitarians (1922); Liberty and Religion (1925);
Back to Realities: A Way Out of the Present
Chaos (1928); and, with J. Estlin Carpenter, the
comparative religionist, he edited Freedom and
Truth: Modern Views of Unitarian Christianity
(1925).
Mellone's final ministry was at Lincoln
between 1930 and 1939, before a long retire-
ment. In retirement he returned to his first love,
philosophy. The Dawn of Modern Thought
appeared in 1930, and he was a contributor to
the Hibbert Journal, for which he wrote a
regular review of philosophical literature, and
to Faith and Freedom.
Mellone was a philosophical idealist for
whom religious faith was an experience of the
675
MIDGLEY
absolute worth and reality of our ideals,
together with an intellectual interpretation of
that experience.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Studies in Philosophical Criticism and
Construction: A Summary of the Problems
of Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1897).
Elements of Modern Logic (Edinburgh,
1905).
Laws Of Life: An Introduction to the
Elements of Ethics (1910).
'Immortality', in J. Hastings (ed.),
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics
(1914), vol. 7, pp. 172-9.
Eternal Life Here and Hereafter (1916).
'Scholasticism', in Hastings' Encyclopaedia of
Religion and Ethics (1920), vol. 11, pp.
239-49.
Articles in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th
edn (1929).
The Dawn of Modern Thought: Descartes,
Spinoza, Leibniz (Oxford, 1930).
Bearings of Psychology on Religion (1939).
Leaders of Early Christian Thought (1954).
Many articles in the Hibbert Journal and
Faith and Freedom.
Further Reading
Evans, E.D. Priestley, A History of the New
Meeting House, Kidderminster (1900), pp.
147-9.
Andrew M. Hill
MIDGLEY, Mary Beatrice (nee Scrutton:
1919-)
Mary Scrutton was born in London on 13
September 1919, the daughter of Tom Burton
(a canon) and Evelyn Lesley Scrutton (nee Hay).
As an undergraduate from 1938 to 1942, she
studied philosophy and classics at Somerville
MIDGLEY
College, Oxford for her BA degree. After a brief
stint as a civil servant (1942-3), Midgley taught
classics at secondary school level in Berkshire
and Bedford, and served for a period of time as
secretary to the classicist Gilbert Murray. Her
first university appointment, as lecturer in phi-
losophy, was at the University of Reading from
1949 to 1950. She married Geoffrey Midgley (a
university lecturer in philosophy) on 18
December 1950, moved to Newcastle, and
became the mother of three sons. After the end
of World War II, Midgley started a DPhil at
Oxford on the psychology of Plotinus, but did
not complete the degree. She returned to
teaching in 1961, taking up a position as part-
time lecturer in philosophy at the University of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In 1967 she became a
full-time lecturer, and in 1975, a senior lecturer,
the post she held until retiring early from
teaching in 1980 in order to concentrate on
research and writing. Broadcasting has also
occupied her over the years. In 1994 Midgley
received an honorary DLitt degree from the
University of Durham. She continues to live in
Newcastle.
A remarkably prolific author and an out-
spoken individual, Midgley has remained a
prominent and controversial figure in British
intellectual life since she first started publishing.
A late bloomer, her first - and probably still
best-known - book, Beast and Man: The Roots
of Human Nature, appeared when she was
nearly sixty years of age, and grew out of a
period of reading works on ethology (the study
of animal behaviour, especially in the natural
environment) and socio-biology (the study of
how genes can influence social behaviour), and
reflecting on her firsthand experiences, as a
mother, of children's development. Beast and
Man announced some of Midgley's major pre-
occupations as a writer: exploration of the close
connection between human and non-human
behaviour; deconstruction of prejudices and
misconceptions concerning both human and
animal life fostered by scientists and philoso-
phers; and making room, as a consequence, for
fresh perspectives on human nature and
676
morality, as well as on animals' remarkable
capacities.
A solid lesson embedded in Midgley's
writings is that humans are unique, but so are
other life-forms. Our destiny is not to rule arro-
gantly over nature, heedless of the conse-
quences, but to discover and celebrate our
kinship with other beings.
Midgley's published works embrace topics as
diverse as children's rights, Darwinism, the
sacred and the secular, family dynamics, the
biosphere and zombies. She believes that philo-
sophical ideas underlie everything we believe,
do and say. This 'philosophical plumbing', as
she has labelled it, needs to be excavated for
better understanding of what we stand for - or
to expose and identify the myths we live by.
Some of these myths, such as the belief that
science can serve as a substitute for religion
and ideology in today's world, also need to be
subjected to critical scrutiny and discarded. But
not all myths are harmful and we need them to
make sense of things. The ideas by means of
which we organize our view of the universe,
whatever their origin, have a moral dimension
for Midgley, and she seeks to enrich our appre-
ciation of this fact. Human life is a moral life
through and through, but we often oversimplify
its complexity. In a landmark essay (one of her
most widely reprinted), 'Duties Concerning
Islands' (which first appeared in Encounter in
1983), Midgley points out that widely influen-
tial forms of social contract theory, viewing
humans as 'ultimate, solitary, independent indi-
viduals', have in essence enshrined a model of
physical matter borrowed from, but long since
abandoned by, seventeenth-century physics.
Just as it is outmoded in physics, she argues, so
is it in our thinking about; society. She also
observes that there is a vast class of entities tra-
ditionally neglected or even excommunicated by
Western ethical theory, including children,
defective humans, artefacts, animals, plants,
the biosphere, oneself and God.
An especially noteworthy role that Midgley
has taken on is that of watchdog on the excesses
of modern science and technology, and several

of her books are concerned with related themes.
While her observations about science have been
branded as 'reactionary', many see them as
appropriately corrective and conscience-driven.
For example, Midgley argues that we should
respect emotional reactions against certain
products of genetic engineering because of the
deep-seated convictions from which they spring
- among others, that natural species should not
be drastically altered by human intervention.
And she has championed the 'Gaia hypothesis'
- a vision of the Earth as a gigantic, self-regu-
lating living organism - which is often seen as
an urgently needed antidote to the anthro-
pocentrism and rapacious exploitation of
resources characteristic of industrial civiliza-
tion.
Reviewers have described Midgley's books as
'wise', 'modest', 'sane', 'learned', 'simple', 'intel-
ligent' and 'entertaining', and her writing style
as 'elegant', 'beautiful' and unencumbered by
jargon. She has received plaudits for
'discuss [ing] philosophical issues in a way that
makes clear how they relate to one another,
and why they are important' (James Grant,
New Statesman, 10 August 1979). And it has
been observed that 'Her capacity for scrupulous
examination of a question is equalled only by
her gift for an eviscerating phrase' (Andrew
Brown, The Darwin Wars, 2001, p. 83).
Midgley retains a reputation as an eminently
readable philosopher whose prose has popular
appeal and whose commentaries incisively
address many of the central issues of our time.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature
(Ithaca, 1978; rev. edn, 1995).
Heart and Mind: The Varieties of Moral
Experience (Brighton, 1981).
Women's Choices: Philosophical Problems
Facing Feminism (1983).
Animals and Why They Matter: A Journey
Round the Species Barrier
(Harmondsworth, 1983).
Biological and Cultural Evolution (Tunbridge
Wells, 1984).
677
MILES
Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay (1984).
(with Judith Hughes), Women's Choices:
Philosophical Problems Facing Feminism,
shorter version (New York, 1984);
Japanese trans, by Shiori Gojo and Yuko
Nakamura, Josei no Sentaku: Feminizumu
o Kangaeru (Tokyo, 1990).
Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and
Stranger Fears (1985).
Wisdom, Information, and Wonder: What is
Knowledge /-orf (1989).
Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its
Meaning [Gifford Lectures 1990] (1992).
Can't We Make Moral Judgements? (Bristol,
1991).
The Ethical Primate: Humans, Freedom and
Morality (New York, 1994).
Utopias, Dolphins and Computers: Problems
of Philosophical Plumbing (1996).
Gala: The Next Big Idea (2001).
Science and Poetry (2001).
The Myths We Live By (2003).
Other Relevant Works
The Owl of Minerva (Routledge, 2004).
Memoirs.
Michael Allen Fox
MILES, Thomas Richard (1923-)
T.R. (Tim) Miles was born in Chapeltown,
Sheffield on 11 March 1923. He read Greats,
psychology and philosophy at Magdalen
College, Oxford, graduating with first class
honours. He was one of the first students at
Oxford to graduate in psychology. In 1949 he
was appointed lecturer in the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Wales, Bangor,
though even at this early stage he was interested
in developing psychology as a field of study. He
trained as an educational psychologist, estab-
lished a Psychological Laboratory at the
MILES
University and set up an honours degree in the
subject. In 1963 he became Bangor University's
first Professor of Psychology and was also
awarded a PhD for a thesis entitled 'A
Behaviourist Approach to Psycho-Analysis'.
Doubtless his major contribution has been made
in the study of dyslexia, its diagnosis and treat-
ment. He was the major inspiration in the estab-
lishment and organization of Bangor University's
Dyslexia Unit, which has contributed much to
academic debate on the subject and, in the
process, benefited generations of students in
identifying their condition and suggesting ways
of combating it in their studies. He retired in
1987 and was made professor emeritus.
As a philosopher, Miles has tended to utilize
and explain the work of others rather than
develop his own system and he is open in
acknowledging his debt to various philosophers
and theologians of the twentieth century. As his
Oxford mentor, Gilbert RYLE exercised a for-
mative influence, while echoes of John A.T.
Robinson's secular theology in Honest to God
(1963), Don Cupitt's non-realist approach to
religion and Dewi Z. PMLLIPS'S appropriation of
Ludwig WnTGENSTEESf's philosophy of language
are clear in his work. His major publications in
the field were Religion and the Scientific
Outlook (1959), Religious Experience (1972)
and Speaking of God (1998).
Despite the fact that his work was published
over a period of forty years, Miles's basic philo-
sophical stance remained the same between
1959 and 1998, though by the latter date he
had developed slightly novel terminology. The
major precept in his thought is the differentia-
tion of religious language from factual
language. The latter can be verified through
empirical observation while the former is to be
understood not in literal terms but as parable.
He later came to refer to the differentiation
between profound and standard truth, each
with its own rules for discussion, or, in
Wittgenstein's terms, its own 'language-game'.
Thus references to God's existence have a dif-
ferent meaning from references to the existence
of dodos (Miles's example) because the lack of
678
empirical verification makes the former impos-
sible as literal statements of fact, but does not
necessarily mean that religious statements are
untrue. To misunderstand this, and impose
literal meaning on religious statements, is to
become subject to the 'magnus image' which
degrades and reduces God to a being like other
beings. If understood, however, then the way is
open to protect religious belief from what
appear to be philosophical and scientific attacks
by differentiating between religious and other
kinds of language and, thereby, also differenti-
ating between religious, philosophical or sci-
entific truth.
The influence of the logical positivists is clear,
as is that of linguistic analysis. But what ulti-
mately lays claim to Miles's thought is the
profound sense that words are finally inade-
quate to express religious truth. Silence is the
only valid response. Perhaps this is a rather
fitting conclusion for a member of the Society
of Friends.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Religion and the Scientific Outlook (1959).
Religious Experience (1972).
Speaking of God: Theism Atheism and the
Magnus Image (York, 1998).
Robert Pope
MILNE, Alan John Mitchell (1922-88)
Alan Milne was born in the Wycombe district of
Buckinghamshire on 30 April 1922 and died in
Oxford on 24 May 1988. He joined the army
directly from Uppingham School, serving in
Europe in World War II, where he was blinded
in both eyes by a sniper, whilst leading a bridge-
building operation in 1945. After recuperating at
St Dunstan's, near Brighton, Milne read gov-
ernment at the London School of Economics
(LSE), where he was one of Laski's last students,

gaining a BSc (Econ.) in 1949. He went on to
complete a PhD on Bentham and Coleridge
(1952) and picked up an interest in the British
idealists. He held a Commonwealth Fund
(Harkness) Fellowship at Berkeley and
Princeton from 1952 to 1954. He was assistant
lecturer at the LSE (1954-6) before being
appointed lecturer in social philosophy at
Queen's University, Belfast in 1956. He was
subsequently promoted to a readership in 1965
and, in 1973, to a personal chair. He was
Professor of Political Theory and Institutions at
Durham from 1975 till 1987, when he retired
as an emeritus professor.
Milne's blindness meant that he relied on
others to read for him, and this may have con-
tributed to his close reading of the texts of the
nineteenth-century idealists: Milne's interest in
the English idealists stayed with him through-
out his life, and formed the dominant theme of
his work. In particular, he was interested in
taking T.H. Green's philosophical commitment
to the 'common good' and divesting it of
Green's metaphysical commitments. Crick
declares that 'he tried ... to build a bridge
between the social concerns of the philosophi-
cal idealists and the rationalism of Hume, the
Utilitarians, J.S. Mill especially, Hobhouse, and
Laski' (Politics, Wellbeing and the Market,
p. viii).
Amongst Milne's works are: The Social
Philosophy of English Idealism (1962), his
earliest work which first expounded and then
criticized Green, BRADLEY and BOSANQUET.
Freedom and Rights (1968) took on the idea
(associated with Isaiah BERLIN) that a positive
conception of liberty inevitably ends up in
coercion of others. He argued in The Right to
Dissent and Human Rights and Human
Diversity (1986) that freedom rested on positive
self-determination through interaction with
others. Milne's major works are Ethical
Frontiers of the State (1998) and Politics,
Wellbeing and the Market (2001), in which he
develops a humanistic social ethics in conscious
opposition to T.H. Green's 'spiritual moral of
the true good'. Green, argues Milne, makes
679
MILNE
two key errors: first, he conceives of living well
as indivisible, so that each can live well only to
the extent that all can live well. The second
mistake is the assumption that morality and
fully enlightened self-interest not only coincide,
but are identical. In Ethical Frontiers of the
State Milne reconstructs a theory of the
common good without these over-optimistic
assumptions
Milne practised humanism, in the somewhat
inauspicious context of Northern Ireland at the
height of the 'troubles', as a prominent member
of the Ulster Humanist Association, which con-
tributed to pressure for non-denominational
schools.
According to Bernard Crick, Milne's legacy
was the reinvigoration of the idealist tradition
insofar as it put the common good at the centre
of political and ethical concern: he left 'an
almost forgotten tradition of social and ethical
thought now revised and refreshed' (Politics,
Wellbeing and the Market, p. ix). As such, it
was timely that both Ethical Frontiers of the
State and Politics, Wellbeing and the Market
were published at a time when the neo-liberal
tide of the 1980s had begun to recede, and
many philosophers looked again at the prefig-
urations of communitarian thought in the
Victorian idealists.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Social Philosophy of English Idealism
(1962).
Freedom and Rights (1968).
The Right to Dissent (1974).
Human Rights and Human Diversity: An
Essay in the Philosophy of Human Rights
(1986).
Ethical Frontiers of the State (Basingstoke,
1998).
Politics, Wellbeing and the Market, ed. Roger
Crisp and Alistair Milne, with a Foreword
by Bernard Crick (Basingstoke, 2001).
Jon Pike
MITCHELL
MITCHELL, Basil George (1917-)
Basil Mitchell was born in Bath on 9 April
1917, son of George William Mitchell and
Mary Mitchell. He married Margaret Eleanor
Collin in 1950 and they have four children.
When Mitchell was eleven, he, his parents and
his nine-year-old sister settled in Southampton,
where his father was an established quantity
surveyor. His mother, who had been trained as
a primary-school teacher, was struck by a par-
ticularly virulent form of rheumatoid arthritis
soon after moving to Southampton and
remained almost helpless in bed for the remain-
ing twenty years of her life. It was through his
mother's search for alternative medicines and
philosophies that the family came in touch with
the Sufi movement. Although he had been con-
firmed in the Anglican Church, Mitchell notes
that he was attracted to the Sufi emphasis upon
the mystical essence of the major world religions
and that this influence on his thinking was very
strong by the time that he went to Queen's
College, Oxford in 1935. At Oxford he even-
tually began the study of philosophy but
expresses disappointment that the influence of
philosophical analysis created a climate that
discouraged asking questions about the nature
of ultimate reality and the human relation to it.
Torn between a strong inclination towards
pacifism and a sense of the fight of good against
evil, Mitchell eventually joined the Royal Navy
in 1940, spending the next six years in naval
service, after which he returned to Oxford with
plans to continue his study of Sanskrit and
Indian philosophy. By that time, however, he
had become more conscious of the conflicts
between the Hindu and Christian worldviews,
and remarks that when he found himself in the
company of committed Anglicans, he felt imme-
diately at home. At Oxford, Mitchell began to
meet regularly with a small group of philoso-
phers and theologians who came to call them-
selves 'the Metaphysicals', a name that reflected
their common dissatisfaction with the general
restrictions placed upon discussions of religion
by contemporary linguistic philosophy. A col-
680
lection of articles arising from these discussions
and edited by Mitchell appeared under the title,
Faith and Logic (1957). Among the contribu-
tors to the volume was Austin FARRER, the
person to whom Mitchell attributes something
of a conversion experience. Commenting on
Farrer's 1948 Bampton Lectures, Mitchell
writes that here at last 'was the mystical vision
to which Sufi teaching at its best had inclined
me, but a vision that acknowledged and
enhanced the reality of the created order and the
significance of human history and was inti-
mately involved in the lives and loves of indi-
vidual persons' ('War and Friendship', p. 39).
Following a year as lecturer at Christ Church,
Mitchell was elected in 1947 to a tutorial fel-
lowship at Keble College, a position he held
until 1968, when he succeeded Ian RAMSEY as
the Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of
Christian Religion and as fellow of Oriel
College. He retired in 1984.
Whether reading Mitchell's discussions of
religious education, the nature of the academic
vocation, the role of theology in bioethics, his
analysis of the Church of England's Working
Party's report on the church and the atomic
bomb, or his more extended theoretical discus-
sions, one cannot avoid the image of Mitchell
as a person of reason. He identifies himself as
a philosopher and a Christian rather than as a
Christian philosopher, and in both roles it is the
person of reason in thought and practice that
shines forth. Mitchell never challenges the
importance of the more technical applications
of reason, but he insists upon extending more
narrow conceptions of the scope of reason to
take into account the reasoning of ordinary
persons who try to make sense of and respond
correctly to the environment in which they find
themselves. Reason requires impartiality, but
not neutrality. Impartiality, he argues, means
not that I refrain from reaching a conclusion or
that I remain neutral on value issues, but that I
am fair in my arguments and in assessing the
arguments of my opponents. Impartiality in
this sense is at the heart of Mitchell's inaugural
lecture, Neutrality and Commitment (1968),

where he seeks to vindicate the philosophy of
the Christian religion as an academic subject
within the context of the university.
Two themes are particularly prominent in
Mitchell's work: the justification of religious
belief, and the significance of Christian belief for
issues of morality and social theory. I begin
with the former. Few English-speaking philoso-
phers and even fewer philosophers of religion
are unfamiliar with Mitchell's response to
Antony FLEW in Theology and Falsification'
(1955). In this discussion Flew presents a chal-
lenge to theists arguing that if there is no state
of affairs that would count against such asser-
tions as 'God loves us as a father loves his
children', the assertion dies the death of a
thousand qualifications. It is not an assertion at
all. In contrast to R.M. HARE'S response to
Flew's challenge, in which Hare argues that
religious utterances are not factual assertions,
Mitchell argues that religious utterances are
assertions, that facts do count against theolog-
ical assertions, but that religious believers do not
allow anything to count decisively against them.
Flew had set up the discussion with a parable
of two explorers who come across a clearing in
the jungle in which many weeds and flowers are
growing and debate in a detached way about
the existence of a gardener. In responding to
Flew, Mitchell proposes a parable which is
intended to bring out the more personal context
in which the religious believer is said to have
faith in God. Mitchell tells the story of a resis-
tance worker in time of war in an occupied
country meeting a stranger. They spend the
night together and the stranger tells the resis-
tance worker that he himself is on the side of the
resistance and that he is in command of it. He
urges the partisan to have faith in him no matter
what happens. In the days following their
meeting, the partisan sometimes observes the
stranger cooperating with the enemy and the
partisan's friends question the stranger's loyalty
to the resistance. The partisan, however, con-
tinues to believe that the stranger is on their
side, leading his friends to ask, what would he
have to do for you to admit that he is not on our
681
MITCHELL
side? The partisan acknowledges that the
stranger's ambiguous behaviour does count
against what he believes about the stranger,
but he does not allow anything to count deci-
sively against his faith and belief in him.
Mitchell believes that the parable of the
stranger and the resistance worker provides a
useful analogy for the kind of situation that
constitutes the trial of religious faith. One might
ask, however, is there not some point at which
it would no longer make sense to believe that
the stranger is on the side of the resistance?
Mitchell responds that this is a question that
cannot be answered in advance. If the partisan
is sane and reasonable in his belief, he must
take into account those acts that count against
his faith in the stranger. He must, however,
also take into account those reasons that led
him to trust in the stranger in the first place.
Because of this, the partisan may be said to be
making an assertion in telling his friends that the
stranger is on their side. He may also be said to
be providing an explanation, an interpretation
of the stranger's behaviour that differs from
the explanation which some of his friends place
upon the same facts. By analogy, when a
Christian says, 'God loves me', she is asserting
an article of faith based on a personal relation-
ship that is subject to falsification, but she
cannot say in advance what would count deci-
sively against it, for her trust is based on a
relation or meeting which is decisive for her.
It might be argued that I have given too much
space to this discussion of 'Theology and
Falsification' for an entry of this kind. I have
done so because it continues to be reprinted in
many philosophy of religion texts more than
fifty years after its first appearance, and because
in this early parable we find many of the ingre-
dients of Mitchell's subsequent and more
extended discussions of the justification of reli-
gious belief. The partisan's belief, and by
analogy Christian belief, is in some sense an
explanation. It helps explain and make sense of
the stranger's behaviour in the context of the
resistance movement and it differs from other
interpretations of the same facts. Further, the
MITCHELL
partisan, or the Christian once she has com-
mitted herself, is precluded from taking asser-
tions as provisional hypotheses or as vacuous
formulae to which experience makes no differ-
ence. Mitchell intends to find a balance between
experience and commitment on the one hand,
and argument and explanation on the other
hand. He wants, as he puts it in The
Justification of Religious Belief (1973), to avoid
the impasse in which 'Either God is at best an
inferred hypothesis and faith in God is not more
than the acceptance of an hypothesis; or God is
an experienced reality about which rational
doubt is, at least, for the one who experiences,
impossible' (p. 112).
The primary purpose of The Justification of
Religious Belief is 'to discuss whether religious
belief requires or admits of rational support; if
so, of what sort and to what extent' (p. 1).
Religious belief in this case means the belief of
traditional Christian theism. Mitchell does not
provide us with a precise definition of tradi-
tional Christian theism, but he does say that it
is what the ordinary educated person means
by God, whether Christian or atheist, and that
it is broad enough to take into account such
questions as whether or not God's eternity
implies God's timelessness or whether God is
capable of suffering. Mitchell does not believe
that we are able in the strict sense either to
prove or disprove the existence of God. He
argues, however, that what has been taken as a
series of failures to prove the existence of God
by strict deductive and inductive arguments
may be understood as contributions to a cumu-
lative case argument for the existence of God.
Prima facie, the elements of the Christian
theistic vision tend to reinforce each other in a
way that may be recognized by both theists
and opponents. Thus, while the ontological and
cosmological arguments do not themselves
prove the existence of God, they do provide
what, according to Mitchell, is arguably the
best explanation of the nature and existence of
the universe.
Mitchell is far from being the only contem-
porary philosopher of religion to be interested
682
in cumulative case arguments. In Mitchell's
case, however, the cumulative case argument
takes a somewhat different and what might be
described as less formal turn. Mitchell stands
near to John Henry Newman, whom he fre-
quently cites with significant sympathy for the
latter's effort to understand rationality as prac-
tised in ordinary life. Mitchell's cumulative case
argument for the existence of God is broadly
empirical in nature and is subject to tests of
coherence and correspondence, but it does not
provide a chain of formal reasoning. It is, he
suggests, the kind of argument that we often use
in our efforts to provide a correct interpretation
of a text or historical event. On this view, the
Christian may argue that Christian theism
makes better sense of all the data than the alter-
natives, and the atheist may contest this claim
using a similar form of argument. Although we
are not in a position regarding metaphysical
schemes (or even scientific schemes) to specify
in advance precise rules by which we can decide
between competing explanations, Mitchell
believes that we can rely on consistency, coher-
ence, simplicity and explanatory power, which
are not relative to particular paradigms. Both
the theist and the atheist may acknowledge that
some considerations strengthen their cases while
other considerations weaken them, and each
should take into account the objections of the
other. The process of argument, says Mitchell
quoting John WISDOM, 'is not: a chain of demon-
strative reasoning. It is a presenting and repre-
senting of those features of a case which sever-
ally cooperate in favour of the conclusion' (The
Justification of Religious Belief, p. 45). There is
an ongoing tension in such cases between the
individual data and the overall interpretation
calling at many points for personal judgement.
The overall interpretation has to make sense of
the data without ignoring or distorting it, and
the evidence has to be consistent with other
evidence. In some cases new evidence may help
settle disputes. In other cases, however, one
may offer a new interpretation which reinte-
grates the existing evidence in a more convinc-
ing pattern leading to a shift of vision in the

dispute between the theist and the atheist that
is analogous to what Thomas Kuhn describes as
a paradigm shift in science.
Mitchell holds that traditional Christian
theism in its intellectual aspect is best under-
stood as a worldview which may be judged by
its capacity to provide the best explanation of
all available evidence. But, it might be argued,
religious faith is not primarily an intellectual
matter and, further, religious commitment is
unconditional by comparison with the tentative
belief in metaphysical or scientific worldviews.
Mitchell acknowledges that religious faith is
not merely an intellectual choice between com-
peting hypotheses, and he concedes that there
are differences between the worldviews of
science, morality and religion. He argues,
however, that secular worldviews and moral
and political theories are also accepted in a
manner that is not merely tentative and provi-
sional. In addition, he argues, there is no nec-
essary conflict between holding something to be
an experienced reality and a hypothesis about
it. Even claims to direct perception of God are
held to rely upon a conceptual claim for their
defence. Thus, when such philosophers as John
HICK claim direct experience of God, Mitchell
writes, 'it is proper to ask the question, "how
else would you explain?", and the degree of
confidence he is justified in placing in his inter-
pretation of the experience is related to its plau-
sibility in comparison with the alternatives'
(The Justification of Religious Belief, p. 115).
The relationship between faith as uncondi-
tional commitment and the criticism of faith
from secular and cultural sources outside faith
is the primary theme for Mitchell's Sarum
Lectures delivered in 1992 at Oxford University
and published under the title Faith and
Criticism (1994). Mitchell describes a sharp
division between
those who take it for granted that Christian
theology should be studied with the aid of all
the resources of modern scholarship and with
due attention to all that is received as knowl-
edge in the modern world, and those who
683
MITCHELL
resist this trend as destructive of the historic
faith of the Christians.
(Faith and Criticism^ p. 1)
He is concerned to defend the former, which he
calls the liberal approach, against the latter,
which he calls the conservative approach. The
so-called conservative approach is sufficiently
broad in his definition to allow him to include
not only biblical fundamentalists, but also
Wittgensteinians and existentialists. This is not
to deny the important differences between
biblical fundamentalists and other so-called
conservatives. For example, neither D.Z.
PHILLIPS nor Rudolph Bultmann is a conserva-
tive in the sense of one who argues that scien-
tific or historical judgements that conflict with
the holy scriptures are false. On Mitchell's
account, however, they do as a matter of logic
separate faith as unconditional commitment
from conflicts with other truth claims. More
radical postmodern thinkers, he argues, go even
further in denying the idea of objective truth
altogether.
In working out and defending what he calls
the liberal programme in theology, Mitchell
challenges the sharp distinction often drawn
between unconditional commitment in religious
faith and Clifford-like evidentialism in the
sciences. He argues that commitment is an
essential ingredient of any effective intellectual
endeavour and that criticism is an essential
ingredient of religious commitment. The impar-
tiality required by intellectual criticism does not
imply neutrality or the lack of conviction,
according to Mitchell, but that one take seri-
ously and treat fairly the arguments of one's
opponents. The liberal programme includes an
inevitable tension between those whose concern
is the safeguarding of tradition to ensure that
truth is not lost (traditionalists) and those who
wish to do justice to modern discoveries and
contemporary experience (progressives). This
tension, Mitchell maintains, is both inevitable
and desirable in theology as well as other dis-
ciplines. 'Left to the traditionalists alone the
tradition tends to ossify. In the hands of the pro-
MITCHELL
gressives alone it is liable to become dissolved
in the secular culture' (Faith and Criticism, p. 3).
In The Justification of Religious Belief'(1973)
Mitchell objects to what he conceives to be a
tendency among some theologians to confuse
the theological doctrine of justification by faith
alone with the epistemological doctrine that
faith admits of no rational support. In faith and
Criticism (1994) he is careful to contrast faith
in the pursuit of truth with faith in the search
for salvation, and faith as belief-in with faith as
belief-that. Faith in the sense of believing-in or
trusting reliance upon God is properly described
as unconditional. But this does not imply that
the whole system of Christian belief (belief-
that) to which belief-in is inextricably bound
must also be unconditional. Thus, on his view,
although faith seeks salvation as well as, and he
says even more importantly than, explanation,
it can achieve this goal only if its view of reality
is defensible.
Mitchell often calls upon philosophers who
are also Christians to contribute to discussions
of morality and public policy. This theme is
the central focus of his Cadbury Lectures, Law,
Morality and Religion in a Secular Society
(1967), and the revised version of his 1974-5
Gifford Lectures, Morality: Religious and
Secular (1980). Mitchell challenges what he
calls the new liberalism in the earlier book and
liberal humanism in the later book. He criticizes
the dominant liberal moral theories on the
ground that they provide an inadequate basis
for justifying what he calls the traditional con-
science. He argues for a liberal theory which has
an explicit metaphysical basis and definite ideas
about the nature and destiny of persons which
he believes to be best exemplified in traditional
Christian theism. Mitchell rejects the view that
all morality is dependent upon religious faith,
but he does believe that the Christian faith
extends the insights of the secular mind and
provides a more adequate justification of the
traditional conscience.
Mitchell identifies several contemporary
secular forms of liberalism each of which, he
argues, treats religion as a private matter and
684
hence excludes religious considerations as they
affect morality from issues concerning law-
making. Rational humanism is a form of utili-
tarianism which depends upon a scientific view
of human nature and has strong tendencies to
appeal to scientific authority in defining human
goals and needs. It claims to provide an objec-
tive and universal value system, and inhibits
the exercise of personal judgement on moral
questions. Romantic humanism results from a
revolt against the tendency of scientific
humanism to equate reason with scientific
method and draws upon the earlier romantic
tradition. Mitchell is particularly concerned
with the form of romantic humanism which
tends to reject reason altogether and substitute
a form of subjectivism in which each moral
judgement is relative to the person making the
judgement. A third form of secular liberalism is
called liberal humanism. Liberal humanism is
judged by Mitchell to be superior to romantic
humanism because it does allow a place for
principles of morality which are held to be uni-
versal. This is accomplished, however, by
drawing a distinction between a minimal list of
universal 'moral' principles which are neces-
sary to society and a necessary condition for the
realization of any human ideals, and a plural-
ity of subjective and optional 'ethical' principles.
Rational procedures are relevant in the case of
moral principles and it is assumed that these
principles can be justified by reference to human
needs in society and shown to be universal. By
contrast, the sphere of ethical principles is a
non-rational sphere which includes optional
and often incompatible views which, as in the
romantic view, cannot be evaluated rationally.
Mitchell challenges the tendency of liberal
or secular humanism to make a sharp division
between social morality which is considered to
be rational and universal, and moral ideals
which are said to be non-rational, while arguing
that only the former should be enforced by
society. He calls this division untenable and
argues that the important decisions regarding
our social and political arrangements have to do
with moral ideals which are subject to rational

discussion and depend upon deeply held beliefs
about the nature of human existence Mitchell
recognizes that one may distinguish between
those principles which are applicable to any
society whatsoever and those principles that
are influenced by particular metaphysical and
religious beliefs and vary from particular society
to particular society. He believes, however, that
the new liberalism misunderstands the relation
between social morality and moral ideals, and
presents us with a false alternative between the
protection of society and the protection of indi-
viduals from harm. Society, he argues, consists
of individuals, and individuals cannot exist
independently of society. Further, society
consists of individuals related to one another in
a plurality of institutions which are shaped by
their values and in turn largely determine their
interests and aspirations. Thus the protection of
society involves the protection of institutions,
and the protection of individuals from harm
cannot be realized apart from the institutions
within which the individuals live.
According to Mitchell, many thoughtful
secular thinkers share his reservations about
liberal humanism, and defend what he calls a
'traditional conscience' which tells them that
they should uphold certain values in their own
lives, that the society to which they belong
should exemplify these moral standards, and
that these standards are in some important
sense objective. Such standards include, for
example, the sanctity of human life, protecting
persons from harm, and fidelity in marriage
and family. Mitchell acknowledges that one
might choose to abandon altogether the tradi-
tional conscience and rejoice in their liberation,
but many secular thinkers are not prepared to
follow this route. Iris MURDOCH and Stuart
HAMPSHIRE, for example, share Mitchell's reser-
vations about romantic and scientific
humanism. They seek to justify moral stan-
dards by reference to a conception of human
nature, including standards for the fulfilment of
human needs as individuals and as social beings,
and seek something like a transcendent
standard, the good in the case of Murdoch and
685
MITCHELL
nature in the case of Hampshire. Both, however,
reject a religious alternative with little argument.
In the end, Mitchell argues, neither is able ade-
quately to justify the traditional conscience and
the deepest moral intuitions of Western culture.
What is needed is a more comprehensive moral
theory which makes it intelligible that morality
should be responsive to what we know and
believe about human nature and the world.
Mitchell does not close off the possibility that
an entirely secular worldview might be able to
develop a worldview that would justify the tra-
ditional conscience, but he is doubtful that it
can, and he argues that Christian theism can
provide a more adequate basis for understand-
ing and justifying the traditional conscience
than the secular alternatives known to him.
Mitchell's intention here is not to appeal author-
itatively to the Christian worldview, but to
insist that religious as well as the moral and sci-
entific forms of knowledge be taken into
account, each being understood as both
mutually distinct and mutually correcting.
If morality is conceived as concerned with the
fulfilment of human needs as individuals and as
members of society, argues Mitchell, it can then
be shown that Christianity has its own con-
ception of human needs; 'the needs of men are
those of a creature whom God loves, has
created, redeemed and destined for eternal life,
and who, therefore has an unconditional value'
(Morality: Religious and Secular', p. 107). On
Mitchell's view, the moral law is not merely an
arbitrary command of God but is based upon
human nature as created by God. Further, these
creatures of God are not merely rational beings,
as rational humanists have tended to argue.
They are also individual persons with their own
vocations and access to the means of grace,
persons of spontaneity and authenticity, as the
romantic tradition has emphasized. As is the
case in Mitchell's approach to the justification
of religious belief, his justification of the tradi-
tional conscience by reference to Christian
theism depends ultimately upon a total world-
view of persons and the universe. An adequate
moral theory, he argues, must be able to provide
MITCHELL
a rationale for our deepest moral intuitions and
convictions, and it must have an integrity and
autonomy of its own which will provide a basis
for rejecting a worldview because its ethical
implications are unacceptable.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Ed.), Faith and Logic (1957).
Law, Morality, and Religion in a Secular
Society (Oxford, 1967).
Neutrality and Commitment [inaugural
lecture] (Oxford, 1968).
(Ed.), The Philosophy of Religion (Oxford,
1971).
The justification of Religious Belief (1973).
Morality: Religious and Secular (Oxford,
1980).
How to Play Theological Ping Pong, ed.
William J. Abraham and Robert W.
Prevost (1990).
Faith and Criticism (Oxford, 1994).
Other Relevant Works
Theology and Falsification', in Antony Flew
and Alasdair Maclntyre (eds), New Essays
in Philosophical Theology (1955), pp.
103-105.
'Varieties of Imperative', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society', suppl. vol. 31 (1957),
pp. 175-90.
'Ideas, Roles and Rules', in Gene Outka and
Paul Ramsey (eds), Norm and Context in
Christian Ethics (New York, 1968), pp.
351-65.
'Law and the Protection of Institutions', The
Proper Study [Royal Institute of Philosophy
Lectures] (1969/70), pp. 204-19.
'The Homosexuality Report', Theology
(1980), pp. 184-90.
'I Believe: We Believe', Believing in the
Church [Report of the Doctrine
Commission of the Church of England]
(1981), pp. 9-24.
'Two Approaches to the Philosophy of
Religion', in Jeffrey C. Eaton and Ann
Loades (eds), For God and Clarity: New
Essays in Honor of Austin Farrer (Allison
686
Park, 1983), pp. 177-90.
'Austin Farrer the Philosopher', New Fire,
vol. 7, no. 57 (1983), pp. 452-6.
'The Church and the Bomb'., in David Martin
and Peter Mullen (eds), Unholy Warfare
(Oxford, 1983), pp. 172-9.
The Role of Theology in Bioethics', in Earl E.
Shelp (ed.), Theology and Bioethics
(Dordrecht, 1985), pp. 65-78.
'Newman as a Philosopher', in Ian Ker and
Alan G. Hill (eds), Newman after a
Hundred Years (Oxford, 1990), pp.
223^6.
'Revelation Revisited', in Sarah Coakley and
David Pailin (eds), The Making and
Remaking of Christian Doctrine: Essays in
Honour of Maurice Wiles (Oxford, 1993),
pp. 177-91.
'War and Friendship', in James K. Clark (ed.),
Philosophers Who Believe (Downers
Grove, 1993), pp. 23-44.
'Faith and the Limitations of Open-
Mindedness', in J.J. Macintosh and H.A.
Meynell (eds), Faith, Scepticism and
Personal Identity: A Festschrift for Terence
Penelhum (Calgary, 1994), pp. 31-42.
Tradition', in Philip L. Quinn and Charles
Taliaferro (eds), A Companion to the
Philosophy of Religion (Oxford, 1997), pp.
591-7.
Further Reading
Abraham, William J. and Steven W. Holtzer
(eds), The Rationality of Religious Belief:
Essays in Honour of Basil Mitchell
(Oxford, 1987). Includes a bibliography of
Mitchell's principal writings.
Attfield, R., 'Non-Tentative Religious Beliefs
and Rationality, Sophia, vol. 9 (1970), pp.
16-21.
Durrant, Michael, Review of The justification
of Religious Belief, Religious Studies, vol.
10 (1974), pp. 233-6.
Kellenberger, J., 'We No Longer Have Need
of that Hypothesis', Sophia, vol. 8 (1969),
pp. 25-32.
Markham, Ian. S., 'World Perspectives and

Arguments: Disagreements about
Disagreements', Heythrop Journal, vol. 30
(1989), pp. 1-12.
Mehl, Peter J., 'In the Twilight of Modernity:
Maclntyre and Mitchell on Moral
Traditions and their Assessment', The
Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 19 (1991),
pp. 21-54.
Ten, C.L., 'Religious Morality and the Law',
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 47
(1969), pp. 169-73.
, 'Enforcing a Shared Morality',
Ethics, vol. 82 (1972), pp. 321-9.
Eugene T. Long
MITCHELL, William (1861-1962)
William Mitchell was born at the croft of
Derrylane, Inveravon in Banffshire on 22
March 1861 (not on 27 March, as his obituar-
ies claim) and died in Adelaide at the age of 101
on 24 June 1962. He left a son, Sir Mark
Mitchell and a daughter, Mrs J.R. Thomson.
Like the vast majority of British idealists,
William Mitchell was a Scotsman. His hill-
farmer father, Peter, died when William was
only five years of age, and his mother Margaret
(nee Ledingham) moved the family to Elgin for
educational reasons. Mitchell attended the West
End School at Drainie, and was selected by the
dominie to be one of his pupil teachers, the
reward being personal tuition in prerequisite
subjects for university entrance. A fellow pupil
teacher was the future Prime Minister Ramsey
MacDonald. Mitchell entered Edinburgh
University in 1880 and graduated with an MA
with first class honours in philosophy (1886).
He was taught philosophy by Campbell Eraser.
Mitchell gained a DSc by thesis (1891) in the
Department of Mental Science.
While an undergraduate he reluctantly had
an article published in Mind. He was immedi-
687
MITCHELL
ately appointed assistant to Henry Calderwood,
Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh,
who had submitted Mitchell's undergraduate
paper to Mind. At Edinburgh, Mitchell was a
lecturer in moral philosophy (1887-90), and an
examiner in philosophy and English (1891-4).
He lectured on ethics and education at
University College London (1891^), and on
the theory of education at Cambridge (1894).
It was during this time that he became dedicated
to day training colleges and to raising the stan-
dards of primary school teachers in English
schools. He was later to become immensely
influential in educational policy in South
Australia. His entry in the Australian
Dictionary of Biography is almost wholly
devoted to his educational and administrative
achievements.
In 1894, having declined a chair in Canada in
1892, Mitchell was appointed to the Hughes
Chair of English Language and Literature and
Mental and Moral Philosophy at the University
of Adelaide, South Australia. To this burden
were added classes in economics, which he
taught until 1917, and education, which he
taught until 1909. He would joke that it was
not so much a chair but more of a sofa. He
became Vice-Chancellor in March 1916 and
resigned his chair in 1922. He remained Vice-
Chancellor until 1942, when he succeeded Sir
George Murray as Chancellor. He retired in
1948 at the age of eighty-seven. He once
remarked to JJ.C. SMART that his duties as
Vice-Chancellor took him ten minutes a day.
During his years of service he was the leading
figure in developing the university from a single
building, now named the Mitchell Building in
his honour, to a large complex of buildings
including the Barr-Smith Library. He endowed
the university with its Chair in Biochemistry.
In 1924 and 1926 he gave two sets of ten
lectures as the Gifford Lecturer at Aberdeen
University. He was knighted in 1927 for his
services to the Commonwealth of Australia,
and in 1934 he gave the philosophical address
at the British Academy on 'The Quality of Life'.
Among his honorary degrees are DSc in phi-
MITCHELL
losophy, University of Edinburgh, and Doctor
of Letters of the University of Western
Australia. In 1898 Mitchell married Marjory
Erlistoun, daughter of the Adelaide business-
man and philanthropist R. Barr-Smith. She died
in 1913.
William Mitchell was the only professor of
philosophy among his contemporaries in
Australia to achieve an international reputa-
tion. He was admired by such distinguished
British idealists as Norman KEMP SMITH, Sir
Henry JONES, Bernard BoSANQUET and the
American Brand Blanchard. The book for
which Mitchell gained his international repu-
tation was published in 1907 by Macmillan.
The draft typescript was reviewed for the press
by Henry Jones, who normally was a severe
critic, but in this instance he waxed lyrical. He
said in the reader's report (Macmillan Archives,
British Library): 'It is not often that I have had
the pleasure of approving a book so heartily. It
is extraordinarily strong, and manifests
throughout the most thorough philosophical
grasp.' What distinguished Mitchell from fellow
idealist philosophers was that, like W. Dilthey,
he placed psychology, rather than religion, lit-
erature or poetry, at the foundation of philos-
ophy. He recognized long before Blanshard that
one of the major defects of the idealism of such
thinkers as Bosanquet was the relative neglect
of psychology, which they generally thought
irrelevant to the theory of thinking. Psychology
in his view was the proper introduction for phi-
losophy, and while the two should not be con-
founded, they could not be clearly demarcated.
The better the answers given to the problems of
psychology, the better it was for philosophy.
Structure and Growth of the Mind was con-
ceived as an introduction to psychology, not in
an elementary sense, but insofar as through
psychology the problems of philosophy could
better be conceived.
He was inclined towards absolute idealism,
but emphasized more strongly than many who
followed the creed that thought should not be
confounded with its object. He maintained that
no object becomes mental, nor is altered in
688
being felt, imagined or known. In his notebook,
vol. 33, he argued, for example, that: 'words
and their notions or meanings are only instru-
ments and are never facts of what they denote
and describe' (William Mitchell Papers, Box 2
IP M68n SR, notebook 33, Untitled Lecture,
p. 1). In this respect he was sometimes accused
of being too close to realism or materialism, but
exactly the same criticism was made of Henry
Jones and Bernard Bosanquet, who contended
that things did not come into existence because
we think about them, but that they are never-
theless unintelligible independently of thought.
Mitchell believed that it made no sense to talk
about things in themselves. Things that are not
perceived, and which are isolated from other
things, are beyond comprehension. In rejecting
materialism 'proper', he refused to think of the
mind and its experiences as the brain and brain
processes. With regard to truth, Mitchell sub-
scribed to the idea of degrees of reality. The cri-
terion of truth to which he subscribed, however,
leaned towards that of the pragmatist. We have
certain expectations or prophecies about the
world; if disappointed, the beliefs are thought to
be false, and if fulfilled, they are thought true.
Mitchell maintained that: 'We take and reject
beliefs according as they are consistent with the
system of beliefs that we happen to have formed,
but what is the test of the system itself? How do
we know that it is true to nature? The answer is
... namely, it works' (Structure and Growth of
the Mind, p. 334).
Mitchell's prose style was incredibly dense,
and became more obtuse as he grew older. He
was, nevertheless, capable of perfect clarity
when summing up a distinction, but this was
the exception rather than the rule. For example,
when explaining the materialist view that con-
sciousness is epiphenomenal to brain activity, he
likened it to the whistle of a locomotive that
shows that the engine is going, but which has
nothing to do with making it go. The first
volume of his Gifford Lectures, published in
1933, when he was seventy-two, incorporating
ideas that he developed in his 1929 public
lectures at Adelaide on 'How far Nature is

Intelligible', was almost impenetrable. Mitchell
was concerned to draw out the metaphysical
implications of recent advances in physics.
Reviewers complained that they could not
identify the central conceptions upon which the
book rested. Fundamentally, Mitchell argued
that when nature created plants and animals it
made them sensitive or resistant to stimuli, but
when it created conscious beings it made them
not merely sensitive receptacles for the inpour-
ings of physical stimuli but also directly aware
of objects. He denied the firm line drawn by
Descartes between nature and mind. With the
development of consciousness nature could no
longer compel a reaction to its forces, but
instead invited a response to its values. What he
meant was that the power of an object now lay
in its value, felt or meant, particular or general,
to consciousness. The object therefore became
a new kind of cause in nature: physical and
part of nature as it was, it was intelligible only
through minds. We start with direct acquain-
tance of the surface of nature; the allure of
nature attracts minds to discover the reality of
nature in its depth. The typescript of the second
volume of the Gifford Lectures was destroyed
in the Blitz, and despite trying to reconstruct it
into old age Mitchell was unable to accomplish
the task.
Like his fellow idealists, Mitchell was a social
and educational reformer who saw the indi-
vidual and the state as mutually inclusive. The
state for him had a personality, and could best
be conceived as a living person who should act
as such. The actions of the state should be
wholly enabling, enhancing rather than restrict-
ing individual freedom. In an address to the
Methodist Social Service League ('Christianity
and the Industrial System', 1912), Mitchell
argued that: 'It is the duty of the state to abolish
poverty no less than to abolish crime ... There
is no limit to the taxation it has a right to
impose, if the revenue goes to a healthy purpose
and not to perpetuate incompetence and to
plaster over festering sores' (p. 21).
Mitchell made little impact on the study of
philosophy in Australia, mainly because of the
689
MITCHELL
geographical isolation of the main centres, but
also because Mitchell looked to Britain for his
audience. His greatest influence was upon
Brand Blanchard, who confessed that he owed
a 'large obligation' to Structure and Growth of
the Mind (see Blanchard, vol. 1, p. 97).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Structure and Growth of the Mind (1907).
'Christianity and the Industrial System'
[published by the Methodist Social Service
League] (1912).
Nature and feeling [Macrossan Lectures,
University of Queensland] (1929).
The Place of Minds in the World [Gifford
Lectures 1924] (1933).
'The Quality of Life' [Henriette Hertz
Lecture, British Academy] (1934).
William Mitchell Papers, University of
Adelaide, Australia.
Further Reading
Blanshard, Brand, The Nature of Thought
(1939).
Boucher, David, 'Practical Hegelianism:
Henry Jones's Lecture Tour of Australia',
Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 51
(1990), pp. 423-52.
Boucher, David and Andrew Vincent, British
Idealism and Political Theory (2000).
Da vies, Martin, 'Sir William Mitchell and the
"New Mysterianism"', Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 77 (1999), pp.
253-7.
, The Philosophy of Sir William
Mitchell (1861-1962): A Mind's Own
Place (Lampeter, 2003).
Grave, S.A., A History of Philosophy in
Australia (1978).
David Boucher
MONRO
MONRO, David Hector (1911-2001)
D.H. Monro was born in Whangarei, New
Zealand on 21 October 1911 and died in
Melbourne on 13 May 2001. He was educated
in Auckland, at the Grammar School and the
then University College, and taught philoso-
phy in Dunedin and Sydney before being
appointed in 1961 to the Foundation Chair of
Philosophy at the new Monash University, in
what were then the outskirts of Melbourne. He
built up his department and remained
Chairman of it until he alternated in that role
with a second professor (A.C. Jackson) from
1968. Monro remained philosophically active
for many years after his retirement in 1976.
Among Monro's major interests were the
British moralists of the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries. His writings in this field
include Godwin's Moral Philosophy (1953)
and The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville
(1975). He also edited A Guide to the British
Moralists (1972), which gives many carefully
arranged and introduced excerpts. References to
Hobbes, Hume, Hutcheson, Shaftesbury,
Bishop Butler et al. are also prominent in
perhaps his most important monograph,
Empiricism and Ethics (1967). In that book he
maintains, to use the words of his own closing
summary, 'a subjectivist and naturalist position'
in ethics. People form, he says,
relatively settled policies (which need not be
consciously formulated) of deciding between
alternative courses of conduct by preferring
one type of consideration to another, and so
allowing one type of desire to over-ride
another type of desire ... Such a policy con-
stitutes a [person's] morality. Consequently
A's morality may differ from B's. There are,
however, psychological and sociological
factors that cause [people's] moralities to
resemble one another quite closely, especially
within the same culture ... To say that moral
beliefs, or attitudes, are ultimately subjective
is not to say that they are arbitrary, or that we
can assume them at will. We have the moral
690
attitudes we have because we are the sort of
[people] we are ... To say that [moral prin-
ciples are expressions of over-riding desires]
is not in the least to diminish their force or
their importance.
(Empiricism and Ethics, pp. 230-33)
One desire (X) is overriding relative to another
(Y) for a given agent (A) not in the sense that A
morally ought to give X priority over Y (this
would make the definition of morality circular),
but in the sense that A does give X priority
over Y. This does not mean, though, that where
X conflicts with Y, A always acts in accordance
with X. Rather, X is given priority 'on reflection
and most of the time'; one may on occasion
yield to a temptation to gratify Y instead, but
then one regrets the choice and wishes one had
acted in accordance with X. This feeling is what
constitutes guilt.
Monro's account of morality places him in
the broadly 'subjectivist' or 'expressivist' tradi-
tion whose champions (despite their important
differences) include Hume in the eighteenth
century and Stevenson, HARE and MACKIE in the
twentieth. Empiricism and Ethics was pub-
lished a few years after Hare's famous Freedom
and Reason, in which a very important con-
ceptual feature of moral judgements is held to
be their universalizability: if I make a certain
moral judgement about a given case, I am log-
ically committed to making the same judge-
ment about any relevantly similar case. Monro
concedes that when our actions are going to
affect others it is prudent to put ourselves in
their position(s), since they may feel justified in
treating us as we treat them; he denies, however,
that universalizability has the force which Hare
and others claim for it. The logical requirement
of consistency, which is the basis of universal-
izability, is a different thing, he says, from the
demand for impartiality-, there is nothing incon-
sistent about treating other people differently
from oneself 'simply on the ground that we are
we and they are they', however reprehensible or
imprudent this may be. If I say I am entitled to
act in some very egoistic way, then I may agree

that universalizability commits me to the judge-
ment that anyone relevantly similar to me
would be entitled to do likewise, but add that
the relevant characteristic consists simply in
being /. To believe (with Hare) that universal-
ization necessarily eliminates (or cannot
tolerate) terms such as personal pronouns is to
confuse the requirement of consistency, which
is a legitimate requirement but not thus intol-
erant, with the requirement of impartiality,
which is thus intolerant but is really a substan-
tial moral requirement rather than a logical
one. The belief that the consistency require-
ment is sufficient to generate substantial and
more or less utilitarian moral systems is there-
fore mistaken. If it is insisted that the impar-
tiality requirement is nevertheless a stand-alone
conceptual feature of morality, the question is
then: why should we bother about morality,
rather than governing our lives with say a
purely egoistic set of principles?
Monro readily accepts that his position is
relativistic. His overriding desires may differ
from yours, despite the common causal factors
in your natures and upbringings; and if they do,
there is no saying that his are in some objective
sense better than yours. Yet, he says, this is no
reason for not taking one's desires seriously.
Nor does it commit the relativist to an ethic of
tolerance; such an ethic is after all an expression
of a possible overriding desire, which may or
may not be among the ones that he happens to
have. The distinction between the meta-ethical
relativist thesis and the normative ethic of tol-
erance, like the distinction between the demands
of consistency and impartiality, is an impor-
tant one which many moral philosophers before
and since have failed to observe clearly, or at
least appreciate enough to challenge seriously.
One of Monro's life-long pastimes, inspired
by his early discovery of W.S. Gilbert, was com-
posing witty light verse. While interned as a
conscientious objector during World War II he
smuggled out (via his wife Joyce) a number of
pieces which duly won prizes in magazines and
such. In 1980 the journal Philosophy published
his The Sonneteer's History of Philosophy'.
691
MONRO
Here is one of the twenty-six sonnets:
Kant
When Kant, aroused from his dog-
matic dozes
And conscious of the very little
room
For anti-scepticism left by Hume,
Decided that the intellect discloses,
Not what's out there, as everyone
supposes,
But only what it finds it can sub-
sume
Beneath the Categories (I assume
That they're like spectacles upon
our noses)
He added that this blinker'd
human'll
Catch still some glimpses of the
Noumenal
And that God, Freedom,
Immortality
Are hall-marked: Guaranteed
Reality.
This simply shows what tangled
webs we weave
When we are quite determined to
believe.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Argument of Laughter (Melbourne, 1951).
Godwins Moral Philosophy (1953).
Empiricism and Ethics (Cambridge, 1967).
The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville
(Oxford, 1975).
Ethics and the Environment (1980).
The Sonneteer's History of Philosophy
(Melbourne, 1981).
Other Relevant Works
Don Juan in Australia (Melbourne, 1986).
Fortunate Catastrophes (Melbourne, 1991).
Douglas Adeney
MONTEFIORE
MONTEF1ORE, Alan Claude Robin
Goldsmid (1926-)
Alan Montefiore was born in London on 29
December 1926 as part of a prominent British
Jewish family. He was educated at Clifton
College and, after military service in Singapore,
at Balliol College, Oxford, where he read PPE
from 1948 to 1951. Among his Balliol con-
temporaries were B.A.O. WILLIAMS and J.R.
LUCAS. He embarked on a doctoral thesis at
Oxford under Stuart HAMPSHIRE, although this
was abandoned after his appointment to a lec-
tureship at what was then the University
College of North Staffordshire (later, Keele
University) in 1951. In 1961 Montefiore was
elected to a fellowship at his old college, where
he remained as a tutorial fellow until his retire-
ment in 1994. He also held visiting appoint-
ments at McGill University and the Universite
de Montreal.
Montefiore's philosophical interests in the
1950s and early 1960s were principally in
moral philosophy. The issues that he addressed
and the approach that he took to them were
standard ones in analytical philosophy of the
time. He published articles on such topics as the
meaning of 'good' and the relationships
between 'is' and 'ought', and 'ought' and 'can'.
In his book, A Modern Introduction to Moral
Philosophy (1958), he developed an answer to
one of moral philosophy's central problems -
the objectivity or otherwise of moral judgement
- through an extensive comparative analysis of
factual statements and value judgements. He
also published a regular series of survey articles
on contemporary French philosophy and was a
participant in the celebrated Colloque de
Royaumont of 1958, which brought together
the leading French and British philosophers of
the day.
From the late 1960s onwards the main focus
of Montefiore's philosophical activity changed
somewhat. He organized a number of collabo-
rative projects, often bringing together philoso-
phers and non-philosophers. His work showed
a particular concern for questions that arise for
692
individuals as they operate in public contexts -
issues such as responsibility, integrity and neu-
trality. His writing also articulated a reflexive
sense of the problematic nature of philosophi-
cal discourse that was much more in keeping
with contemporary French writers (such as his
friend, Jacques Derrida) than the more business-
like idiom dominant in Britain and America.
Montefiore was uncommon for the period in
his sympathy for both the analytical and the
continental philosophical traditions. Although
the former was more marked in the early part
of his career with the latter coming to promi-
nence later, there were also some important
continuities. In his analytical writings on moral
philosophy Montefiore defended the separa-
tion between facts and values. However, an
appreciation of the embeddedness of evalua-
tive judgements in descriptive contexts and the
existence of competing descriptive languages
led to a worry about the possibility of neutral-
ity that carried over into later work. Another
continuing theme was Montefiore's interest in
the philosophy of Kant. His response to Kant
was somewhat unusual in Oxford at the time.
Rather than looking for ways to arrive at con-
clusions similar to Kant's by methods that did
not rely on transcendental psychology, as the
leading analytical Kant interpreters of the day
were doing, Montefiore held that the connec-
tion between Kant's critique of Humean and
Cartesian approaches and the doctrine of the
transcendental ego was essential to his thought.
This made him not unsympathetic to the belief
prevalent in the continental tradition that there
is a philosophically cogent progression leading
from Kant's account of transcendental subjec-
tivity to Hegel's absolute subject, although he
feared that in this process of increasing tran-
scendentalization the connection between the
notion of the subject and the actually existing
empirical individual becomes lost.
While Montefiore did not develop these ideas
in detail in his published work, the influence he
had on late twentieth-century philosophy in
Britain was quite considerable. Not only did he
sustain an extensive network of international

philosophical interlocutors but he was an excep-
tionally broad-minded and sympathetic teacher
who helped to educate many philosophers who
would go on to do distinguished work in a
large number of fields.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Modern Introduction to Moral Philosophy
(1958).
'"Ought" and "Can"', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 30 (January 1958),
pp. 24-40.
(with R.F. Atkinson), '"Ought" and "Is"',
Philosophy, vol. 23 (1958), pp. 29-49.
'Fact, Value and Ideology', in A. Montefiore
and B. Williams (eds), British Analytical
Philosophy (1966), pp. 179-203.
(Ed.), Philosophy and Personal Relations: An
Anglo-French Study (1973).
(Ed.), Neutrality and Impartiality: The
University and Political Commitment
(Cambridge, 1975).
'Philosophy as Fiction', in P. Hordern (ed.),
The Novelist as Philosopher: Modern
Fiction and the History of Ideas (Oxford,
1982), pp. 1-19.
(Ed.), Philosophy in France Today
(Cambridge, 1983).
Michael Rosen
MOORE, George Edward (1873-1958)
G.E. Moore was born in the London suburb
Upper Norwood on 4 November 1873 and
died in Cambridge on 24 October 1958. He
was the son of Daniel Moore, MD and
Henrietta Sturge. Daniel Moore worked as a
doctor until he devoted himself full-time to the
education of his eight children. In 1892 Moore
began his undergraduate studies at Trinity
College, Cambridge, focusing primarily on clas-
sical literature. It was during his first year there
693
MOORE
that he met Bertrand RUSSELL. At Russell's
encouragement, Moore turned his attention to
philosophy. As young students, Russell and
Moore were both admirers of absolute idealism,
then championed most prominently by the
philosophers John McTAGGART - at
Cambridge, a teacher of Moore - and the
Oxford Professor F.H. BRADLEY. Following his
undergraduate studies, Moore applied for, and
on his second attempt was awarded, a fellow-
ship at Trinity. During the two years prior to his
fellowship, Moore had begun to turn away
from idealism in favour of what we might call
his 'Common Sense Realism'. As a fellow of
Trinity, Moore gave his first lectures on ethics
at the Passmore Edwards Settlement in London
and completed his first book and most well-
known work, Principia ethica, in 1903. When
his fellowship ended after six years, Moore
spent approximately three and a half years in
Edinburgh with his close friend, Alfred R.
Ainsworth, before moving to London with two
of his sisters. During this time, he did not take
up academic duties. In 1911 Cambridge offered
Moore a lectureship in moral sciences. He
began teaching courses on philosophical psy-
chology, and in 1925, succeeded James WARD
as Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic, a
position Moore held until 1939. During World
War II, at the urging of close friends and col-
leagues, Moore travelled to the United States,
giving lectures and teaching courses at various
institutions; in 1944 he returned to England.
During his professorship at Cambridge, Moore
succeeded G.F. STOUT as the editor of the
journal Mind, and held that position from 1921
to 1947. In 1951 he was appointed to the Order
of Merit. Moore died in Cambridge in 1958.
Within the professional discipline of
academic philosophy, Moore was among the
most influential British philosophers of the early
twentieth century. He is well known for his
contributions to ethics and the theory of knowl-
edge. His emphasis on common sense and the
analytic method in attempting to solve philo-
sophical problems exerted a substantial influ-
ence on the general character of what is now
MOORE
one of the most prominent traditions in
academic philosophy: the analytic, or Anglo-
American, tradition. He was closely associated
with, and exerted not a little in the way of
influence on, some other members of this elite
group, most notably Bertrand Russell, Ludwig
WITTGENSTEIN and P.P. RAMSEY. Outside pro-
fessional academic philosophy, Moore exerted
an important influence on the Bloomsbury
Group, who based many principles they held in
common somewhat loosely on Moore's ethical
philosophy. It is frequently held that the actual
details of Moore's philosophy were much less
influential on the Bloomsbury Group than were
the strength and charisma of his character.
Moore was interested in a wide range of
philosophical topics, most notably, the nature
of goodness, the integrity of our knowledge of
the external world, and the right way to
conduct philosophical inquiry. In an illumi-
nating remark, Moore explains what drew him
to philosophical reflection: 'I do not think that
the world or the sciences would ever have sug-
gested to me any philosophical problems. What
has suggested philosophical problems to me is
things which other philosophers have said
about the world or the sciences' (Levy, p. 14).
Not surprisingly, Moore characterized his
approach to philosophical issues as a commit-
ment to common sense. Here, Moore suggests
that there is a stock of commonly held propo-
sitions - things that most rational agents know
- that provide the background against which
we perform both our ordinary and our philo-
sophical reflections. Examples of such propo-
sitions include 'there now exists a living human
body', 'there are many living humans popu-
lating the earth', 'at some point in the past, this
human (me) was born', 'this human has, at
various times, occupied different locations
relative to the other things populating the
earth', and so on. These sorts of proposition,
Moore thinks, cannot be seriously disputed.
While he does not claim that it is necessarily
incoherent to deny such propositions (and their
implications), he does suggest that most philo-
sophical discussions are implicitly premised on
694
the truth of these background 'common sense'
claims.
Moore is especially influential as a paradigm
for what became the characteristic 'method' of
Anglo-American philosophical inquiry: con-
ceptual analysis, or what was sometimes
referred to as 'ordinary language philosophy'.
Basically, the strategy is to defend philosophi-
cal claims by careful attention to our conceptual
intuitions. These intuitions are revealed to us by
attending, in turn, to our instincts about when
terms are appropriately applied in particular
cases (imaginary or real). For example, Moore
defends the claim that we in fact employ distinct
concepts of certainty. He accomplishes this by
noticing that what we mean when we use the
term differs depending on how we use it.
Compare the expressions 'it is certain that p'
and 'I feel certain that p\ While it is logically
possible that both I feel certain that p and p be
false, it makes no sense to suppose that p could
be false if it is certain that p. Hence, the term
'certain' in the two sentences above clearly picks
out a distinct concept in each case.
In the area of epistemology, or the theory of
knowledge, Moore is concerned to defend the
closely related claims that we do in fact have
knowledge of the external world and that when
we know something, we are in fact certain that
it is true. In keeping with his common sense
approach, Moore famously addressed sceptical
challenges to the existence of the external world.
Descartes, for example, had raised the threat of
scepticism in his Meditations when he pointed
out that how things appear to us in our per-
ception of the external world is equally consis-
tent with both the possibility that those per-
ceptions correctly represent the world, and the
possibility that, as a result of a radical deception
by a malevolent, all-powerful, demon, we are
completely mistaken about the character and
existence of the external world. More recently,
the same point is made by entertaining the pos-
sibility that I might actually be a disembodied
brain in a vat, hooked up to a supercomputer
aimed at constructing an illusion of an external
world. Sceptical hypotheses of this sort seem to

make it impossible to have any knowledge
about the external world. Since my perception
of the world around me is equally consistent
with both the actual existence of that world
and the deceptive supercomputer, I cannot be
certain that I am not a brain in a vat. Yet if I do
not know whether I am a brain in a vat, then
clearly I cannot be certain of the ordinary things
perception tells me - such as, 'I have two hands'
or 'I am sitting at my desk typing'.
Moore turns the sceptical argument on its
head. He offers what he calls a 'proof of the
external world, one that is aimed at ensuring
our knowledge and certainty of its character
and existence. We might summarize Moore's
proof as follows: 'Here is one hand. Here is
another. Hence, there are two human hands.
Hence, external things do in fact exist.' Moore's
proof gives us reason to reject the premise with
which the sceptic begins, since it follows, a
fortiori, from the various conclusions of this
type of argument that I am not a brain in vat.
And so we have before us two types of proof,
Moore's and the sceptic's. Moore's next step is
to give reasons for thinking that his proof of the
external world better meets the criteria for what
makes a proof satisfactory. Among other things,
a good proof must be such that it takes us from
more obvious premises to a less obvious con-
clusion. In this respect, Moore's proof has an
apparent advantage over the sceptics; for, after
all, what could be more obvious than the
premises 'here is one hand' and 'here is
another'? Moreover, Moore insists that he is
not required to give a further proof of these
premises, just as the sceptic is not required to
give a proof of his premises (and in turn proofs
for the premises of that proof, and so on). The
buck stops somewhere, and for Moore, 'here is
one hand' is an excellent place to stop.
Next, in opposition to what is presently the
received view, Moore claims that knowing that
p implies being certain that p is true. Moore's
argument for this thesis appears to rely pri-
marily on linguistic facts about the contexts of
our utterances. At present, I am in a sitting
position, typing. This, it appears, is something
695
MOORE
I know to be true. Moore suggests that in
ordinary circumstances, it would not make
sense to claim that I know that I am now in a
sitting position (and not standing) and yet also
claim that I cannot be certain that I am sitting.
If the evidence of my senses confirms that I am
sitting (and not standing), then it would be a
mistake for me, in those circumstances, to deny
that it is certain. Finally, Moore holds that we
can be certain that a proposition is true even if
that proposition is contingent - that is, even if
it might have been the case that the proposition
was false.
Two points are important here. First, in
places, Moore seems to be thinking of the
expression 'the evidence of my senses confirm-
ing that /?' as a success concept. In other words,
if the evidence of my senses confirms a propo-
sition, then that proposition is true. The
evidence of my senses confirming the truth of
some proposition p must therefore be distin-
guished from it appearing as though p is true.
Second, Moore distinguishes between different
orders of knowledge. Specifically, while I may
know that /?, it need not follow necessarily from
that fact that I know that I know that p. In
short, higher-order levels of knowledge are not
implied by the possession of first-order knowl-
edge. This is important, since philosophers are
apt to argue against the possibility of knowledge
of the external world by showing that we
cannot confirm that I know what I think I
know. Moore suggests that this is a mistake
since one might know that he is not dreaming
even though he can't prove that he's not (and
thus, know that he knows he's not dreaming).
Moore's magnus opus is the Principia ethica,
in which he takes up questions concerning how
we should properly understand our ethical, or
'normative', concepts, in particular the concept
'good'. In the course of his investigation, Moore
offers some of his most important insights,
describing the 'naturalistic fallacy' and the 'open
question' argument.
The naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of inter-
preting attributive claims about moral values as
definitions of those values. (And, as the name of
MOORE
the fallacy suggest, these abortive attempts at
definitions typically happen to involve natural
properties as the defining terms.) Moore held
that the naturalistic fallacy was common in
ethical theorizing and his discussion is an
attempt to warn us away from this mistake. We
can make Moore's discussion of this fallacy
clearer as follows. Start by noticing two impor-
tant distinctions - the distinction between (1)
attributions and definitions, and (2) between
complex and simple concepts. Compare the fol-
lowing two sentences:
'Daisies are yellow.'
Triangles are three-sided figures, the sum of
the interior angles of which is 180°.'
These sentences differ importantly, despite some
grammatical similarities. The first sentence
merely attributes a property to its subject - it
tells us that, among the many things that daisies
are and might be, they are yellow. The second
sentence purports to give a definition or analysis
of the concept 'triangle' - it tells us what the
term 'triangle' means. It is easy to see that it
would be a terrible confusion to suppose that
the first sentence was giving a definition rather
than merely attributing a property, for that
would imply that the person uttering the sen-
tences is suggesting that the correct definition of
the property of being a daisy is the properly of
being yellow. That claim would be clearly false
- 'being a daisy' just does not mean 'being
yellow', even though daisies are in fact yellow.
Next, Moore distinguishes between complex
and simple properties. If it is possible to analyse
a property, then the property is complex. On
the other hand, Moore claims that some
concepts are simple: they are indefinable or
unanalysable. This is not to say that one could
not give a lexical definition of a simple concept
- it is always possible, in other words, to say
something in aid of helping one arrive at the
correct understanding to a term; this is, after all,
the job of a dictionary. Moore's claim, rather,
is that in the case of simple concepts, even the
best lexical definition fails to be a complete
696
analysis of the concept: the definition, while
pushing one towards an understanding of the
concept, does not exhaustively capture the
meaning of the concept as a complex of other
concepts. The meaning is rather grasped by the
understanding as a simple whole. Take, for
example, the concept of 'triangle' and the
concept 'yellow' (the latter is an example
borrowed from Moore). Triangle', as we have
already seen, is a complex concept - the
meaning of the term is exhaustively described
by a complex string of further concepts, which
include the ideas of a figure, an angle and a sum.
The meaning of the term 'yellow', Moore
claims, is simple - there are no further concepts
that make up the meaning of 'yellow'. If a
person understands what it means for some-
thing to be yellow, then the idea of 'yellow' is
grasped by that individual as a simple whole.
Applying these insights to ethical matters,
Moore insists that the concept 'good' is a simple
concept. Thus, no sentence purporting to give an
analysis of 'good' could possibly be correct; since
'good' is simple and indefinable. Despite this
fact, many philosophers have unhappily treated
some of the attributive claims they defend con-
cerning the concept 'good' as definitions of that
concept. Moore explains that these claims, while
perhaps true under a different interpretation,
cannot be definitions. Thus, the naturalistic
fallacy involves interpreting such claims as def-
initions when they are in fact mere attributions.
In other words, it is the mistake of confusing
claims involving 'good' that attribute this
property with claims that define the property.
Moore gives the following example to demon-
strate his point. Suppose I hold that pleasure is
good. If my claim here is that good is properly
defined as pleasure - that good is actually
nothing more than pleasure and that 'good'
merely means 'pleasure' - then I fall prey to the
naturalistic fallacy. The claim 'pleasure is good'
could never correctly mean that good really just
boils entirely down to pleasure, even if it is nev-
ertheless a fact that both pleasure is always good
and is the only thing that is good. In other words,
even if pleasure turns out to be the only intrin-

sically good thing in the universe, it would still
be a mistake to infer that 'good' merely means
'pleasure'. To think otherwise is to commit the
naturalistic fallacy.
(Finally, it is worth noting that Moore calls the
fallacy 'the naturalistic fallacy' because it mis-
takenly attempts to define good as a natural
thing - as, say, pleasure - and in doing so,
attempts to analyse a non-natural property -
specifically, an evaluative or normative property
- in terms of the natural world. This feature of
Moore's discussion, however, should not
obscure the fact that the central mistake of the
fallacy is to suppose that 'good', as a simple
property, could be analysed: see 'The Refutation
of Idealism', p. 65.)
Turning now to Moore's 'open question'
argument, we see him attempting to argue for his
premise that the concept 'good' is in fact simple
and indefinable. Moore claims that for any
possible proposed definition of 'good', it is intel-
ligible to ask whether the analysing properties
proposed by the definition really are, in fact,
good. For example, if I try to define good as
pleasure, I am still faced with the fact that it is
very much an open question whether pleasure is
good. The fact that one's understanding contin-
ues to be faced by the open question shows that
the concepts involved in the purported definition
are distinct from each other, distinct in the under-
standing. Thus, in the case of pleasure, while it
may turn out that 'pleasure is not good' is false,
it is nevertheless an intelligible question, since the
concepts 'good' and 'pleasure' are not the same.
And since, in the case of the concept 'good',
there are no concepts that, by themselves or
taken as a group, are immune to the open
question, good must be indefinable.
Ultimately, Moore held that our understand-
ing of the concept 'good' is direct and intuitive.
Moreover, Moore's own contribution to the
basic task of ethical theory - that is, the task of
making interesting generalizations about ethic
properties such as 'good' and 'right' - includes
his claim that there are only two things that are
intrinsically good: friendship and the pleasure we
experience in our contemplation of the beautiful.
697
MOORE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Prindpia ethica (Cambridge, 1903; rev. edn,
1993).
'The Refutation of Idealism', Mind, vol. 12
(1903), pp. 433-53; repr. in Philosophical
Studies.
'Kant's Idealism', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 4 (1903-1904),
pp. 127-40; repr. in Philosophical Studies.
'The Nature and Reality of Objects of
Perception', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 6 (1905-1906), pp. 68-127;
repr. in Philosophical Studies.
'The Subject-Matter of Psychology',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
10 (1909-10), pp. 36-62.
Ethics (New York and London, 1912).
'The Conception of Reality', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 18 (1917-18),
pp. 101-20; repr. in Philosophical Studies.
'Some Judgments of Perception', Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 19
(1918-19), pp. 1-29; repr. in Philosophical
Studies.
'External and Internal Relations', Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 20
(1919-20), pp. 40-62; repr. in
Philosophical Studies.
Philosophical Studies (New York and
London, 1922).
'A Defence of Common Sense',
Contemporary British Philosophy, edited
by J.H. Muirhead (1925), pp. 193-223;
repr. in Philosophical Studies.
'Proof of an External World', Proceedings of
the British Academy, vol. 25 (1939), pp.
272-300; repr. in Philosophical Studies.
'An Autobiography', in Schilpp (ed.), The
Philosophy of G. E. Moore, pp. 3-39.
'A Reply to My Critics', in Schilpp (ed.), The
Philosophy of G. E. Moore, pp. 535-677.
Some Main Problems of Philosophy (New
York and London, 1953).
Philosophical Papers (New York, 1959).
Elements of Ethics, ed. Tom Regan
(Philadelphia, 1991).
MOORE
Further Reading
Levy, Paul, Moore: G. E. Moore and the
Cambridge Apostles (New York, 1979).
Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), The Philosophy of
G. E. Moore (Chicago, 1942).
Soames, Scott, Philosophical Analysis in the
Twentieth Century, vol. 1, The Dawn of
Analysis (Princeton and Oxford, 2003).
Stroll, Avrum, Moore and Wittgenstein on
Certainty (New York and Oxford, 1994).
Scott Hendricks
MORGAN, Conwy Lloyd (1852-1936)
Conwy Lloyd Morgan was born in London on
6 February 1852 and died in Hastings on 6
March 1936. He was educated at the Royal
Grammar School, Guildford, the Royal School
of Mines, London and the Royal College of
Science, where he was taught and deeply influ-
enced by Thomas Henry Huxley. In 1878 he
married and began his teaching career at the
Diocesan College, Rondebosch, near Cape
Town. He returned to England in 1884 on his
appointment as Professor of Geology and
Zoology at University College, Bristol. From
1887 to 1909 Morgan was also Principal of the
college, and when the college received its uni-
versity charter, in 1909, he became the first
Vice-Chancellor. He resigned from this post in
1910 to take up his former chair, by now
renamed 'Psychology and Ethics', from which
he finally retired in 1919.
Morgan's earliest researches were in the field
of geology, but by the mid 1880s he was
becoming increasingly interested in evolution as
it applied to human and animal behaviour. His
writing at this period reflects this concern,
notably his book The Springs of Conduct
(1885), in which he discusses the origins of
morals, and his 1890 presidential address to
the Bristol Naturalists' Society, The Nature
698
and Origin of Variations'. From the origins of
behaviour he turned to the study of its nature
and variations per se. In this field, his pioneer-
ing work, which has proved to be of lasting
importance, led to his election as a fellow of the
Royal Society in 1899 and to the award of an
honorary degree of DSc from the University of
Bristol in 1910.
Previous studies of animal behaviour had been
based largely on anecdotal evidence and casual
observation, an approach rejected by Morgan in
favour of what he termed 'comparative psy-
chology' - the controlled investigation of animal
behaviour considered in relation to different
phyla. The earlier subjective approach was to be
replaced by planned observation and experi-
mental evidence. He insisted especially that
animal behaviour should not be interpreted in
terms of human characteristics when there was
no need to assume that higher thought processes
were involved in the animal activity being
studied. This principle, which has become
known as 'Lloyd Morgan's canon', was suc-
cinctly expressed by Morgan in An Introduction
to Comparative Psychology (1894). 'In no case',
he wrote, 'may we interpret an action as the
outcome of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be
interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one
which stands lower in the psychological scale'
(An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, p.
53). Morgan's canon offers a salutary warning,
still observed, against the temptation to extend
animal behaviour studies to include the whole of
human psychology.
After his retirement Morgan turned to
broader metaphysical speculation. He had
already entered this field with his contributions
to Hastings's Encyclopaedia of Religion and
Ethics (vol. 7, 1914), on 'Instinct' and
'Laughter', in the former of which he incorpo-
rated a critical analysis of William McDougall's
instinct theory. His major contribution to meta-
physics came with the Gifford Lectures deliv-
ered in 1922-3 and subsequently published as
Emergent Evolution (1923) and Life, Mind and
Spirit (1926). In these he gave systematic struc-
ture to his own interpretation of the idea of the

emergence of novelty, a concept developed by
Samuel ALEXANDER and other neo-realists.
For Morgan the evolution of organisms (in
the broad sense of A.N. WHITEHEAD) is a pro-
gressive emergence of higher wholes and higher
levels, from particles onwards. His view is that
of a monist, seeing reality as a single realm that
is 'both natural and spiritual, in ultimate unity
of substance, but is not both natural and super-
natural if this imply ultimate diversity of orders
of being' (Life, Mind and Spirit^ p. 302). It is
also a natural progression under divine
guidance, leading to a super-cosmic aesthetic or
ethical stage, beyond which is a 'super-aesthetic
and super-ethical' stage of spiritual outlook.
'But', states Morgan, 'all stages fall within the
rational order of the cosmos in our compre-
hensive sense; and for us this rational order is,
in spiritual regard, no other than Divine
Purpose' (ibid., p. 306). Towards the end of his
life Morgan summarized his philosophical
views in his final work, The Emergence of
Novelty (1933).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Springs of Conduct: An Essay in
Evolution (1885).
An Introduction to Comparative Psychology
(1894).
Emergent Evolution; The Gifford Lectures
Delivered in the University of St. Andrews
in the Year 1922 (1923).
Life, Mind and Spirit: Being the Second
Course of the Gifford Lectures Delivered
in the University of St. Andrews in the Year
1923 ... (1926).
The Emergence of Novelty (1933).
Other Relevant Works
Animal Life and Intelligence (1890).
Habit and Instinct (1896).
Animal Behaviour (1900).
Instinct and Experience (1912).
Mind at the Crossways (1929).
Further Reading
Klein, D.B., A History of Scientific
699
MORRIS
Psychology; Its Origins and Philosophical
Backgrounds (New York, 1970).
Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal
Society, no. 5 (December 1936).
Robert A. Gilbert
MORRIS, Charles Richard (1898-1990)
Charles Morris was born in Sutton Valence,
Kent on 25 January 1898 and died at his home
in the Lake District on 30 May 1990. The elder
son of a schools inspector, he was educated at
Tonbridge School. In 1919, after serving in
World War I he went up to Trinity College,
Oxford, where he was a student of H.A.
PRICHARD, and took the shortened degree
course. From 1921 to 1941 he was fellow and
tutor at Balliol College, although for one year
(1926-7) while on leave from Balliol he held a
visiting professorship at University of Michigan,
Ann Arbour.
Always interested in politics (he was an
Oxford City Councillor, 1939-40), during the
war he worked for the civil service. Afterwards
he left university teaching, taking up positions
as Headmaster, King Edward's School,
Birmingham (1941-8), Vice-Chancellor, Leeds
University (1948-63) and finally Pro-Vice-
Chancellor, Bradford University (1966-9). A
tireless champion of education at all levels, he
served on many committees and commissions.
For this work he was knighted in 1953, made
KCMG in 1963 and made a life peer (taking his
title Baron Morris of Grasmere) in 1967.
In philosophical terms Morris's contribution
was as an able and popular tutor, rather than
an original thinker. His published work, though
useful, was not the kind that impacts the direc-
tion of the subject. Still occasionally read today,
his 1931 book on Locke, Berkeley and Hume
is an introductory exposition for students and
general readers which, while informed of con-
MORRIS
temporary criticism, makes no real contribu-
tions of its own. Apart from a handful of pages
in each case detailing their lives and their
moral/political philosophy, it concentrates
wholly on their different theories of knowl-
edge. Dealing with each figure in turn as inde-
pendent thinkers in their own right, rather than
simply as links in a chain, it presents their age
as a period of speculative thought unrivalled
before or since. He regards Locke as the first to
raise 'the grand problem of the relation of Mind
to the Universe' (Locke, Berkeley, Hume,
p. 11) but there is in his account little sense of
the scientific corpuscularian context which has
seemed so important to many modern com-
mentators. His discussion of Berkeley is notable
for the way in which it focuses on the inade-
quacies on the Principles/Dialogues position
and how that was later developed in
Alciphron/Siris, moving away from a crude
idealism of perception to one based more on the
work of the understanding. However, it
presents Berkeley as one merely sceptical about
the existence of material substance, rather than
advocating its positively self-contradictory
nature. The interpretation of Hume is perhaps
the least satisfactory in its somewhat old-fash-
ioned insistence on the scepticism rather than
the naturalism of his approach.
A far more substantial and significant work
was Morris's Idealistic Logic, published in
1933. Holding that the subject is best seen by
'reflecting on the debt which any idealistic logic
must owe to Kant' (Idealist Logic, p. v), the
book begins (after two opening chapters on the
aims and method of logic) with a detailed his-
torical discussion of the way in which tradi-
tional logic gave way to Kant's view. As Morris
presents it, the 'idealistic logic' which devel-
oped from this is really a kind of synthesis of
BRADLEY and JOACHIM (and it might be
wondered quite how representative that is of
idealistic logic more generally) but his accounts
of the main elements in this logic - judgement,
inference and the coherence theory of truth -
are sound and useful. The second half of the
book contains a detailed discussion of COOK
700
WILSON'S criticisms of idealistic logic. Morris's
final conclusions are sceptical, questioning the
ability of idealist logic to deal adequately with
mathematical reasoning, to choose between
rival systematic theories, or to account plausi-
bly for the relation between logic and psychol-
ogy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(with Mary Morris), A History of Political
Ideas (1924).
Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Oxford, 1931)
Idealist Logic (1933).
(Intro.), Leibniz: Philosophical Writings,
trans. Mary Morris (1934).
(with J.S. Fulton), Defence of Democracy
(1936).
W. J. Mander
MUIRHEAD, John Henry (1855-1940)
John Henry Muirhead was born in Glasgow on
28 April 1855 and died in Rotherfield, Sussex
on 24 May 1940. He graduated from Glasgow
University in 1875, where he studied under
Edward Caird, and afterwards won a scholar-
ship to Balliol College, Oxford, where Jowett,
Green and Nettleship all taught, and where he
studied classics. But graduating in 1879 with
only a second class degree, he failed to obtain
a fellowship, becoming instead! assistant in Latin
to George Gilbert Ramsay at Glasgow
University. In 1885 he left to study philosophy
and theology at Manchester New College in
London, where James Martineau was Principal,
with the idea of perhaps becoming a Unitarian
minister. But this was not to be, and in 1888 he
was appointed lecturer in mental and moral
science at the newly founded Royal Holloway
College. He also lectured for Bedford College
and the London Society for the Extension of
University Teaching at the same time. In 1896

he was appointed Professor of Philosophy and
Political Economy at Mason College in
Birmingham. When in 1900 this became the
University of Birmingham the chair was split,
Muirhead remaining Professor of Philosophy
until his retirement in 1922. Muirhead married
twice, in 1892 and again in 1927, but had no
children.
He belonged to the school known as British
idealism, and the greatest influence on him was
Edward Caird. (In 1921, together with another
of Caird's pupil, Henry JONES, he published a
tribute to his former teacher, The Life and
Philosophy of Edward Caird, which makes
very clear the extent of his regard.) Entering into
the subsequent debate, but adding little new,
with regards to metaphysics and religion, he
followed the lead of others in the school, seeing
the main argument for idealism as the Kantian
one from the dependence of the structure of
the objective world on a priori forms supplied
partly by our sensitive and partly by our intel-
lectual nature, unified in the Absolute or God.
His main interest lay, rather, in the moral and
social implications of this idealism.
His first book was the very successful and
popular textbook The Elements of Ethics pub-
lished in 1892. Revised and enlarged it went
through four editions. It makes no pretence at
originality, but is instead a general introduction
to the subject from the Hegelian point of view;
a general re-application of the ideas of Green,
Caird and F.H. BRADLEY. It pointed out clearly
the difference between the conceptions of the
good or end and that of the rule or obligation,
arguing that even if historically it was law which
came first, end is really the more fundamental
conception in terms of which the other should
be understood. He defines the end of action as
the realization of our higher or true self - 'self-
realization' is, he claims, merely a translation of
Aristotle's word energeia, although what he
offers is far more Hegelian than Aristotelian.
Taking that self either as something principally
feeling or as something principally rational, he
considers respectively the theories of hedonism
and that of duty for its own sake. Neither are
701
MUIRHEAD
found acceptable, and nor is the more evolu-
tionary utilitarianism of Spencer, although it is
credited for revealing that the self is no isolated
atom, but rather something essentially social.
To maintain himself in isolated independence,
to refuse to be compromised by social relations
is, argues Muirhead, the surest way for a person
to fail to realize the good he or she seeks. Self-
realization thus lies in the Common Good. For
a man '[t]o seek life in this sense is to lose it. On
the other hand a man finds salvation in the
duties of family, profession, city, country. To
lose his life in these is to find it' (The Elements
of Ethics, p. 172). Rejecting any distinction
between is and ought, he holds that the moral
code exists only in concrete social relations, but
this makes the existence of different standards
a problem. Rather than retreat to relativism,
Muirhead uses the idea of progress, such that
the actual standard at any given time is not 'an
isolated and accidental phenomenon, but takes
its place as a stage in the evolution of a univer-
sal moral order' (ibid., p. 229).
Large parts of the Elements of Ethics follow
Green, but Muirhead also shared Green's great
interest in social reform, and in The Service of
the State, published in 1908, he expounded
Green's political teaching; setting out the reality
and significance of community and of political
allegiance. He continued to work on ethics
throughout his life, and in 1932 published Rule
and End in Morals, which restates what he sees
as the central ethical principle of the idealistic
tradition of Green and BOSANQUET, defending
it against more modern alternatives such as the
ideal utilitarianism of MOORE and RASHDALL
and the intuitionism of PRICHARD and CARRTTT.
While continuing to urge that the good is the
fundamental notion in ethics, he came to hold
that the relationship between the good and the
right was a close and organic one. The great
value of this later work lies in the debate it
presents between the idealist approach to ethics
and its newer critics, in face of which it was
neither mute nor unyielding.
As histories of the movement have noted,
possibly more damaging than anything else to
MUIRHEAD
the fortunes of idealism was World War I.
Encouraged by such philosophers as L.T.
HOBHOUSE, German militarism was seen as a
direct consequence of Hegelian philosophy,
which in consequence began to fall rapidly out
of favour. German Philosophy in Relation to
the War (1915) was written by Muirhead to
attempt to counteract that swing, to avert the
'danger of doing a grave injustice to what was
in essence a great constructive effort of thought
by associating it with the present orgy of
violence and ruthless destruction' (German
Philosophy in Relation to War, p. vi). Offering
a simple account of how the Kantian philoso-
phy developed into that of Hegel, and of the
latter's various receptions during the nineteenth
century, it was Muirhead's claim that current
German militarism was the result not of
idealism itself but of the violent reactions
against it of Schopenhauer, Haeckel, Feuerbach,
Nietzsche and Trietscke. In this way he sought
to free German idealism from the charges
levelled against it, but for all his efforts his case
had little effect on the fate of idealism in this
country.
In addition to ethics, Muirhead also wrote on
the history of philosophy and it was here
perhaps that he made his most original contri-
bution. Coleridge as Philosopher (1930), which
drew heavily on important previously unpub-
lished manuscripts which Muirhead had dis-
covered, served to rescue Coleridge's philo-
sophical views from almost total neglect.
Noting Coleridge's role in introducing Kant to
British readers, it nonetheless emphasizes the
Neoplatonic influence on his thought, and
argues that his system is more correctly thought
of as a product of his own creative genius than
a mere development of German idealism.
In this respect the book forms but a part of
a larger project, which was published the fol-
lowing year. The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-
Saxon Philosophy is a historical survey which
seeks to challenge the popular notion that the
British idealist movement had been nothing but
a German import, breaking in on the tradi-
tional British philosophy of the British empiri-
702
cists. Without denying their German origin, he
argued that the acceptance of these ideas had
been made easier, that the soil was already
prepared, by the existence of a native idealist
tradition, from the Cambridge Platonists of the
seventeenth century, dying down except for a
faint echo in Berkeley, then powerfully revived
in Coleridge, Carlyle, Ferrier and Jowett, to his
own time. The further development of these
ideas is examined through a detailed study of
the philosophy of F.H. Bradley. A parallel evo-
lution in America is noted, and here the detailed
examination is of Josiah Royce. Undoubtedly
Muirhead overstates his case, at times he even
makes mistakes (he says, for example, that
Ferrier owed little or nothing to Kant and Hegel
when there is ample evidence to the contrary),
but the work has an enduring historical value
both for its recovery of a native tradition and its
careful plotting of the reception of Kant and
Hegel in Britain; and considerable critical
importance for its studies of Bradley and Royce,
both of which trace the development of their
thought rather than presenting it as something
static and unchanging. He concludes with an
essay 'What is Dead and what Alive in
Idealism'.
He was a man of vigorous activity, and
matters outside teaching and writing were
always important to Muirhead. In 1888 he
became editor of the Library of Philosophy
(published first by Swan Sonnenschein and then
by Allen and Unwin), a position he held until his
death and which earned him much respect.
Through the library he introduced to English
readers many notable works from a variety of
schools of thought, inspired by his idealist goal
of bringing together many and different points
of view (although convergence of lines of
thought was, it might be argued, something he
had a tendency to overestimate;). He also edited
the first two series of Contemporary British
Philosophy, valuable for their short personal
statements by the leading philosophers of the
day. In 1886 he helped James Bonar, Bernard
Bosanquet and others to found the London
Ethical Society, and he was active with Henry

JONES in the Workers' Education Association.
He played an important part in converting
Mason College into Birmingham University,
and was as influential in the life of the city as he
was in that of the university. In 1929 he became
Chair of the newly founded British Institute of
Philosophy.
Muirhead added little that was really new to
the idealism he had been taught, but he was an
important example of and advocate for that
worldview, and kept the idealist impulse alive
until well into the twentieth century, adapting
it to the changed circumstances of the time.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Elements of Ethics (1892).
The Service of the State: four Lectures on the
Political Teaching ofT.H. Green (1908).
German Philosophy in Relation to the War
(1915).
Coleridge as Philosopher (1930).
The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon
Philosophy: Studies in the History of
Idealism in England and America (1931).
Rule and End in Morals (1932).
Other Relevant Works
Chapters from Aristotle's Ethics (1900).
Philosophy and Life and Other Essays
(1902).
(with H.J.W. Hetherington), Social Purpose:
A Contribution to a Philosophy of Civic
Society (1918).
(with Henry Jones), The Life and Philosophy
of Edward Caird (Glasgow, 1921).
Bernard Bosanquet and his Friends (1935).
Reflections of a Journeyman in Philosophy
(1942).
W. J. Mander
703
MUNDLE
MUNDLE, Clement Williams Kennedy
(1916-89)
C.W.K. Mundle was born in Dysart, Fife on 10
August 1916 and died in Bath on 27 July 1989.
He was educated at Glasgow Academy and St
Andrews University, where he was awarded
first class honours in philosophy before going to
Queen's College, Oxford, where he read for
PPE, which he took with first class honours in
1947. He was Head of the Philosophy
Department at Queen's College, Dundee from
1947 to 1955 and Professor of Philosophy and
Head of the Department at the University
College of North Wales, Bangor from 1955
until his retirement.
Mundle is perhaps best known for his
attempts to clarify and defend the notion of
'the specious present' and other notions central
to our thinking about time. But this is just one
instance of Mundle's insisting, throughout his
career, on taking seriously the reality of various
mental phenomena, rejecting views and
methodologies which were incompatible with
them or which gave insufficient weight to a
first-person awareness of features of one's own
mental life. Hence Mundle's membership (along
with such other philosophers as Sidgwick,
BROAD, H.H. PRICE, SCHILLER and Bergson) in
the British Society for Psychical Research, for
which he served as President from 1971 to
1973. 'Psi-phenomena' suggested the possibil-
ity of some form of mind-world without actual
physical connectedness - in which case, theories
of normal perception, even causal theories
thereof, should not presume that there must be
such an 'interruptable physiological transmis-
sion system'.
Because it too seemed simply to write off
certain mentalistic realities, Mundle was suspi-
cious of the 'linguistic turn' in philosophy and,
more generally, of the attempt to 'fit all mental
concepts into a single straight-jacket'. For
instance, acknowledging the status of language
as a public institution, and the primacy of our
using language to talk about publicly available
objects, Mundle remains unimpressed with
MUNDLE
attempts on the part of 'linguistic behaviourists'
to reduce our talk of various mental states to
talk about observable behaviour. While some
mentalistic concepts (e.g., alert) are closely
related to such behavioural criteria, our concern
in wondering whether Jones is in pain is essen-
tially experiential —we want to know whether
Jones feels pain.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Is Psychical Research Relevant to
Philosophy? Part IIP, Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 24,
Psychical Research, Ethics and Logic
(1950), pp. 207-31.
'How Specious is the "Specious Present"?'
Mind, vol. 63, no. 249 (1954), pp. 26-48.
'Thinking and Experience', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 15 (1954), pp.
156-65.
'Punishment and Desert', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 16 (1954), pp.
216-28.
'Broad's Views about Time', in P.A. Schilpp
(ed.), The Philosophy ofC. D. Broad
(1959), pp. 353-74.
'Common Sense "Versus" Mr. Hirst's Theory
of Perception', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 60 (1959-60), pp.
61-77.
'"Private Language" and Wittgenstein's Kind
of Behaviourism', Philosophical Quarterly,
vol. 16, no. 62 (1966), pp. 35-16.
'The Explanation of ESP', in J.R. Smythies
(ed.), Science and ESP (1967), pp.
197-208.
A Critique of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford,
1970; 2nd edn with 'Second Thoughts - an
Epilogue after 10 Years', 1979).
Perception: Facts and Theories (1971).
Other Relevant Works
'Mr. Hirst's Theory of Perception', Mind, vol.
61, no. 243 (1952), pp. 386-90.
'Mr. Dobbs' Two-Dimensional Theory of
Time', British Journal for the Philosophy of
Science, vol. 4, no. 16 (1954), pp. 331-6.
704
'Mental Concepts', Mind, vol. 72, no. 288
(1963), pp. 577-80.
'Augustine's Pervasive Error Concerning
Time', Philosophy, vol. 41 (1966), pp.
165-8.
Patrick Rysiew
MURDOCH, Iris (1919-99)
Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin on 15 July
1919 and died in Oxford on 8 February 1999.
Her father, who had been a cavalry officer
during World War II, went to work as a gov-
ernment clerk in London after the war, and as
a consequence the family moved there shortly
after Iris was born. She was educated at
Badminton School, Bristol and at Somerville
College, Oxford, where she studied classics,
ancient history and philosophy. From 1938 to
1942 she worked at the Treasury as an assistant
principal and subsequently (1944-6) with the
United Nations relief organization UNNRA.
In 1947 she was awarded a studentship in phi-
losophy at Newnham College, Cambridge. The
following year she was elected a fellow of St
Anne's College, Oxford and remained there as
a tutor until 1963, when she retired to devote
herself to writing. She married fellow academic
and critic John Bayley in 1956. Throughout
most of her life Murdoch devoted her consid-
erable energies to both literary and philosoph-
ical interests, publishing twenty-six novels and
a number of philosophical works. Her first pub-
lication was Sartre: Romantic Rationalist
(1953), which, though primarily an interpretive
work, contains significant indicators of her
future philosophical concerns. These concerns
would include the nature of self-consciousness,
subjectivity, love, contingency and the tension
between the 'inner life' and the life of action.
Her book on Sartre was soon followed by a
sequence of novels, beginning with Under the

Net (1954), which may be read as an imagina-
tive treatment of some of the themes that came
to light in her discussion of Sartre. The central
character in Under the Net is called James
('Jake') Donaghue, but, as the character himself
informs us 'y°u needn't bother about that, as I
was in Dublin only twice' (p. 23). He contrasts
himself with his Irish companion, Finn, 'who is
always saying he will go back to Ireland to be
in a country which really has religion, but he
never goes' (ibid., p. 24). What is made to
matter is not Donaghue's possible connections
with Dublin or Ireland (or with any other his-
torical place) but the unfolding of the discursive,
self-conscious narrative that develops out of
his rootless existence as he continually runs up
against just the kinds of contingency that he
purports to hate ('I want everything in my life
to have a sufficient reason', ibid., p. 26).
Despite Jake Donaghue's curt and apologetic
dismissal of his Irish-seeming associations,
Murdoch's early departure from Ireland did
not entirely remove the country from her own
imaginative or emotional frame of reference.
Her Irish historical novel The Red and the
Green (1965), and the subsequent recurrence of
Irish characters and settings in The Unicorn
(1963) and The Time of the Angels (1966)
reveal the persistence of her Irish background.
The Red and the Green contains, like Under the
Net, an important clue to Murdoch's philo-
sophical concerns. In this novel, a densely
complex story of misunderstandings, failures
of perception and ultimate self-discovery set
against the backdrop of the Easter Rising of
1916, she exploits one of the conventions of the
traditional novel for ethical as much as for
artistic reasons. The convention of multiple
viewpoints enables her to dramatize what is
for her a very important feature of personal
and interpersonal life. A particular character,
viewed through the eyes of others, may appear
clownish, inept and thoughtless, but when the
narrative shifts to his consciousness there may
be revealed an inner life (or a suppressed past
life) that is not detectible in current words and
actions. One of the principal characters in The
705
MURDOCH
Red and the Green is presented in this way, and
is subsequently revealed to be quite other than
he appears to be. A particularly misunderstood
and 'misperceived' character, he is found to
have an incommunicable emotional life - to
have, indeed, such an unutterable regard for
his stepchildren that 'no touch, no look, no
gesture, no tone of voice could give expression
to it' (The Red and the Green, p. 148).
The insight expressed imaginatively through
the 'multiple viewpoints' convention in her fic-
tional work is developed into a subtle ethical
position in Murdoch's philosophical work. In
The Sovereignty of the Good (1970), in the
course of developing a passionate rebuttal of
behaviourism, she argues that morality is more
a matter of vision or attention than of public
behaviour, that the most important struggles
occur inwardly, at the level of thought and per-
ception, rather than outwardly, at the level of
action. These internal struggles may indeed
never be apparent to an 'objective' or third-
party observer. For Murdoch, the proper mark
of the active moral agent is the ability to hold
another individual - or indeed another reality -
in 'a just and loving gaze' (The Sovereignty of
Good, p. 34). Gazing or 'seeing' in this context
has a moral significance, implying clear vision
as a result of imaginative and moral effort.
Clarity of vision also implies a determination to
overcome the various forms of prejudice, self-
deception or self-centredness that may distort or
cloud the proper perception of particular
persons, places or things. Virtue and reality are
so closely linked that the task of seeing or oth-
erwise perceiving any particular thing is first
and foremost a moral one. But a task it is in any
case, the task of struggling to see the world as
it is. The ever-present difficulty is not only to
keep attention fixed on a real situation but also
to prevent such attention 'from returning sur-
reptitiously to the self with consolations of self-
pity, resentment, fantasy and despair' (ibid., p.
91). Much of Murdoch's fiction is concerned
with the ways in which the task of 'really
looking' is distracted, misdirected and some-
times made to seem impossible in certain cir-
MURDOCH
cumstances. Her fiction is also, at its most philo-
sophical, concerned with demonstrating her
conviction that the artist, especially the writer,
is nothing if not a great informant or sage who
lends to the elusive particular a local habitation
and a name' (The Fire and the Sun, p. 86).
She returns to the themes of privacy, internal
struggle and moral perception in her last sub-
stantial philosophical work, Metaphysics as a
Guide to Morals (1992). Clearly impressed by
the work of thinkers as diverse as WITTGENSTEIN
and Jacques Derrida, she nonetheless sets herself
to defend many of the concepts and assump-
tions that 'embarrass' both thinkers. She defends
experience and intuition but especially the
'intense lively privacy' of the internal mental
lives of individuals. She finds that our whole
busy moral and psychological lives abound in
'private insoluble difficulties, mysterious half-
understood mental configurations' (Metaphysics
as a Guide to Morals, p. 280). While acknowl-
edging the importance of the modern emphasis
on the social, cultural, linguistic and environ-
mental factors that shape our minds and per-
sonalities, she also wants to retain a sense of
that private 'thought-being' that is so different
from our lived outer life. An anti-modernist
thinker who is fascinated by the arguments of
the modernists and postmodernists, Murdoch
sets herself to recover what has been lost to the
encroachment of environmental and determin-
istic theorizing, specifically 'our dense familiar
inner stuff, private and personal, with a quality
and a value of its own, something which we can
scrutinize and control' (ibid., p. 153). In her
view, the ultimate effect of the different 'envi-
ronmentalisms' of Hegel, Marx, Wittgenstein,
Heidegger and Derrida is to remove personal-
ity, value and morality from the scheme of
things. These thinkers, concerned as they are
with structures or systems larger than the indi-
vidual, present new determinisms, new and ever
more elaborate pretexts for 'giving up', for
getting rid of freedom, responsibility, remorse
'and all sorts of personal individual unease'
(ibid., p. 190).
706
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Sovereignty of Good (1970).
The Fire and the Sun (1977).
Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1984).
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992).
Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Peter J.
Conradi (1994).
Other Relevant Works
Under the Net (1954).
The Red and the Green (1965).
Further Reading
Antonaccio, Maria and William Schweiker
(eds), Iris Murdoch and the Search for
Human Goodness (Chicago, 1996).
Bayley, John, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch
(1999).
Conradi, Peter J., Iris Murdoch: A Life
(2002).
Gerstenberger, Donna, Iris Murdoch (1975).
Thomas Duddy
MURE, Geoffrey Reginald Gilchrist
(1893-1979)
Geoffrey Mure was born in London on 8 April
1893 and died there on 24 May 1979. After
Eton, in 1912 he went up to Merton College,
Oxford, which was to be his home for the rest
of his career. He was awarded a first in Honour
Moderations but never took Greats due to
service in World War I. After the war he
returned to Merton and when in 1919 his
former tutor H.H. JOACHIM was appointed
Wykeham Professor of Logic, he recommended
Mure to succeed him as the college philosophy
tutor. Between 1929 and 1937 he was also uni-
versity lecturer, and during the war years from
1939 to 1945 he was away from Oxford
serving in the War Office. After the war in 1947
he became Warden of the college. After

becoming Warden he virtually withdrew from
philosophical life in Oxford, although he con-
tinued to publish. He retired in 1963.
He adopted wholeheartedly the absolute
idealism of his tutor, a view that by 1920 was
rapidly losing favour in the philosophical world
at large. He therefore became a kind of lone
voice for an Oxford that had passed.
Continuing to teach through the study of
standard texts, contemporary philosophy was
either ignored or dismissed. Indeed, his teaching
was so out of touch that it was rumoured in the
1930s that the examiners put in special ques-
tions 'for Merton men'.
His first book was on Aristotle, and he was
also a translator of Aristotle. But even in Mure's
Aristotle there was much of Hegel, and it was
principally as a scholar of Hegel that he made
his name - writing three books and many
articles on the philosopher. His Introduction to
Hegel, which appeared in 1940, was strongly
historical, aiming to explain the relationship
between Hegel and his predecessors (especially
Aristotle and Kant) and explains Hegel's general
conception of logic. A Study of Hegel's Logic
(1950), conceived as a sequel to the first book,
works in detail through the encyclopedia Logic,
and is largely expository although it concludes
with some chapters of criticism. Written from
an avowedly idealistic point of view, it was not
an easy book to read, winning it fewer sup-
porters than its scholarly merits perhaps
deserved, but the same could hardly be said for
his third book, Philosophy of Hegel. Published
in 1965 for the Home University Library series,
this short general introduction which covers
the whole of Hegel's system in general outline
has remained a valuable guide for students.
Mure's work on Hegel, written at a time of
profound hostility to the history of philosophy
in general and of ignorance and misunder-
standing of Hegel in particular, helped keep
interest in Hegel alive - it was really not until
the 1970s that the contemporary revival of
interest in Hegel began - but it remained rooted
in its origins (the Hegel it propounds is, for
example, highly metaphysical and systematic)
707
MURE
and is less popular today. His work on Hegel
made Mure himself a solitary figure, dismissed
by most of his Oxford colleagues as a mere
reactionary. The story is told that in the 1950s
as he walked down The High students would
point him out in incredulous wonder as the
sole surviving Hegelian in Oxford.
Mure was not only a champion of Hegelian
idealism, he was also a critic of modern philos-
ophy. In 1958 he published Retreat from Truth,
a wide-ranging and passionate attack on con-
temporary British philosophy, which he saw as
a deeply regrettable regression and turning
away from the speculative thought of the earlier
absolute idealists; a return he attempted in the
book to trace to the practical preoccupation of
the British and the general poverty of modern
cultural life. For Mure, the philosopher was
one engaged in the construction of systems
which dealt with serious questions of ultimate
reality, not a piecemeal conceptual under-
labourer for science, and certainly no mere
mouthpiece of common sense or dissolver of lin-
guistic puzzles. The book had its supporters, but
it is intemperately passionate in tone - modern
philosophy is derided as 'naive', 'absurd', and
a 'product of spiritual sterility' (Retreat from
Truth, pp. vii, viii), and he ends by saying that
if he now had an intelligent son coming up to
Oxford, he would not want him to study phi-
losophy there - and crude in the characteriza-
tion of its targets - the analytic style of RUSSELL,
the ordinary language philosophy of RYLE and
WITTGENSTEIN'S philosophy are all lumped
together as merely deficient variants of the
British empirical tradition of Locke and Hume
- and these two facts together ensured that
among those to whom it was addressed it met
with little attention, and less approval.
His own positive philosophical position,
which he termed 'objective idealism', was set
out in his last book, Idealist Epilogue, pub-
lished in 1978, a few months before his death.
Written in the form of a dialogue with himself
in large part about the correct interpretation of
Hegel, its arguments are rarely strong or self-
critical, but it does provide a good picture of his
MURE

main intellectual debts and overall thought- BIBLIOGAPHY

world. By the end of the book Mure finds Aristotle (1932).
himself out of sympathy, not just with con- Introduction to Hegel (Oxford, 1940).
temporary philosophy but with the entire A Study of Hegel's Logic (Oxford, 1950).
modern world. 'I don't doubt that at least from Retreat from Truth (Oxford, 1958).
the beginning of this century, perhaps earlier, Philosophy of Hegel (1965).
the human species has declined in quality in Idealist Epilogue (Oxford, 1978).
inverse proportion to its increase in quantity'
(Idealist Epilogue, p. 174), he laments. W. J. Mander
Mure was an able philosopher, but loyalty to
his original teachers restricted his thought, and
partisanship came to him too easily. His old-
fashioned style ensured that in his day he was
scarcely regarded, and after his death he was
soon forgotten.

708
 N
NEEDHAM, Noel Joseph Terence
Montgomery (1900-95)
Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham
was born in London on 9 December 1900, the
son of Joseph and Alicia Adelaide Needham,
and died in Cambridge on 24 March 1995.
His father was a London doctor specializing in
anaesthesia and his mother achieved some fame
as a pianist and composer of songs. Joseph
Needham was educated at Oundle School and
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. A reli-
gious man (High Church Anglican), he
combined his beliefs with a commitment to
social justice. He considered entering the priest-
hood, but married Dorothy Moyle, a fellow
researcher in the Cambridge biochemistry
department, in September 1924. In 1933 he
succeeded J.B.S. HALDANE as Sir William Dunn
Reader in Biochemistry at Cambridge, and the
next year published A History of Embryology,
an extension of the introduction to his earlier
work Chemical Embryology (1931). Needham
was elected FRS in 1941 and fellow of the
British Academy in 1971, one of the very few
to obtain this double distinction. In 1992 he
was appointed a Companion of Honour.
Although his background was as an experi-
mental scientist specializing in embryology,
Needham's interests ranged widely and he is
best known for his monumental historical
survey Science and Civilisation in China, which
first appeared in 1954. His interest in Chinese
culture began in 1937, after an encounter with
three visiting Chinese scientists at Cambridge.
709
In their discussions Lu Gwei-Djen, who later
became his second wife, triggered his imagina-
tion by wondering how it was that China, in
spite of its successful scientific past, had been so
much overtaken by the West. Needham began
to read about Chinese culture and philosophy,
and started to learn Chinese with Lu. From
1942 he spent four years as head of a scientific
mission to China, based in Chongqing. During
this time he collected many documents relating
to Chinese science throughout the ages and on
his return to Cambridge began to write up his
findings. The first part of his systematic surve.
of the history of Chinese civilization and its
scientific discoveries was published in 1954.
However the project was never completed by
him, and is still in progress.
In the 1930s Needham was active in propa-
gating a highly political Christianity, empha-
sizing its closeness to Marxism. In his writings
he attempted to link radical Christianity of the
seventeenth century with the politics of the
twentieth century. However, he also believed
Daoism offered hope of reconciliation between
science and religion. He was uncomfortable
with HOGBEN'S behaviourist approach to con-
sciousness and suggested that philosophy and
religion and some mystical experience as well
as science contributed to 'mind'.
Needham's political sympathies lay very
much with the left. In 1931 he was profoundly
influenced by the Soviet view, expounded at the
Second International Congress of the History of
Science and Technology in London, that science
and Marxism were inextricably entwined. He
NEEDHAM
was an active member of the Labour Party and
with J.D. BERNAL was a founder of the
Cambridge Scientists' Anti-War Group, cam-
paigning against militarism. On the outbreak of
World War II he did not at first support the
British war effort but after Germany's attack on
the USSR in 1941 became active in promoting
Anglo-Soviet Friendship. After the war
Needham supported many organizations pro-
moting peace, disarmament and international
understanding. In 1962 he helped found the
British Society for Social Responsibility in
Science.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Sceptical Biologist (1929).
Chemical Embryology (Cambridge, 1931).
A History of Embryology (Cambridge,
1934).
Biochemistry and Morphogenesis (194.2).
Time the Refreshing River (1943).
History is on our Side (1946).
Science and Civilisation in China
(Cambridge, 1954).
Further Reading
Wersky, G., The Visible College (1988).
Alan Cohen
NEWELL, Robert Wheeler (1930-)
R.W. Newell was bom in America. He was
educated at the University of Virginia (BA,
1955; MA, 1957) and at Cambridge (MA,
1961). He was a fellow of St John's College,
Cambridge (1961-4) and subsequently a
lecturer in philosophy at the new University of
East Anglia in Norwich.
In his first book, The Concept of Philosophy
(1967), R.W. Newell acknowledged the impor-
tance for his work of the Cambridge philoso-
pher John WISDOM, whose lectures he had
710
attended. This book is concerned with the chal-
lenge of scepticism. Newell writes that scepti-
cism assumes that the only means to certain
proof is that of discursive reasoning: deduc-
tion or induction. Since neither of these can
provide certain proof, the sceptic concludes
that we can prove nothing. But Newell argues,
as Wisdom had done, that discursive reasonin.
does not constitute the entirety of philosophi-
cal thinking and that there may be other ways
by which understanding can proceed. NewelPs
central task in this book is to argue for the
'reconciliation' of both the discursive and non-
discursive as equally valid modes of philo-
sophical thinking. By means of an investigation
of our habits of thought, in the manner of
WITTGENSTEIN, he contends that propositions
can be formulated which are not discursive but
which yet can be justified; and this would refute
scepticism.
This position was more fully elaborated in
Newell's later book Objectivity, Empiricism
and Truth (1986). Taking his cue from William
James and Thomas Kuhn, Newell rejects the
notion that the only acceptable conception of
objectivity is that in which validation of our
beliefs comes solely from some impersonal
suprahuman realm. He insists, instead, that
'the concepts central to epistemology - knowl-
edge, truth, certainty, objectivity - cannot be
appreciated for what they are without under-
standing their connections with human actions'
(Objectivity, Empiricism and Truth, p. ix).
That is, these concepts need to be reinterpreted
in human terms. Though it is through obser-
vation that we form propositions about the
world, it is not through observation that these
propositions become true. So James and Quine
are right when they say that the propositions
we uphold are those which are essential for the
organization of our observations for our best
pragmatic advantage. However, Newell is not
content with a conception of truth that does not
acknowledge 'that some things are unassail-
ably certain' (ibid., p. x), which is the position
in which he claims James arid Quine leave us.
As proposed in his first book, Newell seeks to

ground certainty in our human thought.
Drawing on one of his earlier publications,
The Scope of Reason: Wisdom, Kuhn and
James' (1984), he discusses Wisdom's exami-
nation of the non-discursive type of reasoning
called case-by-case reasoning. This proceeds
by the making of parallels between particular
instances of experience, yet without any refer-
ence to general principles. Since this particular
case-by-case understanding is prior to the gen-
eralized impersonal understanding of induc-
tion and deduction it is more fundamental,
personal and close to our actual human thought
processes. It is because the propositions of a
pragmatic epistemology must be based on
human thought, and because certainty and the
entire scope of reasoning are not coextensive
with discursive thought, that Newell asserts
that it is the non-discursive case-by-case rea-
soning that can constitute the final court of
appeal for our beliefs, and whose 'unassail-
ability' provides certainty.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Concept of Philosophy (1967).
The Scope of Reason: Wisdom, Kuhn and
James', in Philosophy and Life: Essays on
John Wisdom, ed. Ilham Dilman (The
Hague, 1984), pp. 219-40.
Objectivity, Empiricism and Truth (1986).
Other Relevant Works
'Ethics and Description', Philosophy, vol. 43
(1968), pp. 360-70.
N. J. Fox
NIDDITCH, Peter Harold (1928-83)
Peter Nidditch was born in London on 15
September 1928 and died in Sheffield on 12
February 1983. Son of a rabbi of East
European extraction, he could draw on a
711
NIDD.ITCH
knowledge of Hebrew, Russian, German,
Spanish, Latin and other languages in his own
scholarly work. After attending Clifton College,
he enrolled at Birkbeck College, London, but
had to withdraw and completed his BA (1949)
as an external student. Returning to Birkbeck,
he wrote an MA thesis on Pascal (1951). His
doctoral thesis ('Language and Modern Logic',
1953) developed misgivings he had already
voiced in a contribution to Analysis (1951/2);
he considered some of the doctrines of modern
logic inconsistent with linguistic facts, and
pursued his own enquiry into the logicality of
language. He lectured at Belfast (1954-6),
Liverpool (1956-9) and Bristol (1959-63),
before becoming senior lecturer and then reader
in the philosophy and history of science at the
University of Sussex, where he chaired the
Logic, History and Policy of Science division. In
1969 he became Professor of Philosophy and
Head of Department at the University of
Sheffield, and was briefly Dean of the Faculty
of Arts. In 1980 he received London
University's DLit degree.
Meticulous in everything, Nidditch believed
passionately in the worth of intellectual studies.
Behind an austere public persona he was an
essentially private person, but generous to
aspiring students and scholars. He made his
early reputation in the history and philosophy
of logic and mathematics, publishing mostly
brief papers and a succession of textbooks. The
Development of Mathematical Logic (1962),
tracing the subject from antiquity, was
composed in C.K. OGDEN'S 'basic' English.
Continuing interests in linguistic theory led him
in 1979 to attempt an account of speech acts in
mathematics in which he appears to have had
no followers. His textbooks, often eruditely
documented, were respected for the same pre-
cision he showed in speech, but away from
logic and mathematics he was a mannered
rather than a perspicuous writer.
The services to the history of philosophy that
marked Nidditch's later years are strictly
textual. Self-critical to an exceptional degree, he
ruthlessly exposed the weaknesses of other
NIDDITCH
editors. From 1973 he was general editor of the
Clarendon Locke Edition. His outstanding col-
lation and edition of Locke's Essay concerning
Human Understanding (1975), completed
without computer assistance, baffled the philo-
sophical establishment but transformed the
status of textual scholarship in philosophy; he
also established new standards for manuscript
transcription. None of the further Locke and
Hume editions he projected for himself reached
completion. Though well read, he claimed no
skills as a commentator, and he left it to others
to show that textual collations can bring exeget-
ical rewards. His surviving professional papers
are in Sheffield University library.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'A Note on Logic and Linguistic
Ambiguities', Analysis, vol. 12 (1951/2),
pp. 122-4.
Introductory Formal Logic of Mathematics
(1957).
Elementary Logic of Science and
Mathematics (1960).
The Development of Mathematical Logic
(1962; Spanish trans., Madrid, 1978).
Propositional Calculus (1962).
'Peano and the Recognition of Frege', Mind,
vol. 72 (1963), pp. 103-10.
'Spinoza', in D.J. O'Connor (ed.), A Critical
History of Western Philosophy (1964), pp.
187-203.
(Ed.), Philosophy of Science (1968; Spanish
trans., Mexico, 1975).
'Is Natural Deduction Natural?', Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 43
(1969), pp. 49-68.
The Intellectual Virtues [inaugural lecture]
(Sheffield, 1970).
A Bibliographical and Text-Historical Study
of the Early Printings of John Locke's
'Some Thoughts Concerning Education'
(Sheffield, 1972).
(Ed.), John Locke: An Essay concerning
Human Understanding (Oxford, 1975;
textbook edn with new forematter,
Oxford, 1979).
712
An Apparatus of Variant Readings for
Hume's 'Treatise of Human Nature'
(Sheffield, 1976).
'Preface to the Grammar of Postulates',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 53 (1979), pp. 1-21.
(Ed.), Draft A of Locke's 'Essay Concerning
Human Understanding' (Sheffield, 1980).
(Ed.), Draft B of Locke's 'Essay Concerning
Human Understanding' (Sheffield, 1982).
'The First Stage of the Idea of Mathematics:
Pythagoreans, Plato, Aristotle', Midwest
Studies in Philosophy, vol. 8 (1983), pp.
3-34.
Other Relevant Works
(Ed.), Russian Reader in Pure and Applied
Mathematics (Edinburgh, 1962).
(Rev.), Hume, David, Enquiries concerning
Human Understanding and concerning the
Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge,
3rd edn (Oxford, 1975).
(Rev.), Hume, David, A Treatise of Human
Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edn
(Oxford, 1978).
(Index), Austin, J.L., How to Do Things with
Words, 2nd edn, corrected imp. (Oxford,
1980).
(Ed. with G.A.J. Rogers), John Locke: Drafts
for the 'Essay concerning Human
Understanding' and Other Philosophical
Writings, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1990).
Further Reading
Anon., Locke Newsletter, no. 15 (1984), pp.
9-11.
Atkinson, James, The Times, no. 61462, 21
February 1983, p. 12.
M.A. Stewart

NOWELL-SMITH, Patrick Horace (1914-)
Patrick Nowell-Smith was born in Polzeath,
Cornwall on 17 August 1914. He was educated
at Winchester and New College, Oxford, where
he took first class honours in Greats. In 1937
he was elected to a Commonwealth Fellowship
at Harvard University, where he was awarded
an AM. Following army service in the Middle
East and India he returned to Oxford in 1946
as fellow and lecturer in philosophy at Trinity
College. In 1957 he was appointed to the Chair
of Philosophy at the University of Leicester,
which he held until 1964, when he became
Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Kent at Canterbury. From 1969 until his retire-
ment in 1985 he was Professor of Philosophy
at York University, Toronto. He was married
twice, first in 1946 to Perilla Thyme, with
whom he had three sons and one daughter;
and in 1968 to Felicity Ward, with whom he
had two daughters. He now lives in Oxford.
Although preceded by many broadly ranging
contributions to leading journals (including
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society), most
notably in philosophy of language and logic,
ethics and philosophical theology, Nowell-
Smith's major book, Ethics, appeared in 1954
and has since been many times reprinted. At the
time of its publication - and for a decade or
more to come - Oxford was internationally
influential in the development and practice of
linguistic analysis and the phenomenology of
language. Ethics represents all that is best in this
approach to philosophizing and, indeed, makes
significant advances on a number of fronts.
Nowell-Smith's analysis of what it does and
does not mean to have freedom of choice
provoked significant responses from J.L.
AUSTIN and others; and his subsequent critique
of Austin was, as well as being by and large
correct, one of the finest pieces of close philo-
sophical analysis of the time. Again, his account
of contextual implication generated great
interest, which led him to revise and refine its
less successful aspects in a later address where,
in a 'partial recantation', he elaborates the
713
NOWELL-SMITH
important notion of 'pragmatic implication'.
But Ethics is considerably more than a book of
and for its time. For one thing, it displays a
sweep, a breadth of interest, which contrasts
refreshingly with the narrower and more
intense focus of many of his contemporaries'
thinking and writing. For instance, it attends in
depth to notions such as conscience and con-
scientiousness, and does so because they are
central to moral experience rather than merely
marginal phenomena on the edges of a system
he is eager to expound. This very breadth of
concern sets him apart from the messianic
fervour apparent in some highly influential
writing of the time; and this makes it difficult
to position the book with any great confidence
in any wider picture of British twentieth-
century moral philosophy.
There is another respect in which Ethics is
distinctive. In its genuine and informed interest
in how we actually set about answering
everyday practical questions - on how philos-
ophy can help - it already intimates its author's
increasing concern both with what is nowadays
called 'applied ethics' and, more generally, with
the primary role of philosophy to serve (some
would misleadingly say 'service') other disci-
plines. Taken with Nowell-Smith's genealogi-
cal interest in issues about the origins of
morality and moral concepts and the sources of
motivation and obligation, these twin concerns
provide a frame within which to set his subse-
quent thinking.
A clear case is his work on the place of phi-
losophy and its teaching in universities. His
views are detailed in his inaugural lecture at
Leicester University; and its most successful,
even if short-lived, embodiment was at Kent.
Philosophy, he argued, is at its most helpful in
a multidisciplinary context, for it clarifies the
logic and procedures of other academic subjects
in all manner of indispensable ways. All
students should ideally be trained in basic
argument forms and analytic techniques and at
the same time be encouraged to read at least
one great philosophical classic, preferably Plato.
The value would be at once intrinsic and instru-
NOWELL-SMITH
mental. Designed and taught with these
thoughts very much in mind, foundation pro-
grammes at Kent in its early formative years
were attractive and extremely successful; and
the omnipresence of philosophy seemed
assured. However, the full-blown scheme
barely survived Nowell-Smith's departure a
few years later, and lives on there (and else-
where) in scarcely recognizable form. The
reasons for its near-demise were never peda-
gogical - how could they be? - but economic
and ideological: a predictable drive to depart-
mentalize everything and everyone.
On a more strictly academic level, Nowell-
Smith's growing, but far from exclusive, interest
in the applications of philosophy shows itself in
the substantial body of work (not all of it pub-
lished) which has appeared from the late 1960s
onwards, mostly in the philosophies of history
and historiography, law and bio-medical
matters. In fact, his best writing in philosophy
of history arguably belongs to a decade earlier:
in his seminal 'Are Historical Events Unique?'
(1957) he takes Collingwood and others to
task in order to determine the importantly dif-
ferent roles generalization has in history and the
natural sciences, and what it means to call a his-
torical event 'unique': 'The scientist is inter-
ested in discovering what happens whenever P,
the historian in what happened when P ... [T]o
say that every revolution is unique is ... to say
that no set of predicates which contains every-
thing that we think relevant to the description
and explanation of one revolution could apply
to any other' ('Are Historical Events Unique?',
pp. 116-17). Several later papers in the field
were to examine the nature of philosophical
understanding and the ontology of the past
and historical facts.
Nowell-Smith's work in philosophy of law is
for the major part the product of his Toronto
years and is much inspired by that of DWORKIN
and HART, the latter of whom Nowell-Smith
knew well in his Oxford days. Sometime
President of the Rationalist Association and,
from 1986 to 1988 President of the World
Federation of Right to Die Societies, he has
714
long taken a special interest in the ethics of
euthanasia, and has for many years worked on
a variety of fronts to promote the cause of
death by request and to bring about its decrim-
inalization.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Freewill and Moral Responsibility', Mind,
vol. 57 (1948), pp. 45-61.
'Philosophical Theories', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 48 (1947-8), pp.
165-86.
'Science and Politics, Part IIP, Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 23
(1949), pp. 153-64.
Ethics (Harmondsworth, 1954).
'Determinists and Libertarians', Mind, vol.
63 (1954), pp. 317-37.
'Miracles', in A. Flew and A. Maclntyre
(eds), New Essays in Philosophical
Theology (1955), pp. 243-53.
'Are Historical Events Unique?', Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 57
(1956-7), pp. 107-60.
Education in University: An Inaugural
Lecture Delivered at Leicester University
(1958).
'Escapism: The Logical Basis of Ethics',
Mind, vol. 69 (1960), pp. 289-300.
'Ifs and Cans', Theoria, vol. 26, pt 2 (1960),
pp. 85-101.
'Contextual Implication and Ethical Theory',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 36 (1962), pp. 1-18.
'Utilitarianism and Treating Others as
Equals', Nous, vol. 1 (1967), pp. 81-99.
'Cultural Relativism', Philosophy of the
Social Sciences, vol. 1 (1971), pp. 1-18.
'Some Reflections on Utilitarianism',
Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 2
(1973), pp. 417-31.
'The Constructionist Theory of History',
History and Theory, vol. 16 (1977), pp.
1-28.
'History as Patterns of Thought and Action',
in L. Pompa (ed.), Substance and Form in
History (Edinburgh, 1981), pp. 145-55.

(Ed.), Law and Rights: Supplementary
Readings (York, 1983).
Other Relevant Works
'Death by Request as a Right', Euthanasia
Review, vol. 2 (1987), pp. 80-95.
'In Favour of Voluntary Euthanasia', in R.
Gillon (ed.), Principles of Health Care
Ethics (New York, 1994).
Further Reading
Austin, J.L., 'Ifs and Cans', Proceedings of
the British Academy (1956); repr. in
Philosophical Papers (Oxford, 1961), pp.
153-180.
Corliss, R.L., 'A Theory of Contextual
Implication', Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol.
5 (1972), pp. 215-23.
Goldstein, L.J., 'History and the Privacy of
Knowing', History and Theory, vol. 16
(1977), pp. 29-52.
Harre, R., 'Directed Adjectives',
Philosophical Quarterly (1959), pp. 341-8.
Kattsoff, L.O., '"Trampling on one's
Neighbours" and Nowell-Smith', Mind,
vol. 67 (1967), pp. 544-5.
King-Farlow, J., 'Miracles: No well-Smith's
Analysis and Tillich's Phenomenology',
International Philosophical Quarterly, vol.
2 (1962), pp. 265-94.
MacGuire, R.R., 'Speech Acts,
Communicative Competence and the
Paradox of Authority', Philosophy and
Rhetoric, vol. 10 (1977), pp. 30-45.
Macloskey, H.J., 'Nowell-Smith's Ethics',
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 39
(1961), pp. 251-75.
Pears, D.F., 'Ifs and Cans', pt 2, Canadian
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 1 (1972), pp.
369-91.
'What Determines a Pragmatic Implication?',
Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 19
(1981), pp. 37-48.
Christopher Cherry
715
NUNN
NUNN, Thomas Percy (1870-1944)
Percy Nunn was born in Bristol on 28
December 1870 and died in Madeira on 12
December 1944. His father and grandfather
ran a school in Bristol but it was transferred, in
1873, to Weston-super-Mare. Nunn was not
only a pupil there but, by the time he was
sixteen, he was helping with the teaching. He
continued to teach at the school even after
becoming a student at Bristol University
College, where he was awarded a (London)
BSc in 1890. Upon his father's death in the
same year he took charge of the school for a
while but then resigned, taking up teaching
posts in Halifax and London. In 1905, after
two years teaching in Shoreditch Technical
Institute, he was appointed Vice-Principal of the
London Day Training College. Around this
time London University awarded him a DSc for
a thesis which he later published as The Aims
and Achievements of Scientific Method (1907).
In 1913 he was promoted to Professor of
Education in the University of London. He was
knighted for his services to education in 1930.
The college expanded, taking in overseas
students, and became the University of London
Institute of Education in 1932, with Nunn as its
first Director.
Although Nunn's eminence was primarily as
an educator, he retained an interest in philos-
ophy and was a keen member of the
Aristotelian Society, to which he presented nine
papers and of which he became President
(1923-4). It was before the Aristotelian Society
that he first publicly advocated 'a variety of
what has recently been called the "New
Realism"' (Aims and Achievements, p. 142)
and where he defended it in several of his later
papers. 'The essence of the doctrine', he
claimed, 'is that a large part of the contents of
our consciousness from moment to moment
consist of elements which exhibit themselves as
having a certain unique "priority" to our con-
scious processes ... [which] constitute what I
have described as the Objective' (ibid.). He
acknowledged that his conception of an objec-
NUNN
tive world of 'primary facts', containing
physical and psychical existents as well as 'sub-
sistents' such as relations, was one he had
derived from MOORE and RUSSELL. In his 1909
paper Nunn claimed, as against STOUT in par-
ticular, that the secondary qualities of bodies
were really in them. He even went so far as to
claim that pain is 'outside my mind'. Nunn's
realism, as both Metz and Passmore pointed
out, turns out to be very like phenomenalism,
except that the basic elements of reality are
given a physical rather than a psychical char-
acter.
Nunn seems to have been the first British
philosopher to attach himself to American
'New Realism', drawn perhaps by the way in
which it incorporated scientific ideas. But he
was clearly indebted to the broader realism
that had been revived before and around the
turn of the century, in the work of Meinong,
Moore and Russell, amongst others. Russell
for his part took an interest in Nunn's work
and it was an influence on his neutral monism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'The Aims and Achievements of Scientific
Method', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 6 (1905-1906), pp. 141-82.
The Aims and Achievements of Scientific
Method (1907).
716
'Are Secondary Qualities Independent of
Perception?', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 10 (1909-10), pp.
191-218.
'Sense-Data and Physical Objects',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
16 (1915-16), pp. 156-78.
'Scientific Objects and Common-Sense
Things', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 24 (1923-4), pp. 1-18.
Other Relevant Works
Education, its Data and First Principles
(1920).
Further Reading
Metz, Rudolf, A Hundred Years of British
Philosophy, trans. J.W. Harvey, T.E.
Jessop and Henry Sturt (1938), pt II, chap.
4, esp. pp. 682-5.
Passmore, John, One Hundred Years of
Philosophy (1957), chap. 11.
Stuart Brown
 o
OAKELEY, Hilda Diana (1867-1950)
Hilda Diana Oakeley was born in Durham in
October 1867 and died in London on 7
October 1950. Receiving a first in literae
humaniores in 1898 while a student of
Somerville College, Oxford, she qualified for
both a baccalaureate and a master's degree,
but was not awarded them until 1920, when
Oxford University admitted women to full
membership. While at Oxford, she studied with
William Wallace and attended lectures of
Bernard BoSANQUET and Edward Caird as well.
In 1899 Oakeley became the first Warden of
Royal Victoria College, McGill University,
Canada, where she also served as lecturer in
philosophy. In 1900 McGill awarded her
honorary BA and MA degrees. She returned to
England in 1905 as a lecturer in philosophy and
tutor to women students at the University of
Manchester, and in 1907 became Warden of
King's College for Women, University of
London, serving again as lecturer in philoso-
phy. When King's turned coeducational in
1915, Oakeley accepted the position of Warden
of the Passmore Edwards Settlement in
London. She returned to King's College in 1921
as a university reader in philosophy and sub-
sequently became Acting Head of the
Department. Retiring in 1931, Oakeley served
as the President of the Aristotelian Society in
1940-41. Beyond the several books she wrote,
she generated some forty articles.
Oakeley's first book, History & Progress
(1923), is a collection of articles and addresses
717
written across twenty-two years. The variety of
topics addressed reflects her varied experience
and serves well her intent to show the interplay
between philosophical idealism and life. The
unifying theme of the collection is that a new
individualism is emergent, one that moves
beyond considering the individual simply vis-a-
vis the environment to considering the individ-
ual as a creative personality as well, with a
will, spirit and soul. In striking the chord of per-
sonalism, Oakeley contended that no one
category of life nor special sphere can be
examined in isolation from others if philosophy
is to understand the individual and if history is
to be understood. She next published Greek
Ethical Thought from Homer to the Stoics
(1925), a sketch of the development of Greek
ethical ideas via a generous sampling of texts,
which was reprinted several times across almost
fifty years. Oakeley's major philosophic con-
tributions, however, lay elsewhere, in the devel-
opment of her dual interest in personalism,
with its value-laden emphasis, and in history,
including current events.
In A Study in the Philosophy of Personality
(1928), an outgrowth of public lectures deliv-
ered at King's College in 1927, Oakeley sets
forth, compares and criticizes diverse concep-
tions of 'personality' with their attendant ambi-
guities, and advances her own view as a cor-
rective of these. For her, personality is a prin-
ciple endowing experience with individuality, a
subject characterized by creativity, a spiritual
reality that brings value to experience. In
History and the Self (1934), Oakeley builds
OAKELEY
upon her view of personality, examining how
the self makes history through interpreting and
evaluating events it has influenced in accord
with values it has created. She also considers
how the self can give history meaning by self-
transcendence through participation in activi-
ties of other selves. In so doing, she confronts
the problem of how human beings can do evil
while intending a good end. Broadening her
scope to include political philosophy, Oakeley
contrasts the evil of Hobbes's state with the
good of an organic state in The False State
(1937). In Should Nations Survive? (1942),
written in the midst of war, she questions how
great values of a national spirit can be pre-
served while ridding the nation, the historic
community, of the evils that lurk within it.
Oakeley's view is that a vital sense of national
history, together with the creative release of
personality appropriate to an ordered society,
may provide an answer. Unfortunately neither
the revival of interest in British idealism nor the
emergence of studies of women philosophers
has led to consideration of this philosophically
astute and original thinker.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
History & Progress, and Other Essays and
Addresses (London and New York, 1923).
Greek Ethical Thought from Homer to the
Stoics (Toronto and New York, 1925;
repr. with a 'Note on the Author' by
Ernest Barker, Boston, 1950).
A Study in the Philosophy of Personality
(1928).
History and the Self: A Study in the Roots of
History and the Relations of History and
Ethics (1934).
The False State (1937).
Should Nations Survive? (1942).
Other Relevant Works
My Adventures in Education (1939).
Further Reading
Anon., 'History and Progress', Times Literary
Supplement, no. 1100, 8 February 1923,
718
p. 108.
Onions, R.B., Review of Greek Ethical
Thought from Homer to the Stoics, The
Classical Review, vol. 40 (1926), pp.
122-3.
Stannard, H.M., 'Personality and History',
Times Literary Supplement, no. 1702,13
September 1934, p. 612.
Wai the, Mary Ellen (ed.), A History of
Women Philosophers, vol. 4 (Dordrecht,
1995), passim; partial bibliography, pp.
430-31.
West, Geoffrey, 'Masses and Man', Times
Literary Supplement, no. 2103, 23 May
1942, p. 254.
Wood, G.O., 'The Metaphysical Self, Times
Literary Supplement, no. 1397, 8
November 1928, p. 830.
Carol A. Keene
OAKESHOTT, Michael Joseph (1901-90)
Michael Oakeshott was born on 11 December
1901 in Chelsfield, Kent and died during the
night of 18 to 19 December 1990 at his home
in Acton, Dorset, a week after his eighty-ninth
birthday. Though not conventionally 'rich',
his parents were well enough off to employ a
cook, gardener and chauffeur, and to send
their three children (all boys, Michael being
the second) to a new, 'progressive', co-educa-
tional private school, St George's, Harpenden.
The Headmaster, whom Oakeshott greatly
admired, was an Anglican clergyman of 'mod-
ernist' tendency - a pious man who believed
in Christianity as a practice rather than a
creed. He would devote sermons to Hegel's
philosophy, and instruct his pupils in it on
walking tours.
In 1920 Oakeshott went up as a scholar to
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He
read history, taking the political thought option

in both parts of the Tripos, and graduated with
first class honours in 1923. Immediately on
graduation he took summer courses at the uni-
versities of Tubingen and Marburg in order to
pursue his interests in theology and German lit-
erature (it seems he heard Heidegger lecture at
Marburg). He did so again two years later,
before taking up a fellowship in history at
Caius. In between he had been senior English
master at King Edward VII Grammar School,
Lytham St Anne's, where he wrote his fellow-
ship dissertation. This work is lost, but
Oakeshott said it was a 'dry run' for his first
book, Experience and its Modes (1933).
Oakeshott began lecturing on political
thought early in his appointment, and was
(allegedly) the first person ever at Cambridge to
lecture on Marx. Experience and its Modes,
however, has nothing immediately to do with
politics. It drew extravagant but deserved
praise, both in print and in lectures, from R.G.
COLLINGWOOD at Oxford, but was dismissed as
outdated by the new generation of philoso-
phers influenced by logical positivism. The first
edition, of 1,000 copies, took over thirty years
to sell. Such are the vagaries of intellectual
fashion, however, that Experience and its
Modes has been reprinted three times since the
1960s.
Experience and its Modes is the basis of all
Oakeshott's subsequent thinking. It postulates
a Hegelian Absolute (viz. experience as a
whole), which is fully accessible only to philo-
sophical reflection. For Hegel, thought (or the
self) ascended from its primitive 'unity' with the
not-self through various incomplete 'moments'
in the life of the independent or 'alienated' self,
to its final reabsorption into, and identity with,
the Absolute. This pattern is repeated in Croce
and the early Collingwood. Both saw art,
practice and religion as being just such succes-
sive 'moments'. Following Spinoza and F.H.
BRADLEY, Oakeshott calls such moments (or
discourses) 'modes', but rejects any suggestion
of hierarchy among them. What makes them
equal is their incorrigible 'abstraction' as
compared with experience as a whole.
719
OAKESHOTT
For Oakeshott, though there are in principle
infinitely many, the primary modes are three,
viz historical, scientific and practical experi-
ence. Each has its own structure, norms and
presuppositions. History views the world under
the aspect of pastness; it is 'what the evidence'
- and 'the past' exists only in the evidence -
'obliges us to believe'. Science does so quanti-
tatively, under the aspect of general 'laws'.
Practice does so under the aspect of desire and
aversion. This (desire and aversion) includes
not just greed and fear, but morality and
religion too, which is to say, good and bad. (Art
too belongs to practice, a view which
Oakeshott later retracted as 'foolish'.) The
greatest intellectual sin is irrelevance (or, as
Oakeshott calls it after the scholastics, ignora-
tio elenchi), viz the confusing of modal bound-
aries, for example by interpreting history in
the light of morality or religion, or offering to
make politics 'scientific', or politicizing science,
as under totalitarian regimes. (The idea resem-
bles Gilbert KYLE'S 'category mistake'; Ryle
was one of the few professional philosophers
with whom Oakeshott maintained a personal
acquaintance.) Notionally, philosophy may be
identical with experience as a whole; but in
practice the most it can achieve is to save us
from such confusions. It can never permanently
deliver us from modal experience (and espe-
cially not from the practical mode, on which
our survival depends). Substantially for this
reason, 'experience as a whole' disappears from
Oakeshott's later thought. What remains are
the modes alone, as they spontaneously
multiply, intertwine and engage in an all-
encompassing, permanently inconclusive 'con-
versation'. It is not easy to see how such a 'con-
versation' can occur if Oakeshott's original
injunction against modal confusion is to stand.
Nevertheless, the conversation metaphor
informs all Oakeshott's mature thought, includ-
ing his ethics, aesthetics and educational ideas.
Oakeshott was unconcerned by the reception
of Experience and its Modes. It had excellent
reviews from Collingwood and T.M. KNOX;
and he had earlier received much support from
OAKESHOTT
his publisher's readers, the older idealists W.R.
SORLEY and H.H. JOACHIM. He knew who his
friends were, and seems never to have been
ambitious academically, any more than he was
socially. In old age he refused public honours,
on the grounds that 'public honours should go
to public people'. Though endlessly curious
(and knowledgeable) about the world, he was
the least worldly of men, and, for all his later,
substantially libertarian defence of capitalism,
the least materialistic. Incorrigibly bohemian
and romantic, he was wholly indifferent to con-
ventional comforts, requiring only love (thrice
married, he was notorious for his many, often
simultaneous, affairs), friends, books, conver-
sation, cigarettes, the odd bottle of good wine,
a motor car, the countryside, and, until his old
age, a river or sea to swim in. He was born, and
described himself as, an Edwardian, and enter-
tained many 'period' enthusiasms, among them
'free love', nature mysticism and nude bathing
(which in 1955 landed him in trouble with the
law). Among his early literary tastes were the
Powys brothers (whom he knew) and D.H.
Lawrence.
In the 1930s Oakeshott, with a colleague,
wrote a book on horse-racing (A Guide to the
Classics, or, How to Pick the Derby Winner),
acquainted himself extensively with Hobbes
(on whom, after his 1946 edition of Leviathan,
with its famous Introduction, he was later to
become a world expert), attacked the fashion-
able cult of political 'commitment' ('The Claims
of Polities', reprinted posthumously in Religion,
Politics and the Moral Life, 1993), and, at the
instigation of Sir Ernest BARKER - who had
hoped, but failed, to secure Oakeshott's suc-
cession to his own Chair of Political Science at
Cambridge - produced an anthology, with
commentary, called The Social and Political
Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (1939).
Of these, Oakeshott finds what he calls
Representative Democracy the least unattrac-
tive, despite its muddle and incoherence,
because its central principle (also his own) is
that 'the imposition of a universal plan of life
on a society is at once stupid and immoral'.
720
Such a universal plan is exactly what war
makes imperative. Though old enough for
exemption from military service, Oakeshott
enlisted in the Royal Artillery in 1940, but was
later recruited into 'B' Squadron of the GHQ
Liaison Regiment (alias 'Phantom', a quasi-
freelance battlefield intelligence force), of
which, in Holland, he eventually became
adjutant. By contrast with postwar socialists,
however, Oakeshott thought military organi-
zation not only wasteful enough in war, but
also the worst possible model for peacetime
society. Not only does war necessitate collec-
tivism (since the society has only one goal, to
survive, and all resources must be forcibly bent
in that direction), but the reverse is also true.
Like a nation at war, a collectivist state is ded-
icated to a single end (the realization of some
overall scheme); and when its goal proves
impossible of achievement without massive
coercion, such a state is driven to war in order
to make its ideology and methods seem legiti-
mate.
After the war Oakeshott returned to
Cambridge, and with a few colleagues started
the Cambridge Journal, a lively, wide-ranging
intellectual monthly, which ran until 1952.
Oakeshott soon became its star turn and
general editor. About half of his Rationalism in
Politics and Other Essays (1962) first appeared
in it, including the title essay (1947). He moved
in 1949 to Nuffield College, Oxford, and in
1951 succeeded to Harold Laski's Chair of
Political Science at the London School of
Economics (LSE). The appointment, which was
followed shortly by the fall of the postwar
Labour government, attracted press interest,
on account of Oakeshott's supposed conser-
vatism and the LSE's (equally exaggerated)
socialist reputation. His inaugural lecture,
'Political Education' (1952), emphasizing the
sheer unpredictability of politics, the conse-
quent uselessness (and vanity) of Utopian
planning, and tradition as merely the least unre-
liable of political guides, created considerable
scandal. Far from alone in his opinion, one
well-known LSE left-winger described it as a

direct assault on everything the school stood
for.
These themes, elaborated in Rationalism in
Politics and Other Essays, are the staple of
Oakeshott's 'middle-period' thought, which,
unlike that of other so-called 'liberal-conserv-
atives', is founded neither on rights (cf. Nozick)
nor on economic or scientific-epistemological
analogies (cf. HAYEK, POPPER). Its main thrust,
however, is epistemological, like that of von
Mises (whom Oakeshott nowhere mentions),
to the effect that 'rationalism' pretends, hubris-
tically, to a knowledge it can never possess.
Oakeshott attacks, not socialism specifically,
but the whole post-Enlightenment style of
thought ('rationalism') to which it belongs.
Comprehensive, centralized, planning (he
claims) is simply inappropriate, and also deeply
damaging, to everyday social, ethical, political
and economic life.
The rationalist believes in a single, usually
pseudo-scientific, kind of 'reason', which he
thinks applicable to any activity whatever.
Precisely because it is external to its objects,
however, it can never acquire adequate knowl-
edge of them. So the rationalist's plans are
bound to fail. Rationalism is ignoratio elenchi
writ large. The only knowledge of an activity
relevant to its actual pursuit is that which has
grown up with and out of it. Being handed on
with constant accretions and adjustments, such
knowledge is both literally traditional and fully
contemporary. It cannot, however, be written
down. It is available only in use, and survives
only by being exercised. So, by undermining the
practices and institutions which embody tradi-
tional knowledge, the planner must destroy
every activity (science included) which depends
on it. His much-vaunted 'efficiency' is a sham,
and rationalism accordingly irrational, the relic
(says Oakeshott) of a belief in magic That is to
say nothing of the threat which rationalist
politics pose to freedom, on account of the
rationalist's (Platonic) belief that his 'superior'
knowledge gives him the right to impose his
'plan' on others. (The 'plan' and its supposed
justification together compose his 'ideology'.)
721
OAKESHOTT
In some of the later essays in Rationalism in
Politics Oakeshott returned, less schematically
than before, to the modes, now renamed
'idioms', 'activities', 'practices' and the like.
He amplified his account of history (further
revised in On History and Other Essays,
1983), and gave a rigorously purist description
of a new, independent mode, 'poetry' (aes-
thetic experience, whether of art or nature).
His aesthetics emerged from the novel con-
ception (mentioned above) of the human world
as an endless 'conversation' between various
'voices'. The affinity between Oakeshott's
'voices' and WITTGENSTEIN'S 'language-games',
as between the two thinkers generally, has
been remarked on by Richard Rorty and
others, but, despite living side by side in
Cambridge for the best part of twenty years,
Oakeshott and Wittgenstein never met.
In 1958 Oakeshott gave a course of lectures
at Harvard University, posthumously published
as Morality and Politics in Modern Europe
(1993). It fills the gap between 'The Masses in
Representative Democracy' (originally written
in German in 1957, and, according to
Oakeshott, omitted from Rationalism in
Politics by sheer inadvertence) and part 3 of On
Human Conduct (1975). Like those, the
Harvard lectures set out Oakeshott's
Burckhardt-inspired account of individuality,
its historical emergence, its associated morality,
and the counter-morality of the reaction, col-
lectivism. Accompanying this narrative are
vignettes of various 'individualist' and 'collec-
tivist' thinkers, which, by comparison with
Oakeshott's early Hegelianism, and even his
essays of the 1940s, show an increasingly lib-
ertarian and individualist turn. Locke and
Bentham, for example, are no longer (as for
Oakeshott they once were) a harmless ideo-
logue and a naive rationalist respectively, but
doughty anti-collectivists.
From the outset Oakeshott had given under-
graduate lectures at the LSE on the history of
political thought. These memorably theatrical
performances drew packed audiences from
every quarter of the school, and are now being
OAKESHOTT
prepared for their first publication. In the
1960s, until a decade after his official retire-
ment in 1969, Oakeshott largely devoted
himself to the new one-year graduate MSc
course at the LSE bearing the same title.
Various domestic and visiting luminaries would
give papers at the weekly two-hour seminar, at
which Oakeshott presided, often himself con-
tributing a paper. It was out of these discussions
that Oakeshott's last two new books emerged,
On Human Conduct and On History and Other
Essays. When the 'student revolution' of 1968
hit the LSE (its first UK port of call), Oakeshott
was totally unsympathetic, regarding the ring-
leaders, with some justice, as foreign, profes-
sional troublemakers, and the school's pliant
administration virtually as academic traitors
(which did not prevent him, however, from
offering them robust tactical advice).
On Human Conduct consists of three very
long interconnected essays. It is complex, diffi-
cult, and written (at least the first two-thirds of
it) in a wholly novel technical idiom, which is
nevertheless well suited to the novelty of the
ideas. It begins by dividing the world into two
wholly distinct, non-conversable 'orders'
(mega-modes, as it were), mechanical
'processes' and intelligent 'procedures'. These
correspond more or less to Kant's opposed
realms of 'nature' and 'freedom'. 'Conduct'
belongs wholly to the latter category, and all
conduct is a form of utterance or 'performance'.
Every performance belongs to a 'practice'
(mode, discourse, language-game, or whatever)
and is to be understood only by reference to
that practice's local rules and conventions. All
performances are 'self-disclosures', the recip-
rocal advertisement and satisfaction of wants.
As such they are externally subject to legal and
moral rules (what Nozick contemporaneously
called 'side-constraints'), but are otherwise eth-
ically insignificant. But some are also 'self-
enactments', viz. moral performances or
exploits. Oakeshott does not hesitate to treat
virtue so understood (i.e. as compelled by con-
siderations of honour, grace, generosity, appro-
priateness, etc.) as a kind of poetic utterance, an
722
escape, like art and religion, from 'the deadli-
ness of doing'.
Oakeshott postulates two models of associ-
ation in On Human Conduct. Enterprise asso-
ciation exists for the pursuit of an agreed
common purpose. It is voluntary, subject like
self-disclosure to external ethical constraints,
and (where necessary) managerial, the man-
agement being deputed to act according to the
association's general policy. Civil association,
by contrast, is compulsory, and exclusively
political. It is association simply in terms of
those rules - law - which apply (when so spec
ified) to the pursuit of any purpose. The bond
between the associates (citizens) will be civility,
the practice of respecting others simply as
fellow subjects of the same laws. The law
should not enforce morality as such, since
people's notions of morality differ and the
whole object is to secure a sufficient, and nec-
essary minimum, of consent on their part to
laws which in the nature of things they have
little option but to obey. For this reason to see
Oakeshott as a prophet of 'multiculturalism', as
some have done, is not wholly implausible. But
other commentators would object that, as con-
ceived by Oakeshott, the law's consequent
moral weightlessness strips civil association of
the only authority which might make passion-
ate human beings acknowledge it, and that civil
association actually presupposes a cultural
homogeneity which, by themselves, neither it
nor law can secure. (The same problems are
found in J.S. Mill, to whom Oakeshott makes
no direct reference.)
Finally, as already noted, On Human
Conduct contains Oakeshott's definitive,
Burckhardtian account of modernity and the
rise of the 'individual'. Individuality, marked by
a love of making one's own choices, is the
natural complement of civil association, since,
when the state is turned into a would-be enter-
prise association (the archetypical rationalist,
and indeed totalitarian, project), the common
goal can no longer be chosen, but must be
imposed. Unfortunately there are those, 'anti-
individuals' or 'voluntary slaves' - the 'masses',

who, says Oakeshott, are mostly the creation of
their 'leaders' - to whom choice, like freedom,
is a burden, and who will happily sacrifice both
their own and others' autonomy for the largely
bogus security which socialists and other col-
lectivists offer them. Oakeshott does not dis-
tinguish - though to do so might have been
both prudent and helpful - between the all-
embracing material security, which Oscar
Wilde (in The Soul of Man Under Socialism')
regarded as the precondition of individuality,
and the more limited security of life and
property guaranteed by Hobbesian sovereignty
and ideally realized in the rule of law.
Civil association is an ideal type, seldom if
ever found unmixed with its rival, though
Oakeshott used to joke that twelfth-century
Sicily under Norman rule was a fair approxi-
mation to it. A state governed by it will (sup-
posedly) be united by a general sentiment of
'civility', but will lack both the stifling intimacy
of traditional societies (for which Oakeshott,
traditionalist though he is, expresses no nos-
talgia whatever), and the 'solidarity' and 'fra-
ternity' prized by socialists. The freedom which
Oakeshott cherishes can exist only in society,
and only under law. It is not a right, still less a
natural right, but a collective historical accom-
plishment which the citizen comes to value
both for its own sake and as the precondition
of 'self-enactment'.
Stylistically, and by contrast with the
elegance and vivacity of Oakeshott's earlier
work, On Human Conduct and On History
and Other Essays are exceedingly dense, even
rebarbative. It is as though Oakeshott had
resolved finally to express his fundamental con-
victions in as unambiguous a sequence of for-
mulations as possible, and to pay the inevitable
price for so doing. Even so, 'On History', like
its sequel in the same volume, The Rule of
Law', amply repays the considerable effort of
reading it. Its main object is to portray history
in terms of the causal, intelligible, but non-
mechanical 'fit' between temporally contigu-
ous events. In history there are no remote or
hidden causes, no overarching 'laws' and no
723
OAKESHOTT
simple explanations. The only plausible expla-
nation is a full narrative rehearsal of its com-
ponent events and the tracing of their interre-
lations. From this it must follow that some so-
called 'historical' periods are so under-docu-
mented as not to qualify as historical at all. It
also means that since every historical situation
is unique, history can offer no general guide,
beyond mere common sense, to the fruitful
conduct of policy. Like everything truly
valuable - love, art, friendship, liberal educa-
tion, conversation - history is strictly useless,
which is only to say, an end in itself, and as
such uniquely human. While necessarily depen-
dent on material subsistence and production
(which are thus valuable as means), human
existence nevertheless achieves its real value in,
and from, a realm far beyond and far different
from them. Here and elsewhere Oakeshott
exhibits his ultimate debt to Aristotle. He
himself said that 'St Augustine is my great man',
apparently meaning that, as in Christ's Sermon
on the Mount, 'redemption', to a properly
ordered soul, is available here and now, and is
not some posthumous reward for calculated
'good behaviour'. Other heroes (and Oakeshott
had many) were Rabelais, who adopted
Augustine's 'do as thou wilt' as the motto of the
virtuous Abbey of Thelema, and Cervantes,
for his picaresque philosophy of taking things
as they come. Oakeshott's favourite author of
all was probably the sceptical Montaigne.
Superficially Oakeshott belongs with that
group of postwar anti-totalitarians which
includes his close contemporaries and LSE col-
leagues Popper and Hayek. Unlike theirs,
however, his political thought emerges both
from his account of human experience as a
whole and from a detailed historical aware-
ness (though it does have some resemblance to
the later, less 'economistic' Hayek). For that
reason it seems less ideologically motivated,
less circumscribed by its period (the Cold War),
and perhaps more likely to achieve permanent
classic status. It is also less abstract than the
1970s liberalisms, 'left' and 'right' respectively,
of Rawls and Nozick. Since Oakeshott's death
OAKESHOTT
considerable scholarly efforts have been, and
increasingly are being, devoted to expounding
and interpreting his thought, to reprinting uncol-
lected publications and to retrieving and pub-
lishing hitherto unseen material from the vast
Oakeshott archive at the LSE. One publisher
has produced a volume of Oakeshott's scattered
writings on history, and embarked upon a series
of monographs on his thought. The Michael
Oakeshott Association posts a constantly
updated bibliography on its invaluable website
(see below), and since 2001 has staged a biennial
conference. There is also a forthcoming biogra-
phy based in part on the notebooks that
Oakeshott kept regularly for seven decades, and
in which (he told his future biographer) 'you
will find almost nothing about polities'. It will be
curious to see whether it bears out Oakeshott's
'middle-period', quasi-pragmatist contention,
which appears to compromise the autonomy of
his thought, that thought is invariably the
shadow and precipitate of practice.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Experience and its Modes (Cambridge, 1933;
repr. 1966,1978,1985).
Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays
(1962; new and exp. edn, ed. T. Fuller,
Indianapolis, 1991; includes 'The Masses
in Representative Democracy').
Hobbes on Civil Association (Berkeley,
1975).
On Human Conduct (Oxford, 1975).
On History and Other Essays (Oxford,
1983).
The Voice of Liberal Learning (New Haven,
1989).
Morality and Politics in Modern Europe, ed.
S.R. Letwin (New Haven, 1993).
Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, ed. T.
Fuller (New Haven, 1993).
The Politics of Faith and the Politics of
Scepticism, ed. T. Fuller (New Haven,
1996).
What is History? and Other Essays, ed. L.
O'Sullivan (Thorverton, 2004).
724
Other Relevant Works
(with G.T. Griffith), A Guide to the Classics,
or, How to Pick the Derby Winner (1936;
rev. edn, A New Guide to the Derby,
1947).
'The Concept of a Philosophical
Jurisprudence', Politica, vol. 3 (1938), pp.
203-22, 345-60.
The Social and Political Doctrines of
Contemporary Europe (Cambridge, 1939;
repr. 1941).
'Contemporary British Polities', Cambridge
Journal, vol. 1 (1947-8), pp. 474-90.
'Mr Carr's First Volume', Cambridge
Journal, vol. 4 (1950-51), pp. 344-52.
'The Vocabulary of a Modern European
State', Political Studies, vol. 23 (1975), pp.
319-41,409-14.
Auspitz, J.L. et al., 'A Symposium on Michael
Oakeshott', Political Theory, vol. 4, no. 3
(August 1976), pp. 259-367. Includes
Oakeshott's reply.
further Reading
A full, ongoing Oakeshott bibliography can
be found at http://www.michael-oakeshott-
association.org/bibliography.htm, accessed
January 2005.
Franco, Paul, Michael Oakeshott: An
Introduction (New Haven, 2004).
Grant, Robert, Oakeshott (1990).
Greenleaf, W.H., Oakeshott's Philosophical
Politics (1966).
Liddington, John, 'Oakeshott: Freedom in a
Modern European State', in John Gray and
Zbigniew Pelczynski (eds), Conceptions of
Liberty in Political Philosophy (1984), pp.
289-320.
Nardin, Terry, The Philosophy of Michael
Oakeshott (University Park, 2001).
Norman, Jesse (ed.), The Achievement of
Michael Oakeshott (1993).
Price, Russell et al., Oakeshott memorial
number, Cambridge Review, no. 112
(October 1991).
Robert Grant

O'CONNOR, Daniel John (1914-)
Daniel John O'Connor was born in Seattle,
Washington on 2 April 1914. He studied at
Birkbeck College, University of London. He
entered the Civil Service in 1933. He was
Commonwealth Fund Fellow in Philosophy at
the University of Chicago from 1946 to 1947.
O'Connor served as Professor of Philosophy in
South Africa, first at the University of Natal
from 1949 to 1951, and then at the University
of Witwatersrand from 1951 to 1952. He
taught as lecturer in philosophy at the
University College of North Staffordshire from
1952 to 1954. He was Professor of Philosophy
at the University of Liverpool from 1954 to
1957, and at the University of Exeter from
1957 to 1979. He was visiting professor at the
University of Pennsylvania from 1961 to 1962.
O'Connor has been emeritus professor at
Exeter since 1979.
O'Connor is an author of distinction with
strong interests in the history of philosophy,
logic, the philosophy of education, epistemol-
ogy, the philosophy of language and mind,
and, of late, Eastern philosophy. Besides con-
tributing numerous articles to professional
journals and works of reference (including an
entry on the influential Islamic philosopher
Avicenna in the Companion Encyclopedia of
Asian Philosophy, which appeared in 1997), he
has published various short but solid mono-
graphs that presuppose no philosophical
training and are aimed at the general reader or
the beginning student of philosophy. Although
simple and direct, his introductory works avoid
caricature, manage on the whole to do justice
to the complexities of arguments examined,
and offer some original insights that have
attracted the attention of the professional
reader.
One of O'Connor's best-known works is his
first monograph entitled John Locke, published
in 1952, which offers a clear and readable
account of Locke's system of philosophy.
Treating Locke's Essay Concerning Human
Understanding chiefly as the groundwork of
725
O'CONNOR
the British empirical tradition, O'Connor
focuses principally on Locke's epistemology,
at the expense of his religious and political
ideas, which get minor treatment. The aim of
the work is not to give an account of what
Locke 'really meant' nor to offer a purely his-
toriographical (non-philosophical) account of
the ideas that shaped his thought and its intel-
lectual milieu, but to offer 'a simple account of
what Locke actually said' (John Locke, p. 13).
Yet, the end result reads more as a discussion
of empiricist concerns of the 1950s than as an
exposition of what Locke actually wrote in the
seventeenth century. Although Locke's thought
did become the foundation of the British empir-
ical tradition, empiricism is not the sole force
moulding Locke's thought. Rationalist contents
and methods are also present in Locke's epis-
temology. By placing so much emphasis on
Locke's concern with experience, O'Connor
relegates the Lockean preoccupation with
reason to a subordinate or non-existent role,
with Locke seeming more like a Berkeley or a
Hume. 'Locke's greatest achievement', writes
O'Connor, was 'to establish the fundamental
importance of the empirical element in knowl-
edge' (ibid., p. 219). An alternative view,
however, has reason and experience, rational-
ism and empiricism intermixed in the Essay,
and attaches greater significance to Locke's
attempt to explore the interconnections
between reason and experience.
O'Connor co-authored with Anthony Henry
BASSON (who changed his name in 1962 to
Anthony Pike Cavendish) a short book entitled
Introduction to Symbolic Logic, which was
published in 1953. This work, which went
through several editions and reprints, intro-
duces the prepositional and predicate calculi, as
well as the traditional doctrine of the syllogism
and its relation to the Boolean algebra of
classes.
In his monograph Introduction to the
Philosophy of Education, published in 1957,
O'Connor provides the reader with 'a simple
introduction to philosophical thinking' and a
basic investigation of 'the most obvious points
O'CONNOR
of contact between philosophy and educational
theory' (p. v). By 'philosophical thinking', he
means the 'philosophical analysis' fashionable
at the time. The most obvious points of
contact' are thus those at which analytical phi-
losophy engages educational theory. These
points of contact 'comprise what might
properly be called "the philosophy of educa-
tion"' (ibid., p. 138). His work offers an ana-
lytical philosophy of education concerned prin-
cipally with two questions: 'Is theory of edu-
cation theory properly speaking?' and 'What is
the proper bearing of religion on educational
theory?'. His answer to the latter question is
'none' because, he argues, statements about
religion contain no value concepts and this
rules them out as premises for arguments with
value-statement conclusions (ibid., pp. 127-8).
It follows that they cannot support statements
of value in educational theory. His response to
the first question is that the phrase 'theory of
education' amounts to nothing more than 'a
courtesy title' (ibid., p. 110). O'Connor's defi-
nition of the term 'theory' - a hypothesis which
has been empirically confirmed or a set of log-
ically interrelated hypotheses which have been
empirically confirmed (ibid., p. 76) - is para-
digmatically illustrated by physics and astron-
omy. These questions are explored further and
more incisively by O'Connor along with others
in his work, co-edited with Glenn Langford,
entitled New Essays in the Philosophy of
Education, published in 1973. This volume of
essays, mainly from the University of Exeter,
tackles the nature of both education and edu-
cational theory, and the philosophical issues
related to the main areas of education (i.e.
moral, religious, aesthetic, mathematical, and
scientific education).
O'Connor edited a hefty monograph entitled
A Critical History of Western Philosophy,
which appeared in 1964. It includes twenty-
nine articles on the so-called major figures and
traditions in Western philosophy, which it
traces from its ancient Greek beginnings to its
state in the early 1960s. The list of contributors
to that work includes some of the leading
726
Anglophone philosophers of the twentieth
century, many of whom are the subjects of
entries in the present volume. O'Connor wrote
the articles on Aristotle, Locke and RUSSELL.
The tendency of the papers in the collection is
to give thorough consideration to arguments
and positions, and analyse them in accordance
with the philosophical standards and concerns
of the time. As a consequence, the philosophy
of individual thinkers and schools is detached
from its intellectual context, with historical
concerns explicitly brushed aside.
O'Connor wrote a brief monograph entitled
Aquinas and Natural Law, which was pub-
lished in 1968 in the New Studies on Ethics
series edited by William Donald HUDSON. The
book expounds and examines the ethical
thought of Aquinas in general and his doctrine
of natural law in particular, from the stand-
point of analytic philosophy.
O'Connor's book Free Will, published in
1971, is a short introduction to the perennial
philosophical question of whether human
actions are freely chosen or determined. After
expounding the case in favour of both causal
and logical determinism, O'Connor considers
the folk argument for free will, the determinis-
tic response, and some objections to the latter.
The next section is concerned with compati-
bilism or soft-determinism. In it O'Connor
attempts to reconcile the freedom of the will
and determinism. This is followed by an exam-
ination of the principle of uncertainty and a
closer look at scientific determinism. Two ques-
tions are then raised: first: 'What is a free
choice?' and second 'Are actions events?'. The
book concludes with a re-examination of
fatalism.
O'Connor's work The Correspondence
Theory of Truth, published in 1975, begins
with a useful survey of 'the difficulties in the
way of making a clear and consistent philo-
sophical theory out of a commonsense convic-
tion - that true beliefs and statements corre-
spond to facts' (p. 128). It then touches on the
relevance to the correspondence theory of truth
of Tarski's semantic definition of truth and of

the well-known debate on truth between John
Langshaw AUSTIN and Peter Frederick
STRAWSON. The final chapter of this arguably
uneven book sums up what O'Connor consid-
ers to be worth upholding from the corre-
spondence theory of truth. He distinguishes
between (a) status rerum ('the raw unexperi-
enced welter of objects and events'); (b) things
and their properties, situations, events; and (c)
empirical statements. According to O'Connor,
(b) is the perceived or sensed version of (a),
truth connects (a) and (c), and 'some of th
structural features of status rerum can be trans-
mitted to us in conceptual and linguistic form'
(ibid., p. 131). For O'Connor, it is this latter
hypothesis that is of value in the correspon-
dence theory of truth.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
John Locke (1952; repr. New York, 1967).
(with Anthony Henry Basson), Introduction
to Symbolic Logic (1953; 2nd edn, 1957
3rd edn, 1959).
Introduction to the Philosophy of Education
(1957).
(Ed.), A Critical History of Western
Philosophy (New York, 1964).
Aquinas and Natural Law (1968).
Free Will (1971).
(Ed. with Glenn Langford), New Essays in
the Philosophy of Education (1973).
The Correspondence Theory of Truth (1975).
(with Brian Carr), Introduction to the Theory
of Knowledge (Brighton, 1982).
Other Relevant Works
'Some Consequences of Professor Ayer's
Verification Principle', Analysis, vol. 10
(1950), pp. 67-72.
'Avicenna', in Brian Carr and Indira
Mahalingam (eds), Companion
Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy (New
York, 1997), pp. 881-901.
Further Reading
Who's Who: 2002 (New York, 2002), p.
1600.
727
OGDEN
Mahalingam, Indira and Brian Carr (eds),
Logical Foundations: Essays in Honor of
DJ. O'Connor (New York, 1991).
Enrique Chavez-Arvizo
OGDEN, Charles Kay (1889-1957)
C.K. Ogden was born in Fleetwood on 1 June
1889 and died in London on 21 March 1957.
He was educated at a preparatory school in
Buxton, then at Rossall. In 1908 he won a
classics scholarship to Magdelene College,
Cambridge, where he achieved a first class in
Pt I of the Classical Tripos in 1910. His chosen
field of specialization was the influence of the
Greek language on Greek thought. As an
undergraduate at Cambridge, he launched the
Heretics Society with F.P. RAMSEY, P. Sargant
Florence and H.F. Jolowicz. It became a pub
lishing outlet for progressive thought and pre-
figured the foundation of the Cambridge
Magazine in 1912, which published contem-
porary work in philosophy, aesthetics, psy-
chology and religion, as well as articles on
foreign policy and related issues during the war
years. In 1912 and 1913 Ogden travelled to
France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Switzerland
and India, visiting schools and universities and
carrying out research on methods of language
teaching. In 1922 he took over the editorship
of the international psychological journal
Psyche, a journal of general and linguistic psy-
chology that served as a vehicle for publishing
research in international language problems
and continued the work of the postwar
Cambridge Magazine. In the same year he
began editorial work on two series, The History
of Civilization and The International Library of
Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method.
The latter produced a hundred volumes in its
first decade, many of them stimulated and ini-
tiated by Ogden. From 1925 to 1926 he was
OGDEN
the science advisor for The Forum in New
York. In 1927 he organized the Orthological
Institute, which eventually comprised repre-
sentatives in thirty countries. From the late
1920s onwards Ogden developed the Basic
English project and advised the British govern-
ment on matters of communication related to
it. In October 1943 he gave evidence of the
usefulness of Basic English as an auxiliary inter-
national and administrative language before a
Committee of Ministers set up by Winston
Churchill. In June 1946 he was requested to
assign a General Basic Copyright to the Crown,
and in April 1947 he established the Basic
English Foundation with the help of a grant
from the Ministry of Education. C.K. Ogden
died of cancer in March 1957.
A polymath, Ogden was one of the most
versatile figures in English intellectual life in
the early twentieth century, with a range of
interests in tune with the development of the
human sciences (philosophy of language, soci-
ology and psychology) at the time. His main
philosophical contributions were in philoso-
phy of language, aesthetics and psychology,
but he also distinguished himself as a linguist,
translator, art critic, editor, antiquarian book-
seller and antique dealer. In 1922 he published
the first of two books written in collaboration
with his Cambridge friend LA. RICHARDS, The
Foundations of Aesthetics (also co-authored
by the painter and art historian James Wood).
Though it is a short book, it is both original in
its approach and provocative in style. It was
partly motivated by the authors' dissatisfac-
tion with existing theories of art and beauty,
notably abstract formalism, expressionism and
aesthetic idealism, formulated in the late nine-
teenth century by Roger FRY, Clive BELL and
Benedetto Croce. More particularly, the
approach stemmed from the observation that
thought about the nature of art and beauty
had resulted in many different aesthetic
theories, and that aesthetic investigations
should benefit greatly from the application of
a particular kind of conceptual analysis that
owed much to G.E. MOORE'S technique of
728
multiple definition. The assumption was that
such clarificatory analyses would help in getting
clear about the proper scope of aesthetics.
Despite an apparent pluralism which main-
tained that 'if verbal conflicts are avoided, there
will be seen to be many possible theories of
Beauty, not one only, the understanding of
which may help in the appreciation of Art'
(Foundations of Aesthetics, p. 6), the authors
singled out, among the sixteen theories of
Beauty they discussed, 'the theory of Beauty par
excellence', synaesthesis. The term denoted the
state of equilibrium and harmony brought
about by the satisfaction of the greatest number
of impulses and thus laid the ground for their
psychological theory of value. The latter defined
positive impulses as 'appentencies' and main-
tained that anything contributing to the satis-
faction of such impulses is good or valuable.
Thus 'equilibrium brings into play all our facul-
ties ... Through no other experience can the full
richness and complexity of our environment be
realized' (ibid., p. 91). In this way, the balance of
impulses has a distinctive ethical dimension,
since 'the ultimate value of equilibrium is that it
is better to be fully rather than partially alive'
(ibid.). This also accounts for the authors' con-
viction that aesthetic experience is not radically
isolated from ordinary or non-aesthetic experi-
ence and that consequently the kind of harmony
brought about by the contemplation of and
engagement with an art work is no different in
kind from that derived from non-aesthetic expe-
riences. It follows that 'the reason why equilib-
rium is a justification for the preference of one
experience before another is the fact that it brings
into play all our faculties' (ibid.), not that it
belongs to any particular (i.e. aesthetic or other)
domain. In the realm of aesthetics and art criti-
cism, beauty should therefore not be defined in
abstract or theoretical terms, nor indeed as the
property or feature of an art work. Rather, the
beauty and value of a work is to be established
and studied in terms of its effect upon the
receptor. The book subsequently became a
landmark study in the development of twentieth-
century British aesthetics.

Ogden's second book written in collabora-
tion with LA. Richards, The Meaning of
Meaning, was published in 1923. In the course
of a discussion with Richards in 1918, the two
men outlined the substance of the book, and
Ogden quickly realized how his earlier work on
linguistic theory and practice might be corre-
lated to his awareness (greatly increased by his
wartime experience) of the power of 'Word-
Magic', i.e. 'the superstition that words are in
some way parts of things or always imply
things corresponding to them' (The Meaning of
Meaning, p. 14). The substance of the work
appeared as work in progress in serialized form
in the Cambridge Magazine between 1921 and
1923. In part a critical response to the rising
Cambridge neo-realist school (G.E. Moore and
Bertrand RUSSELL) and to the survival of
'abstractionism', 'vague philosophical specu-
lations' and mysticism, which in their view still
distorted investigations into language and
meaning, the book studied the power of words
in hampering or obscuring thought. Ogden and
Richards believed that the concept of meaning
needed considerable revision and a causal
account of the concept, derived from the rising
new positivist and scientific paradigm, could
help in putting an end to such metaphysical
confusion. To this end symbolism, the disci-
pline designed to tackle these issues, was
defined as 'the study of the part played in
human affairs by language and symbols of all
kinds, and especially their influence on thought.
It singles out for special inquiry the ways in
which symbols help us and hinder us in reflect-
ing on things' (The Meaning of Meaning, p. 3).
The book also included a reformulation of the
rules of classical logic contained in six 'canons
of symbolism'. It refined the theory of definition
with the concept of definition routes, according
to which a sought referent stands to a known
referent on a restricted set of relations.
The semantic model presented in The
Meaning of Meaning was the result of a variety
of influences ranging from pragmatism (the
semiotics of C.S. Peirce and the philosophical
psychology of William James) to behaviourist
729
OGDEN
psychology (B.F. Skinner, J.B. Watson, James
WARD, G.F. STOUT and C.S. SHERRINGTON),
linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure's structural-
ist account of language and meaning) and early
analytic philosophy. More generally, it contin-
ued the British empirical tradition inaugurated
and developed by Bacon, Locke, Hume,
Hobbes and Bentham.
Ogden and Richards outlined a contextual-
ist theory of meaning founded on contextual-
ist behaviourism. The latter involved a
stimulus-response psychology designed to
analyse the 'sign-situation' that allows for the
production of meaning. A 'sign-situation', or
context of utterance, provides the psychologi-
cal foundation for the relation between
meaning and object. The semantic context
theorem maintained that words carry out func-
tions in context and that no word or utterance
has a meaning independently of its context.
Their corrective semantic theory was elabo-
rated on the basis of a triadic model of meaning
aiming to represent the relationship between
symbol (i.e. sign), reference (or thought) at the
apex of the triangle, and referent. The deter-
minate relation between thought and referent
ensures that the speaker can convey a commu-
nicable meaning. The recipient of the object of
communication understands that meaning
through the determinate relation between
symbol and thought. The base of the triangle
relates symbol to referent but the link is
indirect, and the arbitrariness of that relation is
indicated by a dotted line.
The practical approach to theoretical confu-
sion, and the desire to improve communication
and understanding, was partly founded on a
distinction between five linguistic functions:
the referential function, the emotive function,
the expression of a sense of a relation to an
audience, the attitude of the speaker to the
object of discussion or to the referent ('tone'),
and the general intention of the utterance or
'promotion of the effects intended'. Their prin-
cipal object, however, was a more fundamen-
tal distinction between two linguistic functions:
'besides the referential use which for all reflec-
OGDEN
tive, intellectual use of language should be para-
mount, words have other functions which may
be grouped together as emotive' (ibid., p. 10). The
referential (symbolic, cognitive) function is illus-
trated by the strictest scientific and expository
prose, and is designed to express valid, coherent
propositions, while the emotive function serves to
convey or stimulate feeling and attitude, and thus
to bring about adjustments to the emotional state
of a reader or listener. One of the most intense
manifestations of the emotive function is to be
found in poetry. The cognitive/emotive
dichotomy, and the various typologies of lin-
guistic functions described in the book, had a
significant impact on a range of disciplines within
the human sciences.
At the time of its publication, many philoso-
phers and linguists were struck by the provoca-
tive style and boldly original approach of the
study, and it was widely reviewed and dis-
cussed, notably by Bertrand Russell and
Edward Sapir. It anticipated much subsequent
work in philosophical semantics, pragmatics
and linguistic theory. More generally, it pre-
figured the rise of logical positivism in its
various guises (including work in epistemol-
ogy such as AJ. AVER'S Language, Truth, and
Logic and in ethics, most notably C.L.
Stevenson's Ethics and Language}.
Ogden also published Opposition: A
Linguistic and Psychological Analysis in 1932,
a study of various kinds of semantic 'opposi-
tions' informed, like its predecessor The
Meaning of'Meaning, by an empirical concep-
tion of meaning and reference. The book
defined various kinds of 'semantic oppositions'
and aimed to ensure that logic be 'more critical
of its symbolic foundations'. Once again the
book was driven by a desire to discard 'decep-
tive symbols' and to improve linguistic usage in
the interest of clarity of thought and commu-
nication. Some oppositions are for the most
part psychological, in contrast to others that
possess a rigid logic of mutual exclusion.
Maintaining that 'the only true opposites are
those which exhaust a field by negation',
Ogden explored the ways in which word pairs
730
rarely meet that criterion and thus fail to satisfy
adequately the logical condition. The ways in
which such words are grasped and appre-
hended is shown to be frequently a function of
socio-historical circumstance or subjective psy-
chological factors. Though the book is little
read today, it contains many perceptive insights
into semantics, logic and modality.
Odgen also made significant contributions to
philosophy through translations and editing.
He translated fifteen books in a wide variety of
areas, including philosophy but also politics
and psychology. Most significantly, with the
help of P.P. Ramsey, he translated Ludwig
WITTGENSTEIN'S Logisch-Philosophische
Abhandlung, published in English under the
title Tractatus logico-philosophicus, as recom-
mended by G.E. Moore, in 1922. Wittgenstein
largely approved of Ogden's work and it sub-
sequently became one of the standard English
versions of the original text.
Another interest of Ogden's was the work of
the nineteenth-century utilitarian philosopher
Jeremy Bentham, an important influence on
the earlier psychological theory of value pre-
sented in Foundations of Aesthetics and The
Meaning of Meaning. As well as a number of
articles on Bentham's views on translation,
metaphor, dead languages and symbolic asso-
ciation, he published significant work on
Bentham's theory of linguistic fictions, and
more generally defended Bentham's much
neglected contributions to linguistic theory. He
also published editions of Bentham's Theory of
Legislation (1931) and Theory of Fictions
(1932), and delivered the Bentham Centenary
Lecture at University College London in 1932,
published under the title Jeremy Bentham,
1832-2032 in 1932.
Ogden was also the originator of the Basic
English movement, initially developed in coop-
eration with LA. Richards. Basic English is a
considerably revised version of standard
English composed of 850 keywords and rules
of grammar. It was designed to be an 'interna-
tional auxiliary language',

a system in which everything may be said for
the purposes of everyday existence. Its dis-
tinctive features are the selection of words so
that they cover the field, the restriction of the
vocabulary and the elimination of verbs
except for the sixteen verb forms which deal
with the fundamental operations ('put',
'take', 'get', etc.) and their replacement by the
names of operations and directions ('go in',
'put in', etc.).
(Basic English, p. 4)
The idea was that the English auxiliary verbs
'be', 'have' and 'do', may be combined with a
restricted number of verbs, for instance 'make',
'give', 'get', 'keep', 'let', 'put', and a small
number of prepositions, to express all the
meanings and semantic nuances of the bulk of
English verbs. He completed the vocabulary of
Basic English in 1928 and subsequently pub-
lished many books on the subject. Although
Ogden's books on Basic English are only rarely
referred to today, the substance of his work had
a decisive impact on the development of
modern methods of language teaching and
instruction.
However wide or disparate Ogden's interests
seem today, his practical concerns with
language learning and pedagogy are best under-
stood in the light of his broader philosophical
and theoretical projects and the nature of his
progressive political commitments. His work,
though perhaps not ostensibly a coherent
system, can thus be seen in restrospect to derive
from an intense awareness of the interconnect-
edness of theory and practice.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(with LA. Richards and James Wood), The
Foundations of Aesthetics (1922).
(with LA. Richards), The Meaning of
Meaning: A Study of the Influence of
Language upon Thought and of the
Science of Symbolism (1923).
The Meaning of Psychology (1926).
Word Magic (1927).
The ABC of Psychology (1929).
731
OMAN
Basic English (1930).
Debabelization (1931).
The Basic Words (1932).
Jeremy Bentham 1832-2032 (1932). In Basic
English.
Opposition: A Linguistic and Psychological
Analysis (1932).
The System of Basic English (New York,
1934).
Further Reading
Gordon, W.T., C.K. Ogden: A Bio-
Bibliographical Study (New Jersey, 1990).
Black, Max, Language and Philosophy:
Studies in Method (Ithaca, 1949).
Hotopf, W.H.N., Language, Thought, and
Comprehension: A Case Study of the
Writings of LA. Richards (Bloomington,
Indiana, 1965).
Sargant Florence, P. and J.R.L. Anderson
(eds), C.K. Ogden, A Collective Memoir
(1977).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus logico-philo-
sophicus (1922). German text with an
English text en regard by C.K. Ogden,
Introduction by Bertrand Russell.
, Letters to C.K. Ogden, with
Comments on the English Translation of
the Tractatus logico-philosophicus, ed.
with an Introduction by G.H. von Wright
and an Appendix of letters by Frank
Plumpton Ramsey (Oxford, 1973).
Robert Reay-Jones
OMAN, John Wood (1860-1939)
John Wood Oman was born on 23 July 1860,
the second son of a former shipmaster who
farmed in the parish of Stenness, Orkney, and
died in Cambridge on 18 May 1939. He dedi-
cated his 1906 Kerr Lectures 'to the memory of
my father, a scholar only of life and action,
OMAN
but my best teacher'. Until Oman entered
Edinburgh University in 1877 his formal edu-
cation was given by a tutor who taught a small
group of boys. In 1882 Oman took first class
honours in philosophy. As a student he visited
Erlangen, Heidelberg and Neuchatel. He
became deeply interested in the current con-
troversy over biblical criticism; when he began
training for the ministry of the United
Presbyterian Church it was with an open-
minded approach. He already showed great
intellectual strength but was able to relate well
to ordinary people; his difficult speaking style
led to delay in being called to a pastorate. He
eventually settled in 1889 as a minister of the
Presbyterian Church of England at Alnwick,
Northumberland. During his time there he
translated Schleiermacher's On Religion:
Speeches to its Cultured Despisers.
In 1907 he became Professor of Systematic
Theology and Apologetics at Westminster
College, Cambridge, the theological college of his
church, and from 1922 served also as Principal.
He received honorary doctorates from
Edinburgh and Oxford, and in 1938 was elected
a fellow of the British Academy. He was
Moderator of the General Assembly of his
church in 1931, retired in 1935 and died just
before World War II. The proofs of his last book
Honest Religion were found on his desk packed
and addressed to the publishers.
Oman was a philosophical theologian and a
philosopher of religion. He was three times
elected Stanton Lecturer on the Philosophy of
Religion by the University of Cambridge. He
emphasized the relations between faith and
freedom, and between the individual (the person)
and individuality (personality). In Grace and
Personality (1917) he addressed questions of
divine order and human freedom in a way that
was helpful to many in the crisis of World
War I, during which he served for a time with the
YMCA in France. The same theme is treated
more philosophically in The Natural and the
Supernatural (1931). Drawing on his life expe-
rience in Orkney and Northumberland of the
human encounter with open landscapes and the
732
sea, he develops the conviction that there is a
direct human awareness of a divine order both
in nature and in moral values and a balancing
human responsibility to exercise moral and reli-
gious freedom, a freedom which encapsulates
God's highest purposes for human life. Oman's
exposition of religious awareness follows on
from Schleiermacher's 'feeling' of absolute
dependence, distinguished from particular
knowledge and from moral evaluation. Oman
often debated such issues with his Cambridge
contemporary F.R. TENNANT. The basic
approach was continued by Oman's successors
at Westminster College, H.H. FARMER and F.G.
Healey. Oman's outlook is v/ell summed up in
his last book:
The best teaching is help to teach ourselves,
and the best moral aid will help to stand on
our own feet. The ideal giving is a good and
wise father's subordination of all his giving
to making his son an independent and
responsible person, and the ideal receiving for
the son to prove himself worthy in an inde-
pendent manhood.
(Honest Religion, p. 54)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Schleiermacher: On Religion. Speeches to its
Cultured Despisers. Translation and
Introduction (1893; reissued with
Introduction by Rudolf Otto, New York,
1958).
The Problem of Faith and Freedom in the
Last Two Centuries (1906).
The War and its Issues (Cambridge, 1915).
Grace and Personality (Cambridge, 1917;
reissued with Introduction by J. Hick, New
York, 1961).
The Natural and the Supernatural
(Cambridge, 1931).
Honest Religion (Cambridge, 1941). With a
memoir by George Alexander and H.H.
Farmer.
Further Reading
Healey, F.G., Reality and Religion: the

Theology of John Oman (Edinburgh,
1965); bibliography at Appendix 2.
Hood, Adam, Baillie, Oman and
Macmunay: Experience and Religious
Bete/"(Aldershot, 2003).
Martin Cressey
O'NEILL, Onora Sylvia (1941-)
Onora O'Neill was born on 23 August 1941 in
Aughafatten, Northern Ireland. She was
educated at St Paul's Girls' School, followed by
Somerville College, Oxford (BA, MA,
1959-62; honorary fellow, 1993). Having
taken her PhD at Harvard (1963-9), she was
appointed as assistant, then associate professor,
at Barnard College, Columbia University
(1970-77). She returned to England to take up
an appointment at Essex University (lecturer,
1977-8; senior lecturer, 1978-83; reader,
1983-7; Professor of Philosophy, 1987-92).
She became Principal of Newnham College,
Cambridge in 1992. She was created a life peer
in 1999 (Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve).
O'Neill's work has been mainly in the area of
Kantian ethics. She has offered both a reinter-
pretation of Kant's own ethical work and,
based on this re-reading, developed a neo-
Kantian ethical approach which she has used to
discuss ethical and social issues. In Towards
Justice and Virtue (1996) she is concerned to
defend an account of ethics which, against
those who would argue that ethics is rooted in
the specifics of given societies and situations,
would defend the place of universal ethical
principles in practical reasoning. Without such
principles, she suggests, moral reasoning would
cease to be authoritative and to provide a way
of coordinating the actions of disparate indi-
viduals: 'When the constraints of reason are
ignored, coordination and communication fail:
only the Tower of Babel can be built' (Justice
733
O'NEILL
and Virtue, p. 63). On the other hand, she is
equally concerned to defend ethics against those
who believe that universal ethical principles
can provide a set moral code from which
specific actions can be derived. Against such a
picture - one which is often read onto K.ant
O'Neill advocates an ethical constructivism, a
reasoning 'with all possible solidity from avail-
able beginnings, using available and Allow-
able methods to reach attainable and sustain-
able conclusions for relevant audiences' (ibid.).
Instead of an idealism which might make unre-
alistic and contentious assumptions about the
human condition, or a particularism which
might rest content with the accidents of local
conditions, O'Neill advocates a process of
abstraction which produces universal princi-
ples that are, nonetheless, helpful in this process
of ethical construction. The resulting con-
structivist approach to ethics is one that can
provide an account of our obligations to
develop certain virtues, as well as our obliga-
tions to fulfil the demands of justice: it thus
promises to overcome the opposition that
several modern ethicists have set up between
deontological ethics and virtue ethics. Applying
the test that moral principles must be follow-
able by the audience addressed, she concludes
that justice focuses on the principle of rejecting
injury, whilst virtue focuses on the rejection of
indifference and neglect.
One of the criticisms often levelled against
Kant is that his moral philosophy is individu-
alistic. Accordingly, a major concern of
O'Neill's work has been to rescue Kant from
this charge and to apply her understanding of
his approach to social and political issues. An
example of this application can be seen in her
2002 Reith Lectures which deal with the issue
of trust in public life. O'Neill has been con-
cerned in her work to move the emphasis of
ethics away from rights to obligations. As she
argues (e.g., in chapter 5 of Towards Justice
and Virtue) principle-based accounts of ethics
which start from rights have difficulty in dealing
with imperfect obligations - those obligations
which, unlike perfect obligations, do not
O'NEILL
generate corresponding rights. Thus, we may be
plausibly argued to have an imperfect obligation
to cultivate our virtues, but such an obligation
corresponds to no rights. As a result, rights-
based theories tend to overlook a range of oblig-
ations particularly associated with self-develop-
ment, emphasizing a passive response to institu-
tions rather than how people should actively
participate in them. Applying these thoughts to
the issue of trust, O'Neill argues that we need to
rely less on systems of detailed inspection and
audit of public services such as education, and
more on promoting ways for people actively to
check on these services. This should be done not
so much through an emphasis on transparency,
which, through providing too much irrelevant
information, can get in the way of checking, but
rather through the limitation and penalizing of
deception.
O'Neill's Kantian scholarship is well
respected. Her interpretation of Kantian ethics
and her application of it to institutions have
obvious affinities with John Rawls's political
philosophy, whilst perhaps avoiding some of
the difficulties involved in the foundations of
Rawls's approach. The Reith Lectures have
brought her a public profile outside the
academy, where her questioning of regulatory
practices has provoked a sympathetic response.
Among philosophers, those suspicious of any
Kantian approach to ethics focus their criti-
cisms on O'Neill's understanding of the nature
and place of rationality in ethics.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acting on Principle (New York, 1975).
(Ed. with W. Ruddick), Having Children:
Legal and Philosophical Reflections on
Parenthood (New York, 1978).
Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty,
Development and Justice (1986).
Constructions of Reason: Explorations of
Kant's Practical Philosophy (Cambridge,
1989).
Towards Justice and Virtue (Cambridge,
1996).
Bounds of Justice (Cambridge, 2000).
734
A Question of Trust: The BBC Reith
Lectures 2002 (Cambridge, 2002).
Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics
(Cambridge, 2002).
Other Relevant Works
'Constructivism in Ethics', 'Kantian Ethics'
and 'Vulnerability and finitude', in E. Craig
(ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (1998), http://www.rep.rout-
ledge.com, accessed November 2004.
Further Reading
Brady, Emily, 'Onora O'Neill', in Stuart
Brown, Diane Collinson and Robert
Wilkinson (eds), Biographical Dictionary
of Twentieth-Century Philosophers (1996).
'O'Neill of Bengarve, Baroness', in Debretfs
People of Today (2004).
'O'Neill of Bengarve, Baroness', in Who's
Who (2004).
Wood, Allen W., Review of Constructions of
Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical
Philosophy', Philosophical Review, vol.
101, no. 3 (July 1992), pp. 642-50.
Stephen Watt
OSBORNE, Harold (1905-87)
Harold Osborne was born in Wakefield,
Yorkshire on 1 March 1905 and died in
Switzerland in March 1987, shortly after his
eighty-second birthday. He attended Wakefield
Grammar School and then read classics and
philosophy at Cambridge. As a young man he
met with his fellow Yorkshire men, Henry
Moore and Herbert READ. During World War
II he served in Intelligence, after which he joined
the Civil Service, working first in La Paz,
Bolivia, and then, from 1952, in England at the
Board of Trade. His experiences in Bolivia
yielded two books: Indians of the Andes (1952)

and Bolivia: A Land Divided (1954). From
1955 onwards until the last months of his life,
a steady flow of writing on philosophical aes-
thetics and art issued from his pen. In addition
to publishing twenty monographs and more
than fifty articles he was responsible for the
production of three Oxford Companions, not
only editing but also contributing numerous
seminal entries to them. His unpublished
writings and papers were given to the library at
the University of Nottingham in 1990.
Osborne's depth of scholarship and breadth
of competence were remarkable, embracing art
history, connoisseurship, philosophical aes-
thetics, music and chess, as well as a host of
further diverse interests. He was widely read
and knowledgeable in the sciences and was a
highly productive writer and editor, always
ready to consider new ideas and avant-garde
work. A singular achievement, in 1960, was his
founding and subsequent seventeen-year edi-
torship of the British Journal of Aesthetics, the
organ of the British Society of Aesthetics, in the
founding of which he was also involved. His
sustained work in this field did much to estab-
lish aesthetics as a distinct and important uni-
versity study. He became President of the
British Society of Aesthetics in 1981 and was
also Vice-President of the International
Committee of Aesthetic Studies.
Osborne's synoptic mastery of philosophical
aesthetics is evident from a glance at the titles in
the long list of published articles and papers that
he wrote between 1960 and 1984; but probably
the most explicit example of his competence is his
Introduction to the collection of writings,
Aesthetics (1972, Oxford Readings in
Philosophy), in which he provides a multi-dimen-
sional overview of the subject-matter and reveals
his capability to range over and order complex
material with extreme lucidity. He moves with
ease between the early Greeks, eighteenth-century
thinkers such as Shaftesbury and the 'common
sense' theorists, phenomenology, existentialism,
Anglo-American studies, and Kantian and
Wittgensteinian approaches to aesthetics, and
between questions concerning definition, beauty,
735
OSBORNE
nature, art, perception, psychology, judgement,
criticism, appreciation, ontology and value.
Central among Osborne's aesthetic interests
were the topics of perception and appreciation.
The framework of his approach was the view
that aesthetic experience has both intrinsic and
instrumental value, is worth pursuing for its
own sake, and is a percipience that is a form of
cognition detached from practical concerns. He
wrote: 'As pure mathematics is the exercise of
reason divorced from utilitarian function, aes-
thetic contemplation represents the freeing of
perception from domination of the practical'
('Aesthetic Experience and Cultural Value', The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1986,
p. 336). His characteristic method was analyti-
cal and reconstructive: a process of systematic
separation, identification and clarification of the
elements of a concept or an argument succeeded
by its reassembly or correction in a more illu-
minating form. Fundamental to his many dis-
cussions of appreciation was his belief that our
customary responses to works of art are, and
rightly so, to the totality of values a work
contains. At the same time he maintained that we
need to remain alert to the differences between
the criteria we exercise in those responses.
Aesthetic value, he held, is assessed in terms of
percipience within the mode of direct cognitive
apprehension. It is distinct from other modes of
response and evaluation; separable in thought if
not always separate in practice.
Harold Osborne always denied that there
was any originality or novelty in his philo-
sophical writings, insisting that for the most
part 'it has all been said before'. If that was
indeed the case, what is undeniable is that, in
the process of redelivery, what had been said
before was transformed and enriched by his
uniquely fine and discriminating sensibility.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Foundations of the Philosophy of Value
(Cambridge, 1933).
Theory of Beauty: An Introduction to
Aesthetics (1952).
Aesthetics and Criticism (1955; Connecticut,
OSBORNE
1973).
(Ed.), Aesthetics in the Modern World (1968).
(Ed.), Aesthetic (Oxford, 1970).
Aesthetics and An Theory: An Historical
Introduction (1970).
The Art of Appreciation (Oxford, 1970).
(Ed.), The Oxford Companion to Art
(Oxford, 1970).
(Ed.), The Oxford Companion to the
Decorative Arts (Oxford, 1975).
(Ed.), Abstraction and Artifice in Twentieth-
Century An (Oxford, 1979).
(Ed.), The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-
Century An (Oxford, 1981).
Other Relevant Works
'The Quality of Feeling in Art', The British
Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 3, no. 1 (1963),
pp. 38-53.
'Hume's Standard and the Diversity of Taste',
The British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 7, no.
1(1967), pp. 50-56.
'Colour Concepts of the Ancient Greeks', The
British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 8, no. 3
(1968), pp. 260-83.
'The Aesthetic Concept of Craftsmanship',
The British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 17,
no. 2 (1977), pp. 138-48.
'Aesthetic Perception', The British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 18, no. 4 (1978), pp.
307-16.
'What Is a Work of Art?', The British Journal
of Aesthetics, vol. 21, no. 1 (1981), pp. 3-9
'Expressiveness: Where is the Feeling Found?',
The British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 23,
no. 2 (1983), pp. 112-23.
further Reading
Diffey, T.J., 'Harold Osborne (1905-1987)'
[obituary], The British Journal of Aesthetics,
vol. 27, no. 4 (1987), pp. 301-306.
Diane Collinson
736
OWEN, Gwilym Ellis Lane (1922-82)
Gwilym Owen was born in Southsea on 18
May 1922 and died of a heart attack in
Cambridge on 10 July 1982. The only child of
Ellis William Owen, company secretary to the
Portsmouth and Isle of Wight Ice and Cold
Storage Company, and his wife Edith Clara, he
was educated at Portsmouth Grammar School
and Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1940-41,
1946-8), where he took a first in Greats fol-
lowing military service - first in the ranks, and
then as a signals officer with the Special
Operations Executive. He was persuaded by
Gilbert RYLE to stay on and take the new BPhil
course in philosophy, which he completed in
1950. From 1950 to 1953 he held a research fel-
lowship at Durham University, returning to
Oxford to take up the recently established uni-
versity lectureship in ancient philosophy in 1953.
Owen rapidly became reader (1957) and pro-
fessor ad hominem (1963), and was elected a
fellow of Corpus in 1958. In 1966 he moved to
Harvard to the Victor S. Thomas Professorship,
a joint appointment in the three departments of
classics, philosophy and history of science. In
1973 he returned to England on his election to
the Laurence Chair in Ancient Philosophy at
Cambridge, and took up a fellowship at King's
College. The distinction of Owen's work in
ancient philosophy was recognized by election as
fellow of the British Academy; fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences; foreig.
member of the Finnish Academy; President of the
Aristotelian Society (in its centenary year,
1978-9); Nellie Wallace Lecturer at Oxford;
and Sather Lecturer at Berkeley. An honorary
doctorate was conferred on him by the
University of Durham.
Owen's core preoccupation was with the
theory of meaning and its relation to meta-
physics, above all in the writings of Plato and
Aristotle. In a long article on Plato's
Parmenides published in 1939, his mentor
Gilbert Ryle had read that dialogue through
spectacles designed by RUSSELL and
WITTGENSTEIN; another paper of Ryle's on

logical atomism in Plato's Theaetetus - long to
remain unpublished - further excited the
postwar generation of Oxford philosophers.
Owen for his part became convinced that
Plato's most powerful and sophisticated philo-
sophical investigations were to be found in the
relatively neglected critical dialogues of his later
period (i.e. after the Republic), and that Plato
had by then simply abandoned the logically
simplistic theory of Ideas familiar from more
venerated works such as the Symposium and
the Phaedo. The first and most famous of all
Owen's articles - The Place of the Timaeus in
Plato's dialogues' (1953) - proposed a revolu-
tionary redating of the Timaeus from Plato's
late to his middle period. It was a bravura
attempt, inevitably controversial but resource-
ful in argument and impressive in the range
and depth of its command of Platonic texts
and Plato scholarship, to remove one major
obstacle to accepting that the metaphysics of
the Ideas (which are prominent in the Timaeus)
disappears in the later works. Nobody accepts
Owen's case nowadays. But the paper imme-
diately established him not just as an iconoclast,
but as a leading figure in the field.
His leadership was exercised not only
through the pioneering series of major articles
on Plato, Aristotle and the pre-Socratics which
poured from his pen over the next decade. He
was dedicated to the idea and practice of dis-
cussion as the laboratory in which philosophy
and philosophical scholarship could make
communal advances impossible for lone inves-
tigators. At home in Oxford, the study of
ancient Greek philosophy became a major
ingredient in Ryle's BPhil programme. Owen
ran weekly classes on both Plato and Aristotle
throughout the year, which developed into star
attractions for the graduates who flocked to
Oxford not just from other places in the United
Kingdom, but above all - and usually Greekless
- from North America, Australia and New
Zealand. He tried out his own ideas, but with
a zest, charm and open commitment to
argument that encouraged them to venture and
debate their own (the classes became in fact
737
OWEN
theirs as much as his, conscious though they
were of watching a supreme master at work).
The great discovery they made was that Plato
and Aristotle were philosophy, not history of
thought.
Owen's activities were not confined to
Oxford. In 1955, together with mostly young
colleagues in other universities, Owen helped to
found the Southern Association for Ancient
Philosophy (northern and Scottish counterparts
already existed), and read the opening paper at
the first of the annual meetings which continue
to this day - an intricate but far-reaching
analysis of one of the anti-Platonic arguments
and of its target in Aristotle's fragmentary On
the Ideas, subsequently published in 1957. Also
in 1957 he organized and hosted in Oxford
the first Symposium Aristotelicum: an interna-
tional and multilingual forum, gathering
together leading Aristotle scholars every three
years (to begin with mostly from Europe), and
discussing a small number of papers on a major
theme in depth for a full week. This first
occasion was devoted to topics relating to
Aristotle's early years in Plato's Academy.
Owen was a vigorous opponent of Werner
Jaeger's view that Aristotle subscribed to Plato's
middle-period metaphysics in his early work, as
was to emerge above all in the magisterial
British Academy lecture The Platonism of
Aristotle' (1965) - the best introduction to th.
vision shaping the major themes of Owen's
own early work. With other participants in the
symposium, including Paul Moraux and
Ingemar During, a plan of campaign was con-
ceived whereby each would prepare a mono-
graph offering a rigorous re-examination of
the evidence for one or other of the fragmentary
writings from Aristotle's Academic period.
Owen took on On the Ideas. But though he
never abandoned the project, he appears to
have made little progress with it; in fact, apart
from a few short book reviews, articles - stylish,
dense, supple in dialectic - remained his sole
vehicle for scholarly production.
For the Oxford Symposium itself Owen
produced a major essay entitled 'Logic and
OWEN
Metaphysics in Some Earlier Works of
Aristotle' (subsequently published in 1960),
which articulated an idea that is now part of the
common vocabulary of Aristotle scholarship:
'focal meaning'. Aristotle notoriously rejected
the notion underlying Plato's theory of Ideas, of
a unity underlying all uses of, for example,
'good' or 'beautiful'. For him they exhibit an
irreducible variety of senses. What Owen
showed was that in some key texts (he thought
this a later development) Aristotle nonetheless
represented uses of 'being' in the other cate-
gories, for example as 'focally' related to its
single central use as 'substance', and was
thereby able to rescue the idea of metaphysics
(or 'first philosophy', to use his own expression)
as a single discipline. The second symposium,
held at Louvain in 1960, engaged with
problems of Aristotelian method. Owen's con-
tribution, published in 1961, and entitled
'tithenai ta phainomena' ('positing the appear-
ances'), established what has since become
basic teaching in the study of Aristotle:
Aristotle's 'appearances' are not confined to
scientific observations. More importantly, and
in many areas of philosophy, he advises us
quite un-Platonically to note and heed what
people say - both the many and the wise - and
to make that both the starting-point for enquiry
and a test for any theories we may develop:
something that goes for 'physics' as much as
ethics. Both symposium papers evidently reflect
the approach to philosophical questions
through language for which 1950s Oxford is
notorious. Both represented a new turning for
philosophical reflection on Aristotle. But in
each case they did so by focusing on something
absolutely fundamental in his thought. More
than half Owen's twenty published papers were
to be on Aristotelian topics: as well as another
piece on Aristotle's critique of Plato (delivered
to the third Symposium Aristotelicum in 1963,
held once more in Oxford), several more on the
logical structure of his metaphysics, one on
time, one on pleasure, two written near the
end of his life on Aristotelian science, and an
article that appeared posthumously - helping to
738
launch the first number of Oxford Studies in
Ancient Philosophy in 1983 - on the distortions
'philosophical invective' introduces into the
ancient biographical tradition. All remain emi-
nently worth reading; none was or is quite of
the stature attained by those early publications.
For the Oxford undergraduate syllabus,
Owen taught pre-Socratic philosophy. Two
early articles were the result. As well as a
powerful study of Zeno's paradoxes (1957-8),
in 1960 he brought out an essay entitled 'Eleatic
Questions'. It was a landmark in the study of
Parmenides, and remains the classic modern
interpretation. Just as 'tithenai ta phainomena'
argued that Aristotle's Physics was mostly not
physics but philosophy, so 'Eleatic Questions'
established once and for all that Parmenides'
Way of Truth could only be properly under-
stood not by reference to the presuppositions of
earlier Greek cosmology, but as an exercise in
pure philosophical reflection on the require-
ments of all intelligible thought and speech.
'Plato and Parmenides on the Timeless Present'
(1966) pursued Parmenides' 'is' further, into the
Timaeus and Sophist. After the 1953 Timaeus
article Owen did not publish much that was
directly or exclusively focused on Plato,
although he never ceased wrestling with the
later dialogues. But he was finally persuaded to
put in print a long and long-meditated essay of
formidable difficulty on the idea of not-being in
the Sophist, which appeared in 1970.
Parmenides had argued that saying or thinking
what is not is impossible. Owen's account of
how Plato defused the puzzle turns on an intri-
cate account of the dialogue's analysis of 'is
not'. The key move is Owen's insistence that
Plato is exploring false and negative predica-
tion^ not 'nothing' or non-existence. This
insight has remained pivotal for all subsequent
work on the Sophist. In the same year, in a
Festschrift for Ryle, there also appeared a bril-
liantly original study of the dialectic of the
second part of the Parmenides. But not even
Owen was able to persuade many other
scholars to follow him into this treacherous
terrain, even though any who do will be likely

to find in the 'map' he supplied a constant
stimulus. His last article on Plato - a short
piece on the notion of the 'undepictable' in the
Statesman - was his contribution to the 1973
Festschrift for Gregory Vlastos.
By the time he moved to Harvard in 1966
Owen was one of the two dominant figures
(Vlastos being the other) in the study of Greek
philosophy in the English-speaking world. The
success of these two great scholars in inspiring
in generations of graduate students - who
include most of the current leaders in the
subject - a sense of its inexhaustible potential
for living philosophical exploration was
(among other things) a major cause of the pro-
liferation of teaching positions in the field in
North America. Many such jobs are 'single-
ton' posts, and it was partly to counter the
consequent danger of scholarly isolation that in
1967 Owen founded 'the New York group': a
monthly gathering which attracted (and con-
tinues to attract) philosophers teaching in insti-
tutions all along the eastern seaboard to spend
a Saturday reading Greek philosophy together.
The model has since been replicated elsewhere;
and on returning to England Owen himself
instituted a 'London group' (in 1975), which,
like its New York sibling, discussed the central
books of Aristotle's Metaphysics, and ceased
activity only at his death. The London group
published two volumes of records of its notes,
and these are now standing items on bibli-
ographies on the Metaphysics.
Owen's dazzlingly creative period was over
by the end of the 1960s, however, although he
kept teaching until the end, and his presidential
address to the Aristotelian Society ('Particular
and General', 1978-9) - a development of ideas
first presented at the!972 Symposium
Aristotelicum and then to the London group -
was a penetrating piece on one of the most dif-
ficult and crucial issues in Aristotle's theory of
substance. Just before he died, Owen was pre-
sented with a Festschrift of his own (Language
and Logos), containing contributions mostly
from former pupils. It includes a bibliography
of his publications in Greek philosophy and
739
OWEN
science up to that date (1982). His collected
articles were edited posthumously by Martha
Nussbaum, in a volume he had been planning
himself, under the title Logic, Science and
Dialectic (1986).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Logic, Science and Dialectic: Collected
Papers in Greek Philosophy, ed. Martha
Nussbaum (1986).
Other Relevant Works
(Ed. with I. During), Aristotle and Plato in
Mid-Fourth Century. Papers of the
Symposium Aristotelicum Held at Oxford
in August, 1957 (Goteborg, 1960).
(Ed.), Aristotle on Dialectic: The Topics.
Proceedings of the Third Symposium
Aristotelicum (Oxford, 1968).
(Ed. with G.E.R. Lloyd), Aristotle on Mind
and the Senses. Proceedings of the Seventh
Symposium Aristotelicum (Cambridge,
1978).
further Reading
Ackrill, J.L., 'Gwilym Ellis Lane Owen:
1922-82', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 70 (1984), pp. 481-99.
Burnyeat Myles et al., Notes on Book Zeta of
Aristotle's Metaphysics (Oxford, 1979).
The record of a seminar held in London,
1975-9.
, Notes on Books Eta and Theta of
Aristotle's Metaphysics (Oxford, 1984).
The record of a seminar held in London,
1979-82.
Fine, G., 'Owen's Progress: A Review of
Logic, Science and Dialectic',
PhilosophicalReview, vol. 97 (1988), pp.
373-99.
Schofield, Malcolm and Martha Nussbaum
(eds), Language and Logos: Studies in
Ancient Greek Philosophy Presented to
G.E.L. Owen (Cambridge, 1982).
Malcolm Schofield
OWEN
OWEN, Huw Parri (1926-96)
Huw Parri Owen was born in Cardiff and died
there on 26 October 1996. From Cardiff High
School for Boys he went to Jesus College,
Oxford, where he read classics and divinity.
Ordained in the Presbyterian Church of Wales,
he was appointed to teach Greek at the United
Theological College, Aberystwyth in 1949. He
proceeded to Bangor as lecturer in New
Testament, and thence to King's College
London, where he was reader and, from 1971
until his retirement ten years later, Professor of
Christian Doctrine.
In Revelation and Existence (1957) he offers
a searching critique of Rudolf Bultmann's
demythologization project. He welcomes
Bultmann's insistence that revelation is a
personal act of a transcendent yet personal God
which requires a human response, regrets
Bultmann's inadequacy regarding divine
immanence, and repudiates his assumption,
ungrounded in reason or revelation, and
unsanctioned by tradition or experience, that
'personal, subjective, historic truth cannot be
revealed outside an encounter with the spoken
Word' (Revelation and Existence, p. 139).
The Moral Argument for Christian Theism
(1965) is a defence of the possibility of inferring
the existence of God conceived as self-existent,
personal and creative from the objective order
of morality, without recourse to revelation. If
circularity is to be avoided, it must be shown
that moral claims and values can be non-reli-
giously perceived, albeit that such claims and
values are grounded in God's holiness. The
theistic postulate is not required because moral
norms are universal, but because they are oblig-
atory. Owen grants that his arguments are not
necessary for belief in God, for 'the simplest
mind can grasp God pre-philosophically
through the natural law and revelation'; neither
are they sufficient, for 'discursive reason must
give way to intuition is we are to obtain the cer-
titude of faith' (Moral Argument, p. 126).
The Christian Knowledge of God (1969)
comprises Owen's fuller discussion of revela-
740
tion, reason, intuition, faith, experience, sym-
bolization, verification, certainty and knowl-
edge. His objective is 'to show that the tradi-
tional claim to know, and so to be sure of,
God, is both meaningful and valid' (Christian
Knowledge of God, p. v). The exposition turns
upon his conviction that 'Religious knowledge,
even when it is a response to supernatural rev-
elation, is a wholly natural activity of the
human mind; for the latter exists only by being
a created reflection of its divine Archetype'
(ibid.).
In Concepts of Deity (1971) Owen discusses
classical theism, the idea of a finite God, the
God of Neoplatonism and of process theology.
While distinguishing the God of the Bible from
the Hegelian absolute, he does not land in
Barthianism. Against Barth's view that non-
Christian forms of theology do not yield any
truth, Owen insists that 'it is possible to hold
that non-Christians possess a (logically) non-
probative and partial knowledge of God'
(Concepts of Deity, p. 107). Barth wrongly
assumes that original sin entails total ignorance
of God on the part of non-Christians.
Christian Theism: A Study of its Basic
Principles (1984) includes discussions of
creation, the Incarnation, the Trinity, provi-
dence and prayer, evil, Christ the Saviour, grace
and free will, and the soul and immortality. In
an Appendix Owen counters 'John Hick on
Christianity and Other Religions'.
The writings of this kind but intensely shy
man are concise, lucid and, where necessary,
graciously devastating. Staunchly upholding
the faith of the ages, he sprang to its defence in
the present. A faithful churchman, he paid
more attention to scholastic authors, and less to
Calvinism (finding predestination totally unac-
ceptable, and contemplating a form of purga-
tory) than most in his ecclesiastical tradition.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Revelation and Existence (Cardiff, 1957).
The Moral Argument for Christian Theism
(1965).
The Christian Knowledge of God (1969).
 OWEN

Concepts of Deity (1971). Sell, Alan P.P., The Philosophy of Religion

W. R. Matthews: Philosopher and 1875-1980 (1988; Bristol, 1998).
Theologian (1976).
Christian Theism: A Study of its Basic Alan P.P. Sell
Principles (1984).

Further Reading
Morris, Ray, [Obituary], in Year Book and
Directory of the Presbyterian Church of
Wales (1998), pp. 80-81.

741
 p
PARFIT, Derek Anthony (1942-)
Derek Parfit was born in China on 11
December 1942. Educated at Balliol College,
Oxford, he graduated with a BA in modern
history in 1964. In 1967 he gained a fellowship
at All Souls, Oxford, where he has remained
ever since, subsequently becoming senior
research fellow. In addition, he has held visiting
professorships at Harvard, Princeton, New
York University and the University of
Colorado. In 2005 he will hold a similar visiting
position at Rutgers University.
Parfit's first paper ('Personal Identity', 1971)
redefined the debate on that topic. The modern
discussion of the identity of persons had been
triggered by GRICE'S 1941 paper of the same
name which formalized Locke's claim that the
diachronic identity of a person is defined in
terms of psychological relations across time, a
position adopted by Shoemaker and others,
and criticized by WILLIAMS, who insisted on
the need for a physical criterion for identity.
Then STRAWSON sought to take the debate in a
new direction by claiming in Individuals (1959)
that 'person' as a concept was referentially
basic: far from being defined in either mental or
physical terms, it was required in order to make
full sense of these terms.
Parfit changed the entire shape of this debate
by arguing for three claims: that questions of
personal identity may not have a determinate
answer, that the belief in the determinate nature
of our identity across time has deleterious
effects, and that all the important questions of
742
survival, moral responsibility, etc. do not depend
upon such a determinate concept. It follows that
personal identity itself as a relationship ought to
have no great importance for us.
In arguing for these conclusions, Parfit placed
great reliance upon hypothetical cases or
thought-experiments, and on the intuitions that
they provided. An amoeba, for instance, repro-
duces by fission into two amoebae. In doing so,
our original unicellular organism has not com-
pletely ceased to exist, but we have no reason
to think it identical to either of the two result-
ing amoebae, for each has a similar claim. And
it cannot be identical to both for then they
would be identical to each other, but they are
not: they occupy different spatio-temporal loca-
tions and can have different future lives. Parfit
asks us to imagine, via a series of hypothetical
medical experiments, that fission happened to
us, that there are two human beings in existence
that were psychologically continuous with our
original self. Such a thing, he argues, is surely
preferable to the total extinction of death. In
this situation there is no one in the future with
whom I am identical: rather, we should
describe it as one in which I survive as two
people. For 'the relationship of the original
person to each of the resulting people contains
all that interests us - all that matters - in an
ordinary case of survival' ('Personal Identity',
p. 10).
Identity across time is necessarily a one-one
relationship: a at time tl can only be identical
to one entity at a subsequent t2. But Parfit
argues that the important psychological rela-

tions can hold in a one-many form (fission) or
a many-one form (fusion). In each case, what
matters is the relationship of psychological con-
tinuity, that there will be at least one person
who possesses my important psychological
features: memories, intentions, etc. Since it has
been argued that memory entails identity, Parfit
substitutes the concepts of q-memory, q-inten-
tion, etc., based upon Shoemaker's quasi-
memory: q-remembering an experience is phe-
nomenologically like remembering, but is jus-
tified by the fact that someone had that expe-
rience, without the implication that this
someone was my present self. I can q-remember
someone else's past experience or q-intend
someone's future action if I am psychologically
connected to them in the right way.
If the relationship between a psychological
state (a memory or intention, say) and its object
(the experience remembered, the action
intended) is a direct one, then Parfit defines
'psychological connectedness' as the holding
of these direct relations, while 'psychological
continuity' can consist of overlapping chains of
such direct relations. Thus an old man may no
longer be psychologically connected to the
infant he once was, but is psychologically con-
tinuous with him. Parfit claims that 'connect-
edness is a more important element in survival'
(ibid., p. 21) and connectedness is a relation of
degree, so what matters for the survival of the
person, for our survival, is a matter of degree
and need not be determinate.
An important moral consequence for Parfit
was the weakening of the principle of self-
interest. If my future self is psychologically con-
nected to me, then I have an interest in its well-
being that is proportionate to the degree of
survival involved. I should be very concerned
about myself-tomorrow but much less con-
cerned about myself-in-fifty-years-time, for I
am strongly psychologically connected to the
former but much more weakly so to the latter.
And weakening my self-interest over time in
this way allows me to adopt a much more
impartial attitude towards interest in general,
towards the interests of others.
743
PARFIT
That the metaphysical revisionism proposed
in this paper was a necessary step towards a
moral position became clear with the publica-
tion of Parfit's book Reasons and Persons in
1984 (rev. edn, 1986). Here the revisionist
analysis of personal identity was even more
radical, but was now embedded within a set of
theses about rationality and morality. The work
is a dense collection of finely detailed argu-
ments, often brilliantly illuminated by imagi-
native examples and thought-experiments.
From the outset Parfit's target is the Self-
Interest Theory, the claim that self-interest
'gives each person this aim: the outcomes that
would be best for himself, and that would make
his life go, for him, as well as possible' (Reasons
and Persons, p. 3). He argues that such a view
may be self-defeating, that one's life may go
better if one is not self-interested. Next he con-
siders consequentialism, the claim that 'there is
one ultimate moral aim: that outcomes be as
good as possible' (ibid., p. 24), and seeks to
show through a series of examples and hypo-
thetical cases that consequentialism may be
indirectly but not directly self-defeating. There
is a detailed examination of coordination
problems and moral dilemmas, leading to the
conclusion that common sense morality, the
claim that we have special obligations to certain
classes of people - close relatives, friends,
employees, etc. - is self-defeating and needs to
be revised. One of his aims in this part of the
book, then, is to reduce the distance between
consequentialism and common sense morality,
perhaps by trying to make common sense
morality as agent-neutral as consequentialism.
In the second part of the book Parfit attacks
self-interest from another direction, via an
examination of the rationality of holding dif-
ferent attitudes towards one's interests at dif-
ferent parts of one's life. There is a detailed
consideration of different versions of the
Present-Aim Theory, leading Parfit to accept a
version that says 'what I have most reason to do
is what would best fulfil those of my present
desires that are not irrational (ibid., p. 119). But
which of my desires about my own interests are
PARFIT
rational? Parfit asks how rational it is to care
for close or more distant parts of one's own life,
arguing that, though we have a bias towards
our near future, this cannot be justified. I
should not care more now about a pain I shall
suffer tomorrow than about one I shall suffer
in a year's time. And there is no real rational
justification for caring more about a pain I
shall suffer tomorrow than one I suffered yes-
terday, though pragmatic considerations mean
that this is how most of us feel. Parfit con-
cludes that the Self-interest Theory must be
rejected and that we should accept an amended
version of the Present-Aim Theory.
He then moves on to a detailed consideration
of the topic of personal identity, one consider-
ably expanded and in some ways more radical
than in his earlier paper. As before, he argues
that neither a physical nor a psychological cri-
terion for personal identity need give a deter-
minate answer but now he introduces a new
claim, that such criteria - separately or together
- may be undermined by sorites arguments.
Thus if a sufficient number of either my brain-
cells or my mental states or both are artificially
changed, it may be an unanswerable question
whether the person following such an operation
is me or not. Instead Parfit takes up and
augments the radical claim of his first paper:
that personal identity itself does not matter.
What does matter is what he terms Relation R,
'psychological connectedness and/or continuity
with the right kind of cause' (Reasons and
Persons, p. 215), to which he adds a more
radical claim still, that 'the right kind of cause
could be any cause' (ibid.). Thus I can survive
all manner of hypothetical changes - brain
transplants, teletransportation, etc. - as long as
enough of my psychology survives, if someone
possesses enough q-memories of my experi-
ences or acts on sufficient of my q-intentions.
If I continue as one person, then we may wish
to say that I am identical with that person. But
what matters is the survival in some form of my
psychology, and not the identity: survival as
two or more persons after fission may be just
as good.
744
This claim is buttressed by a series of argu-
ments designed to show that Relation R is
indeed all that matters, that the existence and
value of psychological connectedness and/or
continuity need not presuppose the existence of
a single determinate person or unified con-
sciousness. Plausible thought-experiments are
provided to overcome the intuitive difficulties
of trying to imagine oneself surviving as two or
more people simultaneously. Parfit denies
Williams's claim that 'whether a future person
will be me must depend only on the intrinsic
features of the relation between us. It cannot
depend on what happens to other people'
(Reasons and Persons, p. 267). In Parfitian
terms, whether I survive as another person may
depend upon intrinsic features: whether we can
call this survival identity depends on whether
there exist any other survivors with some of my
psychology.
Parfit allows we may have difficulties in fully
accepting this view of ourselves. 'At the reflec-
tive or intellectual level, I would remain con-
vinced that [this view] is true. But at some
lower level I would still be inclined to believe
that there must always be a real difference
between some future person's being me, and his
being someone else' (ibid., p. 279).
Nevertheless, he believes it would be better for
our moral attitudes if we could embrace this
view, at least at an intellectual level.
Next Parfit mobilizes this view of personal
identity to attack once more the Self-interest
Theory, and especially its implication that 'a
rational person should be equally concerned
about all the parts of his future' (ibid., p. 313).
If what is essential about me across time is my
psychological connectedness, then my concern
for a future person should be proportionate to
the degree of connectedness involved. The more
distant the future person, the less connected-
ness, and therefore the less concern, I should
feel. My future self ceases to be the source of
special concern, and Parfit concludes therefore
that 'we ought not to do to our future selves
what it would be wrong to do to other people'
(ibid., p. 320) but that any significantly greater

level of prudential restraint on my behaviour
towards my future self cannot be rationally
justified. Such a view raises difficulties about
desert and punishment, but Parfit holds that
our beliefs about these must be amended to fit
in with this reductionist view of the person.
Against those who would see such changes in
our moral outlook as disturbing, he says 'I find
the truth liberating and consoling. It makes me
less concerned about my own future, and my
death, and more concerned about others' (ibid.,
p. 347).
Parfit ultimately embraces a version of con-
sequentialism reshaped by his view of personal
identity and uses this theory to explore conse-
quentialist paradoxes. He tries to defeat what
he terms the Repugnant Conclusion, that for
any given population it would be better to
have a larger population, each of which was
somewhat worse off. For if consequentialism
entails this, we should be aiming at the largest
possible population of people with barely tol-
erable lives, rather than a smaller population
of better-off people. Again the problem is one
of distributing goods and consequences across
time as well as synchronically. Parfit concludes
that there is no easy solution to the problems
for future generations raised by consequen-
tialism and that 'to solve this problem we
require a new theory of beneficence' (ibid.,
p. 451).
Throughout the book Parfit argues for the
importance of impersonality in our moral
thinking. An impersonal approach to morality
will cause me to reject Self-interest. An imper-
sonal approach to my self supports this move
by seeking to weaken the boundaries between
my self and other selves. In effect, his meta-
physical revision of the nature of personal
identity aligns it with the impersonality of tra-
ditional utilitarianism, though Parfit at key
points marks his consequentialism off from the
standard versions of utilitarianism.
In the years immediately after the publication
of this book Parfit published a number of
defences and replies to criticism, but little has
appeared over the last decade bar an occasional
745
PARFIT
paper on motivation or on philosophical cos-
mology. A much-delayed 1997 collection of
papers on Parfit was finally published without
his reply to his critics: the editor revealed that
Parfit's reply was expanding into three books
about the self and about morality, and their
appearance is awaited with keen interest.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Personal Identity', Philosophical Review,
vol. 80, no. 1 (1971), pp. 3-27.
Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984; rev
edn, 1986).
Other Relevant Works
'On "The Importance of Self-identity"',
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 68 (1971), pp.
683-90.
'Is Common Sense Morality Self-Defeating?',
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 76 (1979), pp.
533-45.
'Future Generations: Further Problems',
Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 11
(1982), pp. 113-72.
'Personal Identity and Rationality', Synthese,
vol. 53 (1982), pp. 227-41.
'Rationality & Time', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 84 (1983-4), pp.
47-82.
Comments on Symposium on Reasons and
Persons, Ethics, vol. 96, no. 4 (July 1986.
pp. 832-72.
'Why Does the Universe Exist?', Harvard
Review of Philosophy, vol. 1 (1991), pp.
2-5.
'The Unimportance of Identity', in Henry
Harris (ed.), Identity (Oxford, 1995), pp.
13-45.
'Reason and Motivation', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 71 (1997)
pp. 98-130.
'Bombs and Coconuts, or Rational
Irrationality', in Christopher Morris and
Arthur Ripstein (eds), Practical Rationality
and Preference: Essays for David Gauthier
(Cambridge, 2001).
PARFIT
Further Reading
Dancy, Jonathan (ed.), Reading Parfit
(Oxford, 1997).
Wolf, Susan et al., Symposium on Reasons
and Persons, Ethics, vol. 96, no. 4 (July
1986), pp. 704-831.
Jerry Goodenough
PARKINSON, George Henry Radcliffe
(1923-)
Harry Parkinson was born in Tientsin (now
Tianjin) on 2 November 1923 of British parent-
age. He was educated at the Bradford
Grammar School (1934-41) and at Wadham
College, Oxford (1942,1946-9). He obtained
first class honours in literae humaniores in
1949, and the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
(Oxford) in 1952. In 1950 he was appointed
assistant lecturer in philosophy at the University
of Reading, under Professor H.A. HODGES. He
remained at the University of Reading until he
retired in 1989, having attained the ranks of
lecturer (1952), senior lecturer (1964), reader
(1971) and professor (1974). He was Head of
the Department of Philosophy from January
1983 to September 1989, and saw the depart-
ment through difficult years in which philoso-
phy departments in Britain were threatened
with (and in some cases subjected to) closure.
He was made Emeritus Professor of Philosophy
in October 1989. Parkinson has also been
closely associated with the journal Studia
Leibnitiana from its inception in 1969, and
became one of its editors in 1988. He married
June Rawson in 1953 and has two children
and four grandchildren.
Harry Parkinson is perhaps best known for
his work on Leibniz and Spinoza, and in this
connection two monographs stand out:
Spinoza's Theory of Knowledge (1954) and
Logic and Reality in Leibniz's Metaphysics
746
(1965). He has supplemented these works with
an extensive body of interpretation, commen-
tary and critical analysis of these philosophers,
as well as with numerous editions and transla-
tions of their works. All told his contributions
have made him one of the leading UK author-
ities on the rationalists.
In Spinoza's Theory of Knowledge Parkinson
argues that it is Spinoza's epistemology that
allows us to take his metaphysics seriously.
That said, for Parkinson both Spinoza's meta-
physics and epistemology serve to account for
human well-being: following Leon Roth he
regards Spinoza as 'primarily a moralist'. On
Parkinson's view, Spinoza's deductive system is
a serious attempt at philosophizing, a con-
tention that opposes the position of, for
example, the idealist H.H. JOACHIM, for whom
the Ethics' deductive structure is not essential
to understanding Spinoza's key doctrines.
Perhaps the most important area in which
Parkinson differs from Joachim is the theory of
truth. For Joachim, Spinoza espouses a coher-
ence theory containing the rudiments of the
(Hegelian) idealist view that 'Reality (Deus sive
Natura), whether as "idea" or as ideatum ... is
a Dialectic - a s£//-analysis and s^/f-synthesis,
a Whole which is in, and by, and as, the devel-
opment of itself (Joachim, 1940, p. 99). This
interpretation arises from Spinoza's view that
reality is one infinitely complex substance,
which entails the idealist position that all rela-
tions are internal. This internality of all rela-
tions has been understood in Spinoza's regard
to mean that there is only one true idea, and
Parkinson's rejection of this reading rests partly
on his explanation of how for Spinoza truth can
be a property of fragments of ideas, and partly
on his recognition that for Spinoza not all pri-
vation of knowledge is error (as it would be for
the idealist). Parkinson's Spinoza advances a
doctrine of multiple truths interrelated in a
deductive system.
This interpretation rests on a certain under-
standing of the kinds of knowledge in Spinoza's
system. In keeping with his rejection of Spinoza
as an idealist, Parkinson's explication of

Spinoza's distinction between imagination,
reason and intuitive knowledge (scientia intu-
itiva] advances the view that for Spinoza both
reason and intuitive knowledge are genuine
forms of knowledge, and not related as steps in
a dialectic culminating in a synthesis of the
abstract and concrete. Nor is Parkinson among
those who regard scientia intuitiva, the highest
form of knowledge, as some sort of mystical,
supra-conceptual insight. Rather, he argues
that, at least in Spinoza's theory of knowledge,
it is both inferential (though not rule-reliant)
and of particular things - simply 'a type of
deductive knowledge, not very different from
reason' (Spinoza's Theory of Knowledge, p.
190) - though in Spinoza's moral theory it is
our highest intellectual activity.
The theme of freedom, both for the individ-
ual and in the wider polis, appears frequently
in Parkinson's writings. For him the central
concept in Spinoza's account is that of endeav-
our (conatus), the drive possessed by each thing
to persevere in its own being, insofar as it is in
itself. Although through conatus human actions
follow with necessity, they are free in the sense
that they are not externally compelled. This is
because freedom is a function of inner deter-
mination, i.e. of our determination by thought
or necessitating reason, not external determi-
nation of the kind involved in mechanical cau-
sation. Importantly, however, both determina-
tions are the manifestations, in thought and
extension, of the necessitating activity of the
single, self-same substance; which means that
conatus does not involve a 'two-world' or dual-
istic view. While conatus serves for Parkinson
to defend Spinoza from the objections to
freedom raised by contemporary physicalist
accounts of human action, it is not clear that his
explication solves a central metaphysical issue
which he thinks confronts Spinoza, namely that
freedom seems to be the divine prerogative
solely ('Spinoza on the Power and Freedom of
Man', p. 544). For Spinoza, only God's exis-
tence follows from inner determination, i.e.
'from the necessity of its nature alone' (Ethics,
I D7). Problematically, then, while our acts
747
PARKINSON
may be free when they are rational, they never
seem to be free in being ours.
Spinoza's view that freedom lies in the
exercise of reason (over the passions) puts him,
according to Parkinson, in the camp of those
who espouse 'positive freedom', a view of
freedom frequently criticized in Anglo-
American philosophy by, for example, Karl
POPPER and Isaiah BERLIN (who popularized
the term), for both of whom it implies despo-
tism. In Spinoza's case such freedom is based on
the concept of the human as essentially rational.
The despotism arises (allegedly) from the fact
that particularly the masses require coercion
into the life of reason by means of dogmas of
faith instilled in them 'for their own good'. For
Parkinson ('Spinoza on the Freedom of Man
and the Freedom of the Citizen', 1984), the
key to defending Spinoza lies in understanding
how he accommodates the doctrine of 'negative
freedom', the liberal complement of positive
freedom that emphasizes the freedom of indi-
viduals from interference by others. He argues
(ibid., p. 54) that there is no inconsistency
between Spinoza's defence of freedom of
thought and his positive concept of freedom,
'because these dogmas are intended simply to
get people to act in certain ways; their truth or
falsity is not relevant. Men's "freedom to phi-
losophize" is not affected - and Spinoza never
suggests that this freedom is for some men
only'. To this one might reply, first, that
Parkinson's point stands only relatively
speaking, for the application of such dogmas is
a (pedogical) form of coercion. Second, that
Spinoza never suggests that intellectual freedom
extends only to some seems beside the point,
for how could it make sense for him to suggest
it extends to all? Dogmas are applied because
those upon whom they are worked are sup-
posedly incapable of philosophizing; how, then,
can such freedom meaningfully be extended to
them?
Parkinson's Logic and Reality in Leibniz's
Metaphysics is a systematic analysis of Bertrand
RUSSELL'S A Critical Exposition of the
Philosophy of Leibniz, one of the most influ-
PARKINSON
ential treatments of Leibniz's philosophy (and
for some one of Russell's best books). Russell's
argument for the tight relation between logic
and metaphysics in Leibniz's system stems from
Leibniz's claims about the implications of his
logical doctrine that in all true affirmative
propositions the concept of the predicate is
contained in the concept of the subject (the
inesse principle). Parkinson demonstrates the
extent to which Leibniz's metaphysical doc-
trines are not simply results of his logic; in par-
ticular, the concepts of substance and God play
either implicit or explicit roles in shaping
Leibniz's metaphysics, roles that go unex-
plained or unacknowledged by Russell. Among
the issues dealt with are Leibniz's preference for
an intensional interpretation of propositions
and the Spinozism (monism) Russell imputes to
Leibniz. Against the views of Russell, C.I. Lewis
and L. Couturat that Leibniz's preference was
unreasoned - being either the result of religious
prejudice, habit or uncritical adherence to
Aristotle - Parkinson replies that Leibniz was
motivated by 'the desire to deny existential
import to the universal proposition' (Logic and
Reality in Leibniz's Metaphysics, p. 19).
Against this O'Briant (1967) cites textual
counter-evidence suggesting indecisiveness on
Leibniz's part on the existential import of uni-
versal propositions, though it seems possible
both that Parkinson is right that Leibniz's pref-
erence was reasoned (in the way Parkinson
argues), and that Leibniz was indecisive. As
for Russell's argument that Leibniz's preposi-
tional logic commits him to monism, it is based
on his claim that propositions that employ
mathematical ideas, for example There are
two men', cannot be put into subject-predicate
form. Parkinson attempts to prove that they
can. His efforts in this, cited further below,
have been challenged by F. Feldman (1973).
As for Leibniz's account of freedom,
Parkinson's careful and sustained analysis
(Leibniz on Human freedom, 1970) canvasses
Leibniz's answers to four standard objections to
freedom, the last of which - the argument from
the causation of human events - he deems the
748
most serious. Leibniz gives a dispositional
account of free will as a cause of our actions,
and the question is how it can be a free cause,
i.e. a cause whose product is a free act. For
Parkinson, Leibniz's important manoeuvre lies
in his claim that there can be actions that are
both free and necessary. Such actions are
'inclined', not 'necessitated', because although
they always happen, they are not logically nec-
essary. Here Parkinson rightly draws an impor-
tant parallel between Leibniz's account and
Spinoza's positive freedom. Because Leibniz's
inclining causes are free when they are rational,
reasons are free causes for both Spinoza and
Leibniz. Nonetheless, Leibniz's famous and
suggestive distinction between inclining and
necessitating ultimately disappoints according
to Parkinson, for it 'does not seem adequate to
answer the objection that a man's strongest
motive [i.e. inclining motive] is causally deter-
mined, and that therefore he must act as he
does' (Leibniz on Human Freedom, p. 63).
Parkinson has produced several editions of
Spinoza's and Leibniz's writings, of which only
his De summa rerum: Metaphysical Papers,
1675-76 is mentioned here. His analysis reveals
that many of the essentials of Leibniz's system
- and in particular Leibniz's views on the nature
of the God-world relation - were actually in
place a decade before the Discourse on
Metaphysics (1686), a work many regard as the
first reasonably complete articulation of
Leibniz's views. The overall unity of Leibniz's
thinking which Parkinson argues is revealed in
these early papers is a theme to which he
returns, notably, in 'Substantial Forms in the
"Systeme Nouveau" and Related Works'
(1996). Pace, for example, C.D. BROAD and
D. Garber, for whom Leibniz's idealistic period
began only in about 1704, Parkinson's account
of substantial forms supports the thesis that in
the Systeme Nouveau (1695) Leibniz was
already an idealist. Important evidence in
Parkinson's case is Leibniz's idealistic view of
primary matter as a (confused) form of per-
ception. This assessment of Parkinson's
position, according to which Leibniz displays a

consistent adherence to certain basic principles
- thereby leaving fewer 'unbridgeable gaps' in
his philosophy (cf. 'Leibniz's Philosophical
Aims: Foundation-Laying or Problem Solving',
p. 67) - also accords with Parkinson's rejection
of Stuart Brown's novel thesis (in Leibniz,
1984) that Leibniz was less a rationalist foun-
dationalist and more concerned with erecting a
deductive system based on revisable hypothe-
ses. On Parkinson's view, for example,
Leibniz's important predicate-in-subject prin-
ciple makes its appearance early in Leibniz's
metaphysical writings and remains operative
into his mature philosophy (e.g., the Theodicy)-,
whereas for Brown et al. (e.g., David WIGGINS),
Leibniz abandons that principle in his mature
work.
Given his scrutiny of Spinoza and Leibniz,
Parkinson has not surprisingly formulated posi-
tions on the relation between these two ratio-
nalists. Beyond his response, in Logic and
Reality, to Russell's charge that Leibniz's logic
renders his philosophy Spinozist (i.e. a panthe-
istic, monistic determinism), he addresses the
Spinoza-Leibniz relation in a very careful,
tightly argued paper ('Leibniz's Paris Writings
in Relation to Spinoza', 1978), where he
contends that Leibniz's early Paris writings
exhibit no pantheistic or deterministic tenden-
cies. Using Leibniz's thoughts on Spinoza at
this time (1672-6) as a guide to the ordering of
his writings in this period, Parkinson regards
Leibniz's engagement with Spinoza as a sketch
of his later metaphysical doctrine of divine
choice as the basis of contingency. This of
course bolsters Parkinson's attempt to dissolve
Russell's charge that Leibniz was secretly a
Spinozist but publicly a pluralist.
Parkinson's interest in the 'positive' concept
of freedom makes him something of a rarity in
an Anglo-American tradition sceptical of it.
His interest extends beyond its manifestations
in the systems of Spinoza and Leibniz to the
philosophies of Hegel and Marx, as well as to
the Marxist Georg Lukacs. In his largely expos-
itory but well regarded Georg Lukacs (1977)
Parkinson presents his subject as grappling
749
PARKINSON
throughout his works with one of the most
important problems in Marxist theory, namely
the tension between communism's opposition
to class oppression on the one hand and its
attack on bourgeois liberty on the other. This
work, along with edited collections of papers
on Lukacs (1970) and on more contemporary
Marxist thought (1989), are acknowledged as
having disseminated the thought of Lukacs as
well as of other twentieth-century Marxists to
a wider academic audience, though external,
political developments rather than logic have in
some respects dissipated interest in this area.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Spinoza's Theory of Knowledge (Oxford,
1954).
Logic and Reality in Leibniz's Metaphysics
(Oxford, 1965).
Leibniz on Human Freedom (Wiesbaden,
1970).
Georg Lukacs (1977).
(Ed. and trans.), Leibniz: De summa rerum:
Metaphysical Papers, 1675-76 (New
Haven, 1992).
(Gen. ed. with Stuart Shanker), Routledge
History of Philosophy, 10 vols (1993-9).
(Ed. and trans.), Spinoza, Ethics (Oxford,
2000).
Other Relevant Works
'Language and Knowledge in Spinoza',
Inquiry, vol. 1 (1969), pp. 15-40.
'Science and Metaphysics in the Leibniz-
Newton Controversy', Studia Leibnitiana
Supplementa, vol. 2 (1969), pp. 79-112.
George Lukacs: The Man, his Work and his
Ideas (1970).
'Spinoza on the Power and Freedom of Man',
The Monist, vol. 55 (1971), pp. 527-53.
'Hegel's Concept of Freedom', in G.N.A.
Vesey (ed.), Reason and Reality (1972),
pp. 174-95.
'Leibniz's Paris Writings in Relation to
Spinoza', Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa,
vol. 18 (1978), pp. 73-89.
'Spinoza on the Freedom of Man and the
PARKINSON
Freedom of the Citizen', in Z. Pelczynski
and J. Gray (eds), Conceptions of Liberty
in Political Philosophy (1984), pp. 39-56.
'Hegel, Marx and the Cunning of Reason',
Philosophy, vol. 64 (1989), pp. 287-302.
'Leibniz's Philosophical Aims: Foundation-
Laying or Problem Solving', in Mathesis
rationis: Festschrift fur Heinrich Schepers
(Minister, 1990), pp. 67-78.
'Substantial Forms in the "Systeme
Nouveau" and Related Works', in R.
Woolhouse (ed.), Leibniz's 'New System'
(1695) (Florence, 1996), pp. 123-39.
Further Reading
Brown, S.C., Leibniz (Brighton, 1984).
Feldman, Fred, 'Leibniz's Commitment to
Monism', Idealistic Studies, vol. 3 (1973),
pp. 18-31.
Joachim, H.H., A Study of the "Ethics" of
Spinoza (Oxford, 1901).
, Spinoza's 'Tractatus de Intellectus
Emendatione' (Oxford, 1940).
O'Briant, Walter H., 'Leibniz's Preference for
an Intensional Logic (A Reply to Mr.
Parkinson)', Notre Dame Journal of
Formal Logic, vol. 8 (1967), pp. 254-6.
Russell, Bertrand, A Critical Exposition of
the Philosophy of Leibniz, 2nd edn (1937).
David Scott
PATON, Herbert James (1887-1969)
Herbert James Paton was born in Abernethy,
Perthshire on 30 March 1887 and died in
nearby Bridge of Earn on 2 August 1969. He
was the son of William Macalister, an
Abernethy clergyman, and Jean Robertson
Millar, of a family which came from Paisley. He
was educated at the High School of Glasgow
and at the University of Glasgow, where he
took an MA in 1908. That same year, he
750
entered, as Snell Exhibitioner and Newlands
Scholar, Balliol College, Oxford, where he
obtained an MA in 1914. He was appointed
fellow at Queen's College, Oxford and pra-
elector in classics and philosophy from 1911 to
1927; he served as Dean from 1917 to 1922
and junior proctor from 1920 to 1921. He was
Laura Spelman Rockefeller Research Fellow at
the University of California at Berkeley from
1925 to 1926. He was Professor of Logic and
Rhetoric at the University of Glasgow from
1927 to 1937 and Dean of the Faculty of Arts
from 1935 to 1937. He received a DLitt from
Balliol College, Oxford in 1933. Paton was
White's Professor of Moral Philosophy and
fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford from
1937 to 1952, curator of the Bodleian Library
from 1938 to 1952, and professor emeritus
from 1952 to 1969. He was Forwood Lecturer
at the University of Liverpool from 1948 to
1946, Gifford Lecturer at St Andrews from
1949 to 1951, and visiting professor at the
University of Toronto in 1955. Paton achieved
many other academic honours, including an
honorary degree of DLitt from the University of
Edinburgh, and degrees of LL D from the uni-
versities of Glasgow, St Andrews and Toronto;
he was honorary fellow of Queen's College
and honorary fellow of Corpus Christi College,
both at Oxford. He acted as Crown Assessor
on Court at the University of St Andrews from
1953 to 1960. He was fellow of the British
Academy, member of the Mind Association,
member (and past President) of the Aristotelian
Society, and editor of the philosophical division
of Hutchinson Publishing Group's University
Library.
Paton served in several key positions outside
academia including, during World War I, in the
Intelligence Division of the British Admiralty
from 1914 to 1919, on the Sub-Commission
for Polish Affairs in Paris as British represen-
tative in 1919 and, during World War II, in the
Foreign Research and Press Service (after 1943,
Foreign Office Research Department) from
1939 to 1944. He was member of the Executive
Committee of the League of Nations Union

from 1939 to 1948. Paton was a member of the
congregation of the Church of Scotland.
Paton's first book, entitled The Good Will,
published in 1927, is primarily a work of
idealist ethics that bears the influence of
Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, the
Italian idealists, as well as the tradition of
English idealism. It has the subtitle A Study in
the Coherence Theory of Goodness, and in it
Paton argues that, just as the concept of truth
can be understood in terms of coherence - i.e.
the truth of a proposition consists in its being
a member of a coherent and consistent system
of other propositions - so can the concept of
goodness be understood in terms of coherent
willing. To be good, according to Paton, is to
will (or to be willed) coherently. His theory
possesses the virtue of emphasizing, vis-a-vis
willing, the priority of the whole over its parts,
that is that an act of will may be identified only
in terms of its relationship with a body - what
Paton calls 'a policy' - of other such acts. On
the other hand, his theory possesses the vice of
being obscure, failing as it does to explain why
a coherent will is a good will. It also leaves
unclear what other things are important besides
these coherence relationships between acts of
will, for it seems unlikely that one can develop
a plausible theory of goodness by holding that
the network of relationships is all that we have.
Paton is best known for his scholarly work
on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, espe-
cially his penetrating two-volume study (that
extends only to the end of the analytic) of
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, entitled Kant's
Metaphysics of Experience, published in 1936.
One characteristic of this work is its close
fidelity to the original text - it discusses in
painstaking detail virtually every passage in the
first half of the Critique. This has the advantage
of genuinely representing Kant's thought and
shedding light on the Kantian text in terms
that Kant himself might have found intelligible,
in his own language so to speak. However, it
has the disadvantage that it exposes Paton's
commentary to the criticism that it lacks suffi-
cient critical distance, and to the complaint
751
PATON
that to expound Kant's views in Kantian or
near-Kantian terms fails to explain them.
Another characteristic of Paton's commentary
is its attempt to move away from the standard
interpretations of the time including those of
Edward Caird, Harold Arthur PRICHARD, and
Norman KEMP SMITH. These commentators
view Kant as significantly confused, unclear
and inconsistent, whereas Paton sees him as
intelligible, clear and consistent in general.
Kemp Smith, influenced by the ideas of German
commentators such as Erich Adickes and Hans
Vaihinger, sees the Critique in a way as a patch-
work of segments that were written at signifi-
cantly different periods and lack internal con-
sistency. In contrast, Paton challenges the
patchwork thesis and claims that the Critique
has a coherent and unitary structure. Some
might argue that it is one thing to claim that
Kant is clear and consistent, and another to
show how this is so. Paton, according to critics,
has a tendency to do the former but fails to
accomplish the latter. It must be added that
Paton rightly never claims that the Critique
makes for easy reading - at one point he likens
picking one's way through the Transcendental
Deduction to crossing a vast desert.
As White's Professor of Moral Philosophy,
Paton had the opportunity to shift his focus to
Kant's ethics. His Categorical Imperative, a
commentary on the Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals, was published in 1947.
Like his commentary on the first part of the
Critique, this work is extremely useful up to a
point. Paton manages to sort out the difficult-
to-understand and dated psychological termi-
nology in which Kant formulates much of his
argument. Consequently, bewildered readers
tend to find not insignificant enlightenment in
Paton's rendering of the text. On the other
hand, at just this point the reader arguably
begins to notice a lack of critical distance from
the original text. Nonetheless, Paton's
Categorical Imperative remains one of the best
English commentaries of Kant's Groundwork.
More generally, while his commentaries on
Kant have been much criticized, they yet remain
PATON
classics of Kantian exegesis, containing much
insight and serving to liberate the difficult texts
for analysis.
The Moral Law, published in 1948, if not
aptly entitled, nonetheless is a clear and solid
translation of the Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals accompanied by
succinct useful commentary. In Defence of
Reason, published in 1951, is a collection of
some of Paton's most important papers, which
were published independently over a period of
twenty-seven years, from 1922 to 1948 (inclu-
sive). There are a total of fourteen pieces
included in this work, which does not have a
single overarching thesis; though if there is a
single thread running through this collection it
is Paton's concern with reason, in the context
of the philosophy of Kant. Several papers stand
out. The central piece, 'Is the Transcendental
Deduction a Patchwork?', challenges the
general approach to the Critique adopted by
Kemp Smith and his German forerunners. 'The
Key to Kant's Deduction of the Categories'
questions the 'official' doctrine, maintained
again by Kemp Smith among others, that for
Kant the forms of judgement are forms of
analytic judgement only. The papers 'Can
Reason be Practical?' and 'Kant's Idea of Good'
served as preliminary studies for Paton's
Categorical Imperative. Finally, on a separate
note, 'Fashion and Philosophy' is a criticism of
Oxford analytic philosophy. Interestingly,
Gilbert RYLE - one of the champions of ana-
lytical philosophy - was a student of Paton.
The Modern Predicament, published in
1955, is a wide-ranging monograph on the phi-
losophy of religion based on the Gifford
Lectures which Paton presented at St Andrews.
His goal in this work is, from the point of view
of human experience and human ideals, to
attempt to formulate the 'principles' of religion
which, he explains, are designed to 'state the
conditions without which religion ceases to be
religion and becomes something altogether dif-
ferent' (Modern Predicament, p. 27). He main-
tains that religion, faced by science, is in a
predicament from which it can be rescued only
752
by a 'new effort of thinking', and so long as this
is lacking 'the modern world is bound to suffer
from a divided mind and from a conflict
between the heart and the head' (ibid., p. 115).
He regards the modern predicament as the
apparently 'unbridgeable gulf between science
and religion or - it might be better to say -
between knowledge and faith' (ibid., p. 374).
Borrowing from Martin Buber's / and Thou,
Paton maintains that 'religion and science are
not two rival theories professing to explain the
world in different ways' (ibid., p. 172). The
conflict between religion and science, Paton
maintains, is not so much a conflict of explicit
theories as 'a conflict of different attitudes in the
soul of each individual man [and woman]'
(ibid., p. 374). Paton's own view departs from
the experience of the individual and develops a
'critical philosophy' along; Kantian lines. 'A
critical philosophy can only leave beyond expe-
rience a blank in which by metaphysical
thinking we can obscurely conceive the exis-
tence of the unconditioned. On the basis of
moral conviction we may believe that this blank
may be filled by the existence of a holy God'
(ibid., p. 333). 'Religious principles can be con-
firmed only in the life of religion, just as scien-
tific principles can be confirmed only by a suc-
cessful pursuit of science' (ibid., p. 353).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Good Will: A Study in the Coherence
Theory of Goodness (1927).
Kant's Metaphysics of Experience: A
Commentary on the First Half of the Kritik
der reinen Vernunft, 2 vols (1936).
The Categorical Imperative: A Study in
Kant's Moral Philosophy (1947).
(Ed. and trans.), The Moral Law: Kant's
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
(1948).
In Defence of Reason (1951).
The Modern Predicament: A Study in the
Philosophy of Religion (1955).
Other Relevant Works
'Is the Transcendental Deduction a

Patchwork?', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society (1930).
The Key to Kant's Deduction of the
Categories', Mind, vol. 40 (1931), pp.
310-29.
(ed. with Raymond Klibansky), Philosophy
and History (Oxford, 1936).
Fashion & Philosophy (Oxford, 1937).
'Can Reason be Practical?' [Annual
Philosophical Lecture, Henriette Hertz
Trust of the British Academy], Proceedings
of the British Academy, vol. 29 (1943), pp.
65-105; and separately as monograph
(1946).
'Kant's Idea of Good', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society (1944).
Immortality (Berkeley, 1956).
Kant on Friendship (1957).
The Claim of Scotland (1968).
Further Reading
Anon., The Times, 5 August 1969, p. 10.
Brown, Stuart, Diane Collinson and Robert
Wilkinson (eds), Biographical Dictionary
of Twentieth-Century Philosophers (1996),
pp. 601-602.
Contemporary Authors Online (Farmington
Hills, Michigan, 2003). Reproduced in
Biography Resource Center (2003),
http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC,
accessed November 2004.
Cross, R.C., The Modern Predicament',
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 6 (1956), pp.
359-65.
Lewis, Hywel David (ed.), Contemporary
British Philosophers: Personal Statements,
3rdser. (1956), pp. 337-54.
Walsh, W.H., 'Herbert James Paton:
1887-1969', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 56 (1970), pp. 293-308.
Enrique Chavez-Arvizo
753
PAUL
PAUL, George Andrew (1912-62)
George Andrew Paul was born in Corsock,
Dumfriesshire on 18 May 1912 and died in a
sailing accident on Coniston Water in the Lake
District. He undertook his higher education at
the University of St Andrews and then at
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he gained
his PhD. In 1939 he was appointed as research
fellow at Trinity College. In the same year he
travelled to Australia and found himself
stranded there on the outbreak of World
War II. He subsequently obtained a post as
lecturer in philosophy at Melbourne University,
where he remained until 1945. From 1945 until
his death he was fellow in philosophy at
University College, Oxford.
Paul wrote very little, confining himself to
articles in such journals as Mind and the
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, and
contributing chapters to larger collections. In
his last post at University College he taught
moral, political and ancient philosophy, but
his main influence in philosophy was in
Melbourne, where he was the first lecturer in
Australia to run courses on WITTGENSTEIN. His
lectures on Wittgenstein were packed, as
students and staff from outside the Philosophy
Department came to hear them.
In 1936 Paul published his most influential
article, which combined influences from the
British analytic tradition and from
Wittgenstein. He was thus primarily interested
in meaning, and particularly in the logical status
of statements about sense-data. In his article he
said that talk of sense-data should be construed
linguistically rather than ontologically. Such
statements take the form that they do on
grounds of convenience, but take us no nearer
to a description and an understanding of
reality. Paul's later work in political and social
philosophy took an approach similar to that of
the Oxford philosophy of 'ordinary language'
begun by J.L. AUSTIN.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Analysis of Sense Data', Analysis, vol. 3
PAUL
(1935), pp. 12-20.
'Is There a Problem about Sense Data?',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 15 (1936), pp. 61-77.
'Lenin's Theory of Perception', Analysis, vol.
5 (1938), pp. 65-73.
Review of L.S. Stebbing, Philosophy and the
Physicists, Mind, vol. 47 (1938), pp.
361-76.
'The Problem of Guilt', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 21 (1947),
pp. 209-18.
'Democracy', Chamber's Encyclopaedia, vol.
4 (1950).
Chapters on Moore and Wittgenstein, in A.J.
Ayer (ed.), Revolution in Philosophy
(1957).
Further Reading
Grave, S.A., A History of Philosophy in
Australia (1984).
Kathryn L. Plant
PEACOCKE, Christopher (1950-)
Christopher Peacocke was born in Birmingham
on 22 May 1950. His father, Arthur Peacocke,
had a highly distinguished career, working both
as a biochemist and theologian. As an under-
graduate, Christopher Peacocke studied PPE
at Exeter College, Oxford (1968-71), where his
philosophy tutors were Christopher Kirwan
and John Cottingham, taking his BA with first
class honours in philosophy and economics.
After a year as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard
University, he returned to Oxford in 1972 to
study for the BPhil in philosophy under the
supervision of Dana Scott, first at Merton
College, and from 1973 as a junior research
fellow at Queen's College, winning a distinction
in the BPhil in 1974. He then began working o.
his doctorate, under the supervision of Michael
754
DUMMETT, and in 1975 was elected to a prize
fellowship at All Souls College. He was
awarded his doctorate in 1979, and in the same
year took up a permanent lectureship at Oxford
University and a tutorial fellowship at New
College, Oxford. In 1985 he was appointed to
the Susan Stebbing Professorship of Philosophy
at King's College London, and in 1989 to the
Waynflete Professorship of Metaphysical
Philosophy at Oxford. He was elected a fellow
of the British Academy in 1990, and held a
Leverhulme Research Professorship from 1996
until 2000. In 2000 he left Oxford to become
a Professor of Philosophy at New York
University, and in 2004 he became a Professor
of Philosophy at Columbia University.
While he was a research fellow at Oxford in
the 1970s Peacocke was a member of a dis-
cussion group that included three other slightly
older philosophers: Gareth EVANS, John
MCDOWELL and Crispin WRIGHT (the meetings
of this group are described in McDowell's
preface to Evans's posthumously published
masterpiece, The Varieties of Reference}. Of
these three, Peacocke seems to have been closest
in his philosophical interests and orientation to
Evans. Like Evans and unlike Wright, he has
always been a realist, opposing Dummett's anti-
realism in the philosophy of language, and
defending the idea that the understanding of a
statement essentially involves knowledge of its
truth-conditions; he also sided with Evans in
supposing that the study of thought was more
philosophically fundamental than the study of
language. Like Evans and unlike McDowell, he
has always believed that philosophers should
aim to formulate rigorous philosophical
theories that will give substantive philosophical
explanations of phenomena that genuinely
demand explanation; and like Evans, he
believed that one test that a good philosophical
theory should meet is that it: should be capabl.
of being integrated with the best empirical
theories in related areas (such as linguistic and
psychological theories).
His first book, Holistic Explanation (1979),
was an exploration of structural parallels

between broadly Strawsonian insights into our
thought about space and perception, on the
one hand, and broadly Davidsonian insights
into our interpretative thought about mental
states and action; it contained an argument in
favour of the token identity theory (the identi-
fication of particular mental events with par-
ticular physical events), as well as an attempt at
solving the problem that Davidson despaired of
solving, the problem of 'deviant causal chains'.
His second book, Sense and Content (1983),
was concerned with the nature of experience,
and the role of experience in the nature of
thought in general. The first chapter, which
has been widely reprinted, defended the claim
that experience has purely 'sensational' features
as well as intentional content; the book also
contained a notable discussion of first-person
thought (thought of the kind that the thinker
would naturally express using the first-person
pronoun T).
His third book, Thoughts (1986), was con-
cerned with what makes it the case that our
thoughts have the content that they have. He
described his orientation towards this question
as one of 'manifestationism without anti-
realism': like Dummett, he believed that the
content of our thoughts must be capable of
being 'manifested'; but unlike Dummett, he
insisted on a realist interpretation of thought
(which would make it possible for the content
of a thought to be true even if it is unverifiable).
He aimed to develop this idea by suggesting
that the contents of thought are individuated by
their 'canonical acceptance conditions' - the
conditions under which a thinker is entitled to
accept the content in question, or the further
contents that judging that content commits the
thinker to accepting. The last two chapters of
the book include a discussion of knowledge,
including an attempt to explain why the famous
'Gettier cases' do not count as knowledge.
His fourth book, A Study of Concepts
(1992), continued focusing on the content of
thought, by developing a general theory of
concepts. Here the 'manifestationist' idea is
replaced by the idea that a concept is individ-
755
PEACOCKE
uated by its possession condition - that is, by
the condition that a thinker must meet in order
to possess the concept. He also demanded that
a concept's possession condition must meet a
subtle sort of non-circularity constraint ('the
A(C) form'): in specifying this possession con-
dition, it is fine for the theorist to use the very
concept under discussion in the meta-language,
so long as the concept is not used in 'hyperin-
tensional' opaque contexts, where it specifies
the content of a thought or utterance; that
would presuppose what is to be accounted for
- what it is for a thought to involve that
concept (rather than any other concept).
In his later work he came to suspect that this
non-circularity constraint might be too strong.
But he still subscribed to his conviction that phi-
losophy should give rigorous substantive expla-
nations of phenomena that genuinely
demanded explanation, and that these expla-
nations would involve defending certain claims
about what it is for thought to have the content
that it has. The phenomena that he aimed to
explain in his next two books were to a large
degree epistemological. His fifth book, Being
Known (1999), concerns the general philo-
sophical problem of how to reconcile a plausi-
ble account of how we could acquire knowl-
edge in a given area of thought with a broadly
realist conception of truth in that area of
thought. The areas that he focuses on include
the past, metaphysical necessity, the intentional
contents of our own mental states, the self and
freedom of the will. In his sixth book, The
Realm of Reason (2004), he aimed to develop
a 'rationalist' epistemology, according to which
the most fundamental principles about what
entitles us to hold beliefs are all without excep-
tion a priori. He then applied this framework
to such classical problems as why perception
entitles us to form beliefs about our environ-
ment, the problem of induction and the
methods of moral thought.
Peacocke has published a large number of
articles on a wide range of topics beyond those
covered in these books. These include such
topics as the nature of logic, our thought about
PEACOCKE
causation, intention and akrasia, depiction in
the visual arts and the nature of the mental
phenomenon of attention. It is hard to think of
a British philosopher who made a greater con-
tribution to the subject in the last twenty-five
years of the twentieth century; there is every
sign that he will continue to make an equally
significant contribution in the first few decades
of the present century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Holistic Explanation (Oxford, 1979).
Sense and Content (Oxford, 1983).
Thoughts: A Study of Content (Oxford,
1986).
A Study of Concepts (Cambridge, Mass.,
1992).
Being Known (Oxford, 1999).
The Realm of Reason (Oxford, 2004).
Other Relevant Works
Evans, Gareth, The Varieties of Reference,
ed. John McDowell (Oxford, 1982).
Ralph Wedgwood
PEARS, David Francis (1921-)
David Pears was born in Bedfont, Middlesex on
8 August 1921. He was educated at
Westminster School and at Balliol College,
Oxford, where he took his BA in literae human-
lores with first class honours in 1947. Pears was
appointed as research lecturer at Christ Church,
Oxford in 1948 and remained there until 1950.
He took a fellowship in philosophy at Corpus
Christi College, Oxford from 1950 to 1960,
and was tutor in philosophy at Christ Church
from 1960 to 1988. Pears was made a fellow of
the British Academy in 1970. He became reader
in philosophy in 1972 and Professor of
Philosophy in 1985. He has held many visiting
professorships in the United States. After he
756
retired in 1988 Oxford made him an emeritus
professor. Pears was President of L'lnstitut
International de Philosophic from 1988 to
1991.
Pears has produced significant studies of
Aristotle, David Hume, Bertrand RUSSELL and
Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN. In 'Courage as Mean'
(1980) he has argued that since Aristotle's
account of the virtue of courage involves the
discrete feelings of fear and confidence, it
cannot lie in a mean in just the same fashion as
his other virtues. Furthermore, it is difficult to
see how any individual virtue could be placed
on two distinct scales. Pears has examined
many facets of Hume's work. He investigated
in 'Hume's Empiricism and Modern
Empiricism' (1963) the extent of the affinity
between Hume's and modern logical empiri-
cism. Pears's consideration of whether Hume
had a naturalistic explanation of the notion of
logical necessity focused on inferences and
demonstrated the affinities between demon-
strative and non-demonstrative reasoning in
terms of a straightforward account of associa-
tion. In 'Hume on Personal Identity' (1963)
Pears claimed that Hume had attempted to
produce a theory of personal identity within the
confines of an egocentric framework. However,
his introspection only discovered a succession
of variously related impressions and ideas, and
did not produce one of the self which is
supposed to have them. Hume's personal
identity theory is not realistic because it fails to
consider the spatial and temporal dimensions of
identity and does not adequately differentiate
between individuals. The deficiencies of
Hume's account probably indicate that it is not
possible to produce an egocentric type of
personal identity theory which is satisfactory.
Pears argued in Hume's System: An
Examination of the First Book of his Treatise
(1990) that Hume rejected both rationalism
and naive empiricism. His theory of ideas had
the dual function of being a theory of meaning
and of belief, and his complex empiricism
encompassed both theories. Pears claimed that
this empiricism obtained significant results even

though its basic methodology is flawed because
of the dependence on the notion of private
ideas. Hume's theories do not fit into a
standard taxonomy of the types of philosoph-
ical theory and they rely upon a refined kind of
naturalism which has some affinities with
Wittgenstein's. In Bertrand Russell and the
British Tradition in Philosophy (1967) Pears
traced the influence of the tradition of British
empiricism and Hume upon Russell's develop-
ing views from 1905 to 1919. Russell rejected
Hume's propensity for scepticism about the
external world because he held that there is
comprehensive scientific knowledge about this
world and any philosophy of mind which
threatens that knowledge. Bertrand Russell
(1972) is a general survey of his work, and
Russell's Logical Atomism (1972) considers
ramifications of his view that propositions
which ascribe phenomenal properties to sense-
data are atomic.
Pears argued in Wittgenstein (1971) that the
Tractatus logico-philosophicus should be
regarded in terms of Wittgenstein's aim of
showing the limits of language and indicating
how this delineation resolves the problems of
philosophy. In Wittgenstein's early works the
philosophy of mind received little discussion
because the primary focus of these works is a
logical and mathematical approach to the phi-
losophy of language. He held that thoughts
have an identical structure to the sentences
which express them but he did not try to
explain what constitutes a thought. The task of
philosophy is to create an abstract representa-
tion of language and logic, and is not con-
cerned with how the representation is exem-
plified in the real world. The objective of the
Tractatus of demonstrating language's limits,
and the significance of this for solving philo-
sophical problems is extended and modified in
the Philosophical Investigations. In his philos-
ophy of mind Wittgenstein sought to describe
the diversity of mental phenomena in a way
which recognized their specificity. His descrip-
tive method is suited to this area of philosophy
as mental phenomena exhibit a huge and subtle
757
PEARS
range of variation. Several themes which dom-
inated Wittgenstein's later work are the notions
of the various diverse modes of meaning, the
problems of definition, and the concept of phi-
losophy as therapy which liberates one from the
grip of false analogies. In 'Literalism and
Imagination: Wittgenstein's Deconstruction of
Traditional Philosophy' (2002) Pears claimed
that Wittgenstein did not proffer any philo-
sophical theories since he thought that they are
never explanatory. Pears in The False Prison: A
Study of the Development of Wittgenstein's
Philosophy (1987-8) charted the development
of Wittgenstein's ideas for resolving the
problems of solipsism and the application of
language to the world from the Tractatus to the
Philosophical Investigations. The objective of
Wittgenstein's criticism of solipsism is to
demonstrate that in its attempt to represent
what it sees as the truth, solipsism ceases to
have its intended meaning. Pears perceived
solipsism as the dominant theme of the
Tractatus. He claimed the critique of it in
Wittgenstein's early work was directed towards
the identification of the conscious subject, and
that only in his later philosophy was it extended
to the identification of the objects of immedi-
ate consciousness. In the case of the application
of language, Wittgenstein replaced the postu-
lated contact between a name and the object
that it names with an account of a rule which
is anti-platonic and naturalistic in character.
Pears maintained that two critical requirements
for having a language are the ability to appeal
to public objects and to other's judgements.
He regarded the interpretation of Wittgenstein's
private language arguments in terms of the
practices of a community of language users as
unsatisfactory as it solely focuses on the latter.
Pears claimed that the philosophy of mind
stands at the centre of all philosophy for every-
thing is mediated through the mind, and he
has been very influential in this field. In
Predicting and Deciding (1975) Pears examined
the relationship between an individual's delib-
eration and another person's prediction of the
result of that deliberation. If one attempts
PEARS
inductively to predict the results of one's delib-
eration, it seems as though the individual is
trying to view the matter as another would
perceive it. Pears argued that the gap between
decision and action cannot be bridged without
the employment of inductive argumentation,
and this even applies to the case where it is
solely the contribution of the individual to a
particular outcome that is in question. The
issue of whether the connection between
wanting and doing is a causal one is considered
by Pears in a 'Sketch for a Causal Theory of
Wanting and Doing' (1975). He focused upon
the difficulties of attempting to fit an individ-
ual's knowledge into a causal framework which
related wanting to doing, and argued that there
is an invalid inference from the idea that a
belief is caused in a particular way to the idea
that this belief is unreasonable. In Freedom
and the Will (1963) Pears regarded the link
between determinism and free will as central to
the problem of free will. Important questions
about what happens in an individual prior to
action, such as how the sequence of delibera-
tion and decision runs, have not been properly
addressed when there has been an adherence to
an unrealistic and overly simplistic theory of the
will, and therefore a theory of this kind must be
avoided. Pears investigated individual actions
from the standpoint of the tradition which
maintains the compatibility of determinism and
free will in 'Rational Explanation of Actions
and Psychological Determinism' (1973). He
argued that explaining actions in terms of indi-
vidual's reasons tends in the direction of a goal
of deterministic explanation and provides some
support for this tradition. Pears is especially
well known for his work on motivated irra-
tionality and he has contended that philoso-
phers have tended to exaggerate human ratio-
nality. Motivated Irrationality (1984) examined
the idea of acting irrationally in a manner moti-
vated by wishes. Unconscious motivation and
self-deception roughly correlate to the situa-
tion where a wish biases the process of forming
rational beliefs, and generates irrational ones.
Weakness of the will approximately matches
758
the case where a wish biases the process of
rational deliberation and action, and produces
actions which go against an individual's better
judgement.
Pears has also made important contributions
to epistemology and metaphysics. In 'The
Problem of Universals' (1951) he argued that
ostensible explanations of universals are
actually only clumsy restatements of the facts
that they were introduced to account for. These
explanations appear substantial because they
commonly take the form of accounting for a
specific fact in general terms. Pears claimed in
'Incompatibilities of Colours' (1953) that the
sentence 'Nothing can be red and green all
over' is neither analytic rior synthetic but
actually expresses a desigriatory rule about
colours which depends upon the verbal rules
for the use of colour words. In What is
Knowledge? (1971) Pears espoused neoclassi-
cal empiricism. He distinguished knowledge
into three types, namely factual knowledge,
knowing how to do things, and knowledge by
acquaintance, and differentiated reasons for
knowledge into a priori arid inductive ones.
Pears examined scepticism about sense-data in
'A Comparison Between Ayer's View About
the Privileges of Sense-Datum Statements and
the Views of Russell and Austin' (1979). He
claimed the fact that social reasons function in
such a way as to let one have the last word on
the character of one's sense-data dispels the
puzzle about why it is always possible that
one's statement about one's sense-data could be
incorrect. This fact comprises part of the basis
of the common intuition that one is the final
authority on the nature of one's sense-data,
and the intuition has no place in philosophical
theories which eliminate its support by regard-
ing the truth or falsity of every sense-data state-
ment as a matter for scientific investigation. In
The Nature of Metaphysics (1957) the objective
of metaphysics is deemed to be the production
of a conceptual framework that applies to all
experience and does full justice to all its aspects,
but Pears states that no single metaphysical
system can achieve this goal. Metaphysical

systems resolve the difficulty of failing to meet
the objective of metaphysics by recommending
a partial system of concepts, and regarding it as
the final satisfactory framework for describing
and explaining reality whilst every other partial
system is counted as being a useful but not
wholly reliable framework. Each system rec-
ommends a particular conceptual framework
and, characteristically, metaphysics is the
activity of conceptual revision. Pears presented
a minimal formulation of the thesis that exis-
tence is not a predicate in 'Is Existence a
Predicate?' (1963). He claimed that if the
subject of a singular statement referentially
implies existence and its verb asserts existence,
this will be a referential tautology, and if its
verb denies existence, this will be a referential
contradiction provided the following three con-
ditions hold. These are that implication and
assertion are about the same worlds, times and
levels. It is possible to extend this minimal for-
mulation to cover general existence statements,
but all versions of the formulation have the
defect that they depend on a notion of reference
which has not been analysed.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'The Problem of Universals', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 1 (1951), pp. 218-27.
'Incompatibilities of Colours', in Antony
Flew (ed.), Logic and Language, 2nd ser.
(Oxford, 1953), pp. 112-22.
(Ed.), The Nature of Metaphysics (1957).
(Ed.), David Hume: A Symposium (1963).
(Ed.), Freedom and the Will (1963).
'Is Existence a Predicate?', Aquinas Papers,
vol. 38 (1963), pp. 3-8.
Bertrand Russell and the British Tradition in
Philosophy (1967).
What is Knowledge? (1971).
Wittgenstein (1971).
(Ed.), Bertrand Russell (New York, 1972).
(Ed.), Russell's Logical Atomism (1972).
Questions in the Philosophy of Mind (1975).
'A Comparison Between Ayer's View About
the Privileges of Sense-Datum Statements
and the Views of Russell and Austin', in
759
PEARS
Graham Macdonald (ed.), Perception and
Identity (1979), pp. 61-83.
'Courage as a Mean', in Amelie Rorty (ed.),
Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (Berkeley,
1980), pp. 171-87.
Motivated Irrationality (Oxford, 1984).
The False Prison: A Study of the
Development of Wittgenstein's Philosophy,
vols 1 and 2 (Oxford, 1987-8).
Hume's System: An Examination of the First
Book of his Treatise (Oxford, 1990).
'The Ego and the Eye: Wittgenstein's Use of
an Analogy', Grazer Philosophische
Studien, vol. 44 (1993), pp. 59-68.
'Literalism and Imagination: Wittgenstein's
Deconstruction of Traditional Philosophy',
International Journal of Philosophical
Studies, vol. 10 (2002), pp. 3-16.
Other Relevant Works
'Causes and Objects of Some Feelings and
Psychological Reactions', Ratio, vol. 4
(1962), pp. 91-111.
'Hume's Empiricism and Modern
Empiricism', in David Hume: A
Symposium, pp. 11-30.
'Hume on Personal Identity', in David Hume:
A Symposium, pp. 43-54.
'Ifs and Cans 1', Canadian Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 1 (1971), pp. 249-74.
'Ifs and Cans 2', Canadian Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 1 (1972), pp. 369-91.
'Rational Explanation of Actions and
Psychological Determinism', in Ted
Honderich (ed.), Essays on Freedom of
Action (1973), pp. 105-36.
'The Appropriate Causation of Intentional
Basic Actions', Critica, vol. 7 (1975), pp.
39-69.
'Hume's Account of Personal Identity',
Philosophic Exchange, vol. 2 (1975), pp.
15-26.
'Sketch for a Causal Theory of Wanting and
Doing', in Questions in the Philosophy of
Mind, pp. 97-141.
'Predicting and Deciding', in Questions in the
Philosophy of Mind, pp. 13-38.
PEARS
The Causal Condition of Perception',
Synthese, vol. 33 (1976), pp. 25-40
The Naturalism of Book 1 of Hume's
Treatise of Human Nature\ Proceedings of
the British Academy, vol. 62 (1976), pp.
249-68.
The Goals and Strategies of Self-Deception',
in Jon Elster (ed.), The Multiple Self
(Cambridge, 1985), pp. 59-78.
'Wittgenstein's Holism', Dialectica, vol. 44
(1990), pp. 165-73.
'Hume on Personal Identity', Hume Studies,
vol. 19 (1993), pp. 289-99.
'Wittgenstein's Naturalism', The Monist, vol.
78 (1995), pp. 411-24.
Further Reading
Charles, David and William Child (eds),
Wittgensteinian Themes: Essays in Honour
of David Pears (Oxford, 2001).
Mark Addis
PEARSON, Karl (1857-1936)
Karl Pearson was born in London on 27 March
1857 and died there on 27 April 1936. The son
of William Pearson, QC, of the Inner Temple,
and his wife Fanny, nee Smith - both of
Yorkshire descent - he was educated at
University College School, then had a year with
a private tutor before going to King's College,
Cambridge in 1875 to study mathematics. At
Cambridge he studied mathematical physics
under teachers of the calibre of James Clerk
Maxwell, Isaac Todhunter, Arthur Cayley, and
Sir George Stokes, and graduated third
Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos of 1879.
He became a fellow of King's College in 1880,
and used the income from his fellowship to
travel to Germany, studying at Heidelberg and
Berlin. His earliest publications, both anony-
mous, reflect his love of German history and
760
culture: The New Werther appeared in 1880,
and The Trinity: A Nineteenth Century Passion
Play followed in 1882. Pearson studied law,
and was called to the bar in 1882, but he never
practised.
In 1884 Pearson was appointed Goldsmid
Professor of Applied Mathematics and
Mechanics at University College London
(UCL). In addition to his teaching duties, he
was working on two substantial editorial tasks,
preparing for publication a collection of the
papers of his late friend William Kingdom
Clifford and the major work of his teacher at
Cambridge, Todhunter. Clifford's The
Common Sense of the Exact Sciences appeared
in 1885; the two volumes of Todhunter's mon
umental A History of the Theory of Elasticity
and the Strength of Materials from Galileo to
the Present Time followed in 1886 and 1893
Pearson's first significant publication in his
own right was a collection oi essays, The Ethic
of Freethought (1888). It includes essays on
'Humanism in Germany', The Enthusiasm of
the Market Place and of the Study', The Moral
Basis of Socialism', The Woman's Question'
and 'Matter and Soul'. The unifying idea
behind the volume was Pearson's devotion to
science, and his passionate conviction that only
scientific methods offered any prospect of
finding solutions to pressing social and politi-
cal problems.
In 1891 he was appointed Professor of
Geometry at Gresham College, once home of
the early Royal Society. His teaching duties
were not onerous, and gave him the opportu-
nity to present his views on the philosophy of
science to a non-specialist audience. It was from
these lecture notes that The Grammar of
Science (1892) was born. In later courses at
Gresham College, Pearson presented the
elements of the theory of probability with a
wealth of illustrations and applications - he
was, by all accounts, a charismatic and com-
pelling teacher.
Until about 1890 Pearson's scientific interests
had been primarily in mathematical physics.
In 1891, however, Walter Frank Raphael

Weldon was appointed Professor of Zoology at
UCL. Under the influence of Francis Galton,
Weldon had become one of the first zoologists
to apply statistical methods to traditional
problems of biology such as inheritance. For
further assistance in the development of the
statistical tools he needed, Weldon turned to his
new colleague Pearson. Through Weldon,
Pearson was introduced to Galton, and soon
became an enthusiastic convert to Galton's
ideas. Although Pearson continued to lecture on
mechanics and applied mathematics until 1911,
his prodigious energy was now increasingly
given over to the mathematization of biology.
The year 1893 saw the appearance of the first
of a long series of papers entitled 'Mathematical
Contributions to the Theory of Evolution', pub-
lished mainly in the Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society. A more popular account
of some of the same themes is provided in The
Chances of Death and Other Studies in
Evolution (1897). Recognition and honours
came thick and fast: FRS in 1896, the Darwin
Medal of the Royal Society in 1898, followed
by numerous lesser grants, honours and
awards.
Weldon, Pearson and their disciples some-
times experienced difficulties in having papers
accepted for publication in the existing scientific
journals - not all the established biologists
welcomed the invasion of their field by the sta-
tisticians. In response to these difficulties,
Galton, Weldon and Pearson jointly launched
the journal Biometrika in 1901. The new
journal was filled with tables and graphs of
statistical data, and detailed accounts of statis-
tical techniques and their applications to
biology. Pearson edited the journal, and con-
tributed many papers of his own to its pages.
The famous chi-squared test of statistical sig-
nificance is perhaps his most well-known con-
tribution to the toolkit of the modern statisti-
cian.
After Weldon's death in 1906, Pearson's
interests turned increasingly, under the influ-
ence of Galton, towards eugenics. Pearson had
long been a frank and unapologetic racist;
761
PEARSON
Galton's eugenics seemed to him to provide a
scientific basis for such prejudices. Although an
enthusiastic socialist and humanist, Pearson
explicitly denies that the sense of human soli-
darity should lead a modern European to sym-
pathize with, for example, Native Americans or
Australian Aborigines. When Galton died in
1911, he endowed a special Chair of Eugenics
at UCL - not surprisingly, Pearson was its firs
incumbent. From 1911 until his retirement in
1933, Pearson was to devote his energies to
the establishment of a new research institute,
the Francis Galton Laboratory for National
Eugenics. He also devoted much labour to a
weighty three-volume biography of his friend
and mentor, The Life, Letters, and Labours of
Francis Galton (1914,1924 and 1930).
Pearson's family life was quite conventional.
In 1890 he married Maria Sharpe, a solicitor's
daughter, by whom he had one son, Egon (who
would succeed his father as Professor of
Statistics at UCL) and two daughters. When
Maria died in 1928, Pearson married Margaret
Child, a co-worker in his laboratory. Pearson
resigned his chair in 1933, and died in 1936,
aged seventy-nine.
The Grammar of Science owes a substantial
debt to the sensationalism of Ernst Mach,
which itself can be traced to the empiricism of
Berkeley and Hume. Pearson is happy to
acknowledge this debt, citing Mach's Beitrage
zur Analyse der Empfindungen (1883), and
two of Mach's articles in the Monist. Science,
Pearson tells us, begins with the co-occurrences
and sequences of sensible qualities in the course
of our experience, and proceeds to the articu-
lation of symbolic representations of those co-
occurrences and successions at the level of
theory. The role of theory is to provide the
most accurate and economical description of
the facts of experience - one must not assume
that theoretical terms such as 'atom' or 'aether'
denote anything independently real. Traditional
textbook definitions of mass ('quantity of
matter') and force ('cause of motion') are objec-
tionably obscure and metaphysical, and must
be replaced by definitions that refer only to
PEARSON
elements given in experience. As for the so-
called 'laws' of nature, they are mere descrip-
tions of observed regularities in the course of
experience, to be assessed in terms of their com-
prehensiveness and simplicity. The aim of
science is economical description and accurate,
well-grounded prediction (often probabilistic in
form); there is no reason to assume that the sci-
entist penetrates to those supposed hidden
essences and causes which, on realist accounts
of science, provide explanations of the phe-
nomena. The sensationalism of Pearson and
Mach is a clear precursor of the accounts of
science given by the logical positivists of the
Vienna Circle.
With the exception of a favourable review in
the Monist, the early critical reception of the
Grammar was hostile. Pearson's anti-meta-
physical outlook seemed positively to invite
misunderstandings. Since Pearson asserts - pre-
sumably on the basis of experience - that con-
sciousness is only ever produced in a material
brain and nervous system, he is attacked by St
George Mivart in the Fortnightly Review as a
dogmatic materialist. In his polemical
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, however,
Lenin denounces Mach and Pearson as
Berkeleyan idealists! Other critics focused on
the apparent incoherence in Pearson's notion of
sensation. Can there be unsensed sensations?
Pearson thinks that the answer is 'yes', but this,
objects the anonymous reviewer in Mind,
betrays the principles of empiricism and turns
the sensation into a thing-in-itself, independent
of its relation to the perceiving mind. A similar
objection is voiced by Charles Sanders Peirce,
who insists that the 'sensations' of Mach and
Pearson are theoretical entities posited by psy-
chologists, not objects given in immediate expe-
rience. Our immediate experience, says Peirce,
is of tables and chairs, trees and houses, not of
sensations. Other critics press Pearson on the
topic of other minds. Bodies, according to
Pearson, are mere 'constructs', i.e. mental com-
binations of present sense-impressions with
past or stored ones and, of course, anticipations
of future ones. But the minds supposedly asso-
762
ciated with other human bodies are never
objects of my experience at all - it is hard to see
how a pure sensationalism can avoid solipsism.
To establish objectivity, writes E.A. Singer in
The Philosophical Review, Pearson needs the
notion of a normal human observer; this
requires comparing one's own sensations with
those of others; but those supposed 'others'
can't be assumed to have independent reality of
their own, distinct from one's own experience.
The founding otBiometrika in 1901 marked
the beginning of a new era in the biological
sciences. The use of mathematical methods in
biology is now completely uncontroversial, and
all botanists, zoologists and ecologists receive
basic training in statistics. In this respect,
Weldon and Pearson changed the face of
biology. The biometricians weighed, measured
and counted everything that could be weighed,
measured or counted, and produced vast tables
and graphs summarizing their data. Pearson
spent ages, for example, measuring human
skulls, no doubt with supposed relations
between brain size and intelligence in mind. By
gathering data regarding the distribution of a
trait in a population, the variation in the dis-
tribution of a trait in successive generations, or
the transmission of a trait down a lineage, the
biometricians hoped to be able to spell out the
purely empirical laws of heredity. This led to a
vigorous and heated controversy with the
Mendelians, led by the formidable figure of
Bateson. The biometricians sought purely
empirical, descriptive laws of heredity; the
Mendelians searched for the underlying causal
mechanisms involved. The biometricians
accepted from Darwin the maxim Natura non
facit saltum, the Mendelians' 'unit characters'
seemed to involve discrete jumps. In fact, the
whole controversy was unnecessary. On the
methodological issue, there can be no incon-
sistency between one programme which
searches for empirical regularities and another
programme which searches for an underlying
mechanism: the two approaches are comple-
mentary rather than antagonistic. As for the
vexed issue of continuity, once we understand

that a given phenotypic trait usually results
from the contributions of many genes, plus a
variety of environmental factors, it is easy to see
how the Mendelians' 'unit characters' could
be reconciled with, for example, a normal dis-
tribution curve for the distribution of a trait
among a population. Discrete units at the level
of the genotype (genes) are perfectly consistent
with continuity at the level of the phenotype
(manifest traits).
Pearson was convinced, from his student
days, that social and political problems could
only be solved by the application of science.
Although he advocated a form of socialism, it
was far removed from more familiar socialist
creeds. Pearson's socialism was based on a
'social instinct' by which each individual cares
about the good of the clan, tribe or nation.
The Darwinian mechanism of evolution by
natural selection, Pearson argues, can foster
such social instincts through the struggle of
group against group. A group held together by
strong 'social instincts' will triumph over a
more loosely knit group in the struggle for
scarce resources. A scientific morality, Pearson
thought, must be based on recognition of such
biological facts. What is good is what is good
for the group; this may require selective
breeding from the 'best' stocks and the segre-
gation or sterilization of the 'worst', for
example the feeble-minded. Within the state,
we thus have the basis for a policy of eugenics:
young men and women should examine closely
the biometric pedigrees of potential spouses
before venturing upon marriage. As for the
relations between races, this is essentially one of
competitive struggle. It would be a false sense
of human solidarity, writes Pearson in chapter
9 of the Grammar, that would regret the
'replacement' of the Australian Aborigines by
more advanced white men. In National Life
from the Standpoint of Science (1901) he is
still more explicit, arguing that it is the struggle
between the races that drives human progress
- end the struggle, and humankind would
stagnate and degenerate. The man who says
that 'he loves the Kaffir as he loves his brother'
763
PEARSON
is probably guilty of self-deception. But if such
attitudes were ever to become widespread in
one nation, that nation in turn would be
weakened by the decline in its 'national spirit',
and would soon become prey to foreign aggres-
sion. Hitler himself could not have put it more
clearly or more explicitly.
It is disturbing to the modern reader to find
such views expressed without apology or hes-
itation by such a prominent figure, and served
up to his readers with all the authority of
'Science' (i.e. Darwinian biology) supposedly
behind them. We might challenge Pearson
either on the science itself, or on the transition
from scientific fact to social policy. On the
science, it is easy to show that the differences
between the races of humankind are of recent
origin, and so superficial as to be almost negli-
gible. But, Pearson can retort, even if the dif-
ferences are only skin-deep, natural selection
could still have given us a fundamentally
'clannish' mentality, an innate disposition to
care about a small tribal group and to be more
or less indifferent to the rest of the species. It
may be so. But here, surely, we need to appeal
to the fact-value distinction. We don't need to
invoke G.E. MOORE and his 'naturalistic
fallacy' (although of course evolutionary ethics
was prominent among his targets); the message
was already perfectly clear from Huxley's
Evolution and Ethics. If our evolution by
natural selection has given us a propensity to
egoistic individualism, Huxley argues, this is a
morally regrettable fact, but no more. It cannot
show us that we should put our own interests
first, only that we will tend to do so. The path
of moral duty may be the direct opposite of that
of natural inclination. The same line of
argument could be used against Pearson. If he
replies that a group with basically tribalist
instincts (a restricted sense of human solidarity)
will triumph over a group with more universal
sympathies, the moralist can ask two ques-
tions. Is this in fact as clear as Pearson thinks?
Maybe natural selection, in creating rational
beings, has given us the capacity to recognize
the force of rationally binding norms of
PEARSON
conduct, as Kantian moralists assume. Or
maybe we can acknowledge an 'expanding
circle' of widening moral concern, as utilitari-
ans such as Peter Singer hope to promote. But
even if natural selection does favour a tribal
mentality, why should this have any implica-
tions at all for morality? The confusion between
evolution and progress, so prominent in the
debates over Darwinism, seems to lie at the
heart of Pearson's argument. The winners in the
struggle for existence may not be the 'best' in
any sense that we should care about.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Ethic of Freethought, a Selection of
Essays and Lectures (1888).
The Grammar of Science (1892; 2nd edn,
1900; 3rd edn, 1911).
The Chances of Death and Other Studies in
Evolution (1897).
National Life from the Standpoint of Science
(1901).
Karl Pearson's Early Statistical Papers, ed.
E.S. Pearson (Cambridge, 1948).
Other Relevant Works.
(Completed), Clifford, W.K., The Common
Sense of the Exact Sciences (1885).
(Ed. and completed), Todhunter, I., A
History of the Theory of Elasticity and the
Strength of Materials from Galileo to the
Present Time, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1886,
1893).
(Ed.), The Life, Letters and Labours of
Francis Gallon, (Ed.), 3 vols (Cambridge,
1914,1924,1930).
The History of Statistics in the 17th and 18th
Centuries against the Changing
Background of Intellectual, Scientific and
Religious Thought: Lectures by Karl
Pearson given at University College,
1921-1933, ed. E.S. Pearson (1978).
Further Reading.
Aldrich, John, 'Karl Pearson: A Reader's
Guide', http://www.economics.soton.ac.uk/
staf^aldrich/main.htm, accessed November
764
2004.
Anon., Review of The Grammar of Science,
Mind, vol. 1 ns (1892), pp. 429-30.
Dale, A.I., A History of Inverse Probability
from Thomas Bayes to Karl Pearson, 2nd
edn (New York, 1999).
Kevles, D.V., In the Name of Heredity:
Genetics and the Use of Human Heredity
(New York, 1985).
Kotz, S. and N.L. Johnson (eds),
Breakthroughs in Statistics (New York,
1992), vol. 1.
Lenin, V.I., Materialism and Empirio-
Criticism (1908; English trans., 1937).
Magnello, M.E., 'Karl Pearson's
Mathematisation of Inheritance: From
Galton's Ancestral Heredity to Mendelian
Genetics', Annals of Science, vol. 55
(1998), pp. 35-94.
Mivart, St George, Review of The Grammar
of Science, The Fortnightly Review, vol. 58
ns (1895), pp. 423-38.
Olby, R., 'The Dimensions of Scientific
Controversy: The Biometric-Mendelian
Debate', British Journal of the History of
Science, vol. 22 (1988), pp. 299-320.
Pearson, E.S., 'Karl Pearson: An Appreciatio
of Some Aspects of his Life and Work', 2
pts, Biometrika, vol. 28 (1936), pp.
193-257; vol. 29 (1937), pp. 161-248
Peirce, C.S., Collected Papers (Cambridge,
Mass., 1958), vol. 8, pp. 110-11.
Searle, G.R., Eugenics and Politics in Britain
1900-1914 (1976).
Singer, E.A., Review of The Grammar of
Science, the philosophical Review, Vol.9
(1900), pp. 448-50.
Yule, G. Udny and L.N.G. Filon, 'Karl
Pearson', Obituary Notices of Fellows of
the Royal Society of London, vol. 2
(1936), pp. 74-110.
Andrew John Pyle

PEMBER REEVES, Amber, see Blanco White
PENELHUM, Terence Michael (1929-)
Terence Michael Penelhum was born in
Bradford-on-Avon on 26 April 1929. He was
educated at the University of Edinburgh, and at
Oriel College, Oxford. He went from lecturer
to associate professor at the University of
Alberta (1953-63), moved to the University of
Calgary as Professor of Philosophy (1963-78)
and Dean of Arts and Sciences, and became
Professor of Religious Studies (1978-8). He
held visiting positions at Yale University, and
the universities of California, Colorado,
Washington, Michigan and British Columbia.
He was honoured by membership in the Royal
Society, Canada and in a Festschrift edited by
JJ. Macintosh and H.A. Meynell. His major
concern has been with the question as to
whether religious, particularly theistic, belief
can be reasonably held.
Survival and Disembodied Existence (1970)
asks what public criterion could be used to re-
identify a disembodied person as the same
person as one who was encountered previously.
It argues that there are no public criteria for
such re-identification, so that the notion of a
disembodied person existing over time is unin-
telligible? There are two relevant questions: (1)
what conditions must be satisfied if a disem-
bodied person survives over time? (2) how
could we tell that some disembodied person
existed over time? An answer to the first
question is that there must be a self-conscious
being who was embodied before time T and not
embodied at time T, who continues to exist
and is not embodied through time Tl. It seems
impossible to answer the second sort of
question about disembodied existence, or
anything else, unless we can answer the first
sort of question. This raises a problem that is
765
PENELHUM
an artefact of his position: we seem then to
have to answer the first question in order to be
able to answer the second question, and we
cannot answer the second question unless we
have already answered the first. The critic of
Penelhum's argument will also contend that
the proposition expressed by Sentence S is
meaningful if and only if there is some public
criterion by which one can confirm or discon-
firm it is not itself part of our ordinary dis-
course, and stands condemned on its own
terms.
He points out that memory cannot be a cri-
terion for the identity of a person since the con-
ditions for genuine memory include the person
doing the remembering having witnessed the
event, and hence presuppose personal identity
between the witness and the rememberer. He is
sympathetic to the bodily criterion of personal
identity. One objection to it, he notes, concerns
the apparent logical and metaphysical possi-
bility of body switches between two persons
where personal identity goes with the mind,
not the body. Further, suppose technology
advances to the point where we can replace
every body part with a silicone substitute. It is
dubious that something made up entirely of
flesh and bone and some later thing made up
entirely of silicone can be the same body. If
one can survive the replacements, then bodily
continuity is not a condition of personal
identity.
Religion and Rationality (1971) exemplifies
the view that the philosopher's task is to expose
and avoid linguistic confusions and investigate
the structure of ethical and religious language-
games as they are played. The cosmological
argument is alleged to be an argument that
arises from linguistic confusion. This argument
begins with the claim that there are things that
do exist but might not have existed. It then
invites one to consider the collection of all of
such things, which itself exists but might not
have existed. Since whatever exists but might
not have existed is such that its existence must
have an explanation, the existence of the col-
lection must have an explanation. Since the
PENELHUM
existence of everything that exists but might not
have existed is already included in the collec-
tion, its existence must be explained by some-
thing that exists and could not have failed to
exist. Such a being is a necessary being.
Penelhum's critique says that there are only
two relevant senses of necessity - that in which
a truth is necessary because we have decided to
use words in a certain fashion and that in which
a necessary truth is presupposed by all percep-
tual experience. Neither sense of 'necessary' is
the intended sense of the term in 'necessary
being'. So the cosmological argument fails.
Defenders of the argument point out that the
idea that all necessity depends on our own
speech habits is itself a philosophical view that
is no part of ordinary language or common
sense, and so cannot be appealed to by those
who accept only commonsensical claims.
Penelhum distinguishes between various rela-
tions that might hold between theism and
atheism: it might be unreasonable to accept
theism and reasonable to accept atheism; it
might be unreasonable to hold either position.
On his view there is nothing inherently unrea-
sonable in holding either position, so long as we
distinguish between strong and weak reason-
ableness. It is strongly reasonable to believe
that something is so if and only if it would be
unreasonable not to believe it. It is weakly rea-
sonable to believe that something is so if and
only if it is not unreasonable to believe it, not
to believe it, or to believe the opposite. Nothing
inherently prevents theism (or atheism) from
being weakly reasonably believed.
religious belief, though not rational in the
strong sense, is rational in the weak sense.
The weak sense of 'rational' is equivalent, in
effect, to 'not irrational.' Religious belief does
not, or need not, conflict with scientific
knowledge, be involved in self-contradiction,
or be devoid of clear content. Philosophy
can say this much in religion's favor, though
it cannot say more.
(Religion and Rationality, p. 355)
766
God and Scepticism (1983) considers the view
that religious belief inherently lacks, and is
better off without, rational justification. The
central philosophical contention of the book is
the acceptance and defence of the Parity
Argument.
I have accepted a ... permissive version of the
Parity Argument. The Argument tells us that
we believe many things which it is indis-
pensable for us to believe, but for which we
have not discovered rational grounds, and
that it is inconsistent for an unbeliever who
does this to accuse the faithful of irrational-
ity, merely because they believe in God in the
same way.
(God and Scepticism, p. 169)
Acceptance of this argument does not entail
embracing general scepticism, nor does it entail
that the unbeliever is irrational in not believing.
Theistic faith is so analysed as to require the
acceptance of core theistic religious beliefs, and
thus the non-cognitive accounts of religious
belief offered in some contemporary religious
and philosophical contexts are rejected. But
faith also essentially includes a trust in God
that, in its maturest form, rules out fear and
anxiety. This account of faith is compatible
with there being basic beliefs that are accepted
without evidence and with their being accepted
on the basis of proof or revelation. But accep-
tance of the Parity Argument places religious
belief on an epistemic par with, but without
epistemological advantage over, disbelief.
Theism and atheism do not exhaust the alter-
natives regarding religion. There are non-
theistic religions. These add to the world's reli-
gious ambiguity because they provide other
logically possible religious accounts. Penelhum
comments regarding theism and atheism: 'Even
though it matters infinitely who is right, and
even though one's stance on this question can
affect almost every detail of life, it does not
seem that either can convict the other of failing
to meet doxastic [i.e. belief-related] obligations'
(Reason and Religious Faith, p. 111).

He holds that this situation is entrenched by
the relative success of what he calls Basic Belief
Apologetics, whose basic idea is that knowledge
is to be defined in terms of true belief plus
warrant. A person has warrant for a belief
which she forms in the proper way, which
occurs if her belief-forming mechanism operates
in accord with its design plan in an environ-
ment in which it is designed to operate in a
truth-seeking manner. The possession of
knowledge does not require justification.
This approach to knowledge has typically
been applied as a response to those who have
claimed that Christian belief is irrational. The
idea that knowledge must be based on evidence
has been attacked on the ground that it is not
itself favoured by the sort of evidence it says
that we must have in order to know or to
believe reasonably. It is then asserted that
beliefs may be properly basic in the absence of
evidence, so long as they are properly formed.
Penelhum thinks that the Basic Belief
Apologetic is sound but that it can also be
applied in defence of religious belief of a non-
theistic kind as well as beliefs of a non-reli-
gious kind.
The success of Basic Belief Apologetics serves,
in my view, to accentuate this [religious]
ambiguity [of the world], not reduce it. For
it shows that the believer cannot be con-
victed of irrationalism for not providing the
sort of evidence that would convince the
unbeliever to believe. Of course, the believer
will see his or her own doxastic inclinations
as due to divine grace. But this view does
nothing to show that the unbeliever, who
lacks this inclination, is irrational to be
without it or irrational in judging the believer
to be following a doxastic mechanism that
aims at comfort rather than truth.
(Reason and Religious Faith, p. Ill)
Further, 'we live in a world characterized by
multiple religious ambiguity' and the judge-
ments of each tradition that its path to salvation
or enlightenment is the right one, because its
767
PENELHUM
diagnosis of our basic religious problem and its
cure is correct, conflict.
The important point for our present purpose
is that such mutual judgments are expres-
sions of principles that are internal to the
system from within which they are made.
And each will see the doxastic mechanisms of
the others as aimed at something less than the
combination of truth and liberation/salva-
tion that its own is aimed at and as deriving
from a failure to confront the real source of
ill of which its own system informs us.
(Reason and Religious Faith, pp. 118-19)
Christian Ethics and Human Nature (1999)
endeavors to sort out the continuities and dis-
continuities between Christian ethics and secular
ethics, indicate what a Christian view of human
nature amounts to, and contribute to a Christian
perspective on religious pluralism and on con-
temporary ecology. His understanding of the
Christian view of human nature seems to be
central to his own commitment to Christianity
as true: Tor myself, it is the fact that what
Christianity says about human nature seems so
true that makes it a serious candidate for accep-
tance when it proclaims the lordship of God
over creation' (Themes in Hume, p. 20).
Part of this understanding includes human
possession of autonomy:
I am inclined to think that the modern notion
of individual ethical autonomy, which was
first clearly articulated in the Enlightenment,
is not incompatible with Christian decision-
making but is required by it ... I think that
human beings have been endowed with a
capacity for moral judgments that is distinct
from their religious beliefs in the same way
that their capacity for perceptual judgments
is.
(Christian Ethics and Human Nature,
pp. 7,10)
(He does not, of course, mean that we are
somehow the source of the moral law.)
PENELHUM
Penelhum finds another significant part of
the Christian view of human nature in its rejec-
tion of the view that we never willingly or
knowingly do what is wrong - its denial of the
claim that:
no one would be so foolish as to pursue what
he knew to be bad. But this has only to be
stated to be recognized as false. Of course it
is stupid to pursue what one knows to be
bad; that one does it requires some special
explanation; be we do it all the time ... [St]
Paul is telling us this when he tells us that he
continually fails to do what he knows he
should. He is explicitly rejecting the Socratic
understanding of the cause of evil conduct.
(Christian Ethics and Human Nature,
p. 69)
In this book, Penelhum also fine-tunes his views
regarding the multiple religious ambiguity of
the world. He defines inclusivism as follows:
The inclusivist says that it is at least possible
that members of other traditions will achieve,
or be granted, salvation, but that if they are
granted it, this fact has to be understood in
terms of the inclusivist's own tradition ...
There is nowhere to go but to a purged inclu-
sivism. It has to be purged, not only of
patronage, but of self-assurance.
(Christian Ethics and Human Nature,
pp. 59, 73)
Not even a brief discussion of Penelhum should
neglect his splendid work in the history of phi-
losophy, particularly regarding Bishop Butler
and David Hume. In his latest book on Hume,
among other things, he perceptively questions
whether Hume's argued scepticism can find
sufficient support in the Humean claims on
which it is based - whether acceptance of those
claims is compatible with also accepting the
scepticism that they defend. He also offers the
plausible and fruitful suggestion that it is Pascal
who is Hume's deepest protagonist.
768
Hume is trying, however much or little we can
trace his ideas to direct textual influence, to give
an answer to Pascal's fideism, both in his phi-
losophy of religion, and in his secular account
of human nature and its instincts ... their
writings give us the two supreme expressions
of anti-rationalist thought in early modern
times. Neither has been bettered, in my view,
as an exemplar of the stance; he represents. B.
comparison with Pascal, Kierkegaard is turgid;
by comparison with Hume, Kant is ludicrousl.
professorial and RUSSELL merely frivolous. If
one compares the systems, it becomes, in my
view, clearer and clearer that each has
resources that enable him to answer, and to
explain, the other ... The very deadlock that
Pascal and Hume represent... suggests that it
may be mistaken to suppose that we can
understand ourselves and our needs without
knowing the answers to some of the hard ques-
tions about what sort of cosmos we inhabit. If
there is a God who wants to reach us, then our
needs are likely to be rather different from
what they would be if there is not.
(Themes in Hume, p. 282)
Penelhum's reaction to the religious ambiguity
that he has described and defended as holding
true of the world includes what he describes as
his 'belated return' to his Anglican Christian
roots. His expresses this in a passage with which
it seems appropriate to close our discussion.
I have not suddenly joined those who believe,
as I know some do, that there are obviously
no problems about the coherence of this
belief [in life after death]; on the contrary. But
I have come to realize that my very real philo-
sophical bewilderments, like those problems
in secular epistemology, can and do coexist
in one and the same mind with the beliefs
that they challenge. The coexistence is
uncomfortable, and to the rational being an
inescapable and perpetual demand for reso-
lution; but it need not, I hope, negate the
possibility of faith.
('A Belated Return', p. 236)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Survival and Disembodied Existence (1970).
Problems of Religious Knowledge (1971).
Religion and Rationality (New York, 1971).
Hume (1975).
God and Scepticism (Dordrecht, 1983).
Butler (19S5).
David Hume: An Introduction to his
Philosophical System (West Lafayette,
Indiana, 1992).
'A Belated Return', in Kelley James Clark
(ed.), Philosophers who Believe (Downer's
Grove, 1993). Autobiographical.
Reason and Religious Faith (Boulder, 1995).
Christian Ethics and Human Nature [1999
Diocese of British Columbia John Albert
Hall Lectures at the Centre for Studies in
Religion and Society in the University of
Victoria] (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 1999).
Themes in Hume (Oxford, 2000).
Further Reading
Macintosh, J.J. and H.A. Meynell (eds),
Faith, Scepticism, and Rationality: A
Festschrift for Terrence Penelhum
(Calgary, 1994).
Keith E. Yandell
PETERS, Richard Stanley (1919-)
Richard Peters was born in India on 31
October 1919. He was educated at Clifton
College and Queen's College, Oxford. After
taking Honour Moderations in classics, he
joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit in 1940
and spent most of the war doing medical and
social relief work in East London. He then
taught classics for two years at a co-educa-
tional boarding school and worked in his spare
time for a London degree. Awarded a stu-
dentship in philosophy at the University of
London, he then did part-time lecturing and
769
PETERS
research for a higher degree at Birkbeck
College, London. In 1949 he was appointed to
the permanent staff of Birkbeck and was made
reader in philosophy in 1958. After a period as
Visiting Professor in Education at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education in 1961, he was
appointed in 1962 to the Chair of the
Philosophy of Education at the University of
London Institute of Education. Peters's work
falls into three principal categories: political
theory, philosophical psychology and the phi-
losophy of action, and the philosophy of edu-
cation. These areas of his thinking are linked,
particularly the last two.
Peters is a scholarly authority on the history
of psychology and his writings are pervaded by
a deep understanding of the historical evolution
of the subject, a particularly striking example of
which is his book on Hobbes (1956), which
lays great emphasis on the scientific and psy-
chological background to Hobbes's political
thinking. He condensed and edited Brett's mon-
umental History of Psychology into an acces-
sible form, and so successful was this version of
Brett's work, that it went into a second edition.
In general, Peters did not take an explicit meta-
physical stand on questions of philosophical
psychology, concentrating instead on episte-
mological aspects of our understanding of psy-
chological phenomena. There is a
Wittgensteinian influence on his idea of psy-
chological explanation, brought out in his 'The
Concept of Motivation' (1958), which eschews
metaphysical questions about the relationship
between body and mind in favour of a close
examination of psychological explanation.
Regular behaviour is to be explained norma-
tively, in terms of socially constituted rules. In
the normal case of habitual behaviour, expla-
nation for an action is sufficient if it can be
referred to the relevant rule. Habitual behav-
iour is normally to be explained in this way, as
the following of rules that provide a clear
means, given an end. They typically take the
form of a hypothetical imperative 'if you want
x, do y\ They thus bear a strong resemblance
to articulations of Humean-type explanations
PETERS
of rational behaviour, where the end is given
and appropriate means are adopted to reach
that end. Peters differs from Hume, however, in
suggesting that such explanations have to be
characterized in terms of the rules or conven-
tions which govern the selection of the means
to the end, while the end is often implicitly
understood and does not need to be specified.
However, both specification of ends and of
means is not possible without reference to social
conventions regarding what ends are, and what
the actions are that are necessary to achieve
them. Explanations of habitual behaviour,
therefore, constitute a 'logical ceiling' of expla-
nation that distinguish them from, and make
them irreducible to, other kinds of behavioural
explanation. These explanations, sufficient to
explain regular or habitual behaviour, are not
always adequate, however. In general, non-
habitual behaviour cannot be fitted into this
explanatory pattern. Furthermore, these rule-
governed explanations are not ones with which
agents usually justify their own behaviour since
they do not need to and since they are, to an
insider within the culture in which the rules
apply, virtually tautologous. Such explanations
are not reducible to causal ones either, since
they are neither causal themselves nor reducible
to causal explanations. This point is related to
Peters's somewhat Humean critique of Hobbes
on political obedience: it is not because of a
conscious desire to fulfil our part of the contract
that we obey laws, but we are accustomed to do
so because we desire civil peace. Peters differs
from Hume, however, in proposing that this
kind of normative explanation is sui generis,
not to be counted as a species of causal expla-
nation. Peters does, however, distinguish
between habitual behaviour on the one hand,
and acting morally on the other, the latter kind
of action involving the adoption of a moral
code or principle.
However, there are cases where the y (means)
term in the hypothetical imperative cannot be
easily related to any obvious end and, in such
circumstances, we are obliged, if we are to
provide a sufficient explanation of an agent's
770
action, to seek to identify the end in terms of
some more general considerations about
human needs in order to establish the end to
which the means has been adopted. In these
cases, we look for the motive for the action. In
such cases, when we have identified the motive,
the action will normally be interpreted in its
light and will be regarded as a sufficient expla-
nation, given the end that the motive supplies.
Peters holds that in the normal case we do not
ask for the motive. A commuter walking to
the station every weekday morning is not said
to have motive for doing so since her actions
can be explained through the normative struc-
ture within which our usual needs (e.g., to earn
a living) can be understood. By its nature,
however, untypical behaviour requires an
explanation which links ends and means in an
explicit way, which accounts of habitual behav-
iour do not. Thus we may need to learn more
about an individual's particular circumstances
in order to see what the particular motivation
in a case actually is. Such explanations can be
referred to primal drives but only in terms of
the individual circumstances of the agent. In
this respect, Peters is prepared to accept that dif-
ferent kinds of explanation may be appropriate.
To use one of his own examples, a man may
look as if he is crossing the road to buy some
tobacco (habitual behaviour), while in fact his
intention is to take a close look at a pretty
woman standing by the tobacconist's window.
This may be his motive, which in turn may be
either consciously held, may be acceptable to
the individual as an explanation of his behav-
iour offered by a third party, or may even be
attributed to him as an unconscious motive, not
accepted by the agent. Thus motive-type expla-
nations look as if they share the same logical
structure as habit-type ones, but in fact poten-
tially cover a wide variety of cases. Yet Peters
does not include them within the family of rule-
governed explanations and we are left won-
dering whether they are a species of causal
explanation, or another variety of rational
behaviour, or neither depending on the cir-
cumstances. Some light is shed on this by the

fact that Peters considers rational behaviour to
be rationally defensible, that is justifiable by
reasons that seem to support the course of
action taken. Reason explanations will
inevitably refer to the rules which underlie the
ways in which means are related to ends in
human society. Unreasonable behaviour, by
contrast, looks as if the reasons offered or
inferred are inappropriate to the end sought,
although the behaviour is apparently to be
explained within a framework that presup-
poses the agent's rationality. Irrational behav-
iour, by contrast, cannot summon any reasons
for its explanation, which must therefore be
sought in the realm of causality. So Peters has
provided the raw materials for a nuanced
theory of motivational explanation, but the
problem with his account is that of seeing what
exactly the logical status of both rational but
non-habitual and unreasonable behaviour is,
given the framework with which he sets up the
problem in The Concept of Motivation. We
may also wonder about whether the man who
wishes to look at the pretty woman but refuses
to accept this explanation for why he crossed
the road is acting unreasonably, or even irra-
tionally. On the one hand, such an end may be
considered rational; on the other, if the desire
to look was a cause of his behaviour, it is dif-
ficult to see how it could be rational.
It is clear, however, from his ethically
oriented writings that Peters did not consider
habitual norm and causal explanations between
them to cover action explanation. Acting
morally is neither to act according to habit
(here he parts company with OAKESHOTT) nor
is it to act in accordance with a causal law.
Morality involves the adoption of a principle
and subsequent action according to that prin-
ciple. Unlike the case of habitual behaviour,
the agent has to adopt the principle as one
according to which he is going to act. This
view suggests that moral action is norm-guided,
in this case the norm being a self-adopted prin-
ciple of action. Peters does not explicitly
endorse a Kantian moral framework in which
the moral motive would be ultimately a cate-
771
PETERS
gorical one, but we are left wondering what
kind of explanation he would propose for
someone acting according to moral principle.
The habitual act can be referred to a rule, while
the motivated act can be construed as a hypo-
thetical referring to a recognizable need as an
end. Clearly actions of both these types can be
morally motivated (consider someone who
always gives to a beggar on her way to work)
and it would seem as if Peters would have to
say that such actions are norm-guided and that
the norms are moral principles. Moral rules,
unlike customary ones, imply individual
autonomy, which in turn implies that the agent
makes a reasonable evaluation of the rule in an
impartial way before adopting it in the light of
the needs and interests of people likely to be
affected (Social Principles and the Democratic
State, p. 56). But again, if this is so, we need a
broader explanation of norm-guided behav-
iour than Peters offers us. One can extract from
Peters's position, however, the view that the
adoption of moral principles is the work of
someone who is reasonable and that there is a
sense in which a higher-order principle involv-
ing impartiality is invoked as a criterion of the
moral. This puts Peters in the tradition of
natural law and Kantian ethics but still leaves
us with a need for an account of the kinds of
explanation that should be offered of behaviour
governed by moral considerations.
It is important to note one important
category of action whereby the agent acts in
submission to the requirements of an authority.
Peters identifies authorities as either deriving
from their possession of specialist knowledge or
competence, or in virtue of their social role. In
practice the two are very often combined, but
analytically they are distinct. Although Peters
was unsympathetic to contractarian theories
of political obligation, as his book on Hobbes
and the later work, with Stanley Benn, Social
Principles and the Democratic State (1959)
made clear, he decoupled the concept of
authority from that of power and held that
political authority could be possessed without
the possession of political power and vice versa.
PETERS
Although the possession of power may be a
necessary condition for the exercise of author-
ity, it is not, analytically, a component of the
concept. The exercise of authority is bound up
with the use of language, which, in turn, is nec-
essary to secure obedience. By contrast, power
can be exercised without speech in, for
example, the pecking order of hens in a
farmyard. On the other hand, Peters makes it
clear that authority can be exercised charis-
matically, citing the example of the Admirable
Crichton in J.M. Barrie's play of that name .
The fact that the butler Crichton is able to
influence the aristocratic castaways through
the power of speech is, presumably, a telling cri-
terion for his exercise of authority rather than
power in these circumstances. Crichton's
authority, although sociologically charismatic
rather than traditional or legal-rational, is nev-
ertheless epistemic, since it rests on his superior
knowledge and judgement. Political authority
is, then, either secured via some procedure of
entitlement or through the ability of a putative
political authority to secure consent to its pro-
posals. Benn and Peters do not, however, claim
that epistemic authority is necessary for polit-
ical legitimacy.
Social Principles and the Democratic State
(1959) is one of the relatively few substantial
works of political philosophy to have emerged
in the mid twentieth century. Although it was
written as an introductory volume, it includes
very substantial discussion of central topics in
political philosophy and, like POPPER'S Open
Society and its Enemies, can be seen as a
defence of non-partisan liberal democracy. It is
not, however, a work that can be identified
either with any of the political currents within
contemporary democracies or with particular
visions of liberalism such as that of Popper or
Rawls. It seeks to set out a framework for polit-
ical discourse by illustrating the ways in which
central terms in politics are used: rights, democ-
racy and the state are three examples of areas
of substantive discussion in this volume. This
work does not break any particularly new
ground, but provides a very useful introduction
772
to the prevailing state of political philosophy in
the English-speaking world at that time.
Peters made very extensive and influential
contributions to the philosophy of education
and can, in many ways, be regarded as the
founder of analytic philosophy of education in
the UK. His philosophy of education can
usefully be understood in the light of his con-
tributions to ethics, political philosophy, and
the philosophy of mind and action. He is best
known for a systematic defence of a fairly tra-
ditional essentialist liberal view of education.
This is chiefly concerned with the inculcation of
a wide range of knowledge and an associated
development of sensibility, as well as with the
development of character. Education is an ini-
tiation into civilized forms of life and behav-
iour, and to the knowledge and understanding
that make participation in such a form of life
worthwhile. What is less well known is that he
came to change his educational philosophy in
quite significant respects towards the end of
his career. Another feature of Peters's educa-
tional writings is the interest that he took in
empirical work in psychology. Sometimes
Peters writes as if psychologists have more to
learn from teachers than vice versa (e.g.,
Authority, Responsibility and Education,
1959). This is particularly true of his treatment
of behaviourist psychology and some forms of
therapeutic psychologizing, such as the work of
Carl Rogers, about which he often wrote in
scathing terms. At other times he writes as if
empirical researchers have contributed valuable
insights into learning and teaching, for example
in his treatment of Jean Piaget and Basil
Bernstein, whose work has since become the
target of greater critical scrutiny than was
applied by Peters.
He was sceptical about the usefulness of
high-level educational aims, taking the view
that they were likely to result in platitude rather
than anything useful that might guide educa-
tional practice. He thought, however, that con-
ceptual analysis could yield a canonical defin-
ition of education and that such a definition
would show that education was an intrinsic

good. A bad education is one where an intrin-
sically good process has somehow been cor-
rupted or bungled through incompetent
teaching. There could not be such a thing as a
bad education except in a very limited sense.
The process of educating someone, if carried
out successfully, implies knowledge and under-
standing such that the person educated knows
his or her way around a subject and its modus
operandi, and is committed to the value of that
subject. His or her knowledge is much more
than a superficial smattering of relevant facts,
but an integrated understanding of the subject
and how it relates to other valuable subjects.
The knowledge of the educated person
contains, therefore, cognitive depth. An
educated person will also have a cognitive per-
spective such that he will not be limited to
knowledge in the above sense in one or two
subjects, but will have a broad perspective on
the world and on the relationship of different
subjects with each other. Cognitive depth is
not enough; it must be matched by cognitive
breadth. The subjects that comprise the cur-
riculum must be those that exemplify the
achievements of our culture and which any
person of taste and sensibility would wish to
pursue out of an awareness of his or her intrin-
sic interest and value, long after completion of
the formal process of education at school.
There is a sense then, Peters notes, in which one
is formally educated in order to continue with
one's education.
This traditional approach to education did
not mean that Peters was completely unsym-
pathetic to the developments in educational
theory and practice that took place in the twen-
tieth century, but he did adopt a sceptical
attitude to many of those developments. He
believed, for example, that teachers should be
authorities in the cognitive sense and that
children stood in need of instruction as well as
activity in order for them to learn. He was
sceptical about the psychological assumptions
underlying Rousseau's educational theory as
well as that of more contemporary figures such
as Carl Rogers. He thought that the conscious
773
PETERS
institution of educational authority was more
honest and healthy than the manipulative
approach to pupils that he particularly saw in
the working out of Rousseau's educational
project in Emile. This unease paralleled a
similar dislike he felt about the educational
implications of behaviourism. In this respect he
is best seen as a nuanced defender of tradi-
tional forms of education rather than a pro-
gressive educational thinker in the sense in
which that term is usually used. Furthermore,
he believed that in general pupils did not arrive
at school with the cultural, moral and intellec-
tual assets that would enable them to learn.
They would need considerable adult help, not
only to acquire these assets, but also to acquire
the habits and cast of mind that would enable
them to benefit from a liberal education. Most
notably, he appears to have endorsed Basil
Bernstein's theory of restricted and elaborated
codes, which held that working-class pupils
arrived at school with significant cognitive
problems due to the kind of language that they
used.
While Peters was undoubtedly working with
the grain of a well-established tradition of
thinking about education among the ruling and
educational elites in the UK, there was also
some considerable tension between his educa-
tional position and his role as an analytical
philosopher committed to the efficacy of lin-
guistic description and analysis. The problem
can be summarized by saying that Peters was
seen by many to be offering a persuasive and
ultimately stipulative definition of 'education'
and its cognates by appealing to the point of
view of a particular section of a particular
society. He would thus be vulnerable to the
kind of criticisms of analytical philosophy that
were made by Marxists such as Maurice
CORNFORTH. In Peters's defence, it could be
argued that in appealing to the dominant
culture in constructing his definition of educa-
tion he was resting on such a broad consensus
that his stipulations turned out, ultimately, to
be little more than descriptions of the predom-
inant conceptual geography of that particular
PETERS
culture. But such a move would be bought at a
price. Not only would it discount alternative
conceptualizations of education within his own
cultural tradition but would appear to discount
culturally and historically different accounts of
the nature of education. Parochialism is the
danger of such a narrow view of linguistic and
conceptual analysis.
Despite his deep and long-lasting commit-
ment to the traditional liberal view of educa-
tion, Peters did not remain satisfied with this
account, although he is, at the time of writing,
still very closely associated with it. In Essays on
Educators (1981) he sets out a view which is at
odds with his earlier liberal view of education.
In the essay entitled 'Democratic Values and
Educational Aims' he uses W.D. GALLIE'S
account of essentially contested concepts to
reorient his conceptual analysis of education. In
this new account nothing more can be extracted
from the concept of education than that it is a
morally acceptable preparation for a worth-
while kind of life. Crucially, he is open to the
possibility that 'morally acceptable' and 'worth-
while' are themselves not entirely fixed
concepts. This means, in turn, that different
groups and individuals can have different con-
ceptions of education which are themselves
substantive in terms of aims, content and
method. The categorial concept of education is
itself virtually content-free and serves only to
define a central field of human experience.
Particular conceptions of education, on the
other hand, reflect the aspirations and values of
particular communities and societies. This leads
Peters to admit, for example, that preparation
for an economic role could be part of a con-
ception of education, although he does, admit-
tedly, hedge such an education with liberal
qualifications. Nevertheless, this change of per-
spective amounts to quite a sharp break with
the views of education for which he is best
known and it is awkward for Peters's legacy in
the philosophy of education that he is associ-
ated with ideas that he had begun to reject
before he had had a chance to develop fully his
emerging alternative views.
774
In fact, the turn in Peters's views would, if he
had been able to continue working, have
presaged quite substantial developments in the
philosophy of education that: were to occur in
the 1980s and 1990s. These included a retreat
from attempts at canonical definitions of edu-
cation, a growing recognition of the contested
and political nature of attempts to justify par-
ticular educational practices and an increasing
openness towards vocational education. His
legacy within the philosophy of education will,
however, be likely to remain associated with the
defence of traditional liberal education and an
attitude of scepticism towards the followers of
Rousseau's and Dewey's educational thinking.
Peters's lasting influence is mostly to be
found within his philosophy of education. He
is still regarded as the British representative of
a particular view in general and liberal educa-
tion in particular, and his earlier approach con-
tinues to be defended within contemporary phi-
losophy of education, most notably perhaps in
the writings of David Carr, although Carr's
own thoroughgoing Aristotelianism would not
necessarily have been endorsed by Peters. Peters
had, in his heyday, a profound influence on
other analytical philosophers of education: P.H.
HIRST, R.F. DEARDEN, J.P. White and R.K.
ELLIOT. But much work in the subject has taken
different directions, some of these more in
keeping with Peters's later account of education
as a contested concept and his growing
sympathy with some versions of vocational
education. Whichever way one interprets his
legacy in this area of philosophy, either as a tra-
ditional liberal or as a practitioner of a more
politically aware and reflective form of con-
ceptual analysis than he had previously
espoused, Peters is a key figure in twentieth-
century philosophy of education.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Ed. and abridged), G.S. Brett, Brett's History
of Psychology (1953).
Hobbes (1956).
Authority., Responsibility and Education
(1959).

(with Stanley Benn), Social Principles and the
Democratic State (1959).
Ethics and Education (1966).
(Ed.), The Concept of Education (1967).
(with P.H. Hirst), The Logic of Education
(1970).
(Ed. with R.F. Dearden and P.H. Hirst),
Education and the Development of Reason
(1972).
Reason and Compassion (1973).
Psychology and Ethical Development (1974).
(Ed.), The Philosophy of Education (1973).
Further Reading
Cooper, David E. (ed.), Education, Values
and Mind: Essays for R.S. Peters (1986).
Christopher Andrew Winch
PHILLIPS, Dewi Zephaniah (1934-)
Dewi Phillips was born in Morriston, Swansea
on 24 November 1934. He was educated at
Swansea Grammar School, at University
College, Swansea, where he graduated MA,
and at St Catherine's Society, Oxford
University, receiving an Oxford BLitt. He held
these academic posts: assistant lecturer in phi-
losophy at Queen's College, Dundee in the
University of St Andrews (1961-2); lecturer at
Queen's College, Dundee (1962-3); lecturer in
philosophy at University College, Bangor
(1963-5); and lecturer in philosophy at
University College, Swansea which became the
University of Wales, Swansea (1965-7).
Thereafter he became senior lecturer
(1967-71), Professor of Philosophy (1971-96)
and Rush Rhees Research Professor
(1996-2003). At Swansea he was the Dean of
the Faculty of Arts (1982-5) and Vice-Principal
(1989-92). He is Danforth Professor of the
Philosophy of Religion, Claremont Graduate
School, California (1992-). He has been a
775
PHILLIPS
visiting professor at, for example, Yale
University (1985), and he has given many
endowed lectures: the William James, at
Louisiana State University (1982); the Marett,
at Oxford (1983); the Riddell Memorial, at
Newcastle (1986); the Aquinas, at Oxford
(1987); the Cardinal Mercier, at Leuven (1988);
the R.I. Aaron, at Aberystwyth (1993); the
Leibniz, at California State (1995); and the
McManis, at Wheaton College (1996).
Beginning in 1982 he was editor of the Journal
Philosophical Investigations, and was general
editor of these book series: Studies in Ethics and
the Philosophy of Religion (1968-74); Values
and Philosophical Enquiry (1976-86); Swansea
Studies in Philosophy (1989-); and Claremont
Studies in the Philosophy of Religion (1993-).
In 1998 he was awarded the honorary PhD of
the Abo Academy, Finland.
A philosophical approach to, and treatment
of, religion appears to be dominant in Phillips's
writing. That appearance is not misleading;
but a little below the surface there is a concern
which is found also in his writings about
morality, and about literature, some of which
occur rather as contributory to the philosophy
of religion, while others are primarily about
literature or morality. This unifying concern is
with the proper character of philosophical
work.
Phillips held that philosophy's role is not to
challenge or assess, approve or reject, religion,
but to help us to understand it for what it is.
Nor is it for philosophy to articulate, work out
or affirm appropriate creeds, statements of reli-
gious belief. For example, it will be a mistake
to evaluate religion, as foundationalists in the
theory of knowledge have required, according
to whether its claims can be properly based on
rational intuitions (like those of the mathe-
maticians have been supposed to be) and/or
sense experience. We should rather recognize it
for what it is, not supposing that there are
demands which any discourse must satisfy if it
is to count as rational and truth conveying.
And when we hear or read the religious person
using words which are commonly used in other
PHILLIPS
contexts we should not impose the assump-
tion that such words will carry into their reli-
gious uses just the same implications as they
have in other sorts of context: if we make that
assumption we may fail to grasp what is going
on in the religion, and generate confusion
which we may well attribute to the religion
rather than to our mistaken methodology.
Philosophy's proper job is to understand
religion by seeing it as it is itself rather than by
imposing external criteria to it, criteria holding
a priori.
When the philosopher looks at morality he
must, similarly, observe and seek to understand
what is going on, what people are doing there,
and grasp the point of what is said. Likewise for
literature and the proper business of philo-
sophical aesthetics. However, literature has a
particular value for the philosopher who is
trying to understand what is happening in
religion, or morality, at least in that it presents
possibilities which might escape attention but
which, when recognized, enable the philoso-
pher to grasp what may be, or is, going on in
moral, or religious, practice and language.
Phillips gives WITTGENSTEIN credit for having
led the way to this understanding of philo-
sophical work, and the expressions 'language
game' and 'form of life' which appear in the
writings of Wittgenstein occur frequently, and
with import, in what Phillips says. Other
expressions whose use in Phillips is drawn from
(at any rate) Wittgensteinian discourse about
the proper way to philosophize include
'grammar' and 'practice'. The interpretation
of Wittgenstein's later work was a major pre-
occupation of philosophers, partly because the
aphoristic, not explicitly connected together,
and so enigmatic, quality of much of his work,
together with its widely celebrated perceptive-
ness, required that its meaning be made clear.
Phillips's claim to follow Wittgenstein's lead
thus involved him in disputes over how
Wittgenstein was to be understood.
More specifically the application to religion
by Phillips and others of a philosophical
approach claiming to derive from Wittgenstein
776
generated lengthy controversy. The label
'Wittgensteinian fideism' was employed to
characterize and identify a view which, perhaps
in various versions, this group was supposed to
hold. The group included O.K. Bouwsma,
W.D. HUDSON, R.F. HOLLAND, Norman
Malcolm, Peter WlNCH and others. Phillips was
the most prolific writer of this group, certainly
in respect of philosophy and religion; but he
strongly disavows the description 'fideist' with
its implications of conservatism, anti-intellec-
tualism, and non-rationality, if not irrational-
ity.
In his early work, especially The Concept of
Prayer (1965), 'Wisdom's "Gods'" (1969),
Death and Immortality (1970), Faith and
Philosophical Enquiry (1970) and Religion
without Explanation (1976), he practised phi-
losophy of religion according to the
Wittgensteinian conception of it, drawing also
on Simone Weil, and began both to explain
and advocate that conception. The leading
critics of it were, perhaps, F.C. COPLESTON,
Anthony KENNY, Kai Nielsen and Patrick
Sherry. Phillips held that the effort of philoso-
phers who argue for the existence of God had
been misdirected; the surface appearance of
language used about God has (mis)led people
into supposing God is an entity whose exis-
tence will have to be inferred if religion is to
have a point. God's reality is not of the sort
there implied. The realities of, say, physical
objects, or rainbows, or historical eras or social
institutions are differently constituted, and to
understand them we have to consider the role
they play or may play in human activity, expe-
rience and understanding. When we have
grasped that, we can go on to think appropri-
ately about whether such and such is real. The
question of the reality of God is not appropri-
ately to be investigated by attempting some
kind of argument to design and a designer,
even if such an argument could give reason for
the existence of a designer, as Phillips, agreeing
with Hume, believes that it cannot. What God's
reality is is to be seen when we come to under-
stand what is being done and said by those

who, for example, pray, entrust their future to
God, and worship. This will be to grasp religion
in its own terms, neither being misled by the
surface grammar of speech to suppose God to
be a sort of object, nor imposing some sup-
posedly generally applicable or a priori criteria
for understanding or assessing, upon religion.
It does not follow from any of this, so Phillips
insists (in particular in Belief, Change and
forms of Life, 1986) that religious concepts are
cut off from those which apply outside religion:
if we pray for forgiveness, it will often be for
deeds done in public interactions; if we trust
God for our future, it can be our future in
respect of all the issues a future can contain. If
religion is a form of life, a sort of practice and
speech, it intertwines with other forms of life.
The inapplicability of alien criteria to religion
does not imply that religious practices and
utterances cannot be rationally appraised: given
that we recognize what religious practice is
concerned to do, we can reckon whether par-
ticular actions or utterances are fitting, or
indeed true. The judgement has to be guided by
religious adequacy, and the truth here should
not be assumed to be the same sort of truth as
that of Pythagoras's Theorem, or of Boyle's
Law, or of today's being Tuesday, or of there
being ten matches left in the box.
The distinctiveness of religion not only allows
for evaluation of religion (on its own terms); it
allows also for changes in religion as a conse-
quence of other changes in the cultural or con-
ceptual or noetic or moral or other neighbour-
hood. Given its character and purposes, a
religion may have to change as the world
changes around it. Just as we may learn to
promise, or greet people, or practise hospital-
ity in new ways, so, more profoundly no doubt,
a person can remain faithfully religious pre-
cisely by changing. Thus is the charge of con-
servatism met. Similarly, it is possible for a
religion to be found no longer tenable or
liveable in view of changes in the worlds with
which the religion is intertwined. Faith may
have to be given up. And, of course, a person
can come to see the point in religion, as the
PHILLIPS
(perhaps changing) world helps to reveal a reli-
gious point. Phillips, therefore, repudiated the
charges that, on his accounts, religious practice
and speech is isolated from the wider culture,
uncriticizable, non-rational or conservative. To
the charge, which was made most often in the
early years of Phillips's publication, that accord-
ing to him religion is unintelligible to those
who are not participants and believers in it, he
replied that: the interrelations between religion
and other widely familiar practices give out-
siders ways of grasping what goes on in
religion; that anthropologists' practice in
gaining understanding of practices in cultures
different from their own affords analogies to
the philosopher's work; and that since Phillips
himself says philosophers who need not be reli-
gious believers can and should set out to under-
stand religions, it could never have been part of
his own contention that religion is incompre-
hensible to outsiders.
The distinctiveness (if not independence or
separateness) of religious forms of life means
that reductionist accounts of religion are to be
resisted by the philosopher who sees and iden-
tifies that distinctness. By locating and charac-
terizing distinct features of religious life and its
associated speech, Phillips resisted sociological
or psychological reductionisms, as also those
which reduce religion to morality or (pseudo-)
science. Repeatedly, he insisted that religion is
not an explanatory hypothesis, open to refuta-
tion and rejection or improvement in face of
experience which is incompatible with it.
As other writers sought to supersede the sort
of classical foundationalism sketched above,
Phillips (in Faith after Foundationalism, 1988)
sought to show that they were yet over-respect-
ful to a general broadly foundationalist require-
ment. The reformed epistemologists such as
Alvin Plantinga, though their foundationalism
is perhaps more generous than classical foun-
dationalism, remain foundationalist, imposing
a 'one size fits all' general criterion for proper
believing. Relativists such as Rorty or Berger
and others, though differing widely, arrive at
their views because they thought foundation-
PHILLIPS
alism made proper demands for 'objective'
beliefs. Phillips offered an account which
rejected foundationalists' demands as quite
inappropriate, and exorcised even foundation-
alists' ghosts.
While commentators on Phillips's applica-
tion of his philosophical method to religion
frequently acknowledged his perceptive sensi-
tivity, others questioned whether mainstream
religious people would, on Phillips's account of
God's having reality, be able to pray to one
who has a will and purpose of his own; or
whether when Phillips says that the continuing
reality of the dead is that they have a fixed
eternal significance for the living, he has dis-
torted, even reduced, a feature of mainstream
religion. Even allowing for a philosopher's
properly going deeper into an issue than the
commonplaces of the saloon bar, or popular
devotion, such questions remained problem-
atic.
Phillips's ability to use literary and other
cultural resources for purposes of philosophi-
cal illumination is seen, of course, in his book
about R.S. Thomas (R.S. Thomas: Poet of the
Hidden God, 1986), but it is in evidence in
much of his overtly philosophical publication.
In one such volume of 119 pages (Belief,
Change and Forms of Life) the following names
each appeared, with three or more references,
in the index: Beckett, Chesterton, Hardy,
Hemingway, Billie Holliday, Aldous HUXLEY,
Thomas Mann, Maugham and Wordsworth.
When morality is his topic, Phillips draws
particular features to our attention rather than
defending some general theory in ethics; he is
more likely to use some such noticed feature to
undercut grand ethical theory. The insightful
suggestiveness of Wittgenstein's work contin-
ued to be explored, even celebrated, in later
publications, edited and/or authored by Phillips,
whose philosophical association with Rush
RHEES is especially evident there. Phillips pub-
lished Introducing Philosophy (1996); the
'introducing' is by way of a developing
argument. Some of Phillips's published work is
in the Welsh language.
778
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Concept of Prayer (1965).
(Ed.), Religion and Understanding (Oxford,
1967).
(Ed.), Saith YsgrifAr Grefydd (Dinbych,
1967).
(with H.O. Mounce), Moral Practices (1969).
Death and Immortality (1970).
Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (1970).
(with Ilham Dilman), Sense and Delusion
(1971).
Religion without Explanation (1976).
Belief, Change and Forms of Life (1986).
R.S. Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God
(Allison Park, Pennsylvania, 1986).
Faith after Foundationalism (1988).
(Ed. in honour of Rush Rhees), Wittgenstein:
Attention to Particulars (1989).
Wittgenstein and Religion (1993). Fifteen
previously published papers from 1963
onwards.
Introducing Philosophy (Oxford, 1996).
(Ed.), Rush Rhees on Religion and
Philosophy (Cambridge, 1997).
Other Relevant Works
Copleston, F.C., Religion and Philosophy
(1974).
Kenny, Anthony, 'In Defence of God', Times
Literary Supplement, 7 February 1975.
Nielsen, Kai, Contemporary Critiques of
Religion (1971).
Sherry, Patrick, Religious Truth and
Language Games (1977).
Joseph Houston
PHILLIPS GRIFFITHS, Allen (1927-)
A. Phillips Griffiths, known to the philosophi-
cal world as 'Griff, was born in Llandaff on 11
June 1927. After school in Cardiff, leaving
Whitchurch Cardiff Grammar in 1943, he

studied philosophy first at University College,
Cardiff (interrupted by military service, gradu-
ating with first class honours in 1951), and
then at Oxford, where he was supervised by
Professor H.H. PRICE, taking his BPhil in 1953.
After teaching at the University College of
Wales, Aberystwyth (1955-7) and Birkbeck
College, London (1957-64), he was appointed
founding Professor of Philosophy at the new
University of Warwick in 1964, where he was
Pro-Vice-Chancellor from 1970 to 1977,
retiring in 1992 as professor emeritus. From
1979 to 1994 he was Director of the Royal
Institute of Philosophy. He has held visiting
professorships at Swarthmore College,
Pennsylvania (1963), the University of
California (1967), the University of Wisconsin
(1965 and 1970) and Carleton College,
Minnesota (1985).
Phillips Griffiths's contribution to philosophy
has been both direct, through his philosophical
writings, and indirect, through his role in edu
cational circles and the Royal Institute of
Philosophy. By the time of his appointment as
Warwick's founding Professor of Philosophy he
was widely seen as 'the coming man', with his
work extensively if informally discussed and,
although his scrupulous self-criticism sank the
expected and projected major monograph, his
incisive and imaginative articles remain influen-
tial, perhaps none more so than his contribution
to Paul Edwards's Encyclopedia of Philosophy
on 'Ultimate Moral Principles: Their
Justification' (1967) which both drew on and
extended the scope of his Mind paper
'Formulating Moral Principles' (1956) and his
Aristotelian Society paper 'Justifying Moral
Principles' (1958). Moral principles, such as
'One ought not to tell falsehoods' are used to
justify our moral judgements and to give moral
advice, but they do not function as major
premises in deductive arguments; so construed
ultimate moral principles are indeed unjustifiable
and it is the pervasiveness of such deductive
models that underlies much moral scepticism.
The universality of moral principles consists
in their universal relevance to a class of actions,
779
PHILLIPS GRIFFITHS
not in universally justifying or condemning a
class of actions; thus ultimate moral principles
are not axioms of moral systems but principles
of relevance, necessary but not sufficient - even
given relevant facts - to moral judgement. No
principle need contain instructions for its own
application, and it is with respect to the issue of
how they are to be applied, what weight should
be given to the various available facts, that the
really difficult issues of judgement arise;
however, although judgement does not operate
like a slide-rule, and its methods can be con-
tinually enriched, its findings can be both com.
municated and criticized, and it may of course
be that in many moral matters there is no single
right answer. With respect to the principles
themselves, any proposed justification must
take account of the dual requirement that
moral judgements be both autonomous (not
entirely dependent on non-moral factors) and
objective (such that they should not depend on
the peculiarities of the person making it); this
points to the need for transcendental arguments
to show that certain principles are required by
the formal character of a discourse that is prac-
tical, universal, objective and autonomous (as
morality is commonly supposed to be). 'Kant's
particular solution has not seemed very satis-
factory, but if a solution is to be found at all, it
must be in the same direction' ('Ultimate Moral
Principles', p. 180). He goes on to provide
argument sketches for the claim that no one can
rationally claim to be using such a form of dis-
course without thereby accepting three such
principles, those of impartiality, of rational
benevolence and of liberty, his 'Justifying Moral
Principles' article providing a fuller argument
for the unquestionability in such a context of
the second principle.
But this programme presupposes the viabil-
ity of transcendental arguments. Dispute here
has often been bedevilled by lack of agreement
about how to characterize such arguments, and
this is addressed directly in one of Phillips
Griffiths's subsequent articles, which starts with
Kant's model but extends and modifies it such
that they are arguments to the conclusion that
PHILLIPS GRIFFITHS
the truth of some principle is necessary to the
possibility of the successful employment of a
specified sphere of discourse. No such principle
can be shown to be finally established as nec-
essary for the employment of any such sphere
of discourse, since an opponent might claim to
be using abnormal criteria for judgement in
that sphere, but such arguments have dialecti-
cal force in justifying acceptance of such prin-
ciples, challenging an opponent to state and
defend the supposed abnormal criteria; they
operate, that is, as expository devices of descrip-
tive metaphysics. An example is given in terms
of the practice of assessing reasons. An assess-
able reason is a reason for doing or believing
something that can be characterized as good or
bad (or indeed, in an important sense, no
reason at all), while the reason something
occurs cannot be so assessed. The reason for an
event is typically governed by general connec-
tions (the glass broke because someone threw
a stone at it), and is not assessable (this can
hardly be a bad reason); that some explanations
of action do not presuppose such general con-
nections is a condition of the point of the sphere
of discourse whose aim is the assessment of
reasons for doing one thing rather than
another. Moral reasons, of course, are a
subclass of assessable reasons; so are prudential
reasons, which may also be objective and
autonomous though 'inferior to' moral ones
(The Autonomy of Prudence', p. 179). Such
reasons, it is argued, need not themselves be
generalizable, but their assessment must be,
thus the generalizability of assessments of
reasons for acting is a condition of the appli-
cation of the sphere of discourse of giving
assessable reasons.
Such considerations lead directly into the
interconnected issues of moral psychology
(especially what counts as a reason for action)
and of free will (where our reasons for assess-
ment of actions do not presuppose general con-
nections), and hence to the relations between
reasons and causes. The classic model for
explaining actions in terms of belief plus desire,
where 'wanting or desiring is something that is
780
supposed to go on in the soul or psyche',
Phillips Griffiths roundly rejects as 'nonsense on
stilts' ('Is Free Will Compatible with Something
or Other?', p. 109; he notes the affinities of this
dispute with 'the traditional voluntarist-intel-
lectualist controversy', 'Acting with Reason',
p. 293). All reasons an agent has for action are
beliefs; the final or basic reason for my avoiding
pain is my tautological belief that pain is pain,
and all our basic reasons can only be tautolo-
gies. Further, 'believing one ought to do some-
thing is, in the absence of countervailing factors,
to do it' (ibid., p. 289). Certain beliefs explain
our actions, but this is not because we have
certain wants; it is what it is to have certain
wants. Where an agent acts for a reason but
would still so have acted whatever else he or she
might have believed we look for causes
(explanatory reasons) in terms of general con-
nections (hormonal imbalance or suchlike), but
where the agent's behaviour is responsive to
what other beliefs the agent might have no
such recourse is in place; the action is to that
extent free being dependent upon assessable
reasons, and whatever model we use to eluci-
date explanatory reasons, the causal model is
not appropriate to assessable ones. 'A man is
responsible to the degree to which, if his other
beliefs were different, what was in fact his
assessable reason would not have led to his
doing what he did' ('Reasons and Causes',
p. 346).
On such an account, 'willing is related to
reasons for willing in the way that believing is
related to reasons for believing' ('Belief and
Reasons for Belief, p. 61), and here ethics and
moral psychology spill over into general epis-
temology where Phillips Griffiths has also made
his mark. Belief is in an important sense a nor-
mative concept in that belief is appropriate to
truth; this is how we are able to identify it as a
public concept when it can properly be ascribed
without it being possible to indicate publicly
determinable satisfaction conditions. 'Will or
intention is what we demand of possible actions
that are right, as belief is what we demand of
possible propositions that are true' ('On Belief,

p. 185). Belief presupposes publicly intelligible
and available standards of evidence. Contrary
to received opinion, however, it is not presup-
posed by knowledge. In abnormal cases, a
brutal teacher (or indeed barrister or BBC inter
viewer) may terrorize a small child (or witness
or interviewee) into falsely believing that he or
she does not know something known perfectly
well; the importance to our understanding of
the notion of 'the normal' (not to be confused
with that of 'other things being equal') Phillips
Griffiths has insisted on from the start (see his
early article 'Presuppositions'). Further, not
only do we not necessarily believe what we
know, we may not know what we know, and
such knowledge may be the most valuable
knowledge we have. We may know what we
know by being able to check our procedures,
but we may not be in a position similarly to
check our procedures for checking. 'Our most
comprehensive theories may or may not be
correct; but in either case, our most compre-
hensive correct theories must constitute, in the
absence of a more comprehensive correct
theory, knowledge which we do not know we
have' ('On Falsely Believing that One Doesn't
Know', p. 22). Having highly comprehensive
and correct theories is epistemically extremely
valuable, so we should seek such knowledge
even though we can never say we have finally
found it.
In the light of the above, it will hardly come
as a surprise that, to AUSTIN'S notorious
'although I am not sure importance is impor-
tant: truth is' ('Pretending', p. 278), Phillips
Griffiths riposted: 'while truth is essential,
importance is important' ('On Falsely Believing
that One Doesn't Know', p. 17). His insistence
on scrupulous respect for truth prevented him
from finally presenting the above suggestions in
a unified theory, particularly as his critical intel
ligence increasingly led him, against his will,
more towards a Humean model of ethics, based
round the notion of a 'thelemic standard' con-
structed out of the agent's wants that had
haunted him as early as his 'Acting with
Reason' article (p. 293), than to a refurbished
781
PHILLIPS GRIFFITHS
Kantian one. Similarly, his concern for impor-
tance never left him. Wittgensteinian echoes
some may have noticed above derive less from
the contemporary fashions than from the fact
that he travelled a very similar route to that of
WITTGENSTEIN, from a Schopenhauerian
idealism to realism ('Wittgenstein and the Four-
Fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason',
p. 17; see also 'Proem' to The Impulse to
Philosophise, pp. vi-vii); in the Tractatus this
leads, through seeking for the principle of indi-
viduation in inner sense, to the vanishing (or 'at
least self-contempt') of the self, thereby
enabling the later vision of 'persons as internally
related to others, and thereby constituted by
such a system of relations' as a form of libera-
tion ('Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, and Ethics',
pp. 115-16; see also 'Conclusion' to
Philosophy and Politics, p. 137). Hence
perhaps the vigour of his attack on Ayer's 'case
for saying that a private language must be
thought possible' ('Ayer on Perception', p. 32).
This concern for persons as being internally
related to each other connects with his forays
into political theory, particularly his pioneering
piece on political representation ('How Can
One Person Represent Another', 1960; see also
'Conclusion' to Philosophy and Politics,
p. 131). In ethics his concern for importance led
him to turn his guns both on Kant's claim that
'apart from the end of acting in accordance
with universal law, no end is better than any
other' as being at once unjustified and humanly
'degrading' ('Kant's Psychological Hedonism',
p. 212), and on HARE'S utilitarianism for pro-
viding a theory which 'if the facts were other
than he believes they are' could advocate
tyranny, not least because Phillips Griffiths
judges Hare's 'respect for autonomy' to be an
import into rather than dependent upon the
proposed 'critical utilitarian principles' ('Hare's
Moral Thinking', pp. 501, 511). And after his
conversion from a form of quasi-Manichaean
religious atheism, grounded in an ultra-
Schopenhauerian pessimism, to Catholic
Christianity he was concerned to show both
that hope can be certain, the uncertainty
PHILLIPS GRIFFITHS
residing in 'ourselves' not in 'God's providence'
('Certain Hope', p. 454), and that the possibil-
ity of the sort of conflict between religion and
ethics postulated by Kierkegaard represents 'a
quite wrong-headed notion of ethics' ('Religion
and Ethics', p. 145).
Phillips Griffiths's indirect influence on phi-
losophy was primarily through his founding
and nurturing of a major philosophy depart-
ment and his Directorship of the Royal Institute
of Philosophy, in the course of which he facil-
itated many lectures, conferences, symposia
(the ten volumes of papers he edited for it mas-
sively understate his contribution) and even
videos, extended the work of the Institute into
schools, and encouraged the extramural lec-
turing and public outreach for philosophy that
has been his passion from at least his Birkbeck
days. Beyond this he has also contributed to the
wider discussion of the role of the university,
understood as an institution centrally con-
cerned with the disinterested pursuit of uni-
versal objects which possess reciprocity in the
sense that they present new challenges to the
agent; such learning is an end in itself - thus,
though pursuing such subjects as philosophy
may be useful, 'their use does not determine the
way they are studied' ('A Deduction of
Universities', p. 200); such a radical vision has
important and controversial implications for a
range of matters from the role of university
teaching, through the grounds for university
funding, to academic freedom.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Formulating Moral Principles', Mind, vol. 65
(1956), pp. 38-48.
'Acting with Reason', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 8 (1958), pp. 289-99.
'Justifying Moral Principles', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 58 (1957-8),
pp. 103-24.
(with R.S. Peters), 'The Autonomy of
Prudence', Mind, vol. 71 (1962), pp.
161-80.
'On Belief, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 63 (1962-3), pp. 167-86.
782
'Ultimate Moral Principles: Their
Justification, in Paul Edwards (ed.), The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967), vol. 8,
pp. 177-82.
'Transcendental Arguments',, Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 43
(1969), pp. 165-80.
'Reasons and Causes', in R.F. Dearden, P.H
Hirst and R.S. Peters (eds), Education and
the Development of Reason (1972), pp.
332-47.
(with Haskell Fain), 'On Falsely Believing
One Doesn't Know', in Studies in the
Philosophy of Mind, American
Philosophical Quarterly Monograph
Series, vol. 6 (1972), pp. 10-23.
'Belief and Reasons for Belief, Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 47
(1973), pp. 54-68.
'Wittgenstein and the Four-Fold Root of the
Principle of Sufficient Reason [Inaugural
Address], Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 50 (1973), pp. 1-20.
'Is Free Will Incompatible with Something or
Other?, in Key Themes in Philosophy
(Cambridge, 1989), pp. 101-19.
'Kant's Psychological Hedonism',
Philosophy, vol. 66 (1991), pp. 207-16
Originally contributed to the World
Congress of Philosophy, Brighton, August
1988.
Other Relevant Works
'How Can One Person Represent Another?',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 34 (1960), pp. 187-208.
'Ayer on Perception', Mind, vol. 69 (1960),
pp. 486-98.
'A Deduction of Universities', in Reginald D.
Archambault (ed.), Philosophy and
Education (1965), pp. 187-207.
(Ed.), Knowledge and Belief (Oxford, 1967).
'Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer and Ethics, in
Godfrey Vesey (ed.), Understanding
Wittgenstein (1974), pp. 96-116.
'Academic Freedom: A Reply to Dr Brown',
in S.C. Brown (ed.), Philosophers Discus

Education (1975), pp. 221-41, 257-8.
'Hare's Moral Thinking, Philosophy-, vol. 58
(1983), pp. 497-511.
(prepared with Sir Alfred Ayer and Martin
Warner), The Problem of Evil' [2 of a
series of 8 videotapes], Ethics and Religion
(1984).
'Certain Hope', Religious Studies, vol. 26
(1990), pp. 453-61.
'Conclusion', in G.M.K. Hunt (ed.),
Philosophy and Politics (Cambridge,
1990), pp. 129-39.
(Ed.), The Impulse to Philosophise
(Cambridge, 1992).
'Religion and Ethics', in Martin Warner (ed.),
Religion and Philosophy (Cambridge,
1992), pp. 135-46.
Further Reading
Austin, J.L. 'Pretending', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society', suppl. vol. 32 (1958),
pp. 261-78.
Miller, David (ed.), Griffschrift: Essays
Presented to A. Phillips Griffiths on his
50th Birthday (Coventry, 1977).
Martin Warner
PIRIE, Norman Wingate (1907-97)
Norman Wingate Pirie was born in Midhurst,
Sussex on 1 July 1907 and died in Harpenden,
Hertfordshire on 29 March 1997. The
youngest child of the painter Sir George and his
wife Jean, he was raised in the family home at
Wardend, Stirlingshire and entered Emmanuel
College (Cambridge), graduating BA in bio-
chemistry (1929). While at Cambridge Pirie
made the acquaintance of such luminaries as
J.D. BERNAL and J.B.S. HALDANE, and, like
many of his colleagues, became involved with
socialist groups concerned with national and
international causes. He subsequently became
783
PIRIE
active in the Association of Scientific Workers,
various anti-war movements and the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament - associations which
led to travel restrictions during the Cold War.
In 1940 Pirie moved to the Rothamsted
Experimental Station in Hertfordshire, where
he remained until his nominal retirement in
1972. While his early work in Cambridge was
on the nature of plant viruses (with Frederick
Bawden he demonstrated that the genetic
material found in viruses is RNA), his
Rothamsted work concentrated on leaf protein,
and, beginning in 1942, he wrote approxi-
mately 190 papers, reviews, lectures and
popular articles advocating its use as a food
source. His popular writings on world popu-
lation, contraception and nuclear arms reflected
his concerns for the use of science for the bet-
terment of all. This concern was also reflected
in his contributions to the 'Two Cultures'
debates of the 1950s and 1960s, wherein Pirie
argued that the creative activities of writers
and scientists have much in common, with the
real difference being between responsive, com-
municative individuals and those who are not
While working with Bawden, Pirie developed
a concern for the accuracy of scientific words
and concepts. In 1937 he articulated his concern
that non-scientific words were often appropri-
ated to scientific issues, and that qualities asso-
ciated with 'living' matter, for example growth
and reproduction, clearly applied to non-living
situations. He also realized that the develop-
ment of a more useful terminology would require
a fuller understanding of the philosophical and
scientific dimensions of life. This paper was the
first of over forty articles discussing the nature,
origin and distribution of life. In subsequent
work he emphasized the possibility of life-like
forms occurring in organic tars and gums coating
the surface of metal-containing minerals in the
prebiotic Earth (in opposition to the 'probiotic
soup' hypothesis favoured by the likes of A.I.
Oparin). This would eventually lead to support
for A.G. Cairns-Smith, and L.S. and R. Penrose,
who all developed theories of information flow
using replicating materials.
PIRIE
Pirie received recognition from the Royal
Society for his work: he was elected FRS
(1949), invited to give the Leeuwenhoek
Lecture (1963) and awarded its prestigious
Copley Medal (1971).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Meaningless of the Terms Life and
Living', in J. Needham and D.E. Green
(eds), Perspectives in Biochemistry (1937),
pp. 11-22.
'Green Leaves as a Source of Protein and
Other Nutrients', Nature, vol. 149 (1942),
p. 251.
The Nature and Development of Life and
our Ideas about it', Modern Quarterly, vol.
3 (1948), pp. 82-93.
'Scientists and Writers: The Growing
Cleavage', Penguin Science Survey, vol. B.
(1963), pp. 9-22.
The Origins of Life on Earth: A
Retrospective on Ideas', Interdisciplinary
Science Review, vol. 19 (1994), pp. 13-21.
Further Reading
Pierpoint, W.S., 'Norman Wingate Pirie',
Biographical Memoirs Fellows of the
Royal Society (London), vol. 45 (1999),
pp. 399-415.
Pirie, N.W., 'A Non-Conformist Biologist',
New Scientist, 12 February 1970, pp.
15-18.
John M. Lynch
PIVCEVIC, Edo(1931-)
Edo Pivcevic was born in Omis, Croatia on 11
August 1931. He has been a resident in the
United Kingdom since 1958, and a naturalized
British subject since 1966. He was educated in
Croatia, attending the University of Zagreb,
where he attained the equivalent of first class
784
honours in 1954. He went to the universities of
Erlangen and Minister, Westfalia (Germany);
obtained a PhD at the University of Munster
(1958); and another PhD at the University of
London (1962).
Pivcevic taught philosophy at the University
of Bristol, first as lecturer then as reader, from
1964 to 1997. He was the founder and first
President of the Cogito Society (established
1986). He was also the founder and first editor
of Cogito, an international philosophical
journal, established in 1986 with the aim o
promoting a study of philosophy, especially -
though not exclusively - among A-level
students and undergraduates, as a means of
furthering critical thinking, development of
analytical skills and use of rational argument.
The Cogito Society organized regular confer-
ences for teachers of philosophy, among the
first of their kind in Britain, as well as funding
and running research fellowships both at Bristol
and New College, Oxford.
Pivcevic has also taught as visiting professor
at a number of foreign universities: the
University of Hebei at Baoding and the People's
University of China, Beijing; the University of
Oldenburg in Germany; the University of
Zagreb (Croatia); Holy Cross College,
Worcester, Massachusetts; the International
Centre of Post-Graduate Studies Dubrovnik;
and so on. He was also a visiting fellow at
New College, Oxford in 1998.
His main philosophical interests revolve
around key metaphysical issues: existence,
reality, truth. His central thesis, as sketched
out in his main work The Concept of Reality
(1986), is that in making existential claims,
indeed any truth-claims, we are by implication
saying something about the world as a whole.
The world, however, is not an entity, or a col-
lection of entities and their attributes, but a
configuration of interlocking strands, in which
entities appear as part of the structure of which
the epistemic activity of thinking agents is
another constituent element. The thesis he
defends here and in his subsequent books is
that of ontological structuralism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ironie als Daseinform bei Soeren Kierkegaard
(Gutersloh, 1960).
Husserl and Phenomenology (1970).
Translated into German, Chinese, Korean
and Croatian.
(Ed.), Phenomenology and Philosophical
Understanding (Cambridge, 1975; 2nd
imp., 1979)
The Concept of Reality (1986; 2nd edn,
1993)
Change and Selves (Oxford, 1990; 2nd imp.,
2001; Croatian trans., 1993).
What is Truth? (Aldershot, 1997; German
trans, 2001; Croatian trans., 2002).
Pivcevic has published numerous articles and
book reviews in a variety of international
journals, as well as a volume of
autobiography.
Elizabeth McCardell
PLACE, Ullin Thomas (1924-2000)
U.T. Place was born in Northallerton,
Yorkshire on 24 October 1924 and died in
Thirsk on 2 January 2000. He was educated at
Rugby School, spending a term at Corpus
Christi College, Oxford, before registering as a
conscientious objector in 1943 and working
with a Quaker ambulance unit until the end of
the war. He returned to Oxford in 1946 and
took a degree in philosophy and psychology,
studying under H.P. GRICE and B.A. FARRELL.
He graduated in 1949, and obtained a Diploma
in Anthropology in 1950. In 1951 he was
appointed lecturer in psychology in the
Department of Philosophy, University of
Adelaide. He returned to England in 1954,
where he went to work at the Institute of
Experimental Psychology, Oxford. He worked
as a clinical psychologist from 1960 to 1966,
and then lectured in psychology and clinical
785
PLACE
psychology until 1970, before becoming
lecturer in philosophy, as well as associated
lecturer in psychology, at the University of
Leeds from 1970 until his retirement in 1982.
After retirement, he did work in experimental
psychology at the University of Wales, Bangor,
where he was honorary lecturer, and began
publishing more extensively in philosophy.
Ullin Place, the pioneer of the mind/brain
identity theory, left his brain to the University
of Adelaide where it has been preserved.
U.T. Place will always be remembered as
one of the three philosophers who developed
the identity theory of mind in the late 1950s.
The advent of the identity theory, and more
generally of physicalism, was the most signifi-
cant event in twentieth-century analytic phi-
losophy of mind, for it literally transformed
the subject: from that point onwards, physi-
calism was in the foreground or at least back-
ground of almost all theorizing about the
nature of mind. Place was the first to make it
into print, with his succinct (seven pages) 'Is
Consciousness a Brain Process?' appearing in
The British Journal of Psychology in 1956
(received by the journal in 1954). Two years
later American philosopher Herbert Feigl pub-
lished his considerably longer (128 pages)
article The "Mental" and the "Physical"' in
1958, and a year after that JJ.C. SMART made
what was to become the definitive statement of
the new theory with his 'Sensations and Brain
Processes' published in the 1959 Philosophical
Review.
Though his 1956 paper is well known, the
extent of Place's personal responsibility for the
identity theory is not, and so is in danger of
being seriously underestimated. The fact that
Place's paper appeared in a psychology journal
led to it being overlooked by philosophers: it
only started to be reprinted and widely read
later on as a result of interest in Smart's paper.
Yet it was Place who converted Smart to the
identity theory. JJ.C. Smart took the Chair of
Philosophy in Adelaide University in 1950, and
appointed both U.T. Place and C.B. Martin.
Place developed the identity theory at Adelaide
PLACE
in discussions with Smart, Martin and D.A.T.
GASKING, all of whom firmly resisted his ideas.
Nevertheless, by 1954 Place was convinced
enough of his new theory to end The Concept
of Heed', a partial critique of Rylean behav-
iourism, with the sentence, 'It is my belief ...
that the logical objections to the statement
"consciousness is a process in the brain" are no
greater than the logical objections which might
be raised to the statement "lightning is a motion
of electrical charges'" (p. 255). At this time,
Smart remained unconvinced and continued
to defend a Rylean view; it was not until long
after Place had left Australia (and after Smart
had read Feigl), that Smart came around to
Place's position.
Place himself traced the origins of the identity
theory to E.G. Boring's 1933 The Physical
Dimensions of Consciousness, a work to which
he was introduced at Oxford by B.A. Farrell. In
his highly influential paper 'Experience', Farrell
had discussed and ultimately rejected Boring's
view that 'Neural process and sensation are
identical' ('Experience', pp. 174-5), the very
view Place was later to defend. Now Place may
have discovered the view in Boring and other
psychologists of the early twentieth century,
but it certainly did not originate there: the
general idea that the mind is physical and in
some sense the same thing as the brain has a
very long history, as documented in Lange's
History of Materialism. But though the idea has
been around throughout the ages, it was always
something of a curiosity. It was Place's great
achievement to make physicalism/materialism
about the mind a mainstream view, a position
from which it rapidly became the orthodoxy it
is today.
Place enacted this transformation in the
fortunes of physicalism by arguing that the
identity of sensations with brain processes was
to be construed as a scientific hypothesis, akin
to the reduction of lightning to a motion of
electric charges, or of water to H2O. This move
not only tapped into the general scientific
optimism of the time, it also overcame what
was considered the overwhelming 'logical'
786
objection to physicalism. The objection was
essentially that 'sensation' and 'brain process'
do not mean the same, and so in talking about
sensations we cannot be talking about brain
processes. This objection was forcefully put by
C.D. BROAD in his 1925 The Mind and its Place
in Nature (pp. 612-24), who on that basis dis-
missed 'Reductive Materialism' as 'preposter-
ously silly'. In 'Is Consciousness a Brain
Process?' Place short-circuits this objection at
the outset by agreeing that To say that state-
ments about consciousness are statements
about brain processes is manifestly false'
(p. 45), but points out that this leaves it open
that what we happen to refer to might never-
theless be brain processes. Here we see the
crucial application of Frege's distinction
between sense and reference allowing for two
expressions with different meanings to share a
reference. The difference of meaning prevents
conceptual derivation of the identity a priori,
since the two expressions are logically inde-
pendent of each other, but it leaves open the
possibility that they might be empirically dis-
covered to be determining the same referent in
different ways.
Interestingly, Place does not explicitly make
the connection to Frege, as Feigl and Smart
were to, but instead draws on his background
in ordinary language philosophy to provide a
diagnosis of the apparent force of the logical
objection, which he puts down to 'a failure to
distinguish between what we may call the "is"
of definition and the "is" of composition' ('Is
Consciousness a Brain Process?', p. 45). True
statements involving the 'is' of definition, such
as 'a square is an equilateral rectangle', are nec-
essary and analytic, but true statements involv-
ing the 'is' of composition, such as 'his table is
an old packing case', are contingent and empir-
ical. Only when the 'is' of definition is involved
is it a legitimate objection to simply point out
that the two terms (e.g., 'square' and 'equilat-
eral rectangle') are disconnected in meaning.
But Place's identity theory employs the 'is' of
composition, and so the objection is illegiti-
mate. It is no objection to claiming 'his table is

an old packing case' that 'his table' and 'old
packing case' might not have picked out the
same thing (as they would not have if he had
bought a manufactured table, for instance),
and it is no objection to the identity theory
that 'consciousness' and 'brain process' might
not have picked out the same thing. All that is
being claimed is that they actually do pick out
the same thing.
Place notes that 'his table is an old packing
case' states a token identity, but 'conscious-
ness is a brain process' makes a general claim
about all states of consciousness. This renders
the logical independence of 'consciousness' and
'brain process' more problematic, since Place
doubts that if all tables were packing cases the
terms would have retained their independence.
Place later argued, in his 1967 'Comments'
(footnote pp. 66-7), that if physicalism became
an established fact, physical and mental terms
would likely lose their logically independent
status, in which case mind-brain identity state-
ments would become analytic truths (see also
Dispositions: A Debate, p. 59). The reason for
the logical independence of expressions within
a statement of reduction is that observations
grounding application of each of the expres-
sions 'can seldom if ever be performed simulta-
neously' ('Is Consciousness a Brain Process?', p.
46). Thus the logical criteria for confirming 'a
cloud is a mass of tiny particles' require differ-
ent observations from different perspectives.
The mind-brain case cannot be quite like this,
however, because 'A closer introspective scrutiny
will never reveal the passage of nerve impulses
over a thousand synapses in the way that a
closer scrutiny of a cloud will reveal a mass of
tiny particles in suspension' (ibid., p. 47). What
the identity theory requires instead is that 'sci-
entific observations ... provide an immediate
explanation of the observations made by the
man in the street' (ibid., p. 48). This is how
'lightning is a motion of electric charges' is con-
firmed, since the charges explain the sort of
visual stimulation that lead to reports of light-
ning. The problem is that this seems to be just
what cannot be done in the case of conscious-
787
PLACE
ness, for it is hard to see how investigations into
neural activity could explain consciousness.
It is striking how Place's emphasis on the
explanatory demands of physicalism, which
combines with his conception of neural activity
composing consciousness (an idea passed over
by later identity theorists), parallels contem-
porary discussions of consciousness. In 1983
Joseph Levine coined the term 'explanatory
gap' to describe our inability to explain con-
scious properties as macro-properties of neural
micro-properties. This conception of con-
sciousness as dependent upon and needing to be
explained by lower-level neural properties is
exactly Place's, since composition is an asym-
metrical relation (consciousness is composed of
neural activity and not vice versa), and Place
thinks his hypothesis is to be justified on
explanatory grounds. However, Place would
regard the 'explanatory gap' as an illusion
stemming from what he called 'the phenome-
nological fallacy'. This fallacy is basically
indirect realism, i.e. thinking that phenomenal
properties are directly observable in introspec-
tion and provide indirect access to properties in
the world. Place thinks on the contrary that we
only observe external properties, phenomenal
properties being 'mythological', and that 'when
we describe the after-image as green, we are not
saying that there is something, the after-image,
which is green, we are saying that we are having
the sort of experience which we normally have
when ... looking at a green patch of light' (ibid.,
p. 49). This idea that experiences are described
in terms of the publicly observable and not
anything intrinsic to the experience was called
'topic-neutrality' by Smart, and originates in
B.A. Farrell's 'Experience'. Once this fallacy is
overcome, concludes Place, there is no obstacle
to the physiological explanation of conscious-
ness through the correlation of neural activity
with environmental conditions, which is all
that is required to confirm the mind-brain
identity hypothesis.
One well-known element to the new physi-
calism conspicuously absent from Place's paper
is an appeal to Occam's razor. At the end of his
PLACE
1959 paper Smart describes Place's view that
the identity thesis is a scientific hypothesis as
'partly right and partly wrong' (p. 155). It is
right in the sense that whether consciousness is
identified with a brain process or some other
physical process is an empirical matter, but
wrong to imply that empirical evidence might
decide between the identity theory and compet-
ing metaphysical positions such as dualism. For
the latter task Smart thinks the identity theory
must be defended a priori through an appeal to
Occam's razor. Place defended his position in
'Materialism as a Scientific Hypothesis', arguing
that Smart had confused two issues. Firstly,
logical criteria must be established to determine
when two sets of observations are observations
of the same event. Place's original paper was an
attempt to establish criteria for the mind-brain
case. Secondly, when the criteria are in place, it
is an entirely empirical matter whether the theory
is accepted. In the case of the identity theory, it
depends on whether neural processes can be dis-
covered which satisfy the logical criteria decided
upon. If such processes are found, this counts in
favour of the identity theory and against com-
peting theories such as dualism. Occam's razor
is not needed.
Place maintained a fundamental distinction
between sensations and propositional attitudes.
The identity theory was true only of sensations
and conscious states of which we could sensibly
ask 'what it is like' to be in that state ('The
Concept of Heed', p. 252), and 'where some
sort of inner process story is unavoidable' ('Is
Consciousness a Brain Process?', p. 44). About
propositional attitudes, on the other hand,
Place remained loyal to Rylean dispositional
analysis, and consequently disapproved when
later physicalists such as Armstrong (A
Materialist Theory of the Mind, 1968)
extended the theory to identify propositional
attitudes with brain states (The Two Factor
Theory of the Mind-Brain Relation', 2000).
Place's commitment to analysing propositional
attitudes in terms of hypothetical about behav-
iour, and also his view that words have
meaning only in relation to the publicly observ-
788
able (an idea at work in his diagnosis of 'the
phenomenological fallacy'), explains the fact
that he always described himself as a behav-
iourist ('A Pilgrim's Progress?', p. 50). This
behaviourist allegiance provided a crucial link
to his work in psychology., paradigmatic of
which is the series of four papers he wrote in
the early 1980s ('Skinner's Verbal Behaviour
I-IV') in an attempt to revive interest in the
behavioural analysis of language through a
constructive critique of Skinner.
In his late work, Place became increasingly
concerned with the nature of dispositions. His
1996 'Intentionality as the Mark of the
Dispositional' disputes Breritano's thesis that
intentionality is the mark of the mental. The
various features of intentionality supposed dis-
tinctive of mental phenomena are in fact
features resulting from dispositionality. Since
dispositions can be either physical or mental,
intentionality can be as well. In Dispositions: A
Debate Place combines his view of dispositions
as intentional states 'directed' upon their
possible manifestations, with a broadly Rylean
conditional theory of dispositions, according to
which dispositional properties are the causal
upshot of the microstructure of an entity,
analysed in terms of hypotheticals about 'what
would happen or, in the counterfactual case,
what would have happened, if certain condi-
tions were to be or had been fulfilled' (p. 20).
U.T. Place had a decisive influence on the
philosophy of mind, albeit through one short
paper and the agency of J.J.C. Smart. Of
course, it might be thought that Place's idea was
the inevitable product of a time ripe for a sci-
entifically respectable theory of consciousness,
when phenomenalism was declining in status,
physicalism was emerging in the work of
Carnap, and the shortcomings of behaviourism
were beginning to be felt. However, when we
discover in Place's semi-autobiographical 'A
Pilgrim's Progress?' a young Quaker motivated
to investigate the nature of mind through his
desire to vindicate the reality and life-changing
potential of religious experience, and when we
also recall Place's tenacity in defending a view

considered ludicrous at the time, then confi-
dence in the inevitability of his innovation must
surely be shaken.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Concept of Heed', British Journal of
Psychology, vol. 45 (1954), pp. 234-55.
'Is Consciousness a Brain Process?', British
Journal of Psychology, vol. 47 (1956), pp.
44-50.
'Materialism as a Scientific Hypothesis',
Philosophical Review, vol. 69 (1960), pp.
101-104.
Identifying the Mind: Selected Papers of U.T.
Place, ed. George Graham and Elizabeth
R. Valentine (Oxford, 2004)
Other Relevant Works
'Comments on H. Putnam "Psychological
Predicates'", in W.H. Capitan and D.D.
Merrill (eds), Art, Mind and Religion:
Proceedings of the 1965 Oberlin
Colloquium in Philosophy (Pittsburgh,
1967), pp. 55-68.
'Skinner's Verbal Behaviour I-IV,
Behaviourism, vols. 9-11 (1981-3).
'E.G. Boring and the Mind-Brain Identity
Theory', British Psychological Society,
History and Philosophy of Science
Newsletter, vol. 11 (1990), pp. 20-31.
'Intentionality as the Mark of the
Dispositional', Dialectica, vol. 50 (1996),
pp. 91-120.
(with D.M. Armstrong and C.B. Martin)
Dispositions: A Debate, ed. Tim Crane
(1996).
'The Two Factor Theory of the Mind-Brain
Relation', Brain and Mind, vol. 1 (2000),
pp. 29-43.
'A Pilgrim's Progress? From Mystical
Experience to Biological Consciousness',
Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 9
(2002), pp. 34-52.
Further Reading
Armstrong, D.M., A Materialist Theory of
the Mind (1968).
789
PLAMENATZ
Boring, E.G., The Physical Dimensions of
Consciousness (New York, 1933).
Broad, C.D., The Mind and its Place in
Nature (1925).
Farrell, B.A., 'Experience', Mind, vol. 59
(1950), pp. 170-98.
Feigl, H., 'The "Mental" and the "Physical"',
in H. Feigl, M. Scriven and G. Maxwell
(eds), Concepts, Theories and the Mind-
Body Problem, Minnesota Studies in the
Philosophy of Science, vol. 2 (Minneapolis,
1958); repr. in H. Feigl, The 'Mental' and
the 'Physical': The Essay and a Postscript
(Minneapolis, 1967).
Lange, F.A., The History of Materialism and
Criticism of its Present Importance, trans.
E.C. Thomas with an Introduction by B.
Russell (1925).
Levine, J., 'Materialism and Qualia: The
Explanatory Gap', Pacific Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 64 (1983), pp. 354-61.
Smart, J.J.C., 'Sensations and Brain
Processes', Philosophical Review, vol. 68
(1959), pp. 141-56.
James Tartaglia
PLAMENATZ, John Petrov (1912-75)
John Petrov Plamenatz was born in Cetinje,
the capital of Montenegro, on 16 May 1912
and died at his home near Banbury on 19
February 1975. His father Peter had been
Foreign Minister for Montenegro, and his
mother was of aristocratic background. Peter
Plamenatz was forced to leave Montenegro in
1917, and John was sent to England and
educated at Clayesmore School, and at Oriel
College, Oxford. Plamenatz took the new
school of PPE, but fell ill in 1933, and was
awarded an aegrotat degree. He took the
history school the next year and obtained a
first. In 1936 Plamenatz won election to a
PLAME.NATZ
research fellowship at All Souls, on the basis of
work later published as Consent, Freedom and
Political Obligation (1938). When war broke
out, he joined an anti-aircraft battery, and he
was naturalized in 1941. At the end of the war,
he returned to All Souls, and he spent the rest
of his life at Oxford. From 1951 to 1967 he
was a research fellow at Nuffield College,
before returning to All Souls as Chichele
Professor of Social and Political Theory, suc-
ceeding Isaiah BERLIN. He was elected to a fel-
lowship of the British Academy in 1962.
Plamenatz died in February 1975, exactly fifty-
six years to the day after he landed at Dover.
According to G. Marshall, Plamenatz would
have characterized himself as a social and polit-
ical theorist, rather than as a political philoso-
pher (Marshall, p. 419). Certainly, he did not
develop a distinctive theory or set of proposals
of his own. Rather, his strength lay in the expo-
sition, elucidation and criticism of the canoni-
cal works of the Western tradition in political
thought - Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke,
Rousseau, the English utilitarians, Hegel, Marx
and Weber. The output of work in this area
accounted for the largest contribution to the
subject by anyone in Britain since the war
(Siedentop, p. 16). He brought to this work
the techniques and methods of Oxford philos-
ophy - the techniques of British political
thought after its nineteenth-century Hegelian
phase, associated with BRADLEY and
BOSANQUET. However, his approach was not
that of linguistic analysis: he neither left every-
thing where it was, nor refrained from defend-
ing or criticizing the truth or validity of partic-
ular doctrines. In an important paper on the
methodology of political theory Plamenatz
argued that
the great political thinkers, have raised many
spurious problems ... they have been
confused and have misuse language ... those
who study them ought to subject them to
close and rigorous criticism. I believe they
made many mistakes, but I do not believe
they were mistaken in trying to do what they
790
did. I do not believe that the progress of
science and philosophy has left no room for
their kind of activity.
In this paper Plamenatz took to task, amongst
others, T.D. WELDON for suggesting that all
there is to political philosophy is linguistic
analysis. For example, when giving his account
of the English utilitarians, he was explicit about
his reasons for rejecting their central doctrines.
Whilst he rejected linguistic analysis,
Plamenatz's approach was more robust about
testing for validity and truth than the contex-
tual school, who argued that ideas cannot be
correctly interpreted without the fullest possible
understanding of the motives, intentions and
circumstances of those who express them.
Plamenatz held that, while this contextual
information might be of some help, it was not
essential to the interpretative task.
Consent, Freedom and Political Obligation
(1938) is the work that established Plamenatz's
reputation. Although the doctoral thesis from
which it came was failed by the Oxford exam-
iners, the work succeeded in focusing atten-
tion on consent. On Plamenatz's own account
the work was influenced by H.A. PRICHARD
and E.F. CARRITT, and it examined the role of
consent in securing obligation. In this work
Plamenatz tied the notion of consent closely to
the idea of giving permissions and expressing
wishes. Later, Plamenatz took this analysis to
be too narrow, and he attempted to explain the
case in which someone who voted for an
election candidate who turned out to lose could
be taken to have consented to rule by the
winner. Clearly the voter did not necessarily
express any wish concerning the winner.
Nonetheless, Plamenatz held, he had in some
sense consented to the authority of the winner.
In Man and Society (1963) Plamenatz argued
that Locke had brought together two functions
of consent that ought to be kept apart. It was
right to stipulate consent as a condition for
bringing individuals within the bounds of
society but false to claim that in a constituted
society, an obligation to obey rested on having

consented to obey. '[W]here government
already exists and protects men's rights, they
ought to obey it whether or not they have con-
sented to do so' (Man and Society', p. 224).
In his 1938 monograph Plamenatz aimed to
bring closer together the protection of rights
with the generation of consent. By equating
governmentt by consent simply with 'respon-
sible' government - that is, a system in which
rulers consent to be removed at periodic free
elections - Plamenatz makes the Lockean
position more plausible. However, in doing so
Plamenatz treats consent stipulatively - shifting
the crux of criticism from the suggestion that
consent exists without any corresponding state
of mind on the part of the person who sup-
posedly consents, to the stipulated analysis of
consent. As Siegler and others argued, voters
often do actually vote without consenting to the
authority of the government that results from
their activities.
In The English Utilitarians (1958) Plamenatz
is critical of Mill's claim to rest his anti-pater-
nalistic principles on a utilitarian basis. Such
principles simply do not provide a secure basis
for anti-paternalism, because the choice for or
against anti-paternalist principles is a contin-
gent one. He levelled further criticism at Mill's
advocacy of free speech: in particular, he denied
that a straightforward and normatively
powerful distinction could be drawn between
governmental interference with actions and
with speech: the genuine (utilitarian) reason
for preserving the latter rather than the former
was that controlling actions was more eco-
nomical than controlling beliefs. His assess-
ment of utilitarianism, and especially the utili-
tarian conception of human nature, became,
according to Siedentop, 'an important method
of defining his relation to the English tradition'
(Siedentop, p. 16)
In the 1950s Plamenatz published two more
historical works, The Revolutionary Movement
in France (1952) and German Marxism and
Russian Communism (1954) and developed
an interest in psephology - no doubt partly
due to his colleagues at Nuffield College. He
791
PLAMENATZ
also engaged in continuing interpretative work
on the classic texts, most notably in the dispute
over the 'Warrender thesis'.
J.H. WARRENDER had argued that the
standard interpretation of Hobbes was
mistaken: on this view, Hobbes bases obliga-
tion on the protection that it offers to self-inter-
ested individuals who anticipate the horrors of
the state of nature and commit themselves to
absolute obedience to a sovereign able to
protect them. According to Warrender, this
was insufficient: Hobbes also needed the
backing of the law of nature conceived of as a
Divine Command. So Warrender gave a deon-
tological twist to the traditional reading.
Plamenatz denied Warrender's account in a
polemical argument in a paper in Political
Studies, asserting that Hobbesian individuals
were not only capable of choosing, but also
could not but chose allegiance to an absolute
sovereign if they foresaw their prospects suffi-
ciently clear-headedly.
Plamenatz's work on Marx might be
expected to show signs of partisanship -
Plamenatz was on the staff of King Peter of
Yugoslavia, and published a pamphlet defend-
ing General Mihailovic, and, according to
Berlin, the communist revolution in Yugoslavia
affected him deeply. However, Berlin claims
that his critiques of Marxism are 'among the
most fair-minded analyses of its strengths and
weaknesses, lucid, detailed, and singularly free
from bias or failure of understanding' (Oxford
DNB). Karl Marx's Philosophy of Man (1975),
which was left as a completed manuscript at his
death and published posthumously, was a par-
ticularly important contribution to the critical
discussion of Marx.
Man and Society is Plamenatz's most influ-
ential work and has been for some time a staple
of undergraduate reading lists. The book is
based on lectures given at Columbia, Harvard
and Oxford, and is a critical examination of a
number of important theorists, starting with
Machiavelli, and running through the canon to
Marx. In the Introduction Plamenatz makes
clear his distance from contextualism and his-
PLAMENATZ
torians of political thought, just as he had
established some distance from Weldon and
the assumptions of linguistic analysis in 'The
Use of Political Theory', written at the same
time. Of the contextual school he wrote:
They speak as if, to understand what a man
is saying, we must know why he is saying it.
But this is not true. We need understand
only the sense in which he is using words.
To understand Hobbes we need not know
what his purpose was in writing Leviathan
or how he felt about the rival claims of
Royalists and Parliamentarians; but we do
kneed to know what he understood by such
words as law, right, liberty, covenant and
obligation.
(Man and Society', p. ix)
This insensitivity to context is sometimes more
advertised than applied in the book.
Nevertheless, in retrospect, the account of
methodology does have a rather dogmatic
ring. Contemporary political theorists are apt
to suggest that context and intention can and
do figure in the articulation of meaning - the
'sense in which he is using words'. But both
the analytical philosophers and the contextu-
alists have given a little ground towards a
methodologically pluralist approach.
Recognizing that one reads texts for different
purposes, with different aims, it makes sense
to adopt methodologies that are appropriate
for those ends rather than ruling out one or
other approach to a simply conceived task of
'interpretation' on an a priori basis. And
Plamenatz's suggestion that there should be
some division of labour has been reflected in
the increasing specialization of philosophers
on the one hand and historians of political
thought on the other.
Linguistic analysis, conceived of narrowly,
has also been of declining influence in politi-
cal theory, but not because of polemics like
Plamenatz's. Rather, the work of John Rawls
and the debates following the publication of
A Theory of Justice especially have made it
792
clear that there is much work of substance to
do in political philosophy. It is perhaps plau-
sible to see Plamenatz's work as 'holding the
line' for substantive, normative political phi-
losophy against, on the one hand, linguistic
analysis and contextualism, and, on the other,
postwar confidence of social scientists in their
enterprise. On this account, Plamenatz's task
was completed by the explosion of interest in
normative political philosophy fired by Rawls.
It is difficult to demur from Siedentop's
account of Plamenatz's writing style: 'slight
dependence on previous interpreters, little
concern with detailed textual analysis, direct
and roughly critical cross-examination of the
primary texts, a fearless readiness to identify
nonsense or ambiguity and an uncompromis-
ing pursuit of what is valid or valuable'
(Siedentop, p. 16). In this way, Plamenatz
established his own voice as authoritative.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Consent, Freedom and Political Obligation
(1938).
The English Utilitarians (1949; 2nd edn,
1958).
The Revolutionary Movement in France
(1952).
German Marxism and Russian Communism
(1954).
The Use of Political Theory', Political
Studies, vol. 8 (1960), pp. 37^7.
Alien Rule and Self-Government (1960).
Man and Society, 2 vols (1963).
Ideology (1970).
Karl Marx's Philosophy of Man (1975).
Further Reading
Berlin, Isaiah, 'Plamenatz, John Petrov
(1912-1975)', Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography', Oxford University
Press (2004).
Marshall, G., 'John Petrov Plamenatz
1912-1975', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 62 (1976), pp. 419-26
Siedentop, L.A., 'Prof. John Plamenatz', The
Times, 27 February 1975, p. 16.

Siegler, F., 'Plamenatz on Consent and
Obligation', Philosophical Quarterly
(1968).
Jon Pike
PODRO, Michael (b. 1931)
Michael Podro was born in London and read
English at Jesus College, Cambridge from 1951
to 1954, where he attended F.R. Leavis's
seminar. He was a part-time student at the Slade
from 1955 to 1956, and in November 1956
joined the Philosophy Department at University
College London to undertake a qualifying year
in philosophy prior to engaging in doctoral
research. He wrote his doctorate on Konrad
Fiedler's theory of art under the supervision of
Ernst GOMBRICH and Richard WOLLHEIM. He
was Head of the History of Art Department at
Camberwell School of Art and Design from
1961 to 1967. He was appointed lecturer in the
philosophy of art at the Warburg Institute,
University of London in 1967 and was there
until 1969, when he joined the Department of
Art History and Theory at the University of
Essex. He was made Chair of the Department in
1973 and retired in 1996. He was elected a
fellow of the British Academy in 1992.
Hovering in the terrain between art histori-
ography and philosophy, Podro's books develop
a continuous line of thought that started from a
problem in Gombrich's Art and Illusion identi-
fied by Wollheim in a critical review. Gombrich
assimilated the perception of a painted picture to
Jastrow's duck-rabbit: either one could see the
duck or the rabbit but not both at the same
time (becomes) either one could see the paint or
the picture but not both at the same time.
Wollheim objected that while duck and rabbit
were two incompatible interpretations of the
same configuration, the analogy was imperfect
for paint and picture. Podro turned this into a
793
PODRO
more general problem concerning the way in
which the mind worked upon a pictorial surface
(painted, drawn or sculpted) to generate a trans-
figured subject. The deep difference between
Podro and Gombrich is Podro's aesthetic
response to images, which hardly interested
Gombrich at all. This, in turn, led to a running
debate between Podro and Wollheim on the
precise nature of the dual aspectuality of the
painted image.
The Manifold in Perception (1972) is a his-
torical account of a group of closely related
theories concerning the relationship between a
subject and the artist's painted depiction of that
subject. It discusses the views of Kant, Schiller,
Herbart, Hildebrand, Schopenhauer and Fiedler,
and concludes with a discussion of the tradition
from Kant in contemporary retrospect. That
tradition
had two underlying assumptions. The first
was that any account of art must indicate dis-
tinctive or at least characteristic uses of our
perception, uses which if not exclusive to art
are at least necessary to it, and which are seen
in art in a particularly striking way. The
second assumption was that art involves our
attitudes, in the sense of our serious purposes
as human beings.
(The Manifold in Perception^ p. 121)
The Critical Historians of Art (1982) addresses
the work of art historians who aimed to explore
particular works of art in the light of a concep-
tion of art, not as historically determined objects
but as works that may be seen in the light of
each other. What, in other words, does a work
of art qua work of art hope to achieve? The
book considered the distinctive answers given by
Hegel, Schnaase, Semper, Goller, Riegl, Wolfflin,
Springer, Warburg and Panofsky.
Depiction uses the tools of philosophy and
criticism to examine the work of Donatello,
Rembrandt, Chardin and Hogarth, and is an
outstanding demonstration of the full complex-
ity of aesthetic response to artistic depictions.
PODRO
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art
from Kant to Hildebrand (Oxford, 1972).
The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven
and London, 1982).
Depiction (New Haven and London, 1998).
Richard Woodfield
POLANYI, Michael (1891-1976)
Michael Polanyi was born in Budapest on 11
March 1891 and died in Northampton on 22
February 1976. At the age of seventeen Polanyi
began his medical studies at the University of
Budapest. At the university, he and his brother
Karl, the future economist and historian of the
industrial revolution, founded a radical-pro-
gressive student group called the Galilei Circle,
which participated in publishing a literary
magazine, West, and a political journal,
Twentieth Century. Polanyi did not neglect sci-
entific research. Between 1910 and 1911 he
published three papers on the chemistry of
body fluids while still in his third year of
medical school. Polanyi spent the summer of
1912, before completing his medical degree,
doing research in physical chemistry with
Professor Georg Bredig at the Karlsruhe College
of Technology in Germany. There, Polanyi
researched the relation between the Third Law
of Thermodynamics and extreme pressures.
Bredig sent the results of Polanyi's research to
Einstein, who was quite impressed with the
effort, and Polanyi published his paper on the
subject in 1913. At the end of the summer,
Polanyi returned to the university in Budapest
to complete his medical studies, and received his
degree in 1913. Polanyi then returned to
Karlsruhe, where he engaged in research in
physical chemistry, and published five papers
on thermodynamics and two papers on the
adsorption of gases by solids in 1913-14, and
794
two further papers on adsorption in 1916-17.
When World War I broke out in August
1914, he joined the Austro-Hungarian Army as
a medical officer. Polanyi's military service
ended when he contracted diphtheria in 1915.
During his recuperation he wrote a dissertation
in physical chemistry based upon his Karlsruhe
research. This work, 'Adsorption of Gases by
a Solid Non-Volatile Adsorbent', was accepted
by the University of Budapest, and Polanyi
received a doctorate in chemistry in 1917.
After the war, Polanyi took up a position at
the University of Budapest as assistant to chem-
istry professor George von Hevesy, a former
associate of Bredig in Karlsruhe and of
Rutherford in Manchester. His disaffection for
Bela Kun's communist regime induced him to
leave Budapest for Karlsruhe some time at the
end of 1919. In 1920 Polanyi took up a
position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Fibre
Chemistry in Berlin, and in 1923 he became the
Head of one of the departments of the Fritz
Haber Institute for Physical Chemistry and
Electrochemistry. Based on his work there,
Polanyi was appointed a life member of the
Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of
the Sciences and received the title of professor
from the University of Berlin in 1926. When
Hitler came to power in 1933 Polanyi decided
to leave Germany. He resigned his life mem-
bership of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, relin-
quished his position at the Institute, and
accepted the Chair of Physical Chemistry at
the University of Manchester.
In England, Polanyi continued to run a
research laboratory and to publish significant
scientific papers until the mid 1940s. Polanyi
became a British citizen in 1939, and was
elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1944.
He published his 218th, and final, scientific
paper in 1949.
In the 1930s Polanyi's interests turned
increasingly to politics, economics and philos-
ophy. Polanyi's experiences in Kun's Hungary
and Hitler's Germany had convinced him that
freedom of thought and expression, of which
freedom of scientific research is simply a special

case, is a social necessity. Polanyi believed that
it is this freedom that ultimately ensures that the
truth will be heard, and that it is the possibil-
ity of truth that promises the hope of justice. In
keeping with these convictions, Polanyi pub-
lished essays criticizing the callous disregard
for the truth by both the Nazis and the Soviet
communists. He was a tireless critic of the
forces of social determinism in England, and in
1940 he published The Contempt of Freedom,
a collection of essays criticizing a movement
among British Marxist intellectuals advocat-
ing the social planning of scientific research.
Polanyi's opposition to this movement led him
in 1941 to co-found, with Professor John R.
Baker, a biologist at Oxford, the Society for
Freedom in Science.
Beginning in 1943, Polanyi began to synthe-
size these interests into a research project con-
cerning the interrelationship between scientific
research and the broader social fabric of which
it is a part. He presented this work as the
Riddell Memorial Lectures at Durham in 1945,
and published it, as Science, Faith and Society',
in 1946. In it, Polanyi employed findings of
Gestalt psychology and case studies from the
history of science and mathematics to illumi-
nate the way in which scientific investigation
results from a delicate interaction between the
free thought of individual researchers and the
scientific consensus within which those
researchers function.
Polanyi's new dedication to the development
of a philosophical system capable of explaining
scientific discovery led him to exchange his
Chair in Chemistry at Manchester for a Chair
in 'Social Studies', created specifically for him,
in 1948. On the strength of his growing repu-
tation, the Committee on Social Thought at
the University of Chicago prevailed upon the
university administration to offer Polanyi a
chair in 1950. However, Polanyi was unable to
take up the chair because he was denied a visa
to enter the USA. A 1942 lecture that Polanyi
gave to an organization he did not know to be
communist was sufficient grounds for US offi-
cials to find him to be 'politically unreliable'
795
POLANYI
according to the recently passed McCarran
Act. Thus, despite the recognition conferred
by the invitation to give the Gifford Lectures at
Aberdeen in 1951-2, and although he benefited
greatly from the collaboration of the philoso-
pher Marjorie Grene, Polanyi was forced to
conduct the research for his most significant
philosophical work, Personal Knowledge:
Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy', based on
his Gifford Lectures, without the aid of a
vibrant community of social scientists at the
University of Chicago who were already sym-
pathetic to his ideas.
After the publication of Personal Knowledge
Polanyi was invited to be the first Lindsay
Memorial Lecturer at Keele. The lectures were
published in 1959 as The Study of Man, in
which Polanyi extended to the human sciences
the new philosophy he had expounded in
Personal Knowledge. In the same year, Polanyi
left Manchester to take up a senior research fel-
lowship at Merton College, Oxford. However,
due to the greater interest in his work in the
USA, Polanyi held a number of visiting appoint-
ments there in the years until his death. In 1962
he gave the Terry Lectures at Yale University,
published in revised form in 1966 as The Tacit
Dimension. In 1969 Polanyi gave two series of
lectures on 'Meaning' at the Universities of
Texas and Chicago. In those lectures he
extended his philosophy of tacit integration,
and increasingly used analogies from the realms
of art, religion and myth to illustrate his philo-
sophical system. These lectures, along with
other material, formed the basis for Polanyi's
Meaning, completed with the aid of Professor
Harry Prosch and published in 1975. Polanyi
died in February 1976.
Polanyi's central philosophical work,
Personal Knowledge, published in 1958,
received largely unfavourable reviews from
philosophers. Even those reviewers more
inclined to view the work positively treated it
as a work in the sociology of science. This was
in no small measure due to the difficulty of
Polanyi's presentation. Polanyi wrote in a dense
continental style, employing conceptual frame-
POLANYI
works from Gestalt psychology and mar-
shalling data from psychological research as
evidence for his theses. Furthermore, Polanyi
eschewed the dominant analytical emphasis on
clarity of presentation and providing explicit
proofs of theses. Instead, Polanyi employed a
number of neologisms and relied frequently on
analogical argument based on examples from
a wide range of fields, including biology,
language, art and religion.
Despite these perceived weaknesses in pre-
sentation, Polanyi's work offers much of value
to the careful reader, and his contributions
were recognized by, among others, Thomas
Kuhn and the sociologist of science Robert K.
Merton. Polanyi's criticisms of the then-
dominant positivistic conception of science are
often damning, and his own positive concep-
tion of knowledge prefigures current interests
in both naturalized epistemology and phe-
nomenology. Some of the central issues of the
book include the critique of objectivism, the
introduction of the concept of personal knowl-
edge, and a discussion of the role of tradition
in the 'republic of science'.
According to Polanyi, objectivism involves
the following four theses: (1) knowledge is
limited to what is physically observable and
measurable; (2) thus, scientific theories, in that
they go beyond observables, do not contain
truths; rather, they are 'simple', 'symmetrical',
'economical' or 'fruitful'; (3) knowledge is
detached, and thus incompatible with emo-
tional and personal involvement on the part of
the knower; and (4) reality is reducible to the
objects studied by chemistry and physics.
Polanyi seeks to supplant the objectivist con-
ception of knowledge with his own view of
knowledge as personal. It is crucial to note that
Polanyi's notion of personal knowledge is no
more a subjectivist one than it is an objectivist
one. Polanyi rejects the charge of subjectivism
for a number of reasons, among them his
notion of personal knowledge as fallibilist, his
idea that knowledge establishes contact with
reality in part through its anticipation of as yet
unknown true implications, and his concep-
796
tion of science as attempting to discover the
rational structure intrinsic to reality. This last
point also suggests how Polanyi wished to link
his epistemology and his ontology. For Polanyi,
the structure of knowing is mirrored in the
structure of what is known: "what is compre-
hended has the same structure as the act which
comprehends it' (The Tacit Dimension, p. 55).
One reason Polanyi gives for the irreducibly
personal nature of knowledge is that knowl-
edge is irreducibly tacit. In its most mature
development, Polanyi explicated the notion of
tacit knowing, borrowing from C.S. Peirce's
notion of logical triad, in terms of a tacit triad.
This 'consists in subsidiary things (B) bearing
on a focus (C) by virtue of an integration per-
formed by a person (A)... in tacit knowing we
attend from one or more subsidiaries to a focus
on which the subsidiaries are brought to bear'
(Knowing and Being, 1969, pp. 181-207). An
example of tacit knowing is the use of an instru-
ment, a metal probe, to explore a cavity. One
is subsidiarily aware of the metal probe in one's
hand, but, to the extent that one is skilled in its
use, one is in fact focally aware of the attributes
of the cavity that one is exploring. In being
used by us, tools, like the metal probe, become
a part of us - in Polanyi's terminology, we
indwell them. Indeed, by indwelling tools, we
may become aware of the features of our envi-
ronment to such an extent that we indwell
these features as well. This interiorization of the
environment through tacit knowing Polanyi
terms tacit integration.
Tacit knowing is ineliminable. Any attempt
to train one's focal awareness onto a phenom-
enon of which one is normally merely sub-
sidiarily aware will result in a failure to
continue to perform adequately. Thus, a skilled
musician who trains her attention on the move-
ments of her hands will become confused and
have to stop. Or, as Polanyi notes, subjects
wearing inverting eyeglasses may learn to stop
attending to their visual images, instead attend-
ing from them to the world, and thus cope
with the world around them. However, as soon
as they refocus their awareness on their visual

images themselves, they will again fail to cope.
Polanyi recognizes this phenomenon of tacit
knowing everywhere: in perception, in linguis-
tic communication, in face recognition, in
skilful action. Further, since the actions one
takes in tacit knowing are not themselves
reducible to the following of an explicit set of
rules, the phenomenon of tacit knowing
provides further evidence for the irreducibility
of the role of the personal in knowledge.
Indeed, for Polanyi, the stamp of the personal
is everywhere on knowledge. Its very structure,
which Polanyi sees as involving two 'poles', is
a linkage of the personal, belief, with the objec-
tive, truth. This linkage itself, however, is also
the result of a person's action, an intellectual
commitment, or 'fiduciary act'. It is for this
reason as well that the intellectual passions,
further evidence for the ineliminability of the
personal, are central to scientific knowledge.
These passions play a crucial selective role,
leading to one's judgements of the scientific
value of a particular result or the intrinsic
interest of a particular line of investigation.
They have a heuristic function, linking the
appreciation of the scientific value of a question
to a certain vision of reality, and thus guiding
the way to a solution, to the crucial spark of
intuition. It is this function that also convinces
the scientist to abandon received ways of
thinking and to commit to her own vision. The
appreciation of intellectual beauty also has a
heuristic function, making the intuitive leap to
a radical new theory, once performed, irre-
versible. Finally, the intellectual passions play
a central persuasive role, inducing the scientists'
colleagues to appreciate as well the value of the
endeavour, and of the radical theoretical result,
for themselves. Thus, Polanyi shows the role
that sympathy and trust between scientists play
in the dissemination and acceptance of new
theories.
This last element of the role of the intellectual
passions in the advancement of science is par-
ticularly significant in the relationship between
master and novice. In learning from a master,
according to Polanyi, the novice necessarily
797
POLANYI
surrenders himself to his teacher, for, in
acquiring the standards by which to select
lines of inquiry and to seek innovative
theories, the novice must simply adopt those
standards inculcated in him by his teacher.
To do otherwise, to subject the teacher's stan-
dards themselves to critical inquiry on the
basis of the novice's current standards, would
be impossible for two reasons, Polanyi notes.
First, the novice cannot judge the teacher's
superior standards on the basis of the
student's own current ones. Second, we
cannot subject standards themselves to the
same critique to which, by means of those
standards, we subject other questions. Rather,
the adoption of standards of judgement is the
result of a reaction of the intellectual passions.
Thus, adoption of the standards of scientific
investigation is not itself the result of a
reasoned decision on the part of the novice;
rather, it is like being inducted into a guild, or
society, by the authority governing that
society. Indeed, for Polanyi, it is clear that the
'republic of science' is governed by authority,
for example in the awarding of degrees, grants
and positions or the refereeing of papers.
However, this authority is a General
Authority dedicated only to maintaining
existing standards and the general consensus
concerning the current state of the art, as
opposed to a Specific Authority that imposes
upon its subjects a particular set of beliefs or
theories. Furthermore, it is a society based on
tradition, both of the art of scientific research
and of the respect for scientific standards and
the goal of truth. It is a 'society of explorers',
dedicating themselves to its aims and not
forced to bow to an externally imposed will.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Science, Faith and Society (Chicago, 1946;
1964).
The Logic of Liberty (1951).
Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical
Philosophy (Chicago, 1958; 1974).
The Study of Man (Chicago, 1959; 1964).
The Tacit Dimension (1966).
POLANYI
Knowing and Being, ed. with an Introduction
by Marjorie Grene (Chicago, 1969).
(with Harry Prosch), Meaning (Chicago,
1975).
Science, Economics and Philosophy: Selected
Papers of Michael Polanyi, ed. and with an
Introduction by R.T. Allen (1997).
Further Reading
Allen, Richard, Thinkers of Our Time:
Polanyi (1990).
Gelwick, Richard, The Way of Discovery: An
Introduction to the Thought of Michael
Polanyi (New York, 1977).
Langford, Thomas and William H. Poteat,
Intellect and Hope: Essays in the Thought
of Michael Polanyi (Durham, North
Carolina, 1968).
The Logic of Personal Knowledge: Essays
Presented to Michael Polanyi on his
Seventieth Birthday, llth March, 1961
(1961).
Prosch, Harry, Michael Polanyi: A Critical
Exposition (Albany, 1986).
Wigner, E.P. and R.A. Hodgkin, 'Michael
Polanyi', Biographical Memoirs of Fellows
of the Royal Society, vol. 23 (November
1977), pp. 413-38.
Joseph H. Shieber
POLE, David Lawrence Shmarya (1923-77)
David Pole was born on 6 December 1923 and
died in London on 29 April 1977. He took a
BA in modern history from Oxford (1949) and
another in philosophy from London in 1953.
He took his PhD in philosophy from University
College London (1956), studying under A.J.
AYER. He was appointed first assistant lecturer
(1955), then lecturer (1958) in philosophy at
King's College London and remained there
until 1977.
798
Pole was interested in a wide range of philo-
sophical areas, including aesthetics, ethics,
WITTGENSTEIN, the concept of rationality, and
ancient philosophy. He is probably best known
for his work on Wittgenstein and aesthetics. His
book, The Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein
(1958), was one of the first studies of the
philosopher's later writings. In the book Pole
introduces readers to central topics in the
Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on
the Foundations of Mathematics, and in par-
ticular to Wittgenstein's thought on linguistic
method, language-games and the private
language argument. He raises a number of
objections to Wittgenstein's approach to
language, arguing, for example, that
Wittgenstein 'presents in terms far too negative
the part that intentional and psychological
factors play in language' (Later Philosophy of
Wittgenstein, p. 90). A feeling of strangeness or
fitness in relation to some course of reasoning
may be important to following or not follow-
ing that course, yet Pole claims this would be
discounted by Wittgenstein, and he is disgrun-
tled, generally, with the implications of
Wittgenstein's understanding; of language for
the practice of philosophy. In the light of sub-
sequent work on Wittgenstein's later philoso-
phy, Pole's interpretation has been criticized,
most notably by Stanley Cavell, who argues
that Pole was not sensitive enough to
Wittgenstein's distinctive philosophical style,
and therefore misconstrues many of his ideas.
Pole's Conditions of Rational Inquiry: A
Study in the Philosophy of Value (1961) brings
together his interests in ethics and rationality.
The book is an examination of the place of
evaluation in rational inquiry. It includes an
extensive treatment of the concepts of decision
and inquiry, and of the process of inquiry in
relation to values. His discussion includes an
interesting analysis of the development of
judgement as such and the nature of moral
judgement.
Before his death Pole selected a set of his
essays and reviews that he would have liked
reprinted. The papers and reviews in aesthetics

from this selection, spanning roughly twenty
years, were published posthumously in a col-
lection entitled, Aesthetics, Form and Emotion
(1983). This third book reflects Pole's wide
knowledge of aesthetics and the arts, especially
the arts of literature and architecture. In the
book he declares his firm belief in the central-
ity of aesthetics within philosophy, as opposed
to the peripheral position it had been assigned
in the first half of the twentieth century. The
essays range across a variety of topics, includ-
ing the problems of aesthetic experience, form,
expression, literary criticism, aesthetic judge-
ment, art and morality, representation and
interpretation. The collection was praised by
aestheticians, especially for its original contri-
bution to understanding the concepts of form
and expression. The originality of Pole's
writings in aesthetics is clearly evident in his
interesting discussion of disgust, a topic that has
received attention in aesthetics only very
recently. These essays are refreshing to read
for the lively, clearly argued style that was char-
acteristic of Pole's writing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein: A
Short Introduction with an Epilogue on
John Wisdom (1958).
Conditions of Rational Inquiry: A Study in
the Philosophy of Value (1961).
Aesthetics, Form and Emotion, ed. George
Roberts with a Foreword by Roger Scruton
(1983).
Further Reading
Ashby, Ronald, 'David Pole', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 77 (1976-7),
pp. 271-2.
Cavell, Stanley, The Availability of
Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy', in George
Pitcher (ed.), Wittgenstein: The
Philosophical Investigations (1968), pp.
151-85.
Emily Brady
799
POMPA
POMPA, Leonardo (1933-)
Leon Pompa was born in Edinburgh on 22
February 1933. He was educated at
Bournemouth School and at the University of
Edinburgh, where he gained an MA in history
and an MA and PhD in philosophy. His first
academic appointment was as a lecturer at
Edinburgh, a post which he held from 1961 to
1977. He was then appointed as Professor of
Philosophy at Birmingham University, a post
which he held until his retirement in 1997,
when he became emeritus professor. He is a
member of the Council of the Hegel Society of
Great Britain; of the editorial board for the
journals New Vico Studies, Collingwood
Studies and the History of European Ideas-,
and of the British Journal for the History of
Philosophy, the Aristotelian Society and the
Academic Standing Committee at Edinburgh
University.
In the Preface to one of his early works, Vico:
A Study of the 'New Science', Pompa states
that Vico, apart from the constant interest
aroused by his doctrines in his native Italy, has
until relatively recently been largely ignored in
other countries in the Western world. The
reason for this neglect is not because Vico had
nothing of importance to add to the philosophy
of history and the social sciences, but because
of the obscurity of his style. Patrick GARDINER,
in his article on Vico in The Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (ed. Paul Edwards, vol. 8, 1967),
states that Vico's 'style is often obscure and
scholastic', but his prediction that 'despite
[Vico's] undoubted genius, it seems unlikely
that he will ever be widely read' has proved to
be untrue. Much of Pompa's work in his dis-
tinguished philosophical career has been to
remedy the neglect of Vico in the English-
speaking world, and, particularly with his
translation of Vico's New Science, he has suc-
ceeded admirably in his task.
In his many commentaries Pompa presents
Vico as having denied that there is a 'fixed',
transcendental, transcultural human nature or
essence. Instead, Vico stressed that human
POMPA
beings are shaped by and operate within their
historical circumstances and the social and
cultural institutions of which they are a part.
Such institutions enable human beings to be the
beings they are: it is not the case that we can
transcend our own historical and social setting.
The nature of humankind is thus that it is devel-
opmental or progressive. The 'new science' of
history does not elevate the beliefs and concepts
of any one culture to transcendental superior-
ity: such is the error which Vico calls the
'conceit of scholars'. Nor yet is history hope-
lessly relative: if it were, it would not be a
science. Instead, human beings have a capacity
for self-understanding, and the discrimination
to understand historical, social and conceptual
change, which makes cross-cultural historical
and social discourse possible. The fact that
human beings are both active in, and can con-
struct, history is what renders history a science
superior to the natural sciences. The workings
of historical and social change are not directed
by God or providence: even though Vico's
work incorporates a widespread use of theistic
and scholastic terminology, theism is not
embedded within his theories of history and
society.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Vico: A Study of the 'New Science' (1975).
Human Nature and Historical Knowledge:
Hume, Hegel and Vico (1990).
'Philosophical History and the End of
History', Bulletin of the Hegel Society of
Great Britain (1991), pp. 23-38.
'The Possibility of Historical Knowledge',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 67 (1993), pp. 1-16.
'Vico and Metaphysical Hermeneutics', in
Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Verstehen and
Humane Understanding (1996).
'Theism and Vico's Philosophy and History
of Humanity', II Mondo del Vico/Vico nel
Mondo (2000).
Other Relevant Works
(Ed. with W.H. Dray), Substance and Form
800
in History (1981).
(Ed. and intro.), Vico: Selected Writings
(1982).
(Ed. and trans.), Vico: The First 'New
Science' (2002).
Kathryn L. Plant
POPPER, Karl Raimond (1902-94)
Karl Popper was born in Vienna on 28 July
1902 and died in Croydon on 17 September
1994. He studied mathematics, physics and
psychology (the latter with Karl Biihler) at the
University of Vienna. He fled from the Nazis in
1937 to take a lectureship at Canterbury
University, New Zealand. With HAYEK'S help,
Popper obtained a readership at the London
School of Economics in January 1946, where
he taught until his retirement in 1969. Highly
esteemed for his work, he was made a fellow of
the Royal Society, a fellow of the British
Academy, and a Membre de I'lnstitute de
France. He was knighted by Q'ueen Elizabeth II
in 1965.
Popper is best known for his proposed
method of science: conjectures and refutations,
or for short, falsificationism. Scientific knowl-
edge grows through extravagant guesses con-
trolled by unrestrained criticism. He developed
this approach, partly through debate with the
Vienna Circle, in his first book The Two
Fundamental Problems of the Theory of
Knowledge (first published in 1979) and the
much shortened version of this, The Logic of
Scientific Discovery (1934/59). He shared with
the Vienna Circle an admiration for science. He
also shared with them the desire to (1) explain
how we do know so much in science; (2)
explain how we can make our knowledge
grow; and (3) ascertain.how we can demarcate
science from non-science, pseudo-science and
metaphysics.

With regard to demarcation, Popper was
concerned that two of the most influential doc-
trines, Freudianism and Marxism, were not
open to empirical criticism, yet were both being
presented as scientific. Freud's theory was fun-
damentally immune from criticism from the
start because it could 'explain' any behaviour
(even incompatible behaviours). Marx's theory
began as a falsifiable theory, but was later
immunized against further criticism. He wanted
to contrast these types of theory with Einstein's
new theories, which were self-critically pre-
sented with well-formulated possible counter-
examples.
Popper had fundamental disagreements with
the Vienna Circle. The Circle thought they
could demarcate science by the verificationist
principle, which proposes that only statements
that can be verified by experience are to be
counted as science; indeed, the very meaning of
a statement is its method of verification.
Everything else, apart from logic and mathe-
matics, was to be counted as meaningless. The
problem for verificationism was that the best
examples of scientific theories consisted of uni-
versal statements ('Light always travels at c'),
which cannot be verified, and there are
examples of non-scientific statements (e.g.,
There is a Tyrannosaurus Rex' or There is a
type of substance 1000 times harder than
diamond') that are putatively verifiable but that
one would like to exclude from science. (It is
not so much that these are all false but that, if
they are, you cannot get rid of them by empir-
ical means.) Moreover, the principle of verifi-
cationism itself is not verifiable, and is therefore
meaningless on its own terms.
Popper's approach was to eschew the use of
a criterion of meaning and instead choose a
criterion of falsifiability. What should make a
statement scientific was whether it could be
falsified; that is, whether there were any
possible circumstances whose description
would contradict it. This allowed a truly adven-
turous conception of science, in which a theory
such as 'E = me2' talks about the universal and
deep structure of the world, and also enabled
801
POPPER
Popper to explain and promote the growth of
science and demarcate it from other intellectual
activities, such as religion or metaphysics,
without denying meaning to them. In contrast
to verificationism, it does not presuppose a
given world structure, as it allows us to discover
that no universal laws can be applied: for
example, we may discover that only statistical
laws stand up to our critical tests.
For Popper, science ought to be a battle-
ground of bold conjectures that are subjected to
ruthless and unending criticism, a Darwinian-
like process, leading to further deeper problems.
The conjectures are conceived as unjustified
and unjustifiable flights of fancy. But because
we want to control our theories, they must be
serious attempts to solve a problem, and they
must also be expressed as statements that have
the logical property of being incompatible with
possible reproducible observations. In
Objective Knowledge Popper proposed the fol-
lowing schema:
Problem1 Tentative Theory(s) Error
Elimination(s) Problem2
The schema applies to all life, but in the case of
scientists there ought to be a deliberate attempt
to foster new theories and error elimination. A
problem is raised, for example 'Why are these
crows black?' Alternative theories are proposed
and subjected to error elimination. This then
raises new problems, for example 'Why are all
crows black?'
The conjectures can be either universal state-
ments, for example 'All crows are black' or
singular observation statements, for example
There is solid water at such and such coordi-
nates C at such and such a time and date T on
Mars.' The growth of our knowledge consists
in theories of greater content (preferably
through greater depth and generality) either
absorbing unrefuted theories of lesser content
or replacing refuted theories. For example, the
theory 'All birds acquire their distinctive colour-
ing because of certain enzymes, selected within
that species by evolution' would absorb the
POPPER
black-crow theory. A nice corollary of this
proposal is that theories of greater content are
also more refutable; so as our science grows it
becomes more controllable. In contrast, some
systems of thought, such as Freudianism or
Marxism, become less and less controllable by
empirical means as they are elaborated, just
like old computer programmes that have no
uninstall procedure.
Since ancient Greece, knowledge has been
conceived as justified true belief, contrasted
with merely true belief or opinion. A version of
this doctrine as applied to science is called
induction, made popular by Francis Bacon. For
Popper, verificationism was a form of induc-
tion. David Hume argued that this method was
logically fallacious. Induction held that science
ought to establish a theory by collecting a great
number of observations and inferring, and
thereby justifying, the theory from these. But,
Hume said, no matter how many black crows
had been observed, some unobserved crow
might be non-black. As RUSSELL (1918) has
pointed out, this remains the case even if the
world is finite in space and time, since the claim
to have examined the whole universe is itself a
universal statement. Hume pointed out that
one could not even make the black-crow theory
probable by collecting observations because
there must always be infinitely many possible
cases against a finite number of actual obser-
vations. The probability of any one of our uni-
versal theories being true is therefore zero. This
became known as the problem of induction. It
later emerged under another name, 'the grue
paradox', a clever way of presenting (but a
more restricted version of) Hume's original
point. Hume also asked how any principle of
induction is supposed to be justified? It could
not be by induction, for this would either
launch an infinite regress or prompt a dogmatic
stopping point.
It was clear to Popper that there was a logical
gap between experience and the statements that
were supposed to follow from them in the
inductivist accounts. Fries had pointed out that
only statements can serve as assumptions for a
802
logical inference, but experiences are clearly
not statements. So how were any statements at
all, let alone scientific theories, to be derived
logically from experience? Fries had suggested
that we decree that direct experience just is a
final court of appeal.
Popper's response to this was to give up the
quest for justified true theories and replace this
with the search for simply true (or at least truth-
like) theories. The goal of science was the clas-
sification of theories as true or false, not their
certification as justified or supported. This
decision of Popper's was reinforced by the dis-
covery by Kurt Godel that truth and proof are
radically different even in mathematics. Popper
had also adopted Alfred Tarski's theory of
truth, according to which a statement describes
its own conditions of truth, and is therefore
definable independently of any theory of proof
or justification. But if even singular statements
cannot be justified, how does one successfully
falsify a hypothesis? Suppose; one is trying to
refute the conjecture that all crows are black.
One may truthfully describe the presence of, for
example, a non-black crow. Having accepted
this statement, one may deductively infer from
it that the statement that all crows are black is
false. Indeed, to avoid self-contradiction, you
are obliged to reject the black crow theory.
(One must be clear at this point that one has
not 'proven' the black crow theory false: in a
proof the assumptions are jettisoned, as in a
reductio ad absurdum. But in this case, we
simply 'derive' the falsity of the theory on the
assumption of the observation statement.)
Many objections to Popper's proposed
method were either part of Popper's original
exposition or were anticipated by him and
exploded. He had noted that any theory could
be saved from criticism by immunizing moves:
this was dealt with by the rule not to introduce
auxiliary hypotheses unless they augment the
falsifiability of the resulting system. He had
noted that falsifying a theory is a subtle and in
itself ineradicably conjectural affair - the falsi-
fying hypothesis may require ingenious guess-
work and is itself criticizable (witness the com-

peting and changing interpretations of the
various alleged observations of water on Mars).
This is just one place where Popper goes
beyond earlier writers who are sometimes taken
as anticipating Popper, such as W. Whewell
and J. von Liebig (they had confined the falli-
bility of science to its universal theories;
Popper's method deals with fallibility in an
unconfined and systematic way). It also follows
from this that, for example, finding a non-
black crow (refuting the theory that all crows
are black) is not a confirmation of the exis-
tence of a non-black crow. It is not smuggling
induction in through the backdoor. He had
noted, contrary to Thomas Kuhn in The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that his
proposal was one of method, not a historical
description of what scientists do. He had noted
(though later than The Logic of Scientific
Discovery) that even a false theory might be
retained if it has a large amount of truth to it;
that when all our theories are strictly false, the
battle between theories might be over degrees
of closeness to the truth rather than truth. He
had noted that metaphysics was heavily influ-
ential in the origin of scientific theories: for
example, Democritus's irrefutable theory of
atoms inspired the modern falsifiable version.
One of Popper's major concerns in The Logic
of Scientific Discovery was to explore how the
use of probability in physics could be squared
with falsificationism. Strictly speaking, a prob-
ability hypothesis, such as 'the probability of
heads in the next 100 throws of a coin is Vi' is
not falsifiable because even an arbitrarily large
sequence of heads is compatible with such a
ratio in an infinite sequence. This is the problem
of decidability. Popper f u n d a m e n t a l l y
reworked Richard von Mises's theory, in an
attempt to solve both the problem of decid-
ability and stability, while retaining the appli-
cation (like von Mises's theory) to both mass
statistical effects as seen in statistical mechan-
ics and purely deterministic phenomena.
Popper's solution involved the idea of quite
restrictive finite sequences near the beginning of
a collective.
803
POPPER
However, Popper became unsatisfied with
this interpretation of probability, and substi-
tuted the much more powerful propensity
theory, in which propensities are conceived as
something like force fields of variable strength
constantly jostling with one another for real-
ization (The Propensity Interpretation of the
Calculus of Probability, and Quantum Theory',
1957). The notion of propensities leads onto
Popper's concern with freedom and determin-
ism. Popper was an indeterminist and his argu-
ments are most fully developed in The Open
Universe (1982). Scientific or 'Laplacian' deter-
minism asserts that it is possible (in principle)
deductively to explain or predict any event, to
any desired degree of precision, from appro-
priate laws and sufficiently precise initial con-
ditions. But this view implied that the future is
as fixed as the past and therefore excludes
human freedom and the possibility of radically
new things emerging in the world.
Among the host of arguments that are
deployed in The Open Universe, Popper tries to
show that prima facie deterministic theories do
not imply the strong version of scientific deter-
minism; that even the weak version is incom-
patible with Einstein's theory. He explores the
extent to which the growth of knowledge
affects our ability to predict the future, and he
explores how the existence of abstract things
such as theories and arguments breaks open the
alleged closed character of the determinist's
world. Popper replaces the clockwork deter-
ministic worldview with one based on propen-
sities, a world still constrained by laws, but
one that is more cloud-like than Laplace would
have allowed.
There is a remarkable unity in Popper's
work, and this is no more evident than in the
relationship between his proposed method of
science and his social and political philosophy,
expounded in The Poverty of Historicism
(1944-5) and The Open Society and its
Enemies (1945). These books are a fundamen-
tal critique of wholesale (or revolutionary,
Utopian) social engineering (national socialist,
Marxist or otherwise), and a proposal for
POPPER
'piecemeal social engineering'. Mindful of our
fallibility, ignorance and the ubiquitous unin-
tended results of our plans, Popper prescribes
piecemeal reform because we can better
monitor and eliminate our mistakes on the
small scale. Even on the small scale Popper rec-
ommends that our institutions should be
designed to look for and correct the unintended
repercussions of our laws and social rules.
Popper offers this as an example: 'You cannot
give a man power over other men without
tempting him to misuse it - a temptation which
roughly increases with the amount of power
wielded, and which few are capable of resisting'
(The Poverty of Historicism, 1969, pp. 62-3).
Popper proscribes revolutionary reform
because we can neither easily monitor the
society-wide ramifications nor reverse our
leaps. Popper's adventurism in science and con-
servatism in politics (in the abstract sense) issue
from the same aim: to enhance our control
over our fallible explorations of the unknown.
Many thinkers were convinced that revolu-
tionary change was acceptable because they
could scientifically predict, as an inevitable
event, the coming of the future and better
society. To rebut this, Popper also attacked
their confusion of historical prophecy (pre-
sented as scientific) and truly scientific predic-
tion. A scientific prediction involves the deriva-
tion of a specific event from certain laws and
initial conditions; an historical prophecy
consists of the stark statement that such and
such will happen because it is part of an
inevitable sequence. Strictly considered, scien-
tific laws (alone) do not assert the existence of
anything (let alone inevitable sequences), but
only of what cannot be. ('Light always travels
at c in a vacuum' does not say that light exists,
only that there is no light that travels at any
other velocity.) The particular affect of laws on
events only comes into effect with the occur-
rence of certain initial conditions.
Popper argues that the prediction of social
events is severely limited by the impact on
society of unforeseeable new knowledge. This
argument is elaborated and refined in The
804
Open Universe. Here Popper develops a purely
logical argument in which it is shown that no
scientific predictor - of whatever type - can
possibly predict, by scientific methods, its own
future results. This approach is fundamentally
opposed to what Popper calls historicism, the
thesis that society develops according to an
inevitable set sequence of stages. Marxism is
perhaps the best example of historicism with its
prophecy of the inevitable coming of commu-
nism, after several stages culminating in feu-
dalism and then capitalism. But Popper saw
historicism (or 'progressivism') everywhere,
infecting our theories of art, science, technology
and even morality. What cornes later is often
presumed to be better (Ray Bradbury once said
that if matches had been invented after lighters,
people might have thought them superior).
The Open Society and its Enemies (1945),
which Bertrand Russell described as 'a work of
first class importance ...', is a detailed attack on
particular examples of authoritarian and his-
toricist thought, focusing on Plato (vol. 1), and
on Marx and Hegel (vol. 2). For the old author-
itarian question 'who should rule?' Popper sub-
stitutes the question 'how should we change
our rulers?'. It is in this book that Popper first
expounds the case for critical rationalism.
Popper also explores the paradoxes of democ-
racy, for example that democracy may allow
the election of a dictator (as it did in Germany)
who will eliminate democracy. We must there-
fore design various checks and balances and
uphold the freedom of the individual if we wish
to safeguard democracy.
Popper wished to champion an objective con-
ception of knowledge, and his theory of a world
of autonomous objective problems, theories and
arguments was the culmination of this quest.
The old conception of knowledge as justified
true belief saw knowledge as a state of mind of
the believer. But to Popper it mattered nothing
which theories Einstein believed, but it mattered
a great deal what his theory and arguments were
as set down on paper. Instead of asking 'Is
Einstein justified in believing E = me2?', Popper
wanted to ask questions such as: 'Is E=mc2 true

or closer to the truth than another theory?',
'What problems is it meant to solve and how
well does it solve them compared to other
theories?', 'What are the potential falsifiers?',
'Do the current observational statements con-
tradict it?', 'What other theories does it logically
exclude?' All these questions can be investigated
independently of Einstein's state of mind. A
theory is a product of a mind, but once produced
and written down or recorded in some way, it
has an objective existence and a life of its own.
It may surprise and frustrate us in unforesee-
able and not completely fathomable ways. A
theory like the natural numbers, for example,
may have been invented originally simply to
count sheep, but once invented it has
autonomous properties that can be explored,
such as the prime number sequence. It can inspire
problems such as 'Do prime numbers get rarer
as we ascend the sequence?' Clearly, this
question cannot be answered by looking at the
psychology of the inventor or user of numbers.
It soon became clear to Popper that many more
human products had this autonomous quality.
Popper elaborated this theory in Objective
Knowledge. He argues that one can usefully dis-
tinguish at least three sub-realms of our world:
World 1, the world of physical objects and rela-
tionships; World 2, the world of psychological
states; and World 3, the world of objective
products of the human mind. Plato had argued
for a world of forms, which were equivalent to
objective concepts. Bolzano and Frege had antic-
ipated Popper in the distinction between the
content of our thought and the psychological
state in which it exists: for example, my believ-
ing that the sun will set at 7pm tonight and the
content or 'proposition' that the sun will set
tonight at 7pm. Popper wanted to go further
than these thinkers and acknowledge the objec-
tive existence of not only theories and concepts,
but also problems, arguments and logical rela-
tions. Popper included music, art and even insti-
tutions within World 3.
In the Open Society and its Enemies Popper
expounded the case for critical rationalism. He
wanted to show that rational argument, which
805
POPPER
he equated with critical discussion, is possible
even outside of science, even in the absence of
falsifiable theories. One could even argue the
merits of metaphysical theories. But there was
a lacuna in the case that Popper had presented,
an element of dogmatism, which his brilliant
young student, William Warren Bartley III,
convinced Popper to eliminate (see Realism
and the Aim of Science, chap. 1, sect. 2). Popper
had thought that an unarguable leap of faith
was necessary in the adoption of critical ratio-
nalism. But by clearly distinguishing between
criticism and justification, Bartley persuaded
Popper that he could generalize his critical
rationalism to comprehensive critical rational-
ism, the thesis that all positions may be held
open to criticism without any requirement for
faith, a method that was safe from inconsis-
tency, dogmatism, circularity or infinite regress.
A great deal of the initial debate over Bartley's
position is covered in his Evolutionary
Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of
Knowledge (1987).
Popper inspired many scientists, such as the
Nobel Laureates John Eccles, Peter MEDAWAR
and Ilya Prigogine, and other path-breaking sci-
entists such as David Deutsch, Frank Tipler and
Giinter Wachtershauser. Popper's work left us
with some important problems that have
inspired a great deal of useful work. Some of the
most outstanding of these problems are the
theory of verisimilitude, the theory of propensi-
ties, and the theory and application of World 3.
Acknowledging the fact that we can say that in
an important respect, Newton's theory is closer
to the truth than Galileo's, even though both
theories are false, Popper proposed a definition of
closeness to the truth for two theories. However,
this definition of verisimilitude was refuted by
D.W. Miller ('Popper's Qualitative Theory of
Verisimilitude', 1974). The demise of this first
proposal has stimulated much fascinating math-
ematical and philosophical work, an area for
new thinkers to make their mark in. Popper's
propensity theory has stimulated the invention of
a plethora of variants, and one of the key ques-
tions is its applicability to the single case.
POPPER
Little has been done in actually applying
Popper's theory of World 3 and Hartley's com-
prehensive critical rationalism. However, an
attempt is made critically to apply both in
Percival's paper on the evolution of systems of
ideas (1994).
Popper's work constitutes a substantial and
deep exploration of some of philosophy's
important questions. He discovered and delin-
eated new problems that will engage thinkers
into the unforeseeable future.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Open Society and its Enemies, 2 vols
(1945).
The Poverty of Historicism (1944-5; 1957;
1969).
'On the Status of Science and of
Metaphysics', Ratio, vol. 1 (1958), now
chap. 8 of Conjectures and Refutations.
The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959; 9th
edn, 1977). Originally published as Logik
der Forschung (Vienna, 1934).
Conjectures and Refutations (1963).
Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary
Approach (Oxford, 1972).
The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. P.A.
Schilpp (Chicago, 1974).
Unended Quest (1976). Originally published
as 'Autobiography of Karl Popper' in The
Philosophy of Karl Popper.
(with J.C. Eccles), The Self and its Brain
(1977).
The Two Fundamental Problems of the
Theory of Knowledge (1979).
The Open Universe: An Argument for
Indeterminism, vol. 2 of the Postscript to
The Logic of Scientific Discovery, ed.
W.W.Bartley, III (1982).
Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics,
vol. 3 of the Postscript to the Logic of
Scientific Discovery (1982).
Realism and the Aim of Science (1983), vol. 1
of the Postscript to The Logic of Scientific
Discovery (1985).
A World of Propensities (1990).
Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem
806
(1994).
A Register of Sir Karl's papers in the Hoover
Institution Archives, http://
www.eeng.dcu.ie/~tkpw/hoover/index.html
, accessed November 2004.
Other Relevant Works
'The Propensity Interpretation of the
Calculus of Probability, and Quantum
Theory', in Stephan Korner, Observation
and Interpretation (1957), pp. 65-70.
Popper, Karl and D.W. Miller, 'A Proof of
the Impossibility of Inductive Probability',
Nature, vol. 302, 21 April 1983, pp.
687-8.
In Search of A Better World (1994).
All Life is Problem Solving (1999).
The World ofParmenides (1997).
Further Reading
Online annotated bibliography at The Karl
Popper Web, http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/
~tkpw/intro_reading/Introcluctory_Reading
.html, accessed November 2004.
Forthcoming primary and secondary bibliog-
raphy in Manfred Lube, Bibliographie Karl
R. Popper. Zusammengestellt von Manfred
Lube (Klagenfurt, forthcoming).
Bartley, W.W., III, The Retreat to
Commitment, 2nd English edn (Chicago,
1994; 1984).
Bartley, W.W., III and Gerard Radnitzky
(eds), Evolutionary Epistemology,
Rationality, and the Sociology of
Knowledge (1987; 2nd edn, 1988).
Howson, Colin and Peter Urbach, Scientific
Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach
(Lassalle: 1989).
Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature,
vol. 1, Of the Understanding (1739).
Kuhn, T.S., The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (1962).
Lakatos, I. and A. Musgrove (eds), Criticism
and the Growth of Knowledge (1970).
Lester, Jan, Escape from Leviathan (2000).
Miller, D.W, Critical Rationalism: A
Restatement and Defence (Chicago, 1994).

, Topper's Qualitative Theory of
Verisimilitude', British Journal for the
Philosophy of Science, vol. 25 (1974), pp.
166-77.
Munz, P., Our Knowledge of the Growth of
Knowledge: Popper or Wittgenstein?
(1985).
Notturno, Mark, Perspectives on
Psychologism (Leiden, 1989).
O'Hear, Anthony, Karl Popper (1980).
Percival, Ray Scott, 'Dawkins and Mind
Viruses: Memes, Rationality and
Evolution', Journal of Social and
Evolutionary Systems, vol. 17, no. 3
(1994), pp. 243-86.
Percival, Ray Scott, 'Campbell's Blind
Variation in the Evolution of an Ideology
and Popper's World 3', Philosophica, vol.
60, no. 2 (1997), pp. 113-54.
Russell, Bertrand, Mysticism and Logic and
Other Essays (1918).
Shearmur, J., Political Thought of Karl
Popper (1996).
Stokes, Geoffrey, Popper: Philosophy,
Politics, and Scientific Method (1998).
Tarski, A., The Semantic Conception of
Truth (1943-4).
Watkins, John, Science and Scepticism
(Princeton, 1984).
The Karl Popper Web, http://
www.eeng.dcu.ie/~tkpw, accessed
November 2004.
Ray Scott Percival
POTTER, Martha Beatrice, see Webb
807
POWELL
POWELL, Betty (1922-2002)
Betty Powell was born in Bury, Lancashire on
5 May 1922 and died in Exeter. She attended
elementary school, leaving at fourteen to work
in a mill and later in a bookshop. After attend-
ing evening classes she won a WEA Scholarship
to Manchester University, where she took her
first degree. She then won a Stebbing
Fellowship to do postgraduate work in
London, where she was awarded a PhD in
1957 for a thesis entitled 'Self-Knowledge and
Morality'. In 1960 she was appointed to a joint
post at the University of Exeter as the Warden
of a women's residence and as a lecturer in
philosophy. She was promoted to a senior lec-
tureship in 1974. After her retirement in 1982
she continued to work as a philosophy tutor for
the Open University.
Powell was an outstanding teacher and in
her few publications she proved herself an able
discussant. Her paper on 'Uncharacteristic
Actions' (1959) argues against the view that a
person's actions are only really his if they are
predictable from his character. Her Knowledge
of Actions (1967) may be regarded as a series
of discussions of topics, particularly in the phi-
losophy of mind, which much exercised
philosophers at the time. Powell is critical of
those authors, such as Patrick NowELL-SMlTH,
who claim that an action proper must be
chosen or, such as Stuart HAMPSHIRE, that it
involves a trying. Though her style shows some
debt to Gilbert RYLE, she devotes a chapter to
criticizing his distinction between knowing
how and knowing that. The last and most sub-
stantial chapter is on 'Self-Knowledge'. It is
not entirely clear how the book hangs together
and to that extent James Wallace, in his ungen-
erous review, was right to complain of its
'obscurity'.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Uncharacteristic Actions', Mind, vol. 68
(1959), pp. 492-509.
Knowledge of Actions (1967).
'Descartes's Machines', Proceedings of the
POWELL
Aristotelian Society, vol. 71 (1970-71), pp.
209-22.
Other Relevant Works
'A Note on Deceiving', Analysis, vol. 17
(1957), pp. 93-5.
(with D.J. O'Connor), Elementary Logic
(1980).
Further Reading
Wallace, James D., Review of Knowledge of
Actions, Philosophical Review, vol. 78
(1969), pp. 117-19.
Warnock, Mary, Review of Knowledge of
Actions, Mind, vol. 76 (1967), pp. 612-13.
Stuart Brown
POWICKE, Frederick James (1854-1935)
Frederick James Powicke was born in
Kidderminster on 20 July 1854 and died in
Stockport on 7 December 1935. He was
educated for the Congregational ministry at
Spring Hill College, Birmingham (the prede-
cessor college of Mansfield, Oxford) under
David Worthington Simon, whose biography
Powicke later wrote (1912). He graduated MA
(London) in philosophy, and became a distin-
guished scholar-pastor, who served at Alnwick,
Northumberland (1879-86) and Hatherlow,
Cheshire (1886-1916). He was Hon. DD of
Glasgow University. There were three daugh-
ters and two sons. William Alfred became a
Congregational minister; his brother, Frederick
Maurice, became Regius Professor of Modern
History at Oxford.
Most of Powicke's publications were histor-
ical: studies of the separatists Henry Barrow,
Robert Browne and John Robinson; a history
of the Cheshire Congregational Union; and, as
befits a son of Kidderminster, a major work on
Richard Baxter. But he was equally competent
808
in philosophy. His first published work was A
Dissertation on John Norn's of Bemerton
(1893/4), dedicated to Simon and successfully
submitted in the philosophy faculty of the
University of Rostock for the degree of PhD. He
provides an account of Norris's life, carefully
expounds the 'ideal system', and then discusses
Norris's relation to Locke, Berkeley, the
scholastics and Augustine, and the Cambridge
Platonists. Chapters on Norris's mysticism and
idealism complete the main text, and there
follows a sixty-seven-page annotated bibliog-
raphy of Norris, whose works are described
and placed in their historical and intellectual
context. Powicke concludes, tentatively, that
'we seem to see how the "Ideal element" of
Philosophy may coincide with the sublimest
hope of Christian faith' (Dissertation on John
Norris, p. 150).
In 1897 Powicke published an article, 'Some
Characteristics of the Cambridge Platonists',
in Bihliotheca Sacra. Almost thirty years later
there appeared a major work,, The Cambridge
Platonists: A Study (1926). In the Preface he
estimates the Platonists in relation to his earlier
subject, Norris:
Norris ... was an Oxford man, a Fellow of
All Souls, a pronounced Tory, a somewhat
bigoted controversialist - a contrast, in
short, to the Cambridge men in many
respects. He made much of the Platonic
doctrine of ideas, but not so much in Plato's
way as in that of the eccentric Malebranche
(1638-1713), whose almost solitary English
disciple he was proud to be. Norris the
moralist, as revealed in his sermons, is a
tonic; but Norris the metaphysician, as
revealed in his Theory of the Ideal and
Intelligible World, is a fantastic.
(Cambridge Platonists, p. v)
Powicke discusses the general characteristics
of Cambridge Platonism, and then has chapters
on Whichcote, Smith, Cudworth, Culverwell,
More and Sterry, focusing on their less turgid
and speculative themes. In an epilogue he

shows how Locke is more indebted to these
thinkers than is sometimes supposed, while at
the same time pointing out that Locke gave
impetus to the intellectual shift whereby reason
came to be understood not so much in terms of
the divine light as of common sense.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Dissertation on John Norris ofBemerton
(1893/4).
The Cambridge Platonists: A Study (1926).
Further Reading
Anon., The Congregational Year Book
(1937), p. 105.
Grieve, A.J., 'Frederick James Powicke
1854-1935', Transactions of the
Congregational Historical Society, vol. 12,
no. 7 (August 1936), pp. 295-6.
Powicke, F.J., 'Thomas Campbell Finlayson:
A Belated Personal Reminiscence', The
Congregational Quarterly (July 1934), pp.
326-40.
Alan P.P. Sell
PRICE, Henry Habberley (1899-1984)
H.H. Price was born in Neath, Wales and died
on 20 November 1984. He was educated at
Winchester College and New College, Oxford.
He was a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford
(1922-4), assistant lecturer at Liverpool
University (1922-3), fellow and lecturer in phi-
losophy at Trinity College, Oxford (1924-35),
university lecturer in philosophy (1932-5) and
Wykeham Professor of Logic (1935-59) at
Oxford. He was Gifford Lecturer at Aberdeen
University (1959-60). Price served as a pilot in
the Royal Flying Corps from 1917 to 1919. As
a visitor in Cambridge in the early 1920s, he
attended lectures by G.E. MOORE and C.D.
BROAD, discussing philosophy with them and
809
PRICE
others. He later did much to increase appreci-
ation of their work and that of RUSSELL at
Oxford, and to change philosophy there.
Price's chief philosophical contributions were
in epistemology and philosophy of mind. His
work on these topics was characterized by con-
siderable phenomenological and logical
subtlety. Perhaps as a result, his major philo-
sophical contributions came not in the form of
journal articles like those of many of his con-
temporaries but in four carefully crafted books
that gave him the space to develop his analyses
in detail. However, his work, particularly in
philosophy of mind, was firmly rooted in the
classical British empiricist tradition. With the
decline of that tradition in British philosophy in
the 1950s, thanks to the influence of
WITTGENSTEIN, RYLE and AUSTIN, Price's repu-
tation went into decline and the advances
achieved in his later work were largely over-
looked.
Price rose to prominence with his first book,
Perception (1932), a reworking of his BSc thesis
submitted ten years earlier. In it he argued for
the given, particular sensuous existents imme-
diately present to consciousness in sense expe-
rience that were distinct from psycho-cerebral
events but typically connected to them. What
was given he dubbed 'sense data' and the
awareness of or acquaintance with them a form
of knowing he dubbed 'sensing'. Price allowed
that there might be no sense-datum that was
not the object of other sorts of consciousness as
well, for example conceptual classification, and
also allowed that sense-data might be affected
by past experience, but about the existence of
the given he thought there could be no doubt.
That led to the two main issues of the book: (1)
the nature of our 'perceptual consciousness' of
material objects, and especially (2) the nature of
the 'belonging to' relation holding between
sense-data and material objects. Although
Price's thinking about these issues owed much
to Russell and Broad, his guiding principle
owed more to Moore's commonsensism. Since
science was based on our perceptual knowledge
of macroscopic objects, science could never
PRICE
lead us to doubt our ordinary beliefs about
macroscopic objects like tables and chairs, and
the answers to his two central issues had to
come from philosophical and introspective
reflection rather than science.
Price rejected the naive realist view that sense-
data were part of the surface of material objects
and that our perceptual consciousness con-
sisted in knowing this. He also rejected the
view that sense-data 'belonged to' material
objects simply by virtue of being their sensory
effects and our knowledge of material objects
depending on making, or being able to make,
an appropriate causal inference from sense-
data. All the sense-data that belong to a
material object are members of a 'family' of
sense-data, a group of actual and obtainable
sense-data that are sensed or may be sensed by
many observers and that form a standard solid
together with an indefinite number of distortion
series. The family as whole was not sensed but
constructed by the synthetic activity of the
mind. Data that were separately and succes-
sively presented to the mind are recalled and
held together before the mind, supplemented
with other data, and recognized as a whole.
However, Price also rejected the phenomenal-
ist identification of material objects with
families of sense-data. Instead, he argued that
a material object M consisted of a family of
sense-data F and a physical occupant O, with
O somehow responsible for F, and a sense-
datum 5 belonged to M by virtue of being a
member of F which is coincident with O.
Whether this elaborate synthesis of phenome-
nalism and realism overcomes later objections
to the possibility of a phenomenalist specifica-
tion of F is moot.
Price's epistemology of perception broke
more from the empiricist tradition and was of
more lasting significance for subsequent phi-
losophy. Following the eighteenth-century
philosopher Thomas Reid, Price argued that in
perception we took for granted, rather than
inferred, the existence of material objects by
taking for granted that sense-data we sensed
belonged to material objects. This 'taking for
810
granted' he called 'perceptual acceptance*.
Further acts of perceptual acceptance confirm-
ing our initial perceptual acceptance and speci-
fying further the character of the object ostensi-
bly presented to us gave us a 'perceptual assur-
ance' of the existence and character of the object
that, thanks to the coherence of the whole set of
perceptual acceptances, increased in likelihood
and approached certainty. The reason was that
each individual act of perceptual acceptance by
itself conferred some fallible, defeasible pre-
sumption in favour of its truth that did not
depend on being able to infer the existence of the
material object from sensed sense-data. Instead,
the existence of a sense-datum is non-inductive
but prima facie evidence for the existence of the
thing we take it to be part of and for its having
the sort of surface it ostensibly has. This
'Principle of Confirmability' was not for Price
just a phenomenological fact about our con-
sciousness but an epistemic fact that was empir-
ically irrefutable and a priori (though not self-
evident). One argument was that the notion of
a systematic 'hallucination' was meaningless. A
better one was based on reflection on what in
particular cases of perceptual consciousness
constituted 'being a reason for' believing in the
existence of material objects. In the empiricist
heyday of 1932, the view that perceptual
takings were prima facie credible was less
appreciated than it became later when the
American philosopher, Roderick Chisholm,
explicitly acknowledging his debt to Price, took
it up. Now, sometimes with an understanding
of its basis as quite different from Price's, the
position has become a mainstream one in con-
temporary epistemology.
Hume's Theory of the External World
(1940) continued Price's investigation of
'families' of sense-data, albeit with a more
purely phenomenalist bent, through a critical
discussion of Hume's account in the Treatise of
how the imagination 'fills in' the gaps in actual
experience to form the supposition of objects
that continue to exist when no longer perceived
and independent of being perceived. Rejecting
talk of unsensed sensibilia as unverifiable and

'meaningless', Price thought there were two
alternatives suggested by Hume: (1) when we
think that sensed sense-data belong to a
material object we think these sense impres-
sions are as //various series of unsensed sensi-
bilia existed, and (2) material object statements
are neither true nor false but simply express
various synthetic activities of the imagination
that are going on when we use material object
language. However, thanks to his doctrine of
perceptual acceptance and assurance, Price did
not follow Hume into scepticism about the
external world. Price approached Hume as a
philosopher dealing with the same problems as
contemporary philosophers, to be criticized
accordingly for his failure to solve these
problems, and also to be used and supple-
mented in coming up with better solutions. His
book did much to make Hume appreciated as
a constructive philosopher, not just as a
negative, sceptical one, and to show that the
history of philosophy was not just a history of
error and confusion. Nonetheless, Price was
not much interested in the historical context or
origin of Hume's work, and his approach later
fell into some disrepute as a result.
Thinking and Experience (1953) was a mag-
isterial study of the nature of thinking within
the empiricist tradition and went far to resolve
many of the puzzles that had traditionally
plagued such accounts. Like Hume, Price
defended a resemblance theory of universals
according to which recognizing that X is F is
recognizing that X resembles some set of par-
ticular exemplars - the F exemplars - as closely
as they resemble each other. Such primary
recognition of familiar characteristics is an
exercise of memory but one that does not
require recalling exemplars individually to
compare them. Indeed, he argued that it did not
matter whether X did resemble actual exem-
plars, just exemplars as ostensibly remembered.
For Price, possession of concepts came in
degrees, and, in the case of empirical concepts,
had as an indispensable basis and 'barebones'
the memory capacity to recognize Fs. However,
concepts could manifest themselves in other
811
PRICE
ways: for example, inductive sign cognition
and behaviour, the production, recognition and
use of physical instances, replicas and pictures,
as well as of imagery, and above all, words. The
basis of verbal thinking was ostensive definition
gradually setting up associative linkages
between word-producing skills and recogni-
tional capacities allowing us to recognize types
of objects and types of words. The customary
habits of expectation we acquire through osten-
sive definition become 'rules' for our own free
use of words in our own thinking, so long as
the exemplars we recall remain stable. Other
empirical concepts are definable in terms of
ostensively grounded concepts, and logical
concepts take the form of habits of inference
and action. The publication of Wittgenstein's
Philosophical Investigations the same year as
Thinking and Experience certainly caused the
latter to suffer in comparison. However,
answers to some of Wittgenstein's challenges
might be found in Price's book.
Price's last major book, Belief (1969), was
based on his Gifford Lectures and dealt with
empirical knowledge, belief and evidence. Price
argued that reasonable empirical belief required
having evidence of perception, testimony,
memory and self-consciousness consisting ulti-
mately of known facts. Price extended his
account of the prima facie credibility of per-
ceptual takings to what we clearly recall and
take others to be testifying to. The burden of
proof in each is on showing that we are in error
in relying on them, not on establishing that we
are not. Belief was a dispositional state that
had 'multi-form' manifestations in hope and
fear, feelings of confidence and doubt, as well
as in action and inaction. Occurrent assent, on
the other hand, was the beginning of belief,
not a manifestation of belief. Price defended the
notion of degrees of assent against Cardinal
Newman and questioned the import of
Newman's distinction between 'real', imagistic
assent, and merely notional, abstract assent.
Although he defended the Humean view that
moral utterances were expressions of attitudes
rather than statements with truth-values, he
PRICE
denied that religious assertions could be under-
stood likewise simply as expressions of attitude
or injunctions to see the world or to act in
certain ways. Factual claims about immortality,
or spiritual capacities, or the existence of God
were key parts of most systems of religious
belief. Price rejected the claim that such claims
were meaningless because empirically unverifi-
able or unfalsifiable. However, sometimes the
experiences that could confirm theistic claims
might be available only to those who had cul-
tivated certain spiritual capacities, attitudes,
practices, virtues and beliefs. Thus, confirma-
tion of religious belief would be a two-part
process. Yet, cultivating the religious life did not
initially require having full religious belief.
Belief for Price had multiform manifestations,
the dispositions to which might come in part or
degrees. So to those who doubted the existence
of spiritual capacities or the potential for con-
firming religious experiences, Price's religious
empiricist can respond 'Try it and see for
yourself!'
Price's views on religion were further devel-
oped in his Essays in the Philosophy of
Religion (1972), based on his Sarum Lectures
of 1971. Much of Price's interest in the phi-
losophy of religion was tied into his long-
standing interest in life after death and para-
psychological phenomena such as ESP, telepa-
thy and psychokinesis. Price conceived of life
after death as an image-filled dream world
where different laws of nature might hold.
He dismissed, doubtless too quickly, the claim
that memories, desires and imagery depended
on a physical brain as a contingent, empirical
hypothesis against which there was empirical
evidence for disembodied survival. Yet, later,
he seems to have thought personal survival
and interaction after death require some sort
of embodied existence, at least some sort of
ethereal or image body.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Perception (1932; 2nd rev. edn, 1950).
Hume's Theory of the External World
(Oxford, 1940).
812
Thinking and Experience (1953; 2nd edn,
1969).
Belief (1969}.
Essays in the Philosophy of Religion
(Oxford, 1972).
Philosophical Interactions with
Parapsychology: The Major Writings of
H.H. Price on Parapsychology and
Survival, ed. Frank Dilley (1995).
The Collected Works of Henry H. Price
1899-1984, ed. Martha Kneale (Bristol,
1996).
Other Relevant Works
The Permanent Significance of Hume's
Philosophy', Philosophy, vol. 15 (1940),
pp. 10-36.
'Clarity is Not Enough', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 19 (1945),
pp. 1-31; repr. in H.D. Lewis (ed.), Clarity
is Not Enough (1963), pp. 15-41.
'Seeming', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 26 (1952), pp. 215-34.
'Appearing and Appearances', American
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 1 (1964), pp.
3-19.
further Reading
Austin, J.L., Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford,
1962).
Ayers, Michael, 'Analytical Philosophy and
the History of Philosophy', in Philosophy
and its Past (1978), pp. 42-66.
Broad, C.D., Critical Notice of Thinking and
Experience, Mind, vol. 63 (1954), pp.
390-403.
Chisholm, R.M., Perceiving: A Philosophical
Study (Ithaca, 1957), chap. 6.
Ewing, A.C., Critical Notice of Hume's
Theory of the External World, Mind, vol.
50 (1941), pp. 156-65.
Ewing, A.C., R.I. Aaron, D.G.C. MacNabb
and H.H. Price, 'The Causal Argument for
Physical Objects', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl, vol. 19 (1945),
pp. 32-100.
Flew, Antony, Critical Notice of Belief,

Mind, vol. 79 (1970), pp. 454-60.
Geach, Peter, Mental Acts: Their Content
and their Objects (1957), chaps 6-11.
Harrison, Jonathan, 'Henry Habberley Price
(1899-1984)', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 80 (1991), pp. 473-91.
Murray, A.R.M., Critical Notice of
Perception, Mind, vol. 42 (1933), pp.
507-23.
Penulhum, Terence, Survival and
Disembodied Existence (1970), chap. 4.
Smythies, J.R., Analysis of Perception (1956),
chap. 5.
Bruce Hunter
PRICHARD, Harold Arthur (1871-1947)
H.A. Prichard was born in London on 31
October 1871 and died in Oxford on 29
December 1947. He studied at Clifton and
New College, Oxford. He was fellow of
Hertford College, Oxford from 1895 till 1898,
and at Trinity College, Oxford from 1898 till
1924. He was appointed White's Professor of
Moral Philosophy in 1928 and held this post
until his retirement in 1937.
Prichard's main philosophical interests lay
in epistemology and moral philosophy, though
it was in moral philosophy that his influence
was greatest. In contrast to the little he pub-
lished, Prichard's influence was huge. He was
the leading figure within the circle of Oxford
ethical intuitionists that included W.D. Ross,
H.W.B. JOSEPH, E.F. CARRITT and John LAIRD,
and his view has come to be regarded as a
classic expression of pluralistic intuitionism.
Prichard's most famous essay is entitled
'Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?'
which appeared in Mind in 1912. He there
argues that moral philosophy does rest on a
mistake, and that the mistake is to try to
provide a single principle that both justifies
813
PRICHARD
and explains the various obligations we have.
Such a principle would justify our obligations
either by providing a reason to do the obliga-
tory action, or by stating what this reason is,
and would explain our obligations by telling us
the reason why we are obligated to do obliga-
tory actions.
The attempt to provide a unifying moral
principle is a mistake, Prichard argues, because
such a master principle is neither possible nor
needed. The most plausible attempts to provide
a unifying ground for all of our obligations
aim to derive the right from the good. But,
Prichard maintains, all attempts to ground the
right in the good must fail. If the most plausi-
ble attempts to provide a unifying ground of
obligation fail, we must conclude that no
unifying ground can be provided.
This conclusion does not lead Prichard to
moral scepticism, or nihilism, however. For
although he denies that any unifying ground of
obligation can be provided, he also insists that
such a ground is not needed. It is not needed
because certain principles of obligation are self-
evident, and so do not need to be grounded in
some other moral principle.
We recognise, for instance, that this perfor-
mance of a service to X, who has done us a
service, just in virtue of its being the perfor-
mance of a service to one who has rendered
a service to the would-be agent, ought to be
done by us. This apprehension is immediate,
in precisely the sense in which a mathemati-
cal apprehension is immediate, e.g. the appre-
hension that this three-sided figure, in virtue
of its so being, must have three angles. Both
apprehensions are immediate in the sense
that in both insight into the nature of the
subject directly leads us to recognize its pos-
session of the predicate; and it is only stating
this fact from the other side to say that in
both cases the fact apprehended is self-
evident.
('Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a
Mistake?', p. 13)
PRICHARD
Like many intuitionists, Prichard does not offer
an exhaustive list of self-evident moral princi-
ples. He does, however, let us know that he
regards principles of fidelity, justice, gratitude
and beneficence as self-evident.
Prichard is, then, both a pluralist and an
epistemological intuitionist. He is a pluralist
insofar as he believes that there is an irreducible
plurality of moral first principles that may
conflict in certain circumstances. He is an epis-
temological intuitionist insofar as he thinks
that these first principles are self-evident, and so
require no further support. Prichard argues for
his pluralism by rejecting the most plausible
monistic views. The most plausible views
attempt to ground morality in some good -
that of the agent (ethical egoism), that of the
consequences of the action (utilitarianism) or
that of the action itself (a view Prichard calls the
'good will' view, Moral Writings, p. 153).
Prichard rejects ethical egoism on the ground
that we cannot conclude that we are obligated
to do a certain act just because it will benefit us.
The fact that, for example, keeping our engage-
ments will benefit us cannot convince us that
we morally ought to keep them. This fact could,
at best, only get us to want to keep our engage-
ments. Our recognition that such acts will
benefit us can generate a desire to do them by
making clear to us that acts of keeping our
engagements are instrumental to something
else we want - namely, our own well-being, our
own good. In this way we acquire an instru-
mental desire to keep our engagements. But
wanting to keep our engagements is one thing,
and believing that we are obligated to keep
them is something quite different (ibid., p. 9).
Following Kant, Prichard believes that moral
requirements are categorical in nature, and are
thus independent of what we desire. So the fact
that considerations of self-interest can get us to
want to do some act is irrelevant to the issue of
whether we ought morally to do that act.
Trying to decide what we morally ought to do
is not trying to decide what we want.
Having rejected ethical egoism, Prichard con-
siders the case for utilitarianism - that is, the
814
view that (1) we ought to do certain acts
because they will produce the best outcome,
and (2) that the best outcome is determined
only by the amount of happiness. Utilitarianism
differs from ethical egoism as it treats
everyone's happiness as equally good. My own
happiness can and should be taken into account
in deciding what I should do, according to this
view, but my happiness has no special status.
If utilitarianism is true, then we must be able
to conclude that we ought (categorically) to do
a certain action just because that action will
produce the best outcome. But we can only
conclude this, Prichard insists, if we assume
that the state of affairs that is good (or, more
accurately, is best) ought to exist (ibid., p. 9).
We must assume this because of the Humean
thesis that we can only derive an 'ought' from
another 'ought'. We cannot derive an 'ought'
from an 'is', even if the 'is' in question is an 'is
best'.
Furthermore, we must assume that the good,
or the best outcome ought to exist in just the
same sense in which the act that is instrumen-
tal to this outcome ought to be done (ibid., p.
10). Since the 'ought' to be justified is a moral
'ought', an obligation, we must assume that
the good outcome ought morally to exist - that
is, the good is obligated to exist. Otherwise we
would be guilty of a fallacy of equivocation,
deriving a moral ought from a non-moral
ought.
But the assumption that a certain state of
affairs (the best state) ought to exist is, Prichard
insists, false. Oughts, and a fortiori moral
oughts, apply only to actions, not to states of
affairs. We might think that someone is oblig-
ated to make the world a better place, but we
cannot think that the state of affairs in which
the world is a better place is obligated to exist.
Since this assumption is needed to derive an
obligation from a good outcome, if the assump-
tion is false then obligations cannot be derived
from good outcomes. Consequently, all forms
of utilitarianism are false.
Utilitarianism also fails to accord with our
moral convictions. We may think that moral

actions often produce the best outcome, but
even when they do we do not necessarily think
that we ought to do those acts because they will
produce the best outcome. We ought to do
certain acts because, say, we have promised to
do them, or because justice requires us so to act,
not because these acts will cause more good to
come into the world than any other action
(ibid.).
Prichard does seem to concede that there
may be an element of truth in utilitarianism:
'that unless we recognized that something
which an act will originate is good, we should
not recognize that we ought to do the action'
(ibid.). Nonetheless, he goes on to write that the
goodness of the outcome is not the reason why
we ought to do the act. It is not at all clear what
Prichard's view is here, but it looks as though
he thinks of the fact that our act will produce
a good outcome as playing the same role as the
fact that we are able to do a certain act. Both
facts are necessary conditions for some act to be
obligatory, but neither is a reason why we
morally ought to do that act. But this is a
puzzling view for a deontologist to hold, and it
is not at all clear why Prichard holds it.
Having rejected egoistic and utilitarian forms
of monism, Prichard turns to what he calls the
'good will' view. According to this view, the
reason why we are obligated to do certain acts
is not because of their instrumental value, as
utilitarians hold, but because of their intrinsic
value. We ought morally to do certain acts
because certain acts, 'e.g. acts of courage and
generosity, are good in themselves' (ibid., p. 3).
Prichard calls this a 'good will' view because
actions are judged to be intrinsically good not
on the basis of what is done, but solely in virtue
of the motive from which they are done.
Prichard then distinguishes two types of action
that are intrinsically good. Such actions are
done either from the belief that they ought to
be done (from a sense of obligation), or from
some 'desire prompted by some good
emotion', such as gratitude, affection, family
feeling or beneficence (ibid., p. 11). These are
the only motives that can make an action
815
PRICHARD
intrinsically good. But neither motive can
ground an obligation.
If the motive in respect of which an action is
good is the sense of obligation, then so far
from the sense that we ought to do it being
derived from our apprehension of its
goodness, our apprehension of its goodness
will presuppose the sense that we ought to do
it ... On the other hand, if the motive in
respect of which we think the action good is
some intrinsically good desire ... the recog-
nition of the goodness of the act will equally
fail to give rise to the sense of obligation to
do it. For we cannot feel that we ought to do
that the doing of which is ex hypothesi
prompted solely by the desire to do it.
(Moral Writings, p. 11)
This is a dense passage, but I think the basic
idea is clear and sound. If I judge my act intrin-
sically good (call this my evaluative judgement)
on the ground that I did it just because I judged
it obligatory (call this my deontic judgement),
then my evaluative judgement presupposes a
prior deontic judgement. For my evaluative
judgement was based upon the fact that my
prior deontic judgement motivated me to do it.
But if my deontic judgement was logically prior
to my evaluative judgement, then my deontic
judgement could not have been based upon
my evaluative judgement.
Good desires cannot ground obligations for a
different reason, according to Prichard. We
cannot judge that we are obligated to do a certain
act if we are moved to do it solely by desire. Why
not? Prichard seems to think the answer is
obvious, so does not tell us. But I take Prichard
to be drawing on his earlier objection to ethical
egoism. Ethical egoism could only get us to want
to do some action, but we cannot conclude that
we are obligated to do some act just because we
want or desire to do it. For moral obligations are
categorical, and hence independent of what we
desire. The fact that we desire to do some act
must, therefore, be irrelevant to the question of
whether we morally ought to do it.
PRICHARD
There is a further error underlying both
versions of the good will view: namely, that it
assumes that the Tightness or wrongness of a
particular act depends upon the motive from
which it is done (ibid., p. 11). This assumption
is, however, false. We are obligated simply to do
certain acts in what Prichard calls the 'narrower
sense' of 'act'. According to the narrow sense, the
motive is not thought to be part of the act. If we
are obligated only to do acts in this narrow
sense, then we are obligated merely to pay our
bills, not to pay our bills from some specific
motive, a good one. If we pay our bills simply
out of fear of the county court, we will have done
what was required of us (ibid., p. 12).
Since all attempts to ground the right in the
good fail, Prichard concludes that all attempts
to ground obligation in some single principle
must fail - that is, he rejects all forms of
monism. He also argues that many moral oblig-
ations do not need any further grounding, so
the failure of monism is no loss. These obliga-
tions do not require further grounding because
they are self-evident.
But although these obligations are self-
evident, and so stand in need of no further jus-
tification, two preliminaries may be necessary
in order to appreciate (recognize) the fact that
we are obligated to do a certain act. The first is
that we may have to follow through the con-
sequences of the action. We may not, for
instance, recognize that we ought not to do a
certain act until we recognize that it will have
some bad consequence, for example it may
hurt someone's feelings (ibid., p. 12). Prior to
recognizing this bad consequence we may ask
why we ought not to do the act. But once we
recognize the bad outcome, we have all the
reason we need not to do the act.
The second preliminary is to recognize some
relation involved in the situation of action, such
as the relation of benefactor to beneficiary, or
of promisor to promisee (ibid., p. 12). If, for
example, we think of an obligatory action
merely as 'giving X a present', we may ask why
we ought to give X a present. But once we rec-
ognize that we stand to X as beneficiary to
816
benefactor, because he has done us a service in
the past - that is, once we recognize that the act
is not merely one of giving X a present, but of
repaying X by a present - no further reason is
necessary. Once these preliminaries are carried
out and the obligation is fully stated, we will
recognize that we need no further justification
for acting in accordance with the obligation.
It sometimes looks as though Prichard thinks
that what is self-evident is some particular act
(in virtue either of some consequence or some
relation). But his considered view is that it is
certain principles of obligation that are self-
evident. In 'What is the Basis of Moral
Obligation?' he states that an obligation to do
a particular action in a particular set of cir-
cumstances can be justified.
The question 'Why ought I to do so and so?'
is sometimes legitimate and admits of an
answer. 'Why ought I to go to Hamlet?'
'Because it will stimulate a certain higher
part of my nature.' 'Why ought I to write to
X?' 'Because he is an old friend and would
like news.' 'Why ought I to send Y a cheque
for £5?' 'Because I owe him the money.'
(Moral Writings, p. 4)
One might go on to ask why we should stimu-
late a higher part of our nature, or benefit our
friends, or pay what we owe, and there might
be an answer to this further question. But this
mode of questioning cannot go on forever. At
some point we should have to regard certain
answers as sufficient, and then the question
'why?' would seem unnecessary.
If we do not put the question ['why?'] again,
the answer instead of, as before, stating
something particular states a principle, e.g.
'Because I ought to stimulate any higher part
of my nature', or 'Because I ought to do any
old friend a service which I alone can render'
or 'because I ought to pay anything I owe or
have promised to pay'.
(Moral Writings, p. 4)

Here we move from the particular to the uni-
versal, to some principle, and it is with such
principles, Prichard maintains, that justifica-
tion stops. It is these principles of obligation,
rather than particular obligatory actions, that
are self-evident, according to Prichard. They are
self-evident not because there is no reason to
believe them, but because they contain this
reason within themselves, a reason that
becomes explicit when the principle is fully
stated (ibid., p. 4).
If there is a plurality of basic moral principles,
there will be situations where they conflict. If,
for instance, the principles of fidelity and benef-
icence are two irreducible moral principles,
then sometimes we will face situations in which
we ought both to keep a promise and help
someone, but cannot do both. If we thought
that all obligations could be grounded in a
single principle, or thought that some moral
principles are absolute in the sense that it is
always wrong to act contrary to them, we
would have some means of resolving such a
conflict. If, say, all obligations could be
grounded in good outcomes, we could resolve
a conflict between fidelity and beneficence by
asking which act will produce the best
outcome. If, on the other hand, we thought
that the principle of fidelity is absolute, we
would have an even easier way of resolving
our conflict. For if the prohibition on infidelity
were absolute and the duty of beneficence not,
we could always know that we should keep our
promise in such a conflict situation.
But Prichard rejects monism, and nothing
he says leads us to suppose that he thought
that any moral principles are absolute. So how
does he deal with conflicts of duty? In 'Does
Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?' he main-
tains that obligations admit of degrees, so that
when they conflict we should ask 'Which is
the greater obligation?' (p. 14n.). But he later
rejected this view.
Prichard modifies his view in 'A Conflict of
Duties', a paper based on notes taken in a
lecture he gave in 1928. In this lecture Prichard
rejects the view that moral conflicts are conflicts
817
PRICHARD
of duty. The view that they are, he writes,
involves a contradiction, for it involves the
belief both that one act is our duty (the act
determined by the greater obligation) and the
other is not, and at the same time that the other
act is also a duty (Moral Writings, p. 79). In 'A
Conflict of Duties' he argues that moral con-
flicts must be understood not as conflicts of
duty, but as conflicts of claims. In conflict sit-
uations only one action is obligatory, and this
is determined by the act that makes the greatest
claim on us (p. 79). This view allows that we
might be morally required to do either one act
or the other in conflict situations. This would
be the case if the two opposing claims were of
equal strength. Prichard only denies that we
could be obligated to do both actions.
This view forced Prichard to change his mind
about the content of self-evident moral princi-
ples. They could no longer be understood as
principles stating that certain acts are obligatory
in virtue of some feature they have, but must be
understood as stating that certain acts make a
claim on us in virtue of certain features they
have (ibid.).
Prichard also came to change his mind on
what it is that is obligatory. At the time of
'Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?' he
thought that what is obligatory are certain
actions. But by the time he wrote 'Duty and
Ignorance of Fact' (1932) he came to believe
that what is obligatory is not that we do certain
actions, but that we set ourselves to do certain
actions (Moral Writings, p. 97). On this view,
then, we have done what morality requires of
us even if we fail to do the action we set our-
selves to do.
At the same time he abandoned his earlier,
strongly objectivist view of the ground of oblig-
ation. He came to think that what we ought to
do is determined not by certain objective facts
(facts about the consequences of our action
and the relations in which we stand), but by our
beliefs about those facts. He was led to revise
his view in this way by epistemological worries.
If what we ought to set ourselves to do is deter-
mined by objective facts, then we could never
PRICHARD
know what it is that morality requires of us, for
we can never know for sure that we are correct
about these facts. We can, however, know what
we believe these facts to be.
Prichard's revised view introduces a strong
dose of subjectivity into his moral theory, as the
beliefs that make certain acts obligatory need
not be true. There remains a certain degree of
objectivity in Prichard's view, for it allows that
we could be mistaken about which act our
beliefs about the facts make obligatory. We
might think that these beliefs ground an oblig-
ation to set ourselves to do act A, when they in
fact ground an obligation to set ourselves to do
act B. Nonetheless, Prichard ended up with a
much more subjectivist moral theory than the
one for which he is renowned.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?',
Mind, vol. 21 (1912), pp. 21-37.
'Duty and Interest' [inaugural lecture,
White's Professor of Moral Philosophy]
(Oxford, 1929).
'Duty and Ignorance of Fact' [Annual
Philosophical Lecture, Henriette Hertz
Trust], Proceedings of the British Academy
(1932).
Moral Obligation: Essays and Lectures, ed.
W.D. Ross (Oxford, 1949; 2nd edn, with
'Duty and Interest' added, 1968).
Moral Writings, ed. J. McAdam (Oxford,
2002).
Other Relevant Works
Knowledge and Perception: Essays and
Lectures, ed. W.D. Ross (Oxford, 1950).
further Reading
Broad, C.D., Critical Notice, Moral
Obligation: Essays and Lectures, Mind,
vol. 59 (1950), pp. 555-66.
Daly, C.B., 'Inter-War British Ethics: The
Oxford Intuitionists', Philosophical Studies
(Ireland), vol. 14 (1965), pp. 55-87.
Hardie, W.F.R., 'H. A. Prichard, Moral
Obligation: Essays and Lectures',
818
Philosophy, vol. 26, (1951), pp. 159-61.
Hawkins, D.J.B., 'The Ethics of H. A.
Prichard', Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 1
(1950-51), pp. 242-7.
MacAdam, J., 'H. A. Prichard', in L. Becker
and C. Becker (eds), Encyclopedia of
Ethics, vol. 2 (New York, 1992).
, 'Harold Arthur Prichard
1871-1947', in Edward Craig (ed.),
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
vol. 7(1998).
Schwarz, S.D., 'Does Prichard's Essay Rest
on a Mistake?', Ethics, vol. 81 (1970-71),
pp. 169-80.
Sievert, D., 'Does Prichard's Essay Rest on a
Confusion?', Ratio, vol. 14 (1972), pp.
172-85.
Stratton-Lake, P., Ethical Intuitionism: Re-
Evaluations (Oxford, 2002).
Philip Stratton-Lake
PRINGLE, John William Sutton (1912-82)
John Pringle was born in Manchester on 22
July 1912 and died on 2 November 1982. He
attended King's College, Cambridge, where he
earned first class degrees in both parts of the
Natural Sciences Tripos, and participated in the
exclusive Cambridge University Natural Science
Club. After a period as a fellow of King's
College, he enlisted and was assigned to the
Telecommunication Research Establishment to
work on radar development. In 1945 he
obtained a lectureship in zoology at Cambridge,
which he held until 1961, when he accepted the
Linacre Chair of Zoology at Oxford. During
this time, Pringle completed notable research on
insect flight, proprioception and physiology.
Pringle remained at Oxford for the rest of his
career, during which time he was instrumental
in the construction of a new laboratory for the
Zoology and the Experimental Psychology

departments and was active in programmes
devoted to the development of science studies
in third-world countries.
At Oxford, Pringle began to make notable
contributions to the philosophy of science and
biology. In his inaugural address, The Two
Biologies (1963), he agreed that biology could
be split into organismic and atomistic pursuits,
but felt that organismic studies needed to be
augmented to include ideas from psychology,
anthropology, animal behaviour and genetics.
Along with a group of like-minded professors
such as A.H. Halsey, Geoffrey A. Harrison,
and Professor E.B. Ford, Pringle began to craft
an undergraduate curriculum for the study of
what he called 'human sciences' designed to
examine the study of humanity from both bio-
logical and social aspects. The programme was
approved by the university despite vocal oppo-
sition, and in October 1970 the first students
were enrolled in the Human Science School.
Pringle also published numerous pieces on
evolution and the role it played in the devel-
opment of human consciousness. In the papers
'On the Parallel Between Learning and
Evolution' (1951) and The Mechanism of
Knowledge: Limits to Prediction' (1976) Pringle
speculated that physical structures in the brain
resulting from evolutionary forces could
account for human attributes such as con-
sciousness and emotions. Pringle argued that as
organisms become more complex, there is a
general loss of localization in the functioning of
the brain. Instead, temporal information in the
form of 'time patterns' spread throughout the
brain. Traits such as consciousness and
emotions might be linked to the brain's ability
to foster these patterns, and natural selection
for them could have been the mechanism that
led to human culture. Furthermore, Pringle
speculated that abstract ideas such as religion
and ethics may be a result of the brain's
inherent tendency to try to forecast the future
and to make the assumption that all external
events have a cause. Despite such explanations,
Pringle remained a devout Christian who found
no problem combining his religious beliefs with
819
PRINGLE-PATTISON
his scientific ones. In regards to evolution and
his faith, Pringle accepted that help and
guidance can be attained through prayer, but
insisted the human body and mind have
evolved by natural selection.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'On the Parallel between Learning and
Evolution', Behavior, vol. 3 (1951), pp.
174-215.
The Two Biologies [inaugural lecture], 24
October 1963, Oxford.
'Biological Responsibility in a Technical
Society', Biology and Human Affairs, vol.
30, no. 3(1965).
'A Vision of Man', Biologist, vol. 19 (1972),
pp. 223-37.
Biology and the Human Sciences (1972).
'The Mechanism of Knowledge: Limits to
Prediction', Proceedings of the 5th
International Conference on the Unity of
the Sciences, Washington D.C., vol. 2
(1976), pp. 961-80.
Further Reading
Wigglesworth, Vincent, 'John William Sutton
Pringle', Biographical Memoirs of the
Fellows of the Royal Society, vol. 29
(1989), pp. 525-51.
Peter Schmidt
PRINGLE-PATTISON, Andrew Seth
(1856-1931)
Andrew Seth was born on 20 December 1856
and died at his estate, The Haining, near Selkirk
on 1 September 1931. The eldest surviving son
of an Edinburgh bank clerk, in 1873 he went
to Edinburgh University, where he developed
an early and lifelong love for the work of
Carlyle and Wordsworth. (For all his subse-
quent love of philosophy it remained his
PRINGLE-PATTISON
lifelong conviction, to which his works bear
abundant testimony, that 'religion and the
higher poetry' bring us nearer to the meaning
of the world than abstract metaphysics.)
Graduating in 1878 with first class honours in
both classics and philosophy, he was awarded
a Hibbert Travelling Scholarship, and spent
two years studying in Berlin, Jena and under
Lotze at Gottingen. In 1880 he was made assis-
tant to his old teacher, Alexander Campbell
Fraser (succeeding W.R. SORLEY in the post),
until in 1883 he took up the Chair of Logic and
Philosophy at University College Cardiff. He
married in 1884. In 1887 he was appointed
Professor of Logic, Rhetoric and Metaphysics
at St Andrews, a position he held for only four
years until in 1891 he took over the Chair of
Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh vacated
by Campbell Fraser. He held this post until his
retirement in 1919. During most of that period
his younger brother, James SETH, held the Chair
of Moral Philosophy in the same university (a
position he occupied from 1898 to 1924). After
his retirement in 1919, he continued to lecture
and write until his death in 1931. In 1898 he
added to his own name that of Pringle-Pattison
as a condition of accepting a bequest.
The Development from Kant to Hegel
(1882), his earliest work, was a revised and
expanded version of the scholarship disserta-
tion resulting from his travels in Germany.
Though in the main expository, the work was
important in giving exposure to what were in
Britain still relatively unfamiliar ideas. In the
book he attempted to show that idealistic phi-
losophy had developed under its own necessary
internal logic from Kant, through Fichte and
Schelling, to its culmination in Hegel. 'Indeed'
he claims, a little optimistically, that 'anyone so
minded might put together a statement out of
Fichte, still more out of Schelling, which would
seem to anticipate all the results of Hegel' (The
Development from Kant to Hegel, p. 86).
Throughout, his emphasis is largely on their
respective philosophies of religion and, though
not wholly without awareness of the difficulties
such philosophies face, generally very positive.
820
In his view the three post-Kantian systems unite
in their common perception of the aim of phi-
losophy as being to exhibit the universe as a
rationally connected system, to demonstrate
that all its different elements constitute an order
in which, and in which alone, they can be
understood.
The following year, together with Richard
Burdon HALDANE (with whom he had been a
student at Edinburgh), he edited a book, Essays
in Philosophical Criticism, dedicated to the
memory of T.H. Green. The volume of pieces
by as then little-known philosophers all influ-
enced by German philosophy may be seen as a
kind of manifesto for the fledgling idealist
school, and included contributions by figures
who would go on to make a great philosophi-
cal impact. (As well as pieces by the two editors,
there were pieces by BOSANQUET, Sorley,
RITCHIE and Henry JONES, together with a
Preface by Edward Caird. Seven of the ten con-
tributors went on to give Gifford Lectures.)
Seth's own contribution, the opening essay of
the collection, entitled 'Philosophy as a System
of Categories', urges the Kantian paradigm of
philosophy as criticism of categories but com-
plains that Kant failed to take this conception
as far as was necessary. He never criticized the
dichotomy between sense and understanding,
between receptive or passive mind and active or
spontaneous mind, with the result that his
account, though denigrating empirical psy-
chology, remains in the end a psychological
theory enslaved to the conception of the mind
as acted upon by something else external to it.
Seth argues that, freed of this misconception,
the Kantian straitjackets of matter and form,
necessary and contingent, even mind and
world, in fact become local and convertible,
'shifting distinctions, relative to the point of
view from which they are contemplated'
(Essays in Philosophical Criticism, p. 13). Such
a shift leads us, he argues, to an idealism in
which the centre of the world lies in our own
nature as self-conscious beings, taken together
in a community at once both secular and divine.
This essay, unmistakably Hegelian in its tone,

was of real importance in setting forth a thesis
as to the proper work of philosophy (as distinct
from the special sciences). He views its task as
the critical interpretation of experience whose
special business is to arbitrate between the
claims of the sciences and between their respec-
tive categories. As he later put it 'The function
of philosophy is ... comparable to that of a
"Warden of the Marches" between the various
sciences, resisting the pretensions of any par-
ticular science to be the exclusive exponent of
reality and assigning to each its hierarchical
rank in a complete scheme of knowledge' (The
Idea of God, p. 108).
While Seth was acting as assistant to
Campbell Fraser in Edinburgh, he invited the
young A.J. BALFOUR, whose Defence of
Philosophical Doubt he had admired, to
address the Edinburgh University Philosophical
Society. Balfour accepted, his visit beginning a
close personal friendship between the men,
which resulted in Balfour's endowment for
three years of a series of lectures to be given by
Seth in order that he might devote his time to
original philosophical work. The first set of
lectures, given in the winter of 1882-3, resulted,
in 1885, in the book Scottish Philosophy. This
is a comparison between the Scottish (Thomas
Reid and William Hamilton's) common sense
answer and the German (Kant's and Hegel's)
idealist answer, to the sceptical threat raised by
David Hume, bringing these seemingly rival
schools into looser relation ('within fighting
distance', as he put it), and thereby asserting the
former as no passing fashion but equal in sig-
nificance to the latter. It endorses the Scottish
Common Sense appeal to the testimony of con-
sciousness - its stance that we should not
question our 'natural belief in such things as
God, personal identity and the existence of an
external world - regretting the subjectivist or
agnostic aspect of Kant's essentially parallel
response. But equally regrettable is found the
fact that in Reid, unlike in Kant, there is
nothing that could really amount to a proof of
his first principles, nor is the enumeration of
principles as full or as methodical as Kant's,
821
PRINGLE-PATTISON
while next to the systematic nature of the
German approach, the indifference - even hos-
tility - to questions of completeness and the
overall rationality of the universe in Scottish
philosophy is seen as a decided weakness. 'It is
important to remember that despair of system
is despair of philosophy, for philosophy just is
system' says Seth (Scottish Philosophy, p. 196).
He ends with an endorsement of F.H.
BRADLEY'S complaint in his Principles of Logic
that Hegel's universe seems like an 'unearthly
ballet of bloodless categories' and recommends
that if we want to hold fast to reality we should
look to the individual. These last ideas
appeared again, in much sharper form, and
this time causing something of an upset, in his
second series of Balfour Lectures, Hegelianism
and Personality, published in 1887. He voices
there essentially two grounds of complaint
against the Hegelian Absolute.
In the first place, interpreting Hegel's transi-
tion from logic to nature in creationist fashion
as the doctrine that nature is the realization of
logic, he objects that this whole process is back
to front. It tries to construct the world from
abstract thought or mere universals when what
is in fact required is some datum of experience.
'We must touch reality somewhere; otherwise
our whole construction is in the air ... no
sophistry can permanently obscure our per-
ception that the real must be given. Thought
cannot make it; thought only describes what it
finds' (Hegelianism and Personality, p. 118).
The result of attempting such an impossible
task is, he argues, a wholly inadequate con-
ception of the world. For in mistakenly
equating existence with knowledge, all dis-
tinctness and particularity vanish, and Hegel
misses out precisely the individual nature of
things. Knowledge must, of course, be general,
but existence is not, and everything which exists
has a life of its own, absolutely unique and
individual, which Hegelian logicism fails to
capture.
Associated with this is a second, more ethical,
concern. Seth objects that the Hegelian eleva-
tion of universality threatens the reality,
PRINGLE-PATTISON
autonomy and value of the finite self. The indi-
vidual vanishes into the community or species,
while man is united with God and with nature
at the cost, it would seem, of losing himself.
Seth takes a stand on the distinctness of indi-
vidual selves. Selves know and interact with
each other and the world, but they remain
separate or 'impervious' to each other. 'I have
a centre of my own - a will of my own - which
no one shares with me or can share', urges
Seth, 'a centre which I maintain even in my
dealings with God' (Hegelianism and
Personality, p. 217), just as, to complete the
picture, there exists a divine centre of thought
activity and enjoyment to which no mortal can
penetrate.
Hegelianism and Personality was an impor-
tant work in the history of idealism. It was
perhaps the first serious internal criticism of the
school, and signals a division between personal
and absolute idealism, which (if in reality less
sharp than it appears) characterized the
movement from then on. The third series of
Balfour Lectures, on realism (to which Seth
became closer as his thought developed), were
less distinguished, appearing in four numbers of
the American journal Philosophical Review
(1892-3), and in book form posthumously in
1933.
In 1897 he published a volume of essays,
Man's Place in the Cosmos and Other Essays
(important principally for its piece 'A New
Theory of the Absolute', discussing F.H.
Bradley's Appearance and Reality) and Two
Lectures on Theism, but after that, besides a
1907 collection The Philosophical Radicals and
Other Essays, he published little until in 1917,
when there appeared his most important work,
The Idea of God in the Light of Recent
Philosophy, an elaboration of his Gifford
Lectures of 1912-13. Bringing together the
reflections of many years, this is his most
complete and final philosophical statement -
although these are perhaps strange words to
apply to his thought. Always sceptical of any
claims to completeness or finality, often devel-
oping his views through criticism and opposi-
822
tion to those of others, his work always has a
tentative and exploratory character.
The Idea of God rejects all attempts to prove
idealism through purely epistemological
argument, singling out for special criticism
Berkeley, Ferrier and T.H. Green. The problem
in Green's argument is that he relies on the
assumption of experience as a matter of atom-
istic and unrelated sensations, and apart from
this understanding it has no value. This was
admissible in relation to the psychology of
Locke and Hume that he was criticizing, but
(Pringle-Pattison argues) is irrelevant to modern
psychology, which reveals to us that experi-
ence is a unified whole, not a multiplicity of
unrelated elements.
Instead he constructs an argument based on
emergent levels or orders of nature. He begins
by drawing on recent developments in biology,
by such figures as J.S. HALDANE and Henri
Bergson, which, he claims, demonstrate the
impossibility of any programme of mechanis-
tic reduction. 'A self-stoking, self-repairing,
self-preservative, self-adjusting, self-increasing,
self-reproducing machine' is only by an abuse
of language spoken of as a machine at all (The
Idea of God, p. 77), he complains. In passing
from the physical to the chemical, the organic
to the inorganic, or the mere animal to the
human, without introducing new entities (it is,
he thinks, illegitimate to appeal to a 'vital prin-
ciple' somehow supplementing the material)
and recognizing the continuity of nature, there
nonetheless emerge new and irreducible cate-
gories of being. In this way he opposes what he
describes as 'the lower naturalism', which
explains by 'levelling down' or looking at
temporal antecedents, by interpreting the more
developed by the less developed, in favour of
what he calls 'the higher naturalism', which
acknowledges the emergence of real differences
when it finds them, and looks not to the begin-
ning but the end of things in the confidence that
reality is the continuous manifestation of a
single power, whose full nature cannot be iden-
tified with the initial stage of the evolutionary
process, but can only be learned from the

course of the process as a whole, and most
fully from its final stages.
It follows that man, as a knowing being, is to
be thought of as something organic to nature, a
natural development, not something distinct from
it. And here is the key to idealism, the unity of
knower and known, for
If we keep steadily in view the fact that man is
from beginning to end, even qua knower, a
member and, as it were, an organ of the
universe, knowledge will appear to us in a
more natural light, and we shall not be tempted
to open this miraculous chasm between the
knower and the realities which he knows.
(The Idea of God, p. 112)
Man as knowing subject is within and continu-
ous with the world he knows, and threat from the
scepticism and relativism of a dualistic meta-
physics can no longer touch us.
Man is organic to nature and his experience,
therefore, largely true. Pringle-Pattison argues
this at length with respect to so-called secondary
qualities. But the same holds good, he believes, for
our aesthetic and moral appreciation. Man's
highest faculties are the most revelatory of the
nature of things, thus it is value and religion
which reveal the nature of the world. In this way,
the fundamental ideal and ethical nature of reality
is given.
The unified developing world process is itself
divine, so the most appropriate name for it is
'God' or 'the Absolute'. It is something thus
revealed through its facts - the world is precisely
the self-expression of God - especially its values.
The presence of the ideal is the reality of God
within us' (ibid., p. 246). It is both all-encom-
passing and immanent in the world.
Given the importance of development, he ends
with a discussion of time. He rejects the view of
Bergson and James that there might be any
genuine novelty or progress in time, and thus
thinks of time as something within the whole. He
thinks of God as both including and transcend-
ing time, and finds some analogy for this in the
specious present.
823
PRINGLE-PATTISON
Although undoubtedly idealistic, what is
offered does full justice to the independence of
reality. Mind certainly does not create nature;
indeed, it depends as much on nature as nature
does on it. They are rather correlative, devel-
oping pari passu, each in step with and in need
of the other.
It is sufficient for the purposes of idealism
that nature as a whole should be recognized
as complementary to mind, and possessing
therefore no absolute existence of its own
apart from its spiritual completion; just as
mind in turn would be intellectually and eth-
ically void without a world to furnish it with
the materials of knowledge and of duty. Both
are necessary elements of a single system.
(The Idea of God, p. 189)
Turning to finite individuals, he continues to
speak out for personal idealism. The divisions
which exist between selves remain important,
and selves are not the kind of things which can
be 'blended' or 'merged', either with each other
or with God. Although not in the Spinozistic
sense (of wholly independent and self-subsis-
tent), each is a substance in the Aristotelian
sense (of that which has predicates), rather than
a mere adjective or quality of the whole; a view
he finds in both Bosanquet and Bradley. Each
individual has a unique nature, 'a little world of
content which ... constitutes an expression or
focalization of the universe which is nowhere
exactly repeated' (ibid., p. 267) and our con-
tribution to the Absolute is precisely ourselves
as such unique and particular individuals. As in
the earlier work, the ultimate basis for this is
experience, which, he urges, no supposed result
of speculative theory should ever be allowed to
override. It is on precisely this ground, for
example, that he urges that no theoretic diffi-
culty in conceiving how we can be free should
prevent us from recognizing that we are. But
there is another side. Although he never explic-
itly abandoned the stance of Hegelianism and
Personality', sensitive to the views of his oppo-
nents and seeking compromise wherever
PRINGLE-PATTISON
possible, there was nonetheless a considerable
weakening of his earlier position. The idea of
the mere individual as an exclusive self-con-
tained unity or 'metaphysical atom' is, he
admits, a fiction (although he acknowledges
that earlier statements of his, in particular the
word 'impervious', might perhaps have implied
this). The self can only exist in relation to
society and, in wider terms, the universe as a
whole. He is highly critical, for example, of
the views of McTAGGART and Howison. The
Absolute is certainly no republic of distinct
selves.
Turning to religion, his God is certainly not
transcendent. He has no existence apart from
his self-manifestation in the world. He objects
that both God and man become bare points of
mere existence, impossible abstractions, if we
try to separate them from one another. Instead,
they need each other. Just as man exists
through expressing the being of God, so God
exists through this act of self-expression.
Inevitably some critics of more orthodox per-
suasion felt he never really advanced beyond
Hegelian pantheism. But this seems unfair in
that he distinguishes his doctrine of the imma-
nence of God from any 'lower pantheism'
(which is equivalent to naturalism and under-
mines value) by emphasizing the significance of
the ideal as something necessarily passing
beyond the actual. As a matter of value, per-
fection is something which transcends as well
as lives immanently in us. Transcendence is a
matter not of ontology but of value, 'The
infinite greatness and richness of the containing
life, as compared with anything as yet appro-
priated by the finite creature' (The Idea of God,
p. 255).
In 1922 (and based on his 1921-2 Gifford
Lectures) appeared The Idea of Immortality,
which, dealing in detail with issues that had
been only touched on in the previous volume,
was in effect a sequel to The Idea of God. His
principal argument is that the heart or truest
view of the universe is to be found in value, pre-
eminently in love. But God, as something
immanent in the world, manifests itself in spirit.
824
Spirits must therefore be the very values of the
universe. But if the unique and individual spirit
is the locus of value, we may conclude that we
'were not made to be broken up and cast aside
and to be replaced by relays of others in a con-
tinual succession' (The Idea of Immortality, p.
191). This is not an argument based on a mere
personal desire for survival, he claims, but
rather an inference from the character of God,
and, against the charge 'too good to be true', he
retorts with words attributed to Emerson that
it is 'too good not to be true'. Arguing that this
is not simply something given, but rather some-
thing won and then preserved, through effort,
he denies that all human souls are necessarily
intrinsically immortal, although neither can we
rule out the possibility of universal restoration.
The Idea of Immortality lacks any very clear
metaphysical basis to deal with more specific
problems concerning immortality. For example,
Pringle-Pattison objects to any doctrine of the
substantiality of the soul, but the neo-
Aristotelian model he works with instead is
ineffective. Moreover, he has difficulties with
the temporal aspects of the question. Making a
distinction between mere prolongation of exis-
tence and 'eternal life', he insists also that the
latter has no value except as a way to lay hold
of the former, but he also recognizes that we
cannot discard duration altogether, lest the
'eternal now' just shrinks to a mathematical
point.
Pringle-Pattison was not an especially
original thinker, nor did he ever claim to be,
content to think about things through the eyes
of his own time and to enter into debate with
his contemporaries. Nevertheless, he was a very
important thinker in the idealist movement.
He sounded a note of early resistance to its
more Hegelian tendencies, while in his later
work (although he is often classed as a personal
idealist) he held out the possibility of a via
media between absolutism and extreme per-
sonalism. Inevitably, there were some who
levelled charges of instability and inconsistency,
or simply lack of clarity, against this position,
but in treading a difficult path he was a subtle

and sensitive thinker. Unlike many of the other
British idealists, he was not actively involved in
politics and wrote little on social questions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Development from Kant to Hegel
(1882).
(Ed. with R. B. Haldane), Essays in
Philosophical Criticism (1883).
Scottish Philosophy (Edinburgh 1885).
Hegelianism and Personality (Edinburgh,
1887).
The Idea of God in the Light of Recent
Philosophy (Oxford, 1917).
The Idea of Immortality (Oxford, 1922).
Other Relevant Works
Man's Place in the Cosmos and Other Essays
(Edinburgh, 1897).
Two Lectures on Theism (Edinburgh, 1897).
The Philosophical Radicals and Other Essays
(Edinburgh, 1907).
Studies in the Philosophy of Religion
(Oxford, 1930).
The Balfour Lectures on Realism (Edinburgh,
1933).
Further Reading
Gallagher, Dennis M., Pringle-Pattison's Idea
of God (Washington, DC, 1933).
Jones, 'Alfred H., 'Professor Pringle-
Pattison's Epistemological Realism', The
Philosophical Review, vol. 20 (1911), pp.
405-21.
Merrington, E.N., 'A Scottish Thinker:
Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison', The
Australasian Journal of Psychology and
Philosophy, vol. 9 (1931), pp. 241-5.
Rashdall, H., The Religious Philosophy of
Professor Pringle-Pattison', Mind, vol. 27
(1918), pp. 261-83.
W. J. Mander
825
PRIOR
PRIOR, Arthur Norman (1914-69)
A.N. Prior was born in Masterton, New
Zealand and died in Norway. He was educated
in Masterton and at the University of Otago,
where he studied under John FINDLAY, gaining
his BA in philosophy in 1935 and going on to
complete an MA thesis evaluating subjectivist
and formalist approaches to logic. During 1937
he held an assistant lectureship at Otago. In
1938 Prior temporarily abandoned his
academic career and spent three bohemian
years wandering in Britain and Europe, return-
ing to New Zealand at the end of 1940. On
emerging from the Air Force in 1945, he
applied for a vacant lectureship at Canterbury
University College in Christchurch (the vacancy
was created by the departure from New
Zealand of Karl POPPER). Prior began his career
at Canterbury in February 1946, becoming
Professor of Philosophy in 1953.
Prior first gained his reputation in ethics and
then went on to do fundamental work in logic
and metaphysics. His first book, in 1949, was
a slim but potent volume entitled Logic and the
Basis of Ethics. Published by the Clarendon
Press, this soon became prominent in Oxford:
AUSTIN liked it, and RYLE approved of 'Prior's
complete lack of mugwumpery'. In 1952 Prior
began publishing technical papers in symbolic
logic - four of them, suddenly, in the same
year. At nearly forty years of age, Prior had
become a formal logician. He completed the
manuscript of what was intended to be his
second book, The Craft of Formal Logic, in
December 1951, sending it to the Clarendon
Press, who agreed to publish it if Prior would
give greater emphasis to modern logic. He
undertook to do so, but ended up writing a very
different book, published in 1955 under the
title Formal Logic. Steeped in Polish logical
notation and the axiomatic method, Formal
Logic typifies Prior's mature work. It teaches,
enthusiastically yet without fuss, that there was
life - fascinating life - before the here and now
of logic. What Prior once wrote admiringly of
the Polish logician Lukasiewicz (in a 1952
PRIOR
review of the latter's work) is no less true of
Prior himself:
having done very distinguished work as a
mathematical logician in the modern style,
[he] is at the same time interested in the
history of his subject... and contrives both
to use modern techniques to bring out more
clearly what the ancients were driving at,
and to learn from the ancients useful logical
devices which the moderns have in general
forgotten.
In 1954 Gilbert Ryle visited New Zealand. He
brought Prior an invitation to visit Oxford and
to deliver the John Locke Lectures. Prior
arranged a twelve-month leave of absence from
Canterbury and arrived in Oxford at the begin-
ning of 1956. Rather quickly a group of logi-
cians began to form around him, including
Peter GEACH, John Lemmon and Ivo Thomas.
George Hughes, at the Victoria University of
Wellington, summarized the news of Prior that
was arriving back home: 'this wild colonial
boy just hit Oxford and started to gather
around him the main people [interested in]
logic, and he started to organise a lot of parties,
almost, for the serious doing of logic'. Prior
kitted out his tiny rented flat with a toyshop
blackboard and held open house. His John
Locke Lectures were published the following
year, under the title Time and Modality.
Following his return to Canterbury, Prior pined
for the logical companionship that he had
found in the UK. When the offer arrived of a
newly established second chair at the University
of Manchester, he snatched it up, leaving New
Zealand in December 1958. He was at
Manchester for seven years, until in 1966
Anthony KENNY recommended him for a fel-
lowship at Balliol. Prior's work was an exem-
plary fusion of philosophy and logic, and on the
eve of his departure from Manchester, he
announced that he was going to Oxford with
a mission: he was determined to interest math-
ematical logicians in philosophy and philoso-
phers in mathematical logic. Sadly, Prior did
826
not live to enjoy the entente cordiale between
philosophy and logic that his work helped to
usher in. He died suddenly of a heart attack
while visiting the University of Oslo.
At a time when modality, and intensional
concepts in general, were under attack, Prior
was a leading figure in the movement to apply
modal logic to the formalization of a wide
variety of linguistic phenomena. An iconoclast
and a resourceful innovator, Prior inspired
many to undertake serious work in modal logic,
and his foundational work in the subject
remains important.
In 1956 Prior and the Dublin logician Carew
Meredith were the first to give a possible worlds
semantics employing the 'accessibility' relation
between worlds. Their idea, now standard in
modal semantics, was that 'Necessarily p' (Np)
is true in a world w if (and only if) p is true in
every possible world accessible from w\ and
'Possibly p' (Mp) is true in a world w if (and
only if) p is true in some possible world acces-
sible from w. They discovered that the axiom
of modal logic Np —> p amounts to the state-
ment that each possible world is accessible from
itself; and the axiom Np -> NNp amounts to
stating that if w2 is accessible from wv and w3
is accessible from w2, then w3 is accessible from
wl (i.e. that the accessibility relation between
worlds is transitive}. If the accessibility relation
is both transitive and symmetrical - i.e. if w2
being accessible from wl implies that wl is
accessible from w2 - then, they showed, the
modal axiom Mp -> NMp holds good. Possible
worlds semantics proved to be both a rich
source of philosophical insight, and the tech-
nical key to a host of important applications of
modal logic.
Prior's most significant achievement was the
invention and development of tense logic. Tense
logic involves two new modal operators, 'It
will be the case that' and 'It has been the case
that'. Prior used his tense logic to articulate
theories about the structure and metaphysics of
time, and to mount a robust defence of free will
and indeterminism. Tense logic is now also
employed for the manipulation of time-depen-

dent data and has numerous applications in
computing, including database management,
program verification, and common sense rea-
soning in artificial intelligence.
In 1949 Prior learned (from Geach's review
of Julius Weinberg's Nicolaus of Autricourt: A
Study in 14th Century Thought] that for the
scholastics, an expression like 'Socrates is sitting
down' - an example discussed by Aristotle - is
complete, in the sense of being assertible as it is,
and is true at certain times, false at others.
(Prior had been brought up on the view, which
is widespread even today, that such an expres-
sion is incomplete until a time-reference is
supplied, and hence that - despite the seeming
naturalness of doing so - one cannot regard the
expression as changing its truth-value with the
passage of time.) It was a crucial discovery for
Prior, and the idea that tensed propositions are
liable to be true at one time and false at another
became central to his philosophy. In a summary
of his views, composed nearly two decades
later, he wrote: 'Certainly there are unchanging
truths, but there are changing truths also, and
it is a pity if logic ignores these, and leaves it...
to comparatively informal "dialecticians" to
study the more "dynamic" aspects of reality'
(Logic and Reality', p. 46).
Geach's review sent Prior back to the ancient
sources, and he found Aristotle describing some
propositions about the future - propositions
concerning events that are not determined at the
time of utterance - as being neither true nor
false when they are uttered, on the ground that
there is, at that time, as yet no definite fact with
which they accord or conflict. Prior endorsed
Aristotle's argument, in chapter 9 of De
Interpretation, for believing in such events: if the
future were determined, 'there would be no need
to deliberate or take trouble, on the supposition
that if we should adopt a certain course, a certain
result would follow, while, if we did not, the
result would not follow'. Prior, once a Barthian
Calvinist but now on the side of indeterminism
and free will, went on to develop profound tech-
nical analyses of the idea that the future is open,
a branching tree of possibilities.
827
PRIOR
Prior desired to formalize the ancient insight
that propositions can change in truth-value
with the passage of time. He soon realized that
off-the-shelf modal syntax could be adapted
to do this. It was simply a matter of taking
seriously an idea that he had discussed in The
Craft of Formal Logic: tense is a species of
modality, to be set alongside the ordinary
('alethic') modes of necessity and possibility.
His first explorations of this calculus of tenses
appeared in his article 'Diodoran Modalities'
(completed by early 1954), in which he wrote:
I here propose to do something a little dif-
ferent, namely to employ the ordinary prepo-
sitional variables 'p', 'q', Y etc., for 'propo-
sitions' in the Diodoran sense [i.e. proposi-
tions which 'may be true at one time and
false at another'] and to use certain operators
which take such propositions as arguments,
and which form functions taking such propo-
sitions as values. I shall use 'Fp' for 'It will be
the case that p'.
('Diodoran Modalities', p. 205)
Prior's earliest calculus of tenses (set out in
'Diodoran Modalities') was the system
produced by adding the following axioms, rules
and definition, to the ordinary propositional
calculus. (1) F(p v q) = (Fp) v (Fq). (2) FFp ->
Fp. (3) If p = q is provable in the calculus (or is
an axiom) then Fp = Fq follows. (4) If p is
provable in the calculus (or is an axiom) then
Gp follows; where Gp, the future perpetual
form 'It will always be the case that p', is
defined as -F-p. There was clearly more work
to be done on this calculus - for one thing there
was no mention of the past - and Prior duly set
about expanding the calculus. He worked fast,
and in August 1954 he unveiled a system of far
greater sophistication in his presidential address
to the second New Zealand Congress of
Philosophy (held in Wellington).
Prior's expanded calculus contained two
additional axioms concerning futurity, Gp —>
Fp and Fp -> FFp. There was also a simplifi-
cation: instead of following his previous
PRIOR
practice and defining G as -F-, Prior took G as
undefined and defined F as -G-; this enabled
him to replace the somewhat unwieldy axiom
(1) by the more elegant G(p —> q) —> (Gp —>
Gq). This calculus of 'pure futurity' he trans-
formed into a calculus of 'pure pastness' by
replacing F throughout the axioms, rules and
definition by the past tense operator P ('It has
been the case that'), and replacing G by the past
perpetual operator H ('It has always been the
case that'). Like ordinary modal logic, both
these 'pure' calculi are mowomodal; that is,
each contains only one undefined modal
operator. Prior wanted a 'full tense calculus',
containing the two undefined operators G and
H, together with the operators F and P defined
in terms of them (such a calculus is known as
a fo/modal logic). To obtain the full calculus it
was not enough simply to bundle together the
two 'pure' systems, for the two tense operators
would then remain independent of one another.
Some interactive axioms, 'laws which relate to
the interaction of pastness and futurity', were
also required. Prior chose p —> GPp and p —>
HFp.
What are the justifications for his axioms
and rules? In 'Diodoran Modalities' Prior was
content to describe FFp —» Fp as 'obvious
enough', but by the time of the Wellington
Congress his thinking had moved forward con-
siderably. He set out what he called the '/-
calculus' (he was later to prefer the term 'U-
calculus'). '/' is the relation 'is later than'
(relating dates). In the /-calculus, the proposi-
tions of the tense calculus are treated as express-
ing properties of dates, '/xz & px' (where p
might be 'Socrates is sitting down', for example)
is read 'x is later than z and p at x'; x and z are
dates. Using the (arbitrary) date z to represent
the time of utterance, Fp is equated with 3x(/xz
& px) ('p at some time later than z'), and Pp
with 3x(/zx & px) ('p at some time earlier than
z'). Gp and Hp are equated with the universal
quantifications Vx(/xz —> px) and Vx(/zx —»
px), respectively. Prior showed that if various
assumptions are made concerning the relation
/, the axioms of the tense calculus can be proved
828
in the /-calculus. (Two years later, he and
Meredith used essentially the same strategy in
creating the possible worlds semantics for
ordinary modal logic.)
Prior discovered that FFp -> Fp and its image
PPp -> Pp follow from the assumption /xy —>
(/yz -* /xz) - a way of stating that the relation
/ is transitive. Fp —> FFp and its image Pp —>
PPp follow given the assumption /xz —> 3y(/xy
& /yz), stating that 'between any two dates
there is another date' (a condition sometimes
said to express time's density}. Gp —> Fp
follows given 3x/xz, stating that 'there is a date
later than any given date', i.e. that there is no
last moment of time. Hp -» Pp requires 3x/zx,
stating that there is no first moment of time.
Prior showed furthermore that no assumptions
at all are needed for the derivation of the two
interactive axioms p —> GPp and p -» HFp, nor
for the axioms G(p -> q) —» (Gp —> Gq) and
H(p —> q) —»(Hp —> Hq). In the case of these
formulae, the ordinary machinery of truth-
functional and quantifier logic suffices for their
proof; and Prior showed that the same is true
of the two rules of the tense calculus. This part,
therefore, of Prior's calculus of tenses is purely
logical, whereas others of the axioms state
physical properties of time. In later work Prior
considered further calculi, in which these
'physical' axioms are replaced by others, for
example axioms stating that time has a first
moment, or is linear (a 'straight line'), or is
non-linear, with the present always standing at
a junction of a number of branches, any of
which might become the actual future.
Which is metaphysically basic, the tense
calculus or the /-calculus? Prior issued a
warning against regarding the above interpre-
tation of the tense calculus within the /-calculus
as 'a metaphysical explanation of what we
mean by fs, has been and will be9: the /-calculus,
he said, is not 'metaphysically fundamental'.
His reason is that 'F(Socrates is sitting down)'
means 'It is now the case that it will be the
case that Socrates is sitting down', whereas
there is no genuine way of representing the
indexical 'now' in the /-calculus (the date

variable z is not an indexical, any more than '25
December 2004' is an indexical). Prior contin-
ued: 'If there is to be any "interpretation" of
our calculi in the metaphysical sense, it will
probably need to be the other way round; that
is, the /-calculus should be exhibited as a logical
construction out of the PF-calculus rather than
vice versa' This idea of the primacy of the
tense calculus over the /-calculus (or, as he later
put it, of McTAGGART's A-series over the B-
series) became a central and distinctive tenet of
his philosophy. Prior took a similar metaphys-
ical position with respect to ordinary modal
logic, arguing that the language of possible
worlds is to be interpreted in terms of a
language with modal operators and not, as is
popularly held, vice versa.
Prior's three books Time and Modality', Past,
Present and Future and Papers on Time and
Tense brought his discovery of tense logic to the
attention of the world. The subject quickly
became an internationally pursued branch of
logic.
Much of Prior's work consisted of the tireless
exploration of a labyrinth of axiomatic calculi.
Yet for him the point of a logical calculus was
always that it had a subject-matter, be it time,
obligation, agency or even biology, and a
concern for philosophical problems never lay
far below his theorems. It was the extra-
symbolic world that mattered to Prior, not the
formal results per se. He wrote:
Philosophy, including Logic, is not primarily
about language, but about the real world ...
Formalism, i.e. the theory that Logic is just
about symbols and not things, is false.
Nevertheless, it is important to 'formalise' as
much as we can, i.e. to state truths about
things in a rigorous language with a known
and explicit structure.
(Logic and Reality', p. 45)
829
PRIOR
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Logic and the Basis of Ethics (Oxford, 1949).
Formal Logic (Oxford, 1955).
'Diodoran Modalities', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 5 (1955), pp. 205-13.
Time and Modality (Oxford, 1957).
Past, Present and Future (Oxford, 1967).
Papers on Time and Tense (Oxford, 1968;
new edn, with additional chaps, ed. T.
Braner, B J. Copeland, P. Hasle and P.
Ohrstrom, Oxford, 2003).
Objects of Thought, ed. P.T. Geach and
AJ.P. Kenny (Oxford, 1971).
The Doctrine of Propositions and Terms, ed.
P.T. Geach and AJ.P. Kenny (1976).
Papers in Logic and Ethics, ed. P.T. Geach
and AJ.P. Kenny (1976).
Worlds, Times and Selves, ed. K. Fine (1977).
Further Reading
Copeland, BJ. (ed.), Logic and Reality:
Essays on the Legacy of Arthur Prior
(Oxford, 1996).
, The Genesis of Possible Worlds
Semantics', Journal of Philosophical Logic,
vol. 31 (2002), pp. 99-137.
B. Jack Copeland
 Q
QUICK, Oliver Chase (1885-1944)
Oliver Chase Quick was born in Sedburgh,
Yorkshire on 21 June 1885 and died in
Longborough, Gloucestershire on 21 January
1944. He was educated at Harrow School and
Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1904, where
he read classics and theology. He was ordained
into the Anglican ministry in 1911. He served as
Vice-Principal of Leeds Clergy School, followed
by a curacy at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London
until his appointment as chaplain to Randall
Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1915.
He became Vicar of Kenley, Surrey in 1918,
which was followed by residentiary canonries at
Newcastle in 1920 and Carlisle in 1923. These
gave him the opportunity to lecture widely. He
became a member of the archbishops' doctrine
commission set up in 1922, forming a close
friendship with its Chairman, William TEMPLE.
In 1930 he became a canon of St Paul's, which
he found conservative and inward-looking, but
where he first seriously engaged in Christian
apologetics. He was a keen ecumenist, taking
part in the Missionary Conference in Jerusalem
in 1928, and the Faith and Order Conferences in
Lausanne in 1927 and Edinburgh in 1937. In
1934 he was appointed by Bishop Hensley
Henson to the professorship of theology at
Durham University which carried a canonry at
the cathedral. In 1939 he became Regius
Professor of Divinity and canon of Christ
Church, Oxford. In his last years he suffered
from serious illness and, while he continued to
lecture, he wrote little.
830
He first book was the collection Essays in
Orthodoxy (1916), which was much influenced
by Charles Gore. Through the 1920s he pub-
lished further volumes of lectures and
addresses, including his 1922 Paddock
Lectures, Liberalism, Modernism and
Tradition, delivered at the General Theological
Seminary, New York. His first major work
was The Christian Sacraments (1927), which
made an important contribution to the debate
over Anglican orders. At St Paul's he wrote
The Ground of Faith and the Chaos of
Thought (1931) and The Gospel of Divine
Action (1933), where he sought reconciliation
between different theological and philosophical
positions. In these works he tried to 'soften the
lines at present dividing our "schools of
thought'" (Gospel of Divine Action, p. viii). His
Doctrines of the Creeds (1938) was described
by John Robinson as 'one of the outstanding
books on Christian doctrine of our generation'
(p. 62). This book proved Quick's most influ-
ential work and remained in print until the
1970s. It sought to present an attractive and
coherent picture of the doctrines of the Creeds
and made use of the philosophical ideas of the
day. His Oxford atonement lectures, where he
attempted to reconcile the different theories in
an overall synthesis, were published posthu-
mously as The Gospel of the New World
(1944).
Quick was a modest man whose influence
was mainly felt though his teaching and preach-
ing. While he did not display much originality
of thought, his 'liberal orthodoxy' (Ramsey,

p. 107) made an impact on a whole generation
of Anglican theologians, for whom theology
and philosophy were not understood as com-
petitors, but as two ways of understanding the
one underlying truth.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Essays in Orthodoxy (1916).
Liberalism, Modernism and Tradition
(1922).
The Christian Sacraments (1927).
The Ground of Faith and the Chaos of
Thought (1931).
The Gospel of Divine Action (1933).
Doctrines of the Creeds (1938).
The Gospel of the New World, with a
memoir by William Temple (1944).
Other Relevant Works
Mozley, J.K., 'Oliver Quick as a Theologian',
Theology (1945).
Ramsey, A.M., From Gore to Temple (1960).
Robinson, J.A.T., Honest to God (1963).
Mark D. Chapman
QUINTON, Anthony Meredith (1925-)
Anthony Quinton was born in Saltash,
Cornwall on 25 March 1925. The son of a
naval surgeon captain, he was educated at
Stowe School and Christchurch College,
Oxford, where he took his BA in PPE with first
class honours in 1948. He served in the RAF
during the war as a flying officer and navigator.
He was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
(1949-55) and of New College, Oxford
(1955-78). He was President of Trinity College,
Oxford (1978-87) and was made an honorary
fellow there from 1987. He became a fellow of
the British Academy in 1977 and from 1985 to
1986 was its Vice-President. In 1982 he was
created a life peer (Baron Quinton of Holywell
831
QUINTON
in the City of Oxford and the County of
Oxfordshire).
Anthony Quinton's The Nature of Things
(1973) appeared some twenty-one years after
his first publication. It is his most important
work in epistemology and metaphysics, and
places him firmly in the analytic tradition of
British empiricism. It is ambitious in its scope
and illuminating of the issues it discusses. The
primary aim of the book is to argue for solid
philosophical foundations for materialism,
something which Hume, for example, failed to
do, according to Quinton, on account of his
scepticism. Quinton attempts to do this by
essentially relativizing ontology to experience,
that is by treating what is directly experienced
as ontologically basic, and arguing at the same
time that these things of direct experience are
both public and material. He examines the
concept of substance, identifying four key
notions or problems: 'individuation', 'identity',
'objectivity' and 'the foundations of knowl-
edge'. Each of these notions, he says, is
supposed to explain how a class of things can
be unified; and he identifies in this respect those
theories, along with their historical proponents,
which he terms 'positive' and 'negative'. The
'positive' introduce the additional element 'sub-
stance' that unifies a class of things; the
'negative' do not. Of the first notion, 'individ-
uation', Quinton asks whether a thing can be
individuated solely by its properties. He con-
cludes that it can but only if these properties
include its positional properties, which are
unique to it, and which are not universally
applicable. A set of qualities becomes the qual-
ities of a concrete thing when that set includes
positional properties. Since it is position alone
that provides individuation, he allows that even
events and sense-data can be individual things.
Although there are some terms or expressions
that have meaning yet fail actually to refer to
anything, no such problem pertains to expres-
sions of position. There is always a 'here'. 'Here
is something F' cannot fail to refer, and this in
its turn presupposes the concrete thing that
possesses the properties.
QUINTON
Of 'identity' Quinton believes that there must
exist things which endure for at least some time
for there to be a world at all. Things which have
only limited identity he terms 'continuants',
and eternally unchanging things 'atoms'.
Continuants have substantial identity that
endure through the changes of their qualities
and spatial positions. In discussing the problem
of objectivity, Quinton asks whether the objects
of perception are only private impressions,
mere appearances. He concludes that 'appear-
ances are not qualities ... they are individuals,
things with qualities' (The Nature of"Things, p.
7). For example, the perception by me of a red
patch in my visual field is not a mere quality,
but a unique individual, since it is positioned at
a particular point in space and time. 'But both
sense-impressions and material objects are indi-
vidual things' (ibid.), thus the problem of objec-
tivity, which presupposes that the direct objects
of perception are private and not things, arises
no more. Accordingly, he goes on in his dis-
cussion of the problem of the foundations of
knowledge to 'defend a somewhat qualified
version of the theory that knowledge has foun-
dations and that they are material objects'
(ibid., p. 10). In the rest of the book he aims 'to
support the metaphysical doctrine of reism
which holds that the fundamental constituents
of the world are material bodies in space and
time' (ibid.). He argues for this by showing
that it is possible to interpret the essences of
Platonism as terms of language and behaviour,
the experiences of Cartesianism as states of the
brain, the theoretical substrata of Locke as
material bodies, and the values of Kant as the
responses of sense organs. That is, they can be
reduced to statements about material objects.
Quinton, therefore, in asserting that our mental
experiences can be restated in material terms,
identifies the mind with the physical brain.
Quinton had previously published his con-
siderations on some of the themes dealt with in
The Nature of Things. In a paper of 1962
entitled 'The Soul' he had discussed, amongst
other issues, the nature of the soul, defining it
as a series of mental states connected by char-
832
acter and memory. In 'Matter and Space'
(1964) he had examined the necessity of spatial
and non-spatial qualities as conditions for
thinghood. Prior to this he had published
'Spaces and Times' (1962), in which he chal-
lenged Kant's assertion 'that there is but one
space and but one time'. What Quinton writes
here has provided for much reaction and
comment in the years since it: appeared, and
several critical replies. Quinton notes that
Kant's argument is that we can only conceive
limited spaces and times as parts of one all-
inclusive space and one all-inclusive time: space
and time are not constructions from these
extents and durations as elements, because they
are somehow presupposed by these elements.
Quinton sets out to test Kant's assertion by
arguing that a coherent multi-space myth is
possible.
He claims that our private experiences, be
they sense-data or dreams, are spatial things:
they are extended, positional and related to
other such things. He describes a man who
falls asleep in England and dreams he is beside
a tropical lake. In the dream world he notes
that the usual coherence of physical space is
present, and it is public insofar as other char-
acters in the dream confirm his own spatial
beliefs by their behaviour and statements. This
implies that the dream world is a separate
spatial world from the world of waking life
unless, either it can be located in the world of
waking life, or dreams per se can be rejected as
'ontological rubbish'. These objections are dis-
missed: the first because a search of the world
of waking life will fail to reveal the contents of
the dream; the second because the dream world
is not non-existent but is merely less coherent
and less consequential than waking life: it is not
analytic that waking life is the only real space.
Quinton concludes that there must be multiple
spatial worlds and this refutes Kant. However,
he does agree with him that there can only be
one time. For there to be multi-temporal worlds
there must be temporal relations between the
things of the same world but not between the
things of the other world: one could not tem-

porally relate what one recalls of a dream with
waking life, for example which events of the
two worlds came first. He claims that this
obstacle can easily be overcome by recording in
waking life what one remembers of one's
dreams. More convincingly, he notes that all
my private experiences, that is all events that I
am logically capable of remembering, must be
temporally related to my present state - as
antecedent to it.
Quinton had argued for a form of naturalism
in ethics at the end of The Nature of Things. In
the same year he also published his major work
on the subject, Utilitarian Ethics. Using a his-
torical approach he takes the writings of
Bentham and John Stuart Mill to represent the
paradigm of utilitarianism. He examines, crit-
icizes and defends their arguments and conclu-
sions 'that the Tightness of actions is deter-
mined by the value of their consequences and
that what determines the value of these conse-
quences is the pleasure or pain that they
include' (Utilitarian Ethics, Preface). By this
standard he argues that Hume is actually more
of a utilitarian than he is often supposed to be,
and that 'ideal utilitarians' like Moore are not
really utilitarians at all.
In an earlier paper 'On Punishment' Quinton
examined the differences between utilitarianism
and retributivism, two theories which he says
are commonly believed to contradict each
other. Retributivism is self-justify ing in that it
holds that the inflicting of suffering as punish-
ment is good in itself, whereas utilitarianism is
justified by something else in that it holds that
the inflicting of suffering is good by virtue of its
desirable consequences. Retributivism, he
argues, is primarily concerned with the question
'When can punishment be applied?' It answers
that punishment of the innocent is not punish-
ment at all, but actually judicial error or ter-
rorism. This demonstrates that retributivism is
really an account of the meaning of the word
'punishment'; thus it is not really a moral
doctrine but a logical one. Rather it is utilitar-
ianism that is moral, for it asks 'When ought we
to punish?', i.e. 'By what criterion?', which it
833
QUINTON
answers in terms of the desirability of its con-
sequences.
Anthony Quinton has also published on the
history of philosophy (Hume, 1998, and Francis
Bacon, 1980); and on political philosophy (The
Politics of Imperfection, 1978, and Political
Philosophy, 1967), in which a moderate form of
conservatism is argued for. In Thoughts and
Thinkers (1982), a collection of essays written
between 1958 and 1976, he covers a variety of
subjects, including individual philosophers and
philosophical movements, politics, intellectual
history and literature. As a whole, the collection
is concerned with the relationship of philoso-
phy to these other disciplines and intellectual
interests.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'On Punishment', Analysis, vol. 14 (1954),
pp. 133^2.
'The Soul', Journal of Philosophy, vol. 59
(1962), pp. 393-409.
'Spaces and Times', Philosophy, vol. 37
(1962), pp. 130-47.
'Matter and Space', Mind, vol. 73 (1964), pp.
332-52.
(Ed.), Political Philosophy (Oxford, 1967).
Utilitarian Ethics (1973).
The Nature of Things (1973).
The Politics of Imperfection (1978).
Francis Bacon (Oxford, 1980).
Thoughts and Thinkers (1982).
Hume (1998).
Other Relevant Works
'Seeming', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 26 (1952), pp. 235-52.
'The Problem of Perception', Mind, vol. 64
(1955), pp. 28-51.
'Properties and Classes', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 58 (1957-8), pp.
33-58.
'Burke on the Sublime and the Beautiful',
Philosophy, vol. 36 (1961), pp. 71-3.
'The "Apriori" and the Analytic',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
64 (1963-4), pp. 31-54.
QUINTON
The Foundations of Knowledge', in Bernard
Williams (ed.), British Analytical
Philosophy (1966), pp. 55-86.
'Perceiving and Thinking', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 42 (1968),
pp. 191-208.
'Objects and Events', Mind, vol. 88 (1979),
pp. 197-214.
'Schlick before Wittgenstein', Synthese, vol.
64 (1985), pp. 389-410.
'Ayer's Place in the History of Philosophy',
Philosophy, suppl. vol. 30 (1991), pp.
31-48.
'Morals and Polities', Philosophy, suppl. vol.
35 (1993), pp. 95-106.
'Political Philosophy', in Anthony Kenny
(ed.), The Oxford History of Western
Philosophy (Oxford, 1994).
'Homosexuality', Philosophy, suppl. vol. 37
(1994), pp. 197-211.
'The Trouble with Kant', Philosophy, vol. 72
(1997), pp. 5-18.
From Wodehouse to Wittgenstein
(Manchester, 1998).
'The Rise, Fall and Rise of Epistemology',
Philosophy, suppl. vol. 48 (2001), pp.
61-72.
834
Further Reading
Ayers, M.R., The Nature of Things',
Philosophy, vol. 49 (1974), pp. 401-13.
Flew, Antony, "The Soul" of Mr A.M.
Quinton', Journal of Philosophy, vol. 60
(1963), pp. 337-44.
French, Peter, 'Multi-Spatial Myths: Kant
and the Dreamer', Southern Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 11 (1973), pp. 167-74.
Haack, R.J., 'Natural and Arbitrary Classes',
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 47
(1969), pp. 307-21.
Kaufman, Arnold, 'Anthony Quinton on
Punishment', Analysis, vol. 20 (1959), pp.
10-13.
King, Peter, 'Other Times', Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 73 (1995), pp.
532-47.
Swartz, Norman, 'Spatial Worlds and
Temporal Worlds: Could there Be More
than One of Each?', Ratio, vol. 17 (1975),
pp. 217-28.
N. J. Fox
 R
RADHAKRISHNAN, Sarvepalli
(1888-1975)
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was born in
Tiruttani, north of Madras, India on 5 (or 20)
September 1888 and died in Mylapore, Madras
on 17 April 1975. Of a poor Brahmin family,
Radhakrishnan was educated at Christian
schools and at Madras Christian College (BA,
1906; MA, 1909), where he studied under
William Miller and A.G. HOGG.
Radhakrishnan taught at Presidency College,
Madras (1909-17) and - after being replaced by
a non-Brahmin - at the University of Mysore
(1918-21), until appointed to the most presti-
gious post in philosophy in India, the King
George V Chair of Mental and Moral Science at
the University of Calcutta (1921-31). In late
1929 he took up a visiting post at Manchester
College, Oxford (1929-30), returning to India in
1931 as Vice-Chancellor of Andhra University
(1931-6). After 1936 Radhakrishnan spent half-
years in Calcutta, as King George V Professor
(1937-41), while also serving as Spalding
Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at
Oxford (1936-9) and Vice-Chancellor of
Banaras Hindu University (part-time, 1939-41;
full-time, 1941-8). In 1931 he was knighted,
and in 1939 elected a fellow of the British
Academy. He was made an Honorary Member
of the Order of Merit (1963) and received the
Templeton Award in 1975. Radhakrishnan
held a number of important political posts,
including Ambassador of India to the USSR
(1949-52) as well as Vice-President (for two
835
terms, 1952-62) and President of India
(1962-7). He retired in 1967; in India, 5
September is celebrated as Teacher's Day in
his honour.
Radhakrishnan was strongly influenced by
idealism - both the British idealism of his
teachers (particularly, A.G. Hogg - who had
been a student of A.S. PRINGLE-PATTISON) and
the Vedantic idealism of his own Hindu tradi-
tion. In much of his work, Radhakrishnan
sought to 'interpret' the East to the West, and
vice versa, drawing on - and engaging - F.H.
BRADLEY, Henri Bergson, James WARD, Bernard
BOSANQUET and others. His writings focus par-
ticularly on questions in ethics, in religion,
science and culture (including the philosophy of
religion), and in social philosophy (particularly
concerning education and democracy).
In his youth, Radhakrishnan was impressed
by the writings of Swami Vivekananda and
Rabindranath Tagore - both of whom had
been influenced by modern Western (primarily
British) thought, and both of whom responded
to it by interpreting Indian philosophical and
religious traditions in a new light. Yet British
philosophy gave Radhakrishnan much of his
vocabulary and style, and his preferred medium
of writing was English. This later led to the
criticism that, like many early twentieth-century
Indian philosophers, Radhakrishnan failed to
see the irony in believing that one could con-
tribute to Indian philosophy in a language that
was not native to India.
Radhakrishnan's first publication was his
MA thesis, The Ethics of the Vedanta and its
RADHAKRISHNAN
Metaphysical Presuppositions. Written in reply
to Hogg's claim that the Vedanta system had
no room for ethics, Radhakrishnan challenged
the view that Hinduism in general and Vedanta
in particular precluded a philosophical ethics
and social responsibility. Radhakrishnan
argued that Vedantin ethics promotes a
Kantian morality of 'duty for duty's sake', and
that its model of the moral teacher and social
reformer was that of the jivanmukti (i.e. one
who has attained spiritual liberation, but
remains among the people as a teacher).
Radhakrishnan's spirited response, as well as
his lucid survey of contemporary views (e.g.,
Lotze, A.E. TAYLOR, J.M.E. MCTAGGART, and
G.H. Howison) on the nature of the Absolute,
impressed his teachers as showing 'a remark-
able understanding of the main aspects of the
philosophical problems'.
Following his graduation, Radhakrishnan
devoted himself to a thorough private study of
his own tradition. Many of his early writings -
which frequently appeared in international
journals - discussed Vedanta and ethics, though
Radhakrishnan also authored a short book for
students on The Essentials of Psychology
(1912).
Radhakrishnan read widely in both Western
philosophy and contemporary Indian thought
(e.g., the work of the theosophist Annie Besant,
and the nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak). Yet
he remained particularly influenced by the
work of Tagore. (It was likely from Tagore
that Radhakrishnan's recognition of the key
role of 'intuitive insight', darshana, in philoso-
phy was taken.) Radhakrishnan saw in
Tagore's version of the Vedantic tradition -
which separated itself from many of the
dogmas and superstitions of popular religion -
a way of presenting Indian thought in the
modern era. In several early essays, leading up
to The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore
(1918), Radhakrishnan insisted that Tagore
was much less influenced by Christianity than
many - such as the Calcutta philosopher W.S.
URQUHART - claimed. As Joshua Kalapati
notes, in these writings of the 1910s
836
Radhakrishnan's work was importantly 'apolo-
getic'. He not only wished to present Indian
philosophy and culture in a modern idiom, but
to defend Hinduism against the criticisms of
Christian philosophers.
Radhakrishnan's first sustained statement of
his philosophical idealism appears in The Reign
of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy
(1920). Critical of Bergson and Ward, but also
addressing the views of Leibniz, Rudolf Eucken,
Bertrand RUSSELL, Howison, Hastings
RASHDALL, F.C.S. SCHILLER and William James,
Radhakrishnan challenged personalism, plu-
ralistic theism and pluralism in general. He
insisted that deviations from absolute idealism
were due to the reign of religion in philosophy,
and that, even if one starts from a pluralistic
view, one is led to idealism. Radhakrishnan's
approach was favourably compared to that of
Bosanquet, and his views were discussed and
sometimes supported by prominent British ide-
alists such as Henry JONES, J.S. MACKENZIE and
C.C.J. WEBB.
This early work established Radhakrishnan's
reputation, and he was invited to contribute a
volume on Indian philosophy to J.H.
MUIRHEAD'S 'Library of Philosophy'. Running
to some 1,600 pages, and published as two
volumes, Indian Philosophy (vol. 1,1923; vol.
2,1927) provided a clear, systematic reading of
the Indian traditions, including Buddhism,
Jainism and the six 'orthodox' schools of
Hindu thought. Absolute idealism - the
Advaita Vedanta of Sankara ~ was described as
close to BRADLEY'S and as the 'crown' of Indian
thought. While noting the importance of Indian
philosophy for the modern world, in his
Conclusion, Radhakrishnan acknowledges its
'unprogressiveness' after the fifteenth century
CE, and the paradox that, just as Indian thought
was ceasing to appear 'grotesque' to the West,
it was becoming so in its homeland.
Radhakrishnan's book was considered by
many to be a 'philosophical classic and a
literary masterpiece', and it has had a lasting
influence - though, at the time, some critics
saw it as too much of a 'digest' of European

scholarship, and more of a 'collection of highly
valuable footnotes'.
In 1926 Radhakrishnan delivered the Upton
Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford.
Published as The Hindu View of Life (1926),
these lectures provide a case for a universal
religion, but also an apologetic for Indian phi-
losophy - and, more specifically, for Hinduism.
Radhakrishnan argued that, because Indian
thought reflected a way of life rather than a set
of doctrines, it could readily accommodate the
results of modern science. These lectures,
together with talks on Bradley and Sankara
given to the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge,
led to an invitation to deliver the Hibbert
Lectures (1929-30).
These lectures - An Idealist View of Life
(1932) - are a mature statement of
Radhakrishnan's idealism. Radhakrishnan calls
his view 'idealist' because, in contrast to the
mechanistic and materialist approach of the
sciences, it recognizes the supremacy of spirit in
human beings, by which they may have the
immediate intuition of their unity with the
eternal, and by which 'an ultimate connection
of value and reality is maintained'.
Radhakrishnan notes the challenges of new sci-
entific knowledge to traditional religious belief,
and the failures of religion - particularly its
apparent moral ineffectiveness. Yet he recog-
nizes that religious experience or 'spiritual intu-
ition' is the soul of religion, and that intuition
is the basis of all forms of cognition.
Radhakrishnan's main concern, then, is to
show the nature and the validity of intuitive
knowledge.
By intuition Radhakrishnan has in mind a
higher and deeper consciousness than that
attainable by the intellect alone; it is not non-
rational, but it is non-conceptual. It is a 'deeper'
consciousness in that it is an extension of per-
ception beyond the senses, yet it is also contin-
uous with, and the basis of, thinking, imagin-
ing and feeling. It is a comprehensive grasp of
subjectivity and objectivity by which one has an
integral view of reality. Radhakrishnan argues
that philosophy, art and science itself are all
837
RADHAKRISHNAN
grounded in such 'creative intuition'. Though
he was faulted by some for allegedly failing to
address the Western scientific 'technique of
objective demonstrability', Radhakrishnan
clearly held that intellect is also necessary in
order to avoid any collapse into obscurantism.
Radhakrishnan insisted that, if human beings
are free, they must be spiritual beings.
Moreover, since human existence involves a
process of self-realization, a series of rebirths
may be required to accomplish this; thus, the
doctrines of both karma and reincarnation are
vindicated. He holds that there is an integral
relation between organisms and their environ-
ment, and that value and reality are insepara-
ble. There is an Absolute Reality which is 'pure
consciousness and pure freedom and infinite
possibility' - and which, from a point of view,
may be called God. Throughout this study,
Radhakrishnan draws, but does not insist, on
traditional Hindu teachings. Nevertheless, he
sees religion as a matter of spirit and quest
rather than dogma, and defends philosophical
idealism as broad and flexible enough to
accommodate the new insights and discoveries
from the sciences.
In 1931 Radhakrishnan was elected Vice-
Chancellor of Andhra University. At the time,
the university was a centre of political unrest
against the British presence in India and in a
state of crisis. Radhakrishnan reformed the
institution - hiring outstanding scholars, orga-
nizing postgraduate programmes and initiating
building projects - but also completed a
number of books, such as East and West in
Religion (1933), The Heart of Hindustan
(1936) and Freedom and Culture (1936). Based
on lectures delivered before general audiences
and at university events in India and Britain,
these books maintained that contact between
West and East was not new, that each con-
tained elements of the other, and that bringing
different traditions into closer contact, while a
challenge, was far from impossible.
Radhakrishnan had a charismatic presence in
Britain, and it is undoubtedly because of this
that his work had such an impact. One example
RADHAKRISHNAN
of this is C.E.M. JOAD'S Counter Attack from the
East (1933). According to Joad, the East was the
guardian of tradition, and its 'attack' - i.e.
Radhakrishnan's 'response' to the malaise found
in both the West and the East - offered 'a new
synthesis of thought expressing itself in religion,
politics, and civilization'. Described by one
reviewer as a piece of 'philosophical journal-
ism', Joad's book portrays Radhakrishnan pre-
senting a 'New Hinduism' that does not break
with the old. Radhakrishnan, Joad insists,
'confirms' a practical ethic that has been reached
in the West, but also provides a 'spiritual back-
ground' for it.
Radhakrishnan returned to Oxford in 1936
to occupy the newly endowed Spalding
Professorship in Eastern Religions and Ethics,
and here he spent six months each year for the
next three years. It was here that he completed
Eastern Religions and Western Thought
(1939), where he argued at length against
Albert Schweitzer's claim that, unlike Christian
thought, Hindu thought is 'World- and Life-
Negating'. This continued Radhakrishnan's
apologetic for Indian thought. It offered a ratio-
nalistic and humanistic version of Hinduism
that not only rejected withdrawal from the
world, but made social action part of one's
spiritual development. Radhakrishnan also
insisted that 'different religions have now come
together', and that the solution to contempo-
rary problems required 'the recognition of the
essential oneness of the modern world, spiritu-
ally and socially, economically and politically'.
The literary critic Leonard Woolf chafed at
what he saw as a rejection of reason, calling
Radhakrishnan's work 'loud quackery'. Others
questioned whether Radhakrishnan had taken
Christianity and Buddhism sufficiently seri-
ously. Webb, for example, argued that
Radhakrishnan failed to give adequate weight
to the Christian claim that Jesus is God; others
noted that Radhakrishnan underestimated the
'world-denying' character of Buddhism.
Radhakrishnan was instrumental in making
then-contemporary Indian philosophy better
known in the West. One notable effort is
838
Contemporary Indian Philosophy (1936, co-
edited with MUIRHEAD), in which some fourteen
Indian philosophers provided short bio-biblio-
graphical essays. Almost all of these thinkers
had been influenced by European philosophy;
half were sympathetic to idealism - though
two were strongly empiricist in approach.
Through these essays, and particularly in his
own contribution ('The Spirit in Man'),
Radhakrishnan hoped to show that Indian phi-
losophy was 'alive', and that, by drawing on the
resources of both the West and the East, a 'spir-
itual revival' could take place.
By the late 1930s Radhakrishnan had
become increasingly involved in educational
policy and the promotion of culture. He had
planned to be a visiting professor at the
University of Southern California in the autumn
of 1939 but, with the outbreak of war,
remained in India. He was elected Vice-
Chancellor of Banaras Hindu University, revi-
talizing and expanding its programmes, holding
the Chair of Indian Culture, and involving
himself actively even in fundraising.
Radhakrishnan was not a 'freedom fighter'
against British rule but, during the war years at
Banaras, he defended the 'Quit India'
movement. He was a strong advocate of demo-
cratic political ideas - which he saw as an
extension of the idealism he had long defended
- and, while initially suspicious of the political
activities of Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi,
came to see Gandhi's political practice of 'non-
cooperation' as 'deeply spiritual'.
Radhakrishnan is not considered to have
made a significant contribution to political phi-
losophy. Nevertheless, in Education, Politics and
War (addresses from 1937 to 1944) and Religion
and Society (lectures given in 1942),
Radhakrishnan called again for spiritual revival
and 'fellowship through religion' in response to
the crisis of the war and the challenge of Marxist
materialism. This, Radhakrishnan argued,
would bring about a new world order which, in
its political expression, would be democratic.
Democracy was not, for Radhakrishnan, a form
of government so much as a habit of mind or a

way of living - a means by which the freedom
and self-realization of the person was to be
achieved. He addressed the issues of caste and of
women in Hindu society, and was somewhat
critical of how they had been interpreted.
Nevertheless, Radhakrishnan saw the Hindu
view as a means of maintaining links with tra-
dition, but also as a way of confronting change.
Following World War n, and particularly after
India's independence in 1947, Radhakrishnan's
public role dramatically increased. He chaired
the commission which reviewed the Indian edu-
cational system (1948), served as Ambassador to
the Soviet Union, and was elected Vice-President
and President of India. He had an important
moral role during the prime ministership of
Jawaharlal Nehru, was a mentor to the future
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and helped to
guide India through the Indo-China War of
1962 and the war against Pakistan in 1965.
Yet Radhakrishnan never ceased writing. In
these latter years he made significant contribu-
tions to the development of 'comparative phi-
losophy'. In 1952 he co-edited a two-volume
collection of essays, History of Philosophy:
Eastern and Western, which adopted a decidedly
non-European perspective. And in East and
West: Some Reflections (1955) Radhakrishnan
again maintained that there could be a meeting
between East and West in philosophy through a
revival of religious faith - more precisely,
through a 'creative religion' which is 'scientific,
empirical, and humanistic'. He also completed
translations of some key religious works - the
Bhagavadgita, Hinduism's most important text
(1948), the Dhammapada, the best-known work
in the Pali Buddhist canon (1950), The Principal
Upanishads (1953) and The Brahma Sutra, the
cryptic summary of the Upanishads by
Badharayana (1960). Radhakrishnan retired
from public life at the age of seventy-nine, and
a number of minor strokes led to a serious
decline until his death in 1975.
The closest the twentieth century has had to
a 'philosopher king', Radhakrishnan was the
best-known Indian philosopher of his genera-
tion and a model of Anglo-Indian philosophy
839
RADHAKRISHNAN
in the first half of the century. Radhakrishnan's
work was central to restating Indian philoso-
phy, especially in relation to modern science
and contemporary social concerns, and making
it accessible to a wide Western readership. In
1952 he was honoured with a volume of
studies on his work, published in the 'Library
of Living Philosophers' series. As a founder of
'comparative philosophy', Radhakrishnan
brought Western and Eastern philosophies into
closer contact. His contributions, however,
surpass those to philosophy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Ethics of the Vedanta and its
Metaphysical Presuppositions (Madras,
1908).
The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore
(1918).
The Reign of Religion in Contemporary
Philosophy (1920).
Indian Philosophy, vol. 1 (1923); vol. 2
(1927).
An Idealist View of Life (1932).
(with J.H. Muirhead), Contemporary Indian
Philosophy (1936; 2nd edn, 1952).
Eastern Religions and Western Thought
(Oxford, 1939).
Religion and Society (1947).
Bhagavadgita [English and Sanskrit] (1948).
Further Reading
Gopal, Sarvepalli, Radhakrishnan: A
Biography (1989).
Joad, C.E.M., Counter Attack from the East
(1933).
Kalapati, Joshua, Dr. Radhakrishnan and
Christianity: An Introduction to Hindu-
Christian Apologetics (New Delhi, 2002).
Murty, K. Satchidananda, and Ashok Vohra,
Radhakrishnan: His Life and Ideas (Delhi,
1989).
Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), The Philosophy of
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (New York,
1952).
William Sweet
RAMSEY
RAMSEY, Frank Plumpton (1903-30)
F. P. Ramsey was born in Cambridge on 22
February 1903 and died in London on 19
January 1930 aged twenty-six. His was a dis-
tinguished Cantabrigian academic family, his
father being President of Magdalene College.
Cambridge remained his home, though he died
in London from an operation for jaundice. His
years were few, yet the fertility of his thought
places him alongside more eminent colleagues,
John Maynard KEYNES, Bertrand RUSSELL and
WITTGENSTEIN, all of whose work he signifi-
cantly affected. His achievements were remark-
able, pioneering - and many: they spanned eco-
nomics, mathematics and philosophy. They
were characterized by lightness of touch,
modesty, good sense and humour.
The young Ramsey flourished in the intel-
lectual atmosphere of home - and school, the
distinguished Winchester College. His interests
became as untidy and straggly as his hair and
dress, straddling the classics, mathematics and
music - and, later, psychoanalysis and marriage
(the marriage brought forth two daughters).
Ramsey fell in love with hill walking, yet feared
heights. He became a passionate atheist, but his
brother became archbishop; and he grew com-
mitted to philosophy, though in philosophy no
academic position came his way. Magdalene
dons C.K. OGDEN and LA. RICHARDS reported
that the teenage Ramsey, with only a German
grammar and Anglo-German dictionary as
guide, learnt to read German in ten days
through grappling with Ernst Mach's Analyse
der Empfindungen und das Verhdltnis des
Physischen zum Psychischen [The Analysis of
Sensations].
In 1920 Ramsey entered Trinity College,
Cambridge, where he read mathematics, grad-
uating in 1923 with the subject's highest marks.
In 1926 he was appointed to a university lec-
tureship in mathematics though earlier Keynes,
recognizing his brilliance, helped him gain a
fellowship at his college, King's. Ramsey was
just twenty-one. Keynes had kindled his interest
in probability theory and economics; and
840
Ramsey, as well as showing Keynes the errors
in his (Keynes's) probability ways, later
produced original economic theories concern-
ing how much a nation should save and tax,
introducing the concept of bliss. Keynes was
impressed, describing the saving paper as one
of the most remarkable in mathematical eco-
nomics ever written. Despite this, Ramsey's
economics papers were neglected until the
1960s and 1970s, when they led to two flour-
ishing branches of economics: optimal accu-
mulation and optimal taxation.
Philosophy was Ramsey's true vocation,
stimulated by discussions with his friend,
Richard BRAITHWAITE, and, far more signifi-
cantly, with MOORE, Russell and Wittgenstein;
these he knew not merely as teachers, but
through the 'secret' Cambridge society, the
Apostles. WHTTEHEAD and Russell's Principia
mathematica and Wittgenstein's Tractatus
influenced him most, together with work by
C.S. Peirce. In the background was W.E.
JOHNSON, to whom Ramsey is often respond-
ing. Even as a teenager Ramsey impressed the
philosophers. It was Ramsey, in his late teens,
to whom OGDEN turned to help translate
Wittgenstein's Logisch-Philosophische
Abhandlung (the Tractatus)^ and, later, dis-
cussions with Ramsey constituted a reason why
Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge, where
Ramsey became his PhD supervisor. Although
early on Wittgenstein cast doubts on Ramsey's
abilities, in his Philosophical Investigations he
writes of Ramsey helping him to realize
mistakes in the Tractatus to a degree to which
he (Wittgenstein) is hardly able to estimate.
Indeed it was Ramsey who responded to the
Tractatus's 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof
one must remain silent' with the demolishing
quip, 'But what we can't say we can't say, and
we can't whistle it either.' Wittgenstein was a
great whistler. Ramsey was not to be whistled
into accepting some nonsense as important
nonsense - and, with such a characteristic light
remark, he helped Wittgenstein to abandon his
nonsense. Later 'resolute' readings of the
Tractatus heroically argue that Wittgenstein

believed all along that the work, in substance,
really was just nonsense.
Pregnant with the philosophical future,
Ramsey's thinking often influenced later
philosophers or anticipated their work by many
years, yet he published merely three papers on
mathematical logic, a couple on universals and
one on propositions - together with some
reviews, notably his of the Tractatus. These,
together with some unfinished papers, fur-
nished the canon The Foundations of
Mathematics and Other Logical Essays, edited
by Braithwaite in 1931, further notes and also
drafts for a projected book on truth being pub-
lished in 1991. Despite the quantitative paucity,
by the end of the twentieth century Ramsey's
genius was recognized - by, for example,
Donald Davidson, David Lewis and Hugh
Mellor - but earlier his ideas were somewhat
neglected. Possibly his early death and the spe-
cialist title of the first posthumous collection
contributed to this oversight. Other explana-
tory factors include his lack of showmanship,
his writings' straightforward style - Keynes
spoke of their easy grace - and Wittgenstein,
the charismatic tortured genius, whose sun
blinded many to all others.
Placing to one side his logicism - the reduc-
tion of mathematics to logic - Ramsey was
identified as a pragmatist, the originator of the
redundancy theory of truth and denier of the
particular-universal distinction. Even ignoring
any proposed reconciliation of redundancy and
pragmatic truth theories, these associations
raise difficulties. Arguably, Ramsey argues only
that the subject-predicate distinction is no guide
to a metaphysical distinction. Concerning 'is
true' Johnson was probably Ramsey's source
(though the idea also occurs in Frege and
Wittgenstein); more pertinently, Ramsey speaks
of no separate problem of truth, separate from
the nature of belief. Ramsey holds to a corre-
spondence theory - a belief is true if it is a
belief that p, and p - though the correspon-
dence is benign, with commitment to neither a
complex ontology of propositionally structured
facts nor any mysterious detached comparison
841
RAMSEY
of beliefs with facts. His correspondence
account is a truism, suggested Ramsey, adding
that there is no platitude so obvious that
eminent philosophers have not denied it.
As for pragmatism, Ramsey has no simple
identification of the true or the right with the
useful - a popular version of pragmatism - but
says, for example, that any useful consequences
independent of hell's existence are irrelevant to
the meaning and truth of the belief that hell
exists. In contrast to 'p is true','/? works' is not
equivalent to p. Ramsey's pragmatism, at a basic
level, is but the stance that beliefs, assertions,
desires and other psychological states must be
understood in terms of their possible causes and
effects - the subjects' actions and dispositions.
Beliefs are viewed as maps by which we steer;
and, in investigating that steering, Ramsey
proposes the first quantitative theory of deci-
sions in terms of strengths of beliefs and desires.
Logic is at the heart of Ramsey's work, but
a logic that extends beyond deduction into -
what Ramsey terms - human logic, that is the
logic of reasonable belief and inferential habits.
Such breadth, and not the typical perfunctory
nod, is found in Johnson and Keynes. With
regard to formal logic and mathematics' foun-
dations, Ramsey improves Principia mathe-
matica, introducing the condition that all
logical and mathematical truths must be tau-
tologies and completely general (expressed by
logical terms alone). Russell's requirement,
solely of the latter condition, fails to identify
just logical propositions. Ramsey distinguishes
between logical and semantic paradoxes, a dis-
tinction now received and debated. The logistic
programme need resolve only the logical para-
doxes; and Ramsey's account replaces Russell's
complex ramified theory of types with a simple
'Ramseyfied' theory. Ramsey thus avoids
Principles non-tautologous axiom of reducibil-
ity. Having repaired Principia, he defends it
against other understandings of mathematics.
Although the twentieth century ended with few
accepting the logicist programme, Ramsey's
definitive version continues to stimulate con-
temporary logicians' thought.
RAMSEY
Towards the end of his life Ramsey became
attracted to intuitionism and interested in
Hilbert's formalist Entscheidungsproblem,
namely the search for a mechanical method of
determining whether an arbitrary mathemati-
cal proposition can be proved in a given theory.
It is now known, in the light of Godel's
Incompleteness Theorem, that the problem
cannot be solved - logico-mathematical proof
cannot embrace all logico-mathematical truth
- and that Ramsey's approach in any case was
unnecessary. Paradoxically, despite this unnec-
essary work for a necessary (though then
unknown) failure of outcome, Ramsey gave
birth (in a few pages) to some impressive com-
binatorial theorems, known collectively as
'Ramsey's theorem', which now form a fertile
branch of mathematics, 'Ramsey Theory'. A
simple manifestation of Ramsey's theorem is
the truth that in any random collection of six
people there must be either a set of three mutual
acquaintances or three mutual strangers.
Ramsey's concern with formal inference
involved the conviction that logic should be
shown to be more than just a collection of nec-
essary truths. Following Wittgenstein's
Tractatus, Ramsey deploys truth possibilities in
order to display the containment of a valid
deduction's conclusion within its premises. A
universal generalization, For all x, Fx, is a con-
junction of singular propositions, Fa, Fb, Fc
..., alone, and the derivation of any one of the
latter is easily seen. A proposed additional
element within the generalization, namely that
the items listed are all there are, is otiose, argues
Ramsey. If the conjunction is true, the sug-
gested supplement adds nothing to the
meaning, for it itself is necessary. Suppose the
conjunction false: there is then an item that
differs numerically from those F items; but that
is a necessary proposition, numerical differ-
ence and identity being necessary relations.
Predilections for population explosions of
propositions are satisfied if difference of
sentence establishes difference of proposition.
The conclusion - one repugnant to Ramsey - is
that from p an infinite number of other propo-
842
sitions follow, such as not not-/?. For Ramsey,
a sentence and its double negations express just
one proposition. This would be clear, were one
to write a sentence upside down in order to
express negation instead of inserting 'not'; for
then negation repetition would return us to the
original sentence. Some have argued that other
compound sentences suggest multiple proposi-
tions: 'Either Socrates is wise or Plato foolish'
gives the proposition that Socrates has the
complex property of being wise unless Plato is
foolish, a proposition distinct from the propo-
sition that Plato is foolish unless Socrates wise.
When considering 'aRb\ for example 'Archy
loves Mehitabel', we might reach three propo-
sitions: that R holds between a and fe; that a has
the complex property Rfc; arid that b has aR.
Resisting prepositional proliferation and
complex universals, Ramsey rejects forcing
compound propositions into subject-predicate
form; and he finds the relational trinity - a
triple vision of the single proposition that aRb
- as senseless as the theological.
Unawed by contingencies of linguistic struc-
tures, Ramsey's work on the non-compound
proposition produces metaphysical pay-off.
Some argue that the linguistic subject-predi-
cate distinction points to a metaphysical par-
ticular-universal distinction: Socrates is funda-
mentally different from being wise. In Ramsey's
view, this is a bad argument. 'Being wise char-
acterizes Socrates' expresses the same proposi-
tion as 'Socrates is wise', yet has 'being wise' as
subject; and the supposed trinity behind 'aRb'
shows that the proposition that aRb can result
from collecting propositions by replacing the
variable in 'xRb' - but the same proposition,
that aRb, can also result from replacing the
variable in laRx' or replacing the variable in
'ajb\ We feel being wise is incomplete and
differs from Socrates because we associate
Socrates with all propositions involving him,
yet we associate being wise \vith only elemen-
tary propositions of the form '# is wise'. We
could do otherwise. Logicians choose what to
reason about and hence quantify over. For
Quine and others, quantification marks a com-

mitment to the reality of the entities quantified.
For Ramsey, quantification shows us as
thinking of the quantified as particulars, but the
quantification is a matter of choice; and his
quantification over properties (in understand-
ing theories) and propositions (regarding truth)
makes no commitment about reality's under-
lying nature.
Ramsey's redundancy observations about
truth maintain the spirit of proposition depop-
ulation. Stylistic considerations to one side, it is
a fact that p and it is true that p amount simply
to that p; and it is false that p amounts to not-
p. Thus Ramsey avoids the dangers of postu-
lating compound facts and distinct proposi-
tions through reiterations of truth. Truth,
though, is often ascribed blind. 'He always tells
the truth' for Ramsey becomes Tor all p, if he
asserts p, p is true', the final 'is true' being a lin-
guistic accident. If we consider propositions of
the 'aRb' form, the analysis would be Tor all
a, R, b, if he asserts aRb, then aRb\ Although
this redundancy theory became muddled with,
and a trailblazer for, various distinct defla-
tionary theories, prosentential versions use a
pronominal model, treating the variable p in
analyses such as the above as akin to a pronoun
- a pro-sentence - and this line of approach was
indeed sketched by Ramsey.
In contrast to typical deflationary theories,
Ramsey maintains a role for truth through a
belief's truth-conditions. Beliefs are understood
in terms of the causal properties of the believ-
ing, with true believing linked to its success.
Belief that p and the content of the belief,
namely that p - one might question the entan-
gling here - are understood in terms of possible
actions; but actions, of course, also depend
upon factors other than belief. Taking an
umbrella might indicate belief in rain, but so
too could leaving the umbrella behind. One
might seek to avoid rain or to avoid dryness.
Umbrella carrying could manifest believed pro-
tection needs because of local riff-raff dangers
or manifest hopes that the umbrella's rainbow
colours prove attractive to a would-be beloved.
Further, desires play upon desires, beliefs upon
843
RAMSEY
beliefs, hopes upon hopes and such upon each
other - all to varying degrees - raising questions
of how they relate to probabilities, condition-
als and generalizations.
Pretending a chicken to be a fully fledged
believer, Ramsey's idea, in 'Facts and
Propositions', is that the bird's full belief that a
caterpillar is poisonous amounts to its declin-
ing to feast on aforesaid caterpillar. The belief
that p and the belief that not not-p possess
causal similarities; thus Ramsey identifies p and
not-not-p. Causal similarity also justifies his
identification of belief that not-p with disbelief
that p. The chicken's rejection of caterpillar
catering is useful to the chicken if and only if
caterpillars are poisonous; the truth of the belief
that the caterpillar is poisonous is captured by
the utility of the actions that manifest the belief.
More generally, Ramsey suggests, any set of
actions for whose utility p is a necessary and
sufficient condition might be deemed a belief
that p and that belief would be true if p - that
is, if the actions are useful in securing what is
wanted. It is curious to identify beliefs with
sets of actions and Ramsey, later, writes more
carefully of degrees of belief as involving dif-
ferent strengths in dispositions to act. Beliefs,
when combined with desires and other psy-
chological states, cause actions. People believe
that it rains when, as a causal result of their
belief, if they want to get wet, they go without
umbrellas and if to remain dry, they stay
indoors or venture out with umbrellas - and so
on.
Semantics, on the above naturalistic
approach, reaps the benefit from Ramsey in
the form of success semantics which develops
Ramsey's identification of the content of a
belief - the proposition believed - with its truth-
conditions, these being identified by what
counts as success, given the belief and desires.
A belief's truth cannot be identified by how it
makes us act given certain desires; our actions
depend not necessarily on truth but on what we
perceive as true. Conditions for a belief's truth
are whether our actions are successful in real-
izing our desires. Actions have multiple causes;
RAMSEY
and we sometimes succeed through mistaken
beliefs or fail even when acting on true beliefs.
Partial beliefs - beliefs concerning what is likely
- can be true, yet secure no success. To identify
a beliefs content, therefore, one needs to isolate
the belief and consider it as a full belief with dif-
ferent possible accompanying psychological
states and outcomes. When, under such possi-
bilities - and Ramsey speaks of possible worlds,
anticipating the Leibnizian terminological
revival - outcomes are reliably successful, the
belief is true. Success semantics, though, shunts
the content problem of belief to desire. For
success semantics to secure success, as well as
exhibiting how all beliefs multiply relate to
their objects and link with possible successful
outcomes, it needs some account of the content
of desires, unfulfilled conditionals and causa-
tion - and to these Ramsey also contributed
influential ideas.
Philosophy of mind reaps benefits from
Ramsey, though with caveats similar to those
above. In addition to Braithwaite's mid-century
work, developing dispositional accounts of
belief, late twentieth-century functionalist
understandings of the mind define psycholog-
ical attitudes, such as beliefs and desires, by
their outcomes, causes and interactions - that
is, by their causal role in behaviour and psy-
chology. Thus, Ramsey is an early exponent of
such thinking. Functionalism, further, can be
read as a special case falling under Ramsey's
treatment of scientific theories, a treatment pro-
viding significant benefits to philosophers of
science.
Scientific theories typically make use of the-
oretical terms that seemingly denote unobserv-
able particulars or properties. Ramsey's paper
Theories' led to theories being construed as
'Ramsey sentences'. A theory, containing defi-
nitions and axioms, might speak of photons
and electrons and use the predicates '... is a
photon', etc. The Ramsey sentence would say
that there is some property such that it has
certain relations to another property such that
... To generate a Ramsey sentence, conjoin all
the theory's sentences; replace each theoretical
844
term by a predicate variable; then existentially
quantify over these variables. The resultant
Ramsey sentence is saying that there are prop-
erties such that they stand in certain causal
relations with each other (this part deriving
from the axioms) and in certain relations to
observable properties (this part deriving from
the definitions). A Ramsey sentence is an instru-
ment for making testable predictions.
Conjuncts within the sentence express no
propositions; they gain their meaning only in
relationship to other conjuncts - and, as dis-
coveries are made, new ones are added within
the quantifiers' scope. Ramsey suggests the
analogy of a story beginning 'Once upon a
time', where any sentence within that story
lacks meaning in isolation and where the story
can be developed. Working within instrumen-
talism, perhaps derived from Mach, Ramsey
anticipates holistic approaches and problems of
commensurability. 'Zeus hurls thunderbolts'
cannot be straightforwardly understood in
terms of another theory lacking 'Zeus'. Decades
later, T.S. Kuhn popularized such concerns.
Despite his instrumentalism, Ramsey does
not doubt the existence of psychological states.
In modelling, in Truth and Probability', how
desires (taken as subjective utilities) and beliefs
(as subjective probabilities) combine to generate
rational decisions, he axiomatizes Bayesian
decision theory, anticipating von Neumann
and Morgenstern on subjective utilities, and
LJ. Savage on subjective probabilities. Ramsey
introduces the concept of ethically neutral
propositions (belief in them are desire-inde-
pendent) in order to develop a scale for degrees
of desire which, with preferences then
expressed between different possibilities, allows
for identification of the subject's partial belief
in any proposition, the partial belief identifying
the subjective probability of what is believed.
Betting scenarios - 'Put your money where
your mouth is!' - bring out the consistency or
otherwise of partial beliefs. If you believe p to
degree one-third, you should believe not-/? to
two-thirds, otherwise a cunning better could
ensure you lose no matter what happens (a

Dutch book). Ramsey also proves, for example,
that acquiring more free information and then
betting on the new probabilities offers at least
as great an expectation of winning as any
immediate bet. Of course, it is questionable
whether betting can sensibly apply to all beliefs,
whether reasoning is immune to the stakes -
Ramsey's uses 'ultimate goods' - and whether
different goods have a common measure.
Ramsey initially took partial belief as a phe-
nomenon for psychologists, but he soon
rejected that, suggesting instead that the partial
beliefs that determine probabilities are not typ-
ically ours - we humans tend to be poor prob-
ability reasoners - but ours were we rational.
The approach, at least seemingly, still has no
relevance to the probabilities of the physical
sciences, where frequency theories are usually
favoured. Ramsey's remarks conflict though: at
one point they include the bizarre suggestion
that our agreement determines physical
chances, as if radium atoms' chance disinte-
grations are psychological matters; elsewhere
Ramsey interestingly suggests that frequency
and partial belief theories are objective and
subjective sides of the same coin.
Of course, there is a marked distinction
between what people believe and decide and
what it is right to believe and decide. Ramsey's
talk of rationality indicates a prescriptive
approach, telling us how we ought to reach
decisions. He might, however, be offering a
descriptive approximation of how people tend
to act - he likens his theory to Newtonian
mechanics: useful, though false - yet one that
also identifies the norm of coherence for any set
of partial beliefs. Which coherent set of beliefs
to hold or whether to choose to be a Dutch
book victim are other matters. It might be
better, notes Ramsey, sometimes to be right,
than consistent yet wrong; it might be reason-
able to sin against rationality. In as far as ratio-
nality or reasonableness work from some of the
subject's beliefs, even if false or of crazy
strength, scope remains for a distinct prescrip-
tive decision theory based on objective proba-
bilities - as since explored by Mellor.
845
RAMSEY
Our beliefs involve universal generalizations,
such as 'Everyone falls sometime', some holding
accidentally, some as natural law. Ramsey,
adopting the Humean view that world-wise
there are merely regularities, explains general-
izations being truly law-like by their role in
our belief system. In 'Universals of Law and of
Fact' Ramsey's position, developed by David
Lewis, is that laws are generalizations that
would be our axioms if we knew everything,
organizing our knowledge deductively and as
simply as possible. This suggests no counter-
factual about omniscience - truth and deduc-
tions are objective - but raises questions about
simplicity's objectivity, the assumption of a
single deductive system and whether it really
accounts for seeming law-like necessities. In a
later, also influential account, 'General
Propositions and Causality', law-like general-
izations - 'variable hypothetical' - no longer
are propositional. The belief that all growling
tigers are hungry amounts to holding the fore-
casting rule: if I meet growling tigers, I regard
them as hungry; and that involves an appro-
priate disposition to act. Such rules form the
system with which believers face the future.
Apart from whether all laws have behavioural
outcomes, the analysis raises the problems of
conditionals; and here we now meet Ramsey's
further originality.
Conditionals, if p then q, often have false
protases, yet are held true not because of that
falsity. 'Had she eaten strawberries, she'd be ill'
is not thought true because she strawberry
abstained; it conflicts with 'Had she eaten
strawberries, she'd be fine.' Disagreement here
has behavioural outcomes: one person eats
strawberries, another not. Such disagreement,
says Ramsey, is over beliefs in g, given p. What
is now known as the Ramsey Test brings this
out: suppose the conditional's protasis true,
revise other beliefs as minimally as possible for
consistency, then assess the apodosis's truth.
There is no belief here in conditional facts and
no truth or falsity of conditionals, though this
raises problems concerning inferences contain-
ing conditionals. Differences expressed through
RAMSEY
such unfulfilled conditionals, singular or
general, are, for Ramsey, differences in rules for
judging: if I meet a j, I regard it as a y; you do
not. Whether this position is consistent with 'is
true' as redundant is open to question - as is
whether plans can have objective bases if there
are no counterfactual facts, with no truth and
knowledge concerning them, and with causal-
ity's temporal order explained just in terms of
what we can affect (as Ramsey also argues).
Ramsey's aim, though, is to avoid the mire of
would-be reality. We simply have different
expectations, grounded in good or bad habits
(though habits need somehow to be grasped
without reference to would-be realities); and to
resolve differences we need more evidence of
the world's regularities.
The world is so constituted that inductive
reasoning often leads to truth. This usefulness
- a healthiness - justifies induction, a justifica-
tion defended by Braithwaite and Mellor, who
agree with Ramsey that no vicious circularity
vitiates the approach. One no more needs to
know that one knows some inductive principle
to engage in reasonable inductive reasoning
than one needs to know that one knows in
order to know anything. Ramsey promotes this
thought, where knowledge is concerned, by
adding to the traditional conditions of truth
merely the condition that the certainty result
from a reliable (causal) process, one that can be
more or less relied upon to give true beliefs. The
analysis has gained influence; it avoids the
quagmire of regresses or unknown founda-
tions, of justificatory articulations, and quali-
fications upon qualifications to avoid justifica-
tions through luck.
Puncturing the pretensions of grammar - he
admired Russell's theory of descriptions as a
paradigm of philosophy - Ramsey, following
Keynes, also rejected as scholastic attempts to
make the vague precise. He grounded his philo-
sophical analysis in a strong naturalism. There
are tensions in his writings: he could kill his
ideas quite casually. His fertile mind generated,
as Davidson says, 'the Ramsey effect': philoso-
phers often find their work already in Ramsey,
846
in embryonic form. Ramsey, himself big with
Johnsonian frame, undoubtedly was a giant
with ideas; inevitably, given his few years, they
are often merely sketched - and in sketches
observers spot different faces.
Hume endeavoured to be the Newton of the
mind; James Strachey, a friend of Ramsey, sug-
gested that Ramsey sought to become Newton
to Freud's Copernicus. Whatever his ultimate
importance, it is doubtful that Ramsey would
have minded. He admired humanity rather
than the heavens' vastness - 'The stars may be
large, but they cannot think or love' - and
however valuable a creative life, insisted that
one should not ignore helping others. He
sensed, however, an inevitable conflict between
civilization and happiness, quipping that ideally
he supposed he would like others cultured and
himself happy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Foundations of Mathematics and Other
Logical Essays, ed. R.B. Braithwaite, with
Preface by G.E. Moore (1931).
Philosophical Papers, ed. D.H. Mellor [an
edn substantially as above, but with
Introduction by Mellor] (Cambridge,
1990).
On Truth, Original Manuscript Materials
(1927-1929), ed. Nicholas Rescher and
Ulrich Majer (Dordrecht, 1991).
Other Relevant Works
Foundations, ed. D.H. Mellor (1978). Repr.
of much of Foundations above, supple-
mented with economics.
Notes on Philosophy, Probability and
Mathematics, ed. M.C. Galavotti (Naples,
1991).
Further Reading
Dokic, Jerome and Pascal Engel, Frank
Ramsey: Truth and Success (2002).
Lillehammer, Hallvard and D.H. Mellor
(eds), Ramsey's Legacy (Oxford, 2005).
Mellor, D.H. (ed.), Prospects for
Pragmatism: Essays in Memory ofF. P.

Ramsey (Cambridge, 1980).
Sahlin, Nils-Eric, The Philosophy off. P.
Ramsey (Cambridge, 1990).
Sturgeon, Scott, 'Conditional Belief and the
Ramsey Test', in Anthony O'Hear (ed.),
Logic, Thought and Language
(Cambridge, 2002).
Peter Cave
RAMSEY, Ian Thomas (1915-72)
Ian Ramsey was born in Bolton on 31 January
1915 and died of heart failure at Broadcasting
House in London on 6 October 1972. Son of
a postal worker, he was educated at the St
John's School, Farnworth and at the Farnworth
Grammar School (on scholarship, 1925-33),
before studying at Christ's College, Cambridge
(also on scholarships, 1933-40), where he
earned his MA with firsts in mathematics
(1936), moral sciences (1938) and theology
(1939), under the philosophical tutelage of A.C.
EWING. Ramsey continued studies toward ordi-
nation at Ripon Hall (1940). He served as assis-
tant curate at Headington Quarry, Oxford
(1940-43), where he met and married
Margretta (usually Margaret) McKay of
Coleraine, near Londonderry. In 1943 he
moved to Cambridge, where he was Chaplain
of Christ's College (1943-9), fellow of Christ's
College and Director of Studies in Theology
and Moral Science (1944-51) and tutor at
Christ's College (1949-51). After appointment
as Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the
Christian Religion and fellow of Oriel College,
Oxford, he enjoyed his most productive years
as author and lecturer (1951-66), publishing all
his major philosophical works during this
period. In 1966 he became Bishop of Durham,
where he threw himself into an extraordinary
regimen of pastoral and ecclesiastical reform
duties, including active participation in the
847
RAMSEY
House of Lords. His continued philosophical
interests were expressed in an edited compila-
tion (1971), containing extracts for use by
students, and in a posthumously published
book (1973), as well as in active correspon-
dence and conversation, but since he refused to
moderate his episcopal schedule as his health
failed, he literally worked himself to death at
the age of fifty-seven.
Ramsey was among the very first
unabashedly Christian British philosophers to
recognize and answer the dramatic challenge to
religious discourse posed by mid-twentieth-
century language philosophy, beginning with
AJ. AYER'S Language, Truth and Logic (1936)
and evolving into the 'functional analysis' of
Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN'S later thought, posthu-
mously published in the Philosophical
Investigations (1953). Wittgenstein had been
appointed to G.E. MOORE'S former Chair in
Philosophy at Cambridge in 1939. During
much of World War II he absented himself in
favour of hospital work in London, but he
returned to Cambridge in 1944, the same year
in which Ramsey was appointed to teach phi-
losophy of religion in Cambridge while
Director of Studies in Theology and Moral
Science at Christ's College. During the three
years before Wittgenstein resigned his chair in
favour of solitary thinking on the coast of
Ireland, he introduced to Cambridge an
exciting new approach to language in which
diversity of uses, plurality of logics, many
'language-games' could thrive together illumi-
natingly, thus dramatically reversing his former
insistence on defining a single legitimate role for
speech. Ramsey witnessed this revolution at
close range, reflecting its influence in the title
and content of his inaugural lecture at Oxford
as Nolloth Professor: 'Miracles: An Exercise
in Logical Mapwork' (1951).
At Oxford during the 1950s Ramsey was a
founding pioneer, with Gilbert RYLE, J.L.
AUSTIN and P.P. STRAWSON, of what came to be
known as 'Oxford philosophy'. His inaugural
lecture at the start of that crucial decade
announced several key themes that would be
RAMSEY
Ramsey's own and would characterize
'ordinary language philosophy' generally, as it
took shape. One was his title metaphor of
language as 'mapping' territories, thus allowing
indefinitely many scales, choices of topo-
graphical features, projections and uses. Early
in his lecture Ramsey warned against confusing
language with the domain of meaning or reality
it 'maps': The countryside we live in ... is never
exhausted by any one map or any number of
them. Somehow it combines and includes all
the facts which each map in its own way char-
acteristically portrays, and more' (Miracles,
p. 4). Another key theme was full acknowl-
edgement of the unverifiablity (and unfalsifia-
bility) of many modes of discourse, including
important religious expressions such as
'miracle' and 'God'. Ramsey was notably
undogmatic in his approach to philosophy of
religion, bending over backwards to be (and to
appear) completely open and honest in fielding
sceptical questions. Still, verification and falsi-
fication are issues appropriate only in some
logical maps, particularly those of science. Since
logical positivism showed that 'God'-talk is
empirically unverifiable, then 'the word "God"
does not work as a high-grade scientific word
at all. It is not a "hypothesis", God-sentences
do not belong to the logic of science' (ibid., p.
9). But this acknowledgement, once one rec-
ognizes legitimate multiplicity in maps and
logics, need not seal off theological discourse
from empirical relevance altogether: 'The word
"God" may well have empirical relevance, but
this distinctive relevance will never be displayed
by working it in a scientific sentence. For the
word has another logical status altogether'
(ibid.). The job of a Christian map-maker,
Ramsey accepts, is to show just how language
important to religious faith actually functions
to provide these empirical connections, 'and
more'.
This constructive task Ramsey pursued in
three primary places: first, in the inaugural
lecture itself, then in Religious Language: An
Empirical Placing of Theological Phrases
(1957), and finally in Models and Mystery
848
(1964). In the first, after contrasting the essen-
tially abstract language of the sciences with the
essentially concrete language of history, he
boldly (for that time) affirms the usefulness of
metaphysical words by which to map territories
of experience that are not fully exhausted by
other, more specific languages, even taken
together. For Ramsey, a key metaphysical word
is T, a term never fully expressible in terms of
observable actions or facts about 'me'. Deep
intuition of my own selfhood makes it clear
that T am never quite captured in facts about
the objective 'me': 'the factual justification for
"I" in particular, and metaphysical words in
general, is given in a non-inferential awareness
more concrete than cognition' (Miracles,
p. 16). But if T transcend all the facts about
'me', then may it not plausibly dawn on us
that 'as the logic of "me" implies another logic
of "I", so also observation-logic about "indi-
viduals" or "other people" implies another
logic for "person"?' In like manner, Ramsey
continues, the word 'miracle' combines the con-
creteness of historical-event logic with the more
abstract explanatory-framework logic of
theistic belief, inasmuch as 'miracle' is by defi-
nition the deliberate act of a personal God. 'So
the question: Can we place "miracle" anywhere
on our language map? becomes: Can we place
"God's activity" anywhere on our language
map?' (ibid., p. 18). Here Ramsey answers affir-
matively, rephrasing the ontological argument
for God's necessity in terms of the logical need
for 'God' as apex-term to explain 'in a not-un-
Berkeleyan manner' the independent existence
of the physical world. The ontological
argument then becomes 'a claim for "God" as
the apex of the language hierarchy which is
necessary to give that hierarchy or map that
finitude which the possibility of its "reason-
able" or "explanatory" use demands' (ibid.,
p. 19). Just as we can discern something 'more'
in ourselves than all the objective facts can
express, so we can discern in the physical
universe, in special situations, a 'more' that
requires personal language for expression.

I want to argue that there is always a 'first-
order' activity which characterizes ourselves
and the whole of our environment and for
whose description 'scientific' language will be
appropriate. But in the case of certain special
situations I suggest that a 'second-order'
activity as well characterizes ourselves and
some appropriate part of the environment,
an activity which demands of its description
words of another logic altogether - indeed
the metaphysical word 'person'.
(Miracles, p. 20)
These special situations are what people of
faith have discerned as 'miracles', thus ground-
ing 'God'-talk empirically, non-inferentially
and vitally. The word "miracle", that is, is a
metaphysical word to name and characterise
those empirical situations when our non-infer-
ential awareness cannot be adequately
described in any language which does not
extend to, and link together, the words
"personal (second-order) activity" and the
word "God"' (ibid., pp. 22-3).
Ramsey's rather vague appeal to 'special sit-
uations' becomes far more specific in his two
books devoted to detailing how talk about
'God' gains its empirical foothold. The key is
evoking a personal 'discernment' of the 'more'
that exceeds but informs the spatio-temporal
domain of science and everyday life. The fun-
damental basis of religion lies here. Religion's
'characteristic claim is that there are situations
which are spatio-temporal and more. Without
such "depth"; without this which is "unseen",
no religion will be possible ...' (Religious
Language, p. 15). In the moment of discern-
ment something decisive happens, as when a
'penny drops' into a vending machine, releas-
ing the mechanism, or when the 'ice breaks' at
a formal party - a chair collapses or a dinner
jacket splits, suddenly revealing real people in
interaction. These are simply analogies of dis-
cernment, of which Ramsey uses many.
Another analogy is the Gestalt switch, when all
at once the lines formerly seen as a duck
become for the viewer a rabbit. But even as he
849
RAMSEY
offers this analogy, he warns: 'I am not
implying that religion is "purely subjective" or
a mere matter for psychology. I do not know
what a "purely subjective" experience is - all
experience is of something ...' (ibid., p. 24).
Religious experience is o^life in a universe,
towards which total, loving commitment is
warranted because of something discerned that
is its uncaused cause, infinitely good, eternally
faithful. The apex-word 'God' is grounded in a
discernment that leads to a commitment. Some
criticize the statement 'God is Love' as an unin-
formative tautology in Christian systematic
speech, but Ramsey replies that it should
instead be seen 'as a significant tautology
labelling a commitment. In this way the logical
structure of the phrase "God is Love" would be
something as follows: We should have to tell a
story of human devotion until a characteristi-
cally religious situation [of discernment and
commitment] was evoked' (ibid., p. 46).
Eventually 'the ice breaks', 'the penny drops'
and the 'more' is discerned.
One need not merely tell such stories. The
structure of 'God'-talk itself is also well
designed to promote discernment in those who
use it thoughtfully. Both in Religious Language
and in Models and Mystery Ramsey develops
his analysis of how basic Christian characteri-
zations of 'God' stir exactly those dissonances
that beg for resolution in discernment of the
'more'. In the previous paragraph, words
drawn from normal spatio-temporal experi-
ence, 'cause', 'good', 'faithful', were modified
by logically odd words, 'uncaused', 'infinitely',
'eternally', pointing towards concepts which
are never met in ordinary life. The former set
offer a conceptual 'model' for the ultimate; the
latter 'qualify' the models in a way that sys-
tematically makes the models unimaginable.
But out of this tension comes both insight and
modesty. Ramsey rejects merely negative
theology:
there must be some sort of structural simi-
larity, some sort of echo between the model
and the phenomena it enables us to under-
RAMSEY
stand, while at the same time denying ...
sheer reproduction, replica picturing. But it
is precisely such similarity-with-a-difference
that generates insight, that leads to disclo-
sures when (as we say) 'the light dawns'.
(Models and Mystery, p. 10)
Still, the dawning light is not so bright that
unproblematic cognition is ever possible. The
intention is to produce, from a single model,
and by means of some qualifier, an endless
series of variants, between any pair of which
there will occur implicit metaphors, in this way
witnessing to the fact that the heart of theology
is permanent mystery' (ibid., p. 60).
Critics of Ramsey's position often pointed
with alarm to the spectre of subjectivism
haunting the notions of 'discernment' and 'dis-
closure' at the base of his epistemic claims.
Ramsey was quick, as we have seen, to deny
that he would be satisfied by any merely sub-
jective interpretation of the 'Gestalt experience'
that occurs when the 'penny drops' or the 'ice
breaks', but critics were persistent in asking
how one can be confident that the 'more' felt in
religious experience is veridically referential.
Some drug-induced hallucinations also give the
feeling that there is 'more' lurking behind the
scenes; why should 'God'-experiences be
exempt from suspicion of being mere psycho-
logical phenomena without objective reference?
Ramsey speaks to this question in several ways.
One way is flat denial:
There is no question of a characteristically
religious situation being merely 'emotional',
if that word is thought to claim that the char-
acteristic features we have been mentioning
are entirely (in some sense or other) 'subjec-
tive'. Let us emphasize, without any possi-
bility of misunderstanding, that all these situ-
ations, all these characteristically different
situations, when they occur, have an objec-
tive reference and are, as all situations,
subject-object in structure.
(Religious Language, pp. 27-8)
850
This is firmly stated, but seriously weakened by
the inclusion of 'as all situations' (including
illusions and hallucinations?) and by remaining
at the level of phenomenological structure, in
which the topic seems to be experience itself,
rather than the relation between experience
and its external referent. This worry is deepened
by Ramsey's remark: 'I do riot know what a
"purely subjective" experience is - all experi-
ence is of something' (ibid., p. 24). But on this
basis, hallucinations are also 'not purely sub-
jective', since they also purport, though falsely,
to be 'of something.
A stronger answer was offered earlier by
Ramsey in his inaugural lecture. There he
stresses (as he did throughout his philosophical
publications) the nested, interconnected char-
acter of religious language under the apex-word
'God'. The difference between hallucination-
talk and veridical-talk would consequently lie
in the quality of the entire maps of which they
are part. Using one set of words rather than
another is recommending an 'index' for coping
with the territory, 'and for this the over-all test,
and one to which it must continually be sub-
mitted, will be the simplicity, comprehensive-
ness, and coherence of the total language'
(Miracles, p. 23). These are general checks on
speculative theory, webbed to experiences of
many sorts at many points. If conceptual maps
connected to the apex-word 'God' can be
shown simpler, more comprehensive and more
coherent than their rivals, then we have a basis
for confidence that 'disclosures' are more than
emotional moments. Then (but only then)
tightly woven theory would support Ramsey in
saying: 'for me the very aptness of the word I
use - disclosure - is that the objective reference
is safeguarded, for the object declares its objec-
tivity by actively confronting us' (Models and
Mystery, p. 58).
A third, pre-theoretical, answer might finally
be grounded in what Ramsey calls 'a non-infer-
ential awareness more concrete than cognition'
(Miracles, p. 16), by which we dimly but
directly apprehend the territory, logically prior
to any map-making. Here the best issue would

probably not be 'God' but another of Ramsey's
passions, 'freedom'. The T that is never
exhausted by objective descriptions of 'me' can
be experienced, enjoyed, intuited apart from the
theories (of science or metaphysics) that would
require 'me' to be determined in every thought
and action. Somewhere the linguistic hall of
mirrors must come to an authoritative end in
experience, and at this end we find the T who
is morally responsible and importantly 'more'
than spatio-temporal maps can show. If such
discernment is possible, Ramsey saw, then it
has a still broader significance: 'For I believe
that the kind of situation which justifies belief
in freedom and immortality, is the kind of sit-
uation to which we must appeal if we seek an
empirical justification for the language of meta-
physics and philosophical theology in general'
(Freedom and Immortality, p. 12).
The fivefold legacy of Ian Ramsey is rich and
ongoing in importance. First, he was among a
handful of prominent Oxford professors who
pioneered 'ordinary language philosophy' even
before the publication of Wittgenstein's
Philosophical Investigations. Second, going
against the fashion of his time, he frankly
advanced this newly flexible and pluralistic
approach in defence of the reasonableness of
theistic, specifically Christian, discourse. Third,
besides showing the courage of conviction, he
was a role model for confidence in intellectual
honesty, allowing philosophical chips to fall
where they might, even to the point of stirring
consternation among Christian traditionalists.
Fourth, Ramsey reinforced British preference
for empiricism, seeking experiential roots for
theology and metaphysics. But fifth, at the same
time, with a number of positive references to
the approach to experience offered by Alfred
North WHFTEHEAD, he worked to reform and
enlarge the cramped understanding of 'experi-
ence' long associated with empiricism from
Hume to Ayer. Despite his relatively short life
span and a mere fifteen years as a chaired
philosopher, Ian Ramsey made a difference to
philosophy - especially philosophy of religion
- that can still be felt.
851
RAMSEY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Miracles: An Exercise in Logical Map work
[inaugural lecture, 7 December 1951]
(Oxford, 1952).
'The Challenge of Contemporary Philosophy
to Christianity', The Modern Churchman,
vol. 42 (1952).
'Christianity and Language', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 4(1954).
'The Systematic Elusiveness of "F",
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 20
(1955).
'Religion and Empiricism: IIP, Cambridge
Review, vol. 77(1956).
'Empiricism and Religion: A Critique of
Ryle's Concept of Mind'', The Christian
Scholar, vol. 39, no. 2 (1956).
'The Paradox of Omnipotence', Mind, vol.
65, no. 258 (1956).
'Persons and Funerals: What Do Person
Words Mean?', Hibbert Journal, vol. 54
(1956).
The Logical Character of Resurrection-
Belief, Theology, vol. 60 (1957).
Religious Language: An Empirical Placing of
Theological Papers (1957).
'Paradox in Religion', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 33 (1959).
Freedom and Immortality (1960).
'Contemporary Empiricism', Christian
Scholar, vol. 43, no. 3 (1960).
The Challenge of the Philosophy of
Language', London Quarterly and
Holborn Review, vol. 186 (1961).
'Religion and Science: A Philosopher's
Approach', Church Quarterly Review, vol.
162(1961).
On Being Sure in Religion (1963).
'A Logical Exploration of Some Christian
Doctrines', Chicago Theological Seminary
Register, vol. 53, no. 5 (1963).
'On Being Articulate About the Gospel',
Chicago Theological Seminary Register,
vol. 53, no. 5(1963).
'On Understanding Mystery', Chicago
Theological Seminary Register, vol. 53, no.
5 (1963).
RAMSEY
'A New Prospect in Theological Studies',
Theology, vol. 67 (1964).
Models and Mystery (1964).
Religion and Science: Conflict and Synthesis
(1964).
Towards the Relevant in Theological
Language', The Modern Churchman, vol.
8 (1964).
'Discernment, Commitment, and Cosmic
Disclosure', Religious Education, vol. 60
(1965).
Christian Discourse: Some Logical
Explorations (1965).
'Berkeley and the Possibility of an Empirical
Metaphysics', in W.E. Steinkraus (ed.),
New Studies in Berkeley's Philosophy
(1966).
Talking About God: Models, Ancient and
Modern', in F.W. Dillistone (ed.), Myth
and Symbol (1966).
Words About God (New York, 1971).
Models for Divine Activity [Zenos Lectures
for 1966], ed. Harry McClatchey (1973).
Other Relevant Works
(Ed., abridg. and Intro.), John Locke, The
Reasonableness of Christianity (1958).
(Ed.), The Prospect for Metaphysics: Essays
of Metaphysical Exploration (1961).
(Ed.), Biology and Personality: frontier
Problems in Science, Philosophy and
Religion (Oxford, 1965).
(Ed.), Christian Ethics and Contemporary
Philosophy (1966).
(Ed. with Ruth Porter), Personality and
Science: An Interdisciplinary Discussion
(Edinburgh, 1971).
Christian Empiricism [collected essays], ed.
Jerry H. Gill (Grand Rapids, Michigan,
1974).
further Reading
Ayer, A.J., Language, Truth and Logic
(1936; 2nd edn, 1946).
Edwards, David L., Ian Ramsey, Bishop of
Durham: A Memoir (1973).
Ferre, Frederick, Language, Logic and God
852
(New York, 1961).
Gill, Jerry H., Ian Ramsey: To Speak
Responsibly of God (1976).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical
Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe
(Oxford, 1953).
Frederick Ferre
RANKIN, Kenneth Walker (1920-)
Kenneth Walker Rankiri was born in
Garlieston, Wigtownshire on 5 April 1920. He
was educated at Whithorn Higher Grade
School (1927-33) and at Edinburgh Academy
(1933-8) on the classics side. He studied phi-
losophy at Edinburgh University (1938-42,
1945-6), first under professors A.E. TAYLOR
and Norman KEMP SMITH, and subsequently
under their successors John MACMuRRAY and
A.D. RITCHIE. He was awarded an MA with
second class honours in 1946, having special-
ized in ancient philosophy. His studies were
interrupted by the war. A conscientious
objector, he was briefly jailed for refusal to
submit to a medical examination. He avoided
an extended prison term by working for the
National Fire Service. Upon his graduation, he
was appointed assistant lecturer in the
Department of Logic and Metaphysics at
Edinburgh but was required to continue war
service as a coal miner until 1948. From 1948
to 1951 he was assistant lecturer in the
Department of Moral Philosophy. He was
junior research fellow in philosophy at
Edinburgh from 1951 to 1953. He was
awarded a PhD in 1956 for his thesis, 'An
Analysis of Choice'. From 1953 to 1962 he
was lecturer, then senior lecturer at the
University of Malaya, teaching in both
Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. From 1962 to
1969 he was senior lecturer, then associate pro-
fessor at Monash University. He was appointed

professor at the University of Victoria in 1969.
He retired from this post in 1985 and was
made professor emeritus. After his retirement
he remained in Victoria, British Columbia and
participated actively in that city's philosophical
community.
A central concern of Rankin's work is the
debate between libertarians and determinists,
including its ethical implications. In Choice and
Chance (1961) Rankin argues that human
actions can be random, or chance, and yet with
human agents responsible for them. Crucial to
the argument is a distinction between explana-
tory (or causal) responsibility and narrative
responsibility (the sort of responsibility one has
for one's actions), but Rankin maintains that
resolution of debates about human freedom
requires reflection on the concepts of substance,
intention, personal identity and time. The
argument of the book was, in consequence,
wide-ranging and complex. Reviews of the
book were generally very positive. One
reviewer placed the book in rather illustrious
company, predicting a three-cornered fight
between Rankin, Stuart HAMPSHIRE'S Thought
and Action and G.E.M. ANSCOMBE'S Intention.
In the event, this debate did not materialize.
Perhaps Rankin's challenging mode of presen-
tation (on which reviewers remarked) and the
difficulty of the subject-matter limited the
impact of Choice and Chance. Many of
Rankin's subsequent publications developed
themes introduced in Choice and Chance.
Among the most important of these is his paper
The Non-Causal Self-Fulfillment of Intention'
1972).
Rankin's second book, The Recovery of the
Soul: An Aristotelian Essay on Self-Fulfillment
(1991), was not so much an examination of
Aristotle as a continuing exploration of the
themes Rankin had addressed in earlier publi-
cations. He argues that somewhat updated
versions of Aristotle's views provide the
solution to a range of contemporary philo-
sophical problems. In particular, Rankin argues
that 'psychocentric physicalism', a form of non-
reductive materialism, can be derived from
853
RAPHAEL
Aristotle's thought. Among the properties held
to emerge from the form of a human body is
what Rankin calls 'O-ability', the ability to act
otherwise. Ordinary minds are thus accorded a
status (as substance) reserved in Aristotle for the
Primer Mover.
Rankin published articles on a variety of
subjects besides those addressed in his books.
These include essays on perception and
McTAGGART's Paradox.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Choice and Chance (Oxford, 1961).
'The Non-Causal Self-Fulfillment of
Intention', American Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 9 (1972), pp. 279-89.
The Recovery of the Soul: An Aristotelian
Essay on Self-Fulfillment (Montreal,
1991).
James O. Young
RAPHAEL, David Daiches (1916-)
David Raphael was born in Liverpool on 25
January 1916. He was educated at the
Liverpool Collegiate School and at University
College, Oxford, where he achieved a first both
in 'Classical Mods' and in 'Greats', taking his
BA in 1938. He was Robinson Senior Scholar
at Oriel College from 1938 to 1940, during
which time he was awarded a DPhil for a thesis
on the moral sense theorists which he later
published as his first book. After a period
(1940-41) in the army, he served in the
Ministry of Labour and National Service, being
promoted to Principal (1944-6). He was
Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Otago, New Zealand from 1946 to 1949. He
then spent some years teaching at the University
of Glasgow where he was appointed lecturer in
moral philosophy (1949), senior lecturer (1951)
and then Professor of Political and Social
RAPHAEL
Philosophy (1960). In 1970 he moved to
Reading as Professor of Philosophy, and in
1973 he became Professor of Philosophy and
Academic Director of Associated Studies at
Imperial College London. He was President of
the Aristotelian Society in the session 1974-5.
He retired to Richmond in 1983, when London
made him an emeritus professor of philoso-
phy. During his teaching career Raphael held a
number of visiting appointments in the United
States. He served on a number of public com-
mittees including the Wheatley Committee on
the Teaching Profession in Scotland, the
Roberts Committee on the Distribution of
Teachers in Scotland and the Scottish
Agricultural Wages Board.
Raphael's early interests were in moral phi-
losophy, specifically in the moral sense theo-
rists, seven of whom featured in his doctoral
thesis. Though the thesis was not purely his-
torical it led on to scholarly work on two of the
moral sense theorists in whom he continued to
take an interest. Raphael was one of the first to
rediscover the neglected Welsh philosopher,
Richard Price (1723-91), of whose Review of
the Principal Questions of Morals he produced
a modern edition. He was also a distinguished
student of Adam Smith, on whom he wrote the
Past Masters text, on whom he gave the Dawes
Hicks Lectures in 1972 and whose philosoph-
ical works he edited for the Glasgow edition of
The Works and Correspondence of Adam
Smith, of which he was joint editor (with J.L.
Macfie). Raphael also produced a valuable
edition of the British Moralists 1650-1800 that
covered the period when moral sense theories
were particularly influential. This was a replace-
ment for the earlier edition of SELBY-BlGGE,
whose two volumes were divided into 'the sen-
timental school' and 'the intellectual school'.
Raphael thought, however, that this dichotomy
had only 'a limited application' and was 'not
necessarily more significant than two or three
other possible methods of classification' (British
Moralists, p. vi). He opted for a straightforward
chronological ordering, beginning with Hobbes
and including Reid, two philosophers who had
854
been omitted by Selby-Bigge. He later pursued
his interest in Hobbes in his Hobbes: Morals
and Politics (1977), an introduction intended
for student use but to which he added sub-
stantial chapters on the Hobbes literature and
on the various interpretations that had been
offered of his philosophy.
Although Raphael had historical interests,
he characteristically combined history with
critical discussion. In his first book, The Moral
Sense (1947), which was based on his doctoral
thesis, he included sections on four of the moral
sense theorists (Hutcheson, Hume, Price and
Reid). In this book he also sketched his own
ethical theory - a deontological and intuition-
ist theory of the kind that had been propounded
by PRICHARD, Ross and Raphael's own teacher,
E.F. CARRTTT. P.P. STRAWSON, in his review,
expressed his opinion that Raphael's account
was open to 'overwhelming' objections
(Strawson, p. 170). And Raphael himself, in his
more systematically philosophical Moral
Judgement (1955), modified his position in a
number of respects. He retained a deontologi-
cal theory but discarded the intuitionism that
usually supports it. In the face of the criticism
of deontological theories that they leave prin-
ciples of obligation as a disconnected bundle, he
sought to unify them through the Kantian prin-
ciple of treating persons as ends in themselves.
Pivotal to Raphael's thought in this book,
and indeed to his moral and social philosophy
generally, is his treatment of the concepts of
justice. It is above all its failure to give an
adequate treatment of justice that, in Raphael's
view, makes utilitarianism an unsatisfactory
theory. And it is the promise of a better account
that led him to a form of deontology. Justice
indeed was a central topic in Raphael's later
philosophy. He wrote several papers on the
subject, brought together in his Justice and
Liberty (1980), and offered a historical and
critical review in his Concepts of Justice (2001).
Another important topic for Raphael was that
of rights, on which he wrote the lead paper for
a Joint Session symposium in 1965 and which
led to a collection of papers he edited by various

authors, some of whom were critical of his
account.
Raphael's original philosophical views, both
in his early books and in his later papers, have
proved controversial. He has been valued,
however, as a fair, accurate and clear com-
mentator on the views of others. He has proved
himself, with a number of books written with
the student or general reader in mind, to be an
outstanding writer of introductory texts. His
Problems of Political Philosophy (1970) is one
of the best books of its kind to have been
written in recent years.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Moral Sense (1947).
Moral Judgement (1955).
The Paradox of Tragedy [Mahlon Powell
Lectures] (1960).
Problems of Political Philosophy (1970; 2nd
edn, 1990).
The Impartial Spectator [Dawes Hickes
Lectures] (1973).
Hobbes: Morals and Politics (1977).
Justice and Liberty (1980).
Moral Philosophy (1981; rev. edn, 1994).
Adam Smith (Oxford, 1985).
Concepts of Justice (Oxford, 2001).
Other Relevant Works
(Ed.), R. Price, A Review of the Principal
Questions in Morals (1948).
'Human Rights', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society', suppl. vol. 39 (1965),
pp. 205-18; repr. with modifications as
'Human Rights, Old and New', in Political
Theory and the Rights of Man (1967), pp.
54-67.
(Ed.), Political Theory and the Rights of Man
(1967).
(Ed.), British Moralists 1650-1800 (Oxford,
1969).
'Hume and Adam Smith on Justice and
Utility', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 73 (1972-3), pp. 87-103.
'Sidgewick on Intuitionism', Monist, vol. 58
(1974), pp. 405-19.
855
RASHDALL
The Study of Morals', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 75 (1974-5), pp.
1-12.
Physics and Ethics: The Influence of Newton
on Moral Philosophy [inaugural lecture]
(1975).
(Ed.), Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral
Sentiments (1976).
(Ed.), Adam Smith, Lectures in Jurisprudence
(1978).
Utilitarianism (Oxford, 1981).
'Can Literature be Moral Philosophy?', New
Literary History, vol. 15 (1983), pp. 1-12.
Further Reading
Cranston, Maurice, 'Human Rights: A Reply
to Prof. Raphael', in D.D. Raphael (ed.),
Political Theory and the Rights of Man,
pp. 95-100.
MacBeath, A., Review of Moral Judgement,
Philosophy, vol. 32 (1957), pp. 269-73.
Strawson, P.P., Review of The Moral Sense,
Philosophy, vol. 23 (1948), pp. 168-71.
Toulmin, S.E., Critical notice of The Moral
Sense, Mind, vol. 57 (1948), pp. 373-81.
Williams, B.A.O., Critical notice of Moral
Judgement, Mind, vol. 64 (1957), pp.
99-109.
Stuart Brown
RASHDALL, Hastings (1858-1924)
Hastings Rashdall was born in London on 24
June 1858 and died in Worthing on 9 February
1924. His father was a Cambridge-educated
minister in the Church of England in sympathy
with the Evangelical movement and a friend of
Tennyson. He was educated at New College,
Oxford, was ordained priest in 1884, became
a fellow of Hertford College, Oxford in 1888,
and a tutorial fellow of New College, Oxford
in 1895. He was elected a fellow of the British
RASHDALL
Academy in 1909, became canon of Hereford
in 1909, Dean of Carlisle in 1917 and honorary
fellow of New College in 1920, and was active
in the Christian Social Union.
RashdalPs three major works are The
Universities of the Middle Ages (1895), The
Theory of Good and Evil (1907) and The Idea
of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919).
Already his contribution to the volume edited by
H. STURT, Personal Idealism: Philosophical
Essays by Eight Members of the University of
Oxford (1902), 'Personality: Human and
Divine', whose title echoed that of J.R.
Illingworth's Bampton Lectures, had presented
in outline the philosophical positions to which he
was to remain faithful during the whole of his
career. In the same year, Rashdall also set out
these positions in 'The Ultimate Basis of Theism',
his contribution to another, equally important,
loosely programmatic work, Contentio veritatis:
Essays in Constructive Theology, by Six Oxford
Tutors (1902), a defence of liberal theological
reconstruction of Christian teaching that went
further than Lux mundi, and whose other con-
tributors were W.R. INGE, H.L. Wild, C.F.
Burney, W.C. Allen and A.J. CARLYLE.
Rashdall's basic philosophical positions were
explained at greater length in a series of
Cambridge lectures on Philosophy and Religion
(1909). Much of his work consisted of shorter
essays, lectures and sermons, and the most
important of them, many of which rank among
his best work, were posthumously published in
three volumes by H.D.A. Major and F.L. Cross.
Rashdall's work on the medieval universities
not only initiated the academic study of this
subject (along with Heinrich Denifle's Die
Entstehung der Universitdten des Mittelalters
bis 1400), but also evidenced Rashdall's knowl-
edge of scholastic philosophy and theology, as
the institutional historiography was inter-
spersed with passages on the substance of what
was taught, and the work thus promoted the
study of medieval thought as well. Not only
was the traditional understanding of the uni-
versity, the definite location with concentrated
personal intercourse between teachers and
856
students over a prolonged period of time, to
remain central to Rashdall's understanding of
higher education, but the rationalism of
Aquinas and Abelard, and the fundamental
importance of the classical legacy of Plato and
Aristotle, were to remain essential to his own
philosophy. In 1901 he published a history of
New College, Oxford, together with R.S. Rait.
Rashdall retained the old agenda of natural
theology, and the harmonization of faith and
reason that characterizes Western culture's
defining classico-Christian synthesis, but with
contemporary liberal theology he took this syn-
thesis further in the direction of a rationaliza-
tion and moralization of Christian doctrine.
He sought to show that the results corre-
sponded to the historical truth, but rejected the
anti-dogmatism of some religious modernists;
it was not a question of an exclusive focus on
a simple original teaching of the historical
Christ. All of this is exemplified in his uncom-
promising rejection, in his Bampton Lectures,
of the 'objective' view of the atonement, the
idea of substitution and expiation, and his
acceptance of the 'subjective' view of Origen
and Abelard, which sees the meaning of the
atonement in the ethical effects or the moral
influence on the believer - a view which, as
Rashdall characteristically put it, has 'nothing
unintelligible, arbitrary, illogical, or immoral
about it' (The Idea of Atonement, p. 360).
Rashdall's philosophy was inspired not only
by T.H. Green's German version of idealism,
but to a unique extent drew also on the native
British source of Berkeley's idealism, and his
work stimulated a renewed interest in
Berkeley's philosophy as relevant in the present.
Rashdall's Berkeleyanism was one of the
reasons why he abandoned Green's single spiri-
tual principle in favour of the distinction
between God and finite spirits. Material things
exist only for or in consciousness, and things
that do not exist for or in our consciousness
must exist for or in God's, 'a Mind, in which
and for which everything that is not mind has
its being' (Philosophy and Religion, p. 29). The
terminology of personalism, the emphasis on

conscious, individual spirits or minds consti-
tuting ultimate reality, was distinctly contem-
porary, however. Rashdall belonged to a broad
current of personalistic and theistic idealism in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
and was regarded by some as the most typical
representative in Britain of such 'personal
idealism'. Yet there are several elements of his
philosophy that distinguish him both from the
broader movement, variously represented in
Britain by A. Seth PRINGLE-PATTISON and
Illingworth, and from other contributions to
Sturt's volume, which was itself on the whole
clearly exceptional. One such element was the
strong element of Berkeleyanism itself. More
importantly, Rashdall's conclusion that the
concept of the Absolute was not to be identified
with the concept of God, although shared by
W.R. SORLEY, was not the norm. The Absolute
was for Rashdall the system and totality of
being, comprising God and the created spirits
together. Rashdall differed also in that he con-
sidered God, although his will is wholly good,
to be 'limited' by an objective constitution of
things, 'eternal necessities which are part of his
own eternal nature' (The Theory of Good and
Evil, vol. 2, p. 242), in such a way as to make
the realization of all good impossible; this
world is thus the best possible. This tran-
scending of the scholastic understanding of
God's omnipotence as not implying the possi-
bility of a violation of the laws of reason which
are part of his own nature, developed by
modern personal idealists as the position that
the eternal truths, and the distinction between
the possible and the impossible, are not limiting
God in any way since they do not exist nor have
any meaning apart from God, in the direction
of the insistence on a 'limitation' which is more
than a self-limitation even made it possible for
Rashdall uniquely to embrace determinism.
Finite spirits are for Rashdall created and
preserved by God, but God, the eternal mind,
is a person alongside other persons, who does
not literally indwell them. Each consciousness
is essentially exclusive of every other. This
position was connected with his insistence on
857
RASHDALL
the impossibility of proofs of God from reli-
gious experience, and with his rejection of the
understanding of knowledge of other minds as
immediate. Such knowledge, including knowl-
edge of God, was for Rashdall inferential: 'It is
only by the analogy of our own immediate
experience that we can come to know anything
at all of what goes on in other people's minds'
(Philosophy and Religion, p. 47). Rashdall
rejected mysticism for the same reason that he
rejected the Absolute of the absolute idealists:
it obliterated the distinction between a human's
personal consciousness, with its proclivities to
evil, and God's. The former cannot be a part or
predicate of the latter. Despite his determinism,
Rashdall turned, with all personal idealism,
against the pantheism that made the moral life
of the individual impossible or meaningless as
it ultimately merged the latter with the whole
or with God. He insisted on individual immor-
tality and rejected not only the understanding
of God as the Hegelian Absolute but also as
Plato's idea of the good and Plotinus's oneness,
and his emphasis on the exclusivity of persons
and the concomitant epistemological positions
made the rejection even stronger than that of
other theistic idealists. Rashdall's position also
made impossible the 'social' understanding of
the Trinity that we find in Illingworth, an inter-
pretation which in Rashdall's view would either
be tritheistic or imply the inclusion of one con-
sciousness in another, and which, he insisted,
did not correspond to the meaning of the term
person in the early Trinitarian dogma.
Like other British and American personal
idealists, Rashdall took over some arguments
from the German nineteenth-century tradition
of 'speculative theism' - with origins in the so-
called 'late idealism' of Schelling and others -
and its latest representative, R.H. Lotze. The
idea of causality corresponds to the experience
of our own conscious will: 'The essence of
Causality is not necessary connexion but
Activity. Such activity we encounter in our own
experience of volition and nowhere else'
(Philosophy and Religion, p. 41). Dovetailing
with the Berkeleyan arguments, this explains
RASHDALL
why a conscious rational being must be the
cause of what is not a product of my voluntary
actions or those of other beings similar to me.
A Lotzean theme is that God must be under-
stood as a person, but free from our limitations:
'God alone fully realizes the ideal of Personality.
The essence of Personality is something
positive: it signifies to us the highest kind of
being within our knowledge - not... the mere
limitations and restraints which characterize
human conscious life as we know it in our-
selves' (ibid., pp. 55-6).
With regard to moral consciousness,
Rashdall accepted immediate experience, since
the moral judgement and recognition of the
good are for him intuitive. The individual is not
subordinate to an impersonal moral or social
order. All value is ultimately value for a
personal consciousness. Yet the moral law 'is to
be found, wholly and completely, in no indi-
vidual human consciousness' (The Theory of
Good and Evil, vol. 2, p. 211); and the objec-
tivity of the 'one absolute standard of values,
which is the same for all rational beings' (ibid.,
p. 286) is guaranteed only by the existence of
the personal God: 'Our moral ideal can only
claim objective validity in so far as it can ratio-
nally be regarded as the revelation of a moral
ideal eternally existing in the mind of God'
(ibid., p. 212). The Theory of Good and Evil,
dedicated to the memory of Rashdall's dis-
parate teachers Green and H. Sidgwick, was an
attempt at a synthesis of idealism and utilitar-
ianism, a non-hedonistic consequentialism or
'ideal utilitarianism' which was in some respects
close to that of G.E. MOORE. Right action is
that which produces most good realized in
personal consciousness as the right kind of
mental qualities or states. These constitute the
well-being of the person, yet are not merely
the pleasurable ones, but also the virtuous. The
nature of these qualities was the 'ideal' element
of Rashdall's ethics, but the utilitarian element
led to his rejection of the self-realizationism or
perfectionism that was common among ideal-
ists. Yet, with many other personal idealists, he
emphasized Christ as the highest ethical ideal
858
manifested as a concrete example of personal
character and life. At least in turning sharply
against the pragmatism of some of the other
contributors to Sturt's Personal Idealism, and
in his firm grounding in classical and medieval
thought, he was closer to the more tradition-
oriented form of personal idealism at Oxford
represented by Illingworth arid C.C.J. WEBB.
Against the new realism he found himself in
agreement with the absolute idealists. In a
review of one of Rashdall's posthumously pub-
lished collections of essays, Ideas and Ideals
(1928), T.S. Eliot wrote that 'His philosophy
was Greats philosophy. Of such was the salt of
Oxford.'
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Universities of the Middle Ages, 2 vols
(1895; 2nd edn, 3 vols, rev. by P.M.
Powicke and A.B. Emden, Oxford, 1936).
'Personality: Human and Divine', in Henry
Sturt (ed.), Personal Idealism:
Philosophical Essays by Eight Members of
the University of Oxford (1902).
'The Ultimate Basis of Theism', in Contentio
veritatis: Essays in Constructive Theology,
by Six Oxford Tutors (1902).
The Theory of Good and Evil, 2 vols (1907).
Philosophy and Religion [Cambridge
Lectures] (1909).
The Idea of Atonement in Christian
Theology [Bampton Lectures] (1919).
Other Relevant Works
(with R.S. Rait), New College (1901).
Is Conscience an Emotion? (1914).
Principles and Precepts, ed. H.D.A. Major
and F.L. Cross (Oxford, 1927).
Ideas and Ideals, ed. H.D.A. Major and F.L.
Cross (Oxford, 1928).
God and Man, ed. H.D.A. Major and F.L.
Cross (Oxford, 1930).
Further Reading
Matheson, P.E. (ed.), The Life of Hastings
Rashdall D. D. (1928), with a
bibliography.

Langford, Thomas A., In Search of
Foundations: English Theology
1900-1920 (Nashville, Tennessee, 1969).
Jan Olof Bengtsson
RAVEN, Charles Earle (1885-1964)
C.E. Raven was born in Paddington on 4 July
1885 and died in Cambridge on 8 July 1964. He
was Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge
(1932-50), where he also served as Vice-
Chancellor of the University. He was a Chaplain
to the Crown (starting in 1919), and a fellow of
the British Academy. A self-confessed 'unrepen-
tant Liberal' Anglican, Raven was long inter-
ested in the natural world, yet studied theology
and classics at Cambridge. His interest in biology
showed itself in several books on birds (e.g., In
Praise of Birds, 1925) and in the history of
biology (e.g., English Naturalists from Neckam
to Ray, 1947). In 1962 he published the first
biography in English of Teilhard de Chardin. In
the area of ethics, he defended a pacifist position
after the destructiveness of World War I (Is War
Obsolete?, 1935).
Raven is best known for two central convic-
tions he defended throughout his career: (1) his
insistence on the harmony of modern science
and religion, and (2) his defence of liberal
Anglicanism in the Gore tradition against the
new 'dialectical' theologians. He responded to
the criticisms of liberal thought against the
growing tide of neo-orthodoxy in England (espe-
cially those in sympathy with Karl Barth, such as
Edwyn Hoskyns). Raven believed that Barm's
theology did not respect reason fully enough,
because he did not value science (especially evo-
lution) highly enough in the domain of religion.
The neo-orthodox theologians rejected the influ-
ence of modern science upon religious thinking
and biblical interpretation. Raven countered that
both the old and the new orthodoxy must go, in
859
RAVEN
favour of a modern faith in step with science
(including social science). He developed this
theological viewpoint most fully in Jesus and
the Gospel of Love (1931), written while he
was still a parish priest. Jesus is interpreted in
the light of evolution and modern psychology
as a personality infused with God's love and
spirit. Raven's most important philosophical
work was Natural Religion and Christian
Theology, the published version of his Gifford
Lectures (1950-51) which develop both of his
central convictions.
Raven held a lifelong appreciation of the
wonders and beauties of the natural world. His
interpretation of evolution was thoroughly
theistic, rejecting any suggestion that life is the
product of blind chance or undirected natural
selection. He argued that a living God was
behind and within the world process. While
human evil - especially poverty, ignorance, and
war - damage God's purposes in history, these
can be overcome by human solidarity and
Christian charity. Throughout his academic
work, Raven proved himself to be a classic
liberal Protestant.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Apollinarianism (Cambridge, 1912).
The Creator Spirit (1927).
Jesus and the Gospel of Love (1931).
Is War Obsolete? (1935).
John Ray: Naturalist (Cambridge, 1942).
Science, Religion and the Future (Cambridge,
1943).
English Naturalists from Neckam to Ray
(Cambridge, 1947).
Science and the Christian Man (1952).
The Theological Basis of Pacifism (1952).
Natural Religion and Christian Theology, 2
vols (Cambridge, 1953).
Teilhard de Chardin: Scientist and Seer
(1962).
Other Relevant Works
A Wanderer's Way (1928).
Musings and Memories (1931).
RAVEN
Further Reading
Dillistone, F.W., Charles Raven: Naturalist,
Historian, Theologian (1975).
Alan G. Padgett
READ, Carveth (1848-1931)
Carveth Read was born in Falmouth on 16
March 1848 and died on 6 December 1931.
Read was an undergraduate at Christ's
College, Cambridge and later, as Hibbert
Travelling Scholar, he also studied at Leipzig
and Heidelberg. His academic appointments
included many years as lecturer on philosophy
and literature at Wren's. Between 1903 and
1911 Read was Grote Professor of Philosophy
at the University of London; in 1911 he took
up the position of lecturer in comparative psy-
chology at University College London, an
appointment that he held until 1921, when he
became Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and
Psychology in the same institution.
Read's work, which began in the compara-
tively conservative world of the late Victorian
period and concluded in the 1920s, explores
evolution and its relationship with belief and,
in particular, superstition. His philosophy was
part of the empiricist tradition and he brought
his sceptical perspective to an investigation
of, in his terms, 'primitive' belief and cultural
behaviours. In the Preface to The Origin of
Man and of his Superstitions (1920), Read
defines the two questions, arising from his
teaching of ethnopsychology, that most con-
cerned him regarding the evolution of society:
'(1) Under what mental conditions did the
change take place from the organisation of
the hunting-pack (when this weakened) to the
settled life of the tribe or group? and (2) Why
is the human mind everywhere befogged with
ideas of Magic and Animism?' Read offers
the conclusion that 'these superstitions were
860
useful and (apparently) even necessary in
giving to elders enough prestige to preserve
tradition and custom when the leader of the
hunt was no longer conspicuous in authority'
(Man and his Superstitions, 1925, pp. xi-xii).
His other work includes A Theory of Logic
(1878) and The Metaphysics of Nature
(1905).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Theory of Logic (1878).
Logic Deductive and Inductive (1898; 4th
edn, 1914).
The Metaphysics of Nature (1905; 2nd edn,
1908).
Natural and Social Morals (1909).
The Origin of Man and of his Superstitions
(1920); 2nd edn in separate vols, The
Origin of Man and Man and his
Superstitions (1925).
Andrew Tate
READ, Herbert Edward (1893-1968)
Herbert Read was bom at Muscoates Grange
Farm in Kirbymoorside in the North Riding of
Yorkshire on 4 December 1893 and died in
Stonegrave, Yorkshire on 12 June 1968. He
was a poet, essayist and critic, a philosopher of
the arts, a pacifist and a self-styled anarchist. He
lived at Muscoates until he was ten, when his
father died and he was sent to a school for
orphans in Halifax. At sixteen he began work
as a clerk in the Leeds Savings Bank, studying
in the evenings for three years in order to
matriculate. He gained admission to the
University of Leeds in 1911 and in the next
three years worked to take two degrees, reading
French, English, history, geology, logic, social
economy, Latin, Roman law, jurisprudence,
common law, constitutional law, political
economy and European history.

Read fought in France and Belgium during
World War I and was awarded the Military
Cross and the Distinguished Service Order.
During the war he and Frank Rutter together
founded Arts and Letters, a journal that was
highly critical of conservative values. After the
war he became an assistant principal at the
Treasury in London. His life changed dramat-
ically when in 1922 he became assistant keeper
of ceramics and stained glass at the Victoria and
Albert Museum. During this appointment he
became active and well-known in the main
stream of London's cultural life. He knew
Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Barbara
Hepworth, and a host of other painters, sculp-
tors and artists engaged in movements such as
vorticism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism
and constructivism, to all of which he was sym-
pathetic. In the development of his critical and
analytic theories he was greatly influenced by
the ideas of Karl Gustav Jung, with whom he
maintained a lifelong connexion. He was fre-
quently in the company of T.S. Eliot and T.E.
HULME, was closely involved with the imagist
movement of which Hulme and Ezra Pound
were founders, and edited a collection of papers
left in chaos on Hulme's death in World
War I. His enduring friendship with Eliot was
often stormy, but always an important factor in
his approach to poetry and the arts in general.
In 1933 Read succeeded Roger FRY as editor
of the Burlington Magazine, holding the post
for six years. Concomitantly he held several
academic posts. He was Clark Lecturer at
Trinity College, Cambridge (1929-30),
Professor of Fine Arts at Edinburgh University
(1931-3) and Sydney Jones Lecturer in Art at
Liverpool University (1935 and 1936). From
1940 to 1942 he was Leon Fellow at the
University of London and was Charles Eliot
Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard
University in 1953 and 1954. In 1953 he was
given a knighthood. He was founder President
of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (1947),
an institution that created an environment for
airing and discussing avant-garde art of all
kinds, for integrating new ideas and discover-
861
READ
ies in the sciences, anthropology and sociol-
ogy, and for formulating ideals of change for
better educational conditions.
After World War II, Read joined the pub-
lishing firm of Routledge and Kegan Paul,
where he edited the English Master Painters
series. During the 1950s he developed his
interest in Henry Moore, building extensively
on an earlier study to produce, in 1965, his
Henry Moore: A Study of his Life and Work.
All the time he was lecturing, travelling, writing
and editing over a wide range of topics, and
also giving vigorous support to pacifist move-
ments such as Ban the Bomb. He had moved
back to Yorkshire in 1949, thereafter com-
muting to London and making frequent forays
to overseas engagements in Europe and the
USA. He died at Stonegrave, his Yorkshire
home, after a four-year illness through which he
struggled to continue in his way of life.
The cultural influences in Read's life were
diverse and numerous. While at university he
turned from a Blakean Christianity to a
Nietzschean worldview, and for several years
his sensibilities were shaped by ideals of unre-
strained originality and expression, and by the
radical kinds of ideas that produced move-
ments such as vorticism and imagism. At the
Leeds Arts Club he engaged in heated discus-
sions of the ideas of T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound,
Roger Fry, Clive BELL and A.R. Orage. By the
outset of World War I he had renounced his
once-strong Tory beliefs and was espousing a
somewhat rebellious socialism, pacifism and, at
the same time, an uneasy kind of patriotism
that must at times have felt at odds with his
espousal of anarchic ideals. His inner life was
sustained by books, paintings, ideas, and the
writers, painters and critics who populated the
world of the arts. When, in 1922, he exchanged
his job in the Civil Service for one in the
Department of Ceramics at the Victoria and
Albert Museum, work and inner life merged
into a seamless cultural activity.
Art and social politics were always impor-
tantly and closely connected for Read: he saw
freedom as the condition of artistic creation. In
READ
Art and Society (1937) he had drawn a dis-
tinction between, on the one hand, markedly
creative persons, and on the other, artisans and
consumers of art. By the time he wrote what is
probably his best-known book, Education
through Art (1943), he had moved to a per-
spective that regarded each person as an artist
of some kind, whose particular abilities should
be nurtured. This change in his conception of
society seems to have been triggered, or rein-
forced, by his experiences when he was advising
the British Council on the selection of children's
art for a wartime exhibition. While carrying out
this task he was impressed and deeply moved
by the work of quite young children, finding in
their paintings evidence of an archetypal
imaging of the kind identified and recorded by
Karl Jung. In particular, he found repeated
instances of depictions of the mandala, radiat-
ing outwards, as a symbolic representation of
centred existence, or being. This was a symbol
Read had frequently observed in avant-garde
art. He noted, too, the children's tendencies to
paint a 'shadow' that he took to be expressive
of a person's darker side, and to create an abun-
dance of mother images, thought by Jung to
symbolize the warding off of isolation and loss.
When Read expounded his theory that children
quite naturally and unconsciously produce such
symbols in their work, and that their manifes-
tation revealed the struggle of innate creative
tendencies to counteract dehumanizing
elements in modern life, his ideas were enthu-
siastically embraced and propagated by art
teachers, many of whom had been moving in a
less articulate way towards the same view, and
who also adopted his account to formulate a
critique of contemporary, so-called liberal, edu-
cation. Read himself wanted nothing less than
that art should be the basis of education and
that it should embrace all modes of expres-
sion: visual, plastic, musical, kinetic and verbal.
He believed that such an education could
develop both the uniqueness and the social con-
sciousness of individuals. Moreover, for him,
the practice of depth psychology was an
integral part of criticism and an essential tool
862
for understanding art of all kinds. He saw the
unconscious as the organizing force of design,
form and order, able to generate unity and
wholeness, and make sense of chaos. The art
symbol, he held, is a product of the uncon-
scious and is intelligible to the initiated, and
also to the uninitiated if they allow it to enter
their unconscious and work there.
In The forms of Things Unknown (1960), a
collection of papers and lectures selected from
his work in the previous decade, Read pursued
the themes that over the years had acquired a
primary significance for him: the importance of
aesthetic education as a counterbalance to and
a liberation from an ever-growing emphasis on
technology and science, and his thesis that art
is a symbolic language that communicates what
is non-propositional, not by generating
emotions, but by pointing towards what is
beyond every day cognizance. In the last two
essays in the book he discusses peace and war,
describing peace as the natural condition of
humankind, war as the result of folly and pride.
The imagination, he maintained, when it is
active and creative, is 'the only effective instru-
ment of peace'.
Within a historical perspective, Read emerges
as one of the last people to champion a set of
artistic beliefs that emerged early in the twen-
tieth century, flourished for three or four
decades, and became known as modernism.
By the last decade of his life modernism was
beginning to give way to what became known
as postmodernism, a trend, or movement, that
dismayed him. In particular, he regarded pop
art as 'tedious', a 'silliness' that, although it
parodied contemporary life, at the same time
condoned its shallowness, and had no interest
in producing art that manifested the organic
forms of an emergent and symbolizing uncon-
scious.
Read published over sixty books and more
than a thousand papers, articles and reviews.
He became an arbiter of taste, bringing to
notice and acclaim numerous artists whose
excellence is now unchallenged, among them a
number of his early associates, Barbara

Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron and
Henry Moore. Privately, he regarded his poetry
and dramatic writing as his most important
work, his genuinely creative contribution to
the arts. His works include the extended poems,
The End of a War' (1933) and 'A World
Within a War5 (1943), and a novel, The Green
Child (1935), an allegorical fantasy of a journey
through the self. His Collected Poems was pub-
lished in 1944. Perhaps it was his personal
assessment of his artistic worth as a poet and
writer that persuaded Read to accept his
knighthood 'for services to literature', even
though it was bestowed by Churchill, whom he
detested, and even though, as, he remarked, it
gave him the 'same status as jockeys, actors,
music-hall comedians'. Many of his friends
thought the award sat uneasily alongside his
anarchistic avowals. What remains uncontro-
versial is the judgement that Herbert Read was
one of the foremost English intellectuals of the
mid twentieth century, that he profoundly
influenced both the direction and understand-
ing of the arts, especially the arts of painting
and sculpture, and that he transformed and
democratized an entire litany of educational
tenets.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reason and Romanticiam (1926).
Julian Benda and the New Humanism
(Seattle, 1930).
The Place of Art in a University (Edinburgh,
1931).
The Meaning of Art (1931).
Form in Modern Poetry (1932).
Art Now: An Introduction to the Theory of
Modern Painting and Sculpture (1933).
The Innocent Eye (1933).
Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial
Design (1934).
Art and Society (1937).
Poetry and Anarchism (1938).
The Philosophy of Anarchism (1940).
To Hell With Culture (1941).
Education through Art (1943).
Freedom: Is it a Crime? (1945).
863
REARDON
The Forms of Things Unknown: Essays
towards an Aesthetic Philosophy (1960).
Henry Moore: A Study of his Life and Work
(1965).
The Origins of Form in Art (1965).
The Cult of Sincerity (1968).
Other Relevant Works
The Sense of Glory: Essays in Criticism
(Cambridge, 1929).
The Contrary Experience: Autobiographies
(1963).
Further Reading
King, James, The Last Modern: A Life of
Herbert Read (1990).
Thistlewood, D., Herbert Read: Formlessness
and Form (Boston, 1984).
Thistlewood, David, 'Creativity and Political
Identification in the Work of Herbert
Read', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol.
28, no. 4 (1986) pp. 345-56.
Diane Collinson
REARDON, Bernard Morris Gavin (1913-)
Bernard Morris Gavin Reardon was born in the
West Ham district of London. He was educated
at the Sir George Monoux School in London,
then at Keble College, Oxford, where he was
awarded a BA in theology in 1935. He was
ordained in the Church of England in 1938,
and became a chaplain to the Armed Forces
during World War II. Thereafter he was Vicar
of Holy Cross Church in Hornchurch, Essex
from 1946 to 1947, Rector at Kelly in Devon
from 1947 to 1959, and of Parham in Sussex
from 1959 to 1963. In 1960 he was also
lecturer in divinity at Bishop Otter College in
Chichester, and in 1963 he was appointed to a
lectureship, and subsequently in 1969 to a
senior lectureship, in theology at the University
REARDON
of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he remained
until his retirement in 1978.
Reardon was one of many philosophers who
contributed to the revival of the study of Hegel
in the English-speaking world. Of primary
interest to Reardon was Hegel's philosophy of
religion. In his work on this topic Reardon
remarks that the whole of Hegel's philosophy,
including his writings on religion in his early
Berlin lectures to his more mature Lectures on
the Philosophy of Religion, are notoriously dif-
ficult and obscure. Despite these difficulties,
Reardon succeeds in giving a clear and concise
interpretation of Hegel's thoughts on religion.
For Hegel any adequate philosophy of
religion must deal with all religions, not just
with Christianity or traditional theism. Any
religion is an expression of the human spirit and
its religious consciousness, which strives
towards an apprehension of the all-encom-
passing Absolute. Hegel thus takes religion as
an aspect of human culture, which must be
investigated historically in order to provide a
basis for its philosophical treatment.
According to Hegel, religion is an imagina-
tive, not a conceptual or abstract representation
of the Absolute. Philosophy should be neutral
in its treatment of religion: it is not part of the
task of philosophers to pronounce religious
doctrines to be true or false, or to try to
persuade people to become religious believers.
Nevertheless, philosophy should be able to
complement religion by making explicit those
beliefs which are implicit in religion, and thus
to make it intelligible.
Reardon is concerned to avoid an overly intel-
lectual interpretation of Hegel such as predom-
inated in the early years of his introduction to the
English-speaking world, and he thus stresses the
part which, for Hegel, the emotions play in
religion. Feelings are a part of the religious
attitude, but religion is not thereby subjective,
because they are directed to the Absolute as their
object and source. As philosophy yields a
rational conception of the Absolute, it rescues
religion from the mental world of pure subjec-
tivity, and places it in the objective realm.
864
Reardon's other works are mainly concerned
with the context and influence of Hegel's
approach to religion, which was pivotal in the
transformation from Kant's heavily ethical and
rational treatment in the Enlightenment to T.H.
Green's dynamism of the religious infusion of
nature as a supplement to the limitations of
philosophy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'On the Problem of a Philosophical
Theology', Hibbert Journal (1970), vol. 59,
pp. 30-37.
Religious Thought in the Nineteenth Century
(1966).
From Coleridge to Gore (1971).
Hegel's Philosophy of Religion (1977).
'Schelling's Critique of Hegel', Religious
Studies, vol. 20 (December 1984), pp.
543-58.
Religion in the Age of Romanticism (1985).
T. H. Green as a Theologian', in Vincent
Andres (ed.), The Philosophy ofT. H.
Green (1986), pp. 36-47.
Kant as Philosophic Theologian (1988).
Other Relevant Works
(Ed. with intro.), Liberal Protestantism
(1968).
(Ed. with intro.), Roman Catholic
Modernism (1970).
Kathryn L. Plant
REDHEAD, Michael Logan Gonne (1929-)
Michael Redhead was born in London on 30
December 1929. He was educated at
Westminster School and at University College
London, where he gained a BSc in physics in
1950. He then pursued a career in the family
business of estate management until returning
to academic work in 1968. In 1970 he obtained

a PhD in mathematical physics from University
College London; his thesis was on 'The
Quantum Theory of Electron-Electron and
Positron-Electron Collisions'. In 1971 he
became an elected member of the Institute of
Physics. He attended a postgraduate course on
the history and philosophy of science at Chelsea
College London in 1972. In 1982 he was
elected a fellow of the Institute of Physics. From
1974 to 1985 Redhead held various research
and teaching positions at Chelsea College
London, then in 1985 he was made Professor
of Philosophy of Physics and Head of the
Department of History and Philosophy of
Science at King's College London, where he
stayed for two years before being made Head
of History and Philosophy of Science at
Cambridge, from whom he obtained his MA in
1987; he was then made Chairman of the
Department in 1993, returning to his previous
position as Head in 1995 for another year. In
1988 he was elected a fellow of Wolfson
College, Cambridge, and then in 1989 of the
Cambridge Philosophical Society, and in 1991
of the British Academy. In 1992 he was elected
Vice-President of Wolfson College, Cambridge,
and in 2000 was elected a fellow of King's
College London. Having been a visiting fellow
there in 1994, in 1998 he settled at the London
School of Economics as Acting Director of the
Centre of the Philosophy of Natural and Social
Science, where he was made a centennial pro-
fessor in 1999, and has stayed up to the present
day as visiting professor and Co-Director of the
Centre. He has been a consulting editor and on
the advisory panel of many journals, among
them Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science and British journal for the Philosophy
of Science.
Redhead is perhaps best known for his con-
tributions to philosophical debates over
quantum mechanics, which has transformed
debate within philosophical theories of causa-
tion, the Copenhagen Interpretation rejecting
determinism within physics. Einstein and POPPER
objected to the Copenhagen Interpretation,
believing it incompatible with realism. The great
865
REDHEAD
success of quantum mechanics therefore needed
to be accommodated within an alternative
system, such as simple alternatives where each
electron follows its own definite path through
one slit or another in the two-slit experiment,
the wave function simply specifying the relative
fractions that may be expected to take paths
ending in each region of the screen. Redhead,
with Incompleteness, Nonlocality and Realism:
A Prolegomenon to the Philosophy of
Quantum Mechanics (1987), helped to rule
out such a simple type of realistic interpretation,
proving it to be inconsistent with the features
of the mathematical representation of dynam-
ical quantities in the theory and with the pre-
sumption that the state of a quantum system
cannot be directly influenced by that which
takes place far away from its location. Einstein
had clarified the assumption that a distant mea-
surement could not affect the state of a particle.
The assumption can be separated into two
assumptions, 'locality' and 'separability'. Bohr,
however, maintained the completeness
argument, and Bell experimentally tested Bohr's
convictions, setting up a similar experiment to
Einstein's. He found it to imply predictions
that conflicted with those of quantum mechan-
ics. Redhead's verification of the quantum
mechanical predictions has provided evidence
that either locality or separability is false, the
veracity of the Copenhagen Interpretation
remaining in doubt, however. Another inter-
esting and important debate that Redhead
engages in, along with van Fraassen and his col-
laborator Teller, is that of identity and indi-
viduation, yet another field revolutionized by
quantum mechanics. The exchange of two par-
ticles of the same kind in classical mechanics
made a numerically distinct but qualitatively
identical state. Electrons are one kind of
particle, photons another kind. These kinds
come in two varieties: bosons and fermions.
Electrons are fermions, photons are bosons.
When two bosons' roles are exchanged the
wave function of a system of bosons is
unchanged. However, for fermions within the
same situation the wave function does change,
REDHEAD
whilst not affecting the probabilities it predicts.
So in both cases the exchange of particles
appears not to change the state, reflected in
equilibrium probabilities of states. As a result,
Redhead and his colleagues wonder if elec-
trons are genuine individuals, in which case
exchanging two such individuals should result
in numerical distinction, but both quantum
mechanical description and observed statistics
seem to indicate to the contrary, so it appears
that they are not individuals, suggesting many
philosophical dilemmas. Within Redhead's
From Physics to Metaphysics, consisting of his
1993 Tamer Lectures at Cambridge, he
defends his own kind of realism, whilst assert-
ing that physics in all its continuing richness
provides a constantly rich resource to meta-
physics. Redhead has a lot in common with
Bohm, who rejected the Copenhagen
Interpretation's claim to completeness, in
favour of a complex realism relying on the
changes of particle position being produced
by a physical force generated by a field
described by the wave function of the entire
system of which the particle is a part. Redhead
wrote Bohm's obituary in Nature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Incompleteness, Nonlocality and Realism: A
Prolegomenon to the Philosophy of
Quantum Mechanics (Oxford, 1987).
'David Bohm', Nature, vol. 360 (1992), p.
107.
(with P. Teller), 'Particle Labels and the
Theory of Indistinguishable Particles in
Quantum Mechanics', British Journal for
the Philosophy of Science, vol. 43 (1992),
pp. 201-18.
From Physics to Metaphysics (Cambridge,
1995),
Other Relevant Works
'Logic, Quanta and the Two-Slit
Experiment', in Peter Clark and Bob Hale
(eds), Reading Putnam (Oxford, 1994).
'Popper and the Quantum Theory', in
Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Karl Popper:
866
Philosophy and Problems (Cambridge,
1995).
Andrew Aitken
REES, David Arthur (1922-2003)
D.A. Rees was born in Leicester on 18 February
1922 and died in Oxford on 11 November
2003. He was educated at Wyggeston Boys
Grammar School in Leicester and at Merton
College, Oxford. He graduated BA in 1945
and DPhil in 1953, with a thesis on the
meaning and purpose of Aristotle's division of
faculties in the soul. He was assistant in the
Department of Moral Philosophy in Aberdeen
(1946-8) before moving to the Department of
Philosophy at the University of North Wales,
Bangor, where he was assistant lecturer
(1948-50) before being promoted lecturer
(1951) and then senior lecturer (1954). He was
appointed fellow and tutor at Jesus College,
Oxford as well as university lecturer in philos-
ophy in 1954. He was subsequently senior tutor
(1959-72) and Vice-Principal (1971-2) of the
college. After his retirement in 1987 he was
made an emeritus fellow.
Rees did not publish any books of his own,
but did do much to bring to press the classical
scholarship of others. Most substantial of these
works were two by A.S.L. Farquharson.
Following Farquharson's death, Rees edited
Farquharson's typescript of his life of Marcus
Aurelius, and also completed Farquharson's
two-volume translation and commentary on
Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. Although he
is not acknowledged in the publication details
for this work, John Sparrow, in his brief
Introduction, singles out Rees's tireless work in
bringing Farquharson's edition to press. Rees
also edited for publication H.H. JOACHIM'S
lectures on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and
provided an Introduction to a reprint of James

Adam's commentary on Plato's Republic. In
that Introduction Rees is critical of much of,
what he believes to be, Adam's dated scholar-
ship. He does, however, argue that this criti-
cism, and the many criticisms of others that he
lists, merely shows the quality of the debate that
Adam's edition fostered in Platonic scholarship.
In the 1950s and 1960s Rees also published
a series of articles on contemporary moral phi-
losophy. Many of these were first given as
addresses to the Aristotelian Society. In these he
criticizes the affect that contemporary linguis-
tic philosophy has on moral discourse. He is
especially critical of what he believes to be the
philosophical limitations of G.E. MOORE'S 'nat-
uralistic fallacy'. Lying behind these criticisms
is a desire in Rees to establish the logical coher-
ence of theological premises in moral debate, a
relationship that Moore had claimed to
disprove with his 'naturalistic fallacy'. In his
article on The Ethics of Divine Commands'
(1956-7) Rees openly states that he wishes to
'take more seriously ... the idea of a specifically
theistic morality' (p. 106). Kai Nielsen, in an
article published in Mind in 1961, attacks Rees
for attempting to make the link between
morality and religion. Although acknowledging
the coherence of Rees's thought, Nielsen argues
that it goes against the essential logic of moral
philosophy. Nielsen argues that Rees in this
manner has more in common with the German
'Crisis Theologians' such as Karl Earth, and
Rudolf Bultmann than he does with contem-
porary moral philosophy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
(Comm. by H.H. Joachim, ed. D.A. Rees),
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
(Oxford, 1951).
(Ed.), Farquharson, A.S.L., Marcus Aurelius:
His Life and his Works (Oxford, 1951).
'The Ethics of Divine Commands',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
57 (1956-7), pp. 83-106.
(Intro.), Plato, The Republic of Plato, ed.
James Adam, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1963).
867
REID
Other Relevant Works
Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations of the
Emperor Marcus Aurelius, ed. and trans.
A.S.L. Farquharson, 2 vols (Oxford, 1944).
Nielsen, Kai, 'Some Remarks on the
Independence of Morality from Religion',
Mind, vol. 70 (1961), pp. 175-86.
Benjamin Carter
REID, Louis Arnaud (1895-1986)
Louis Arnaud Reid was born in Elton on 18
February 1895 and died in London on 26
January 1986. He studied philosophy at the
University of Edinburgh and held lectureships,
first at Aberystwyth, then Liverpool, between
1919 and 1926. From 1932 to 1947 he was
Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at
Armstrong College, Newcastle. In 1947 he
became the first Professor of Philosophy of
Education at the Institute of Education in the
University of London. He remained in that post
until his retirement in 1962, devoting great
energy to the development of theories of edu-
cation, and to encouraging the nurture of the
aesthetic sensibilities of the young. As professor
emeritus at the London Institute, he continued
to teach and write, remained an active member
of the British Society of Aesthetics, and main-
tained a close and staunchly supportive involve-
ment with the Philosophy of Education Society
of Great Britain.
In addition to the philosophy of education,
Reid's major concerns were knowledge, belief,
truth and aesthetic meaning. In Knowledge and
Truth (1923) he set out a 'new realist' theory of
knowledge, positing the thesis that knowing
something is not passive but is an activity that
enables the mind to apprehend a 'given'. Truth,
he held, is attained when one knows reality as
it actually is. In A Study in Aesthetics (1931) he
developed these ideas in relation to art and
REID
morality and traced connections between art,
truth and beauty. His Meaning in the Arts
(1969) brought together many of the topics he
had explored over the years in papers and
lectures, and confirmed him not only as a
vigorous force in the philosophy of education
but also as a notable contributor to the mid-
twentieth-century movement that established
philosophical aesthetics as a distinct and sig-
nificant study in British universities. His last
book, Ways of Understanding and Education
(1986), was published when he was ninety.
Reid rejected a view, quite widely held in
educational circles, that art was simply a
vehicle for self-expression. In its place he for-
mulated a theory that recognized the com-
plexity of aesthetic experience, that regarded
it as a special kind of non-propositional
knowledge, and that had important implica-
tions for educational practice in the arts.
Central to his account were the claims, first,
that aesthetic meaning is sui generis, and
second, that it is inseparable from the form in
which it is embodied. On this view, to ask,
when seeking strictly aesthetic meaning, 'What
does this work of art (a poem, music, picture,
etc.) express?' is to ask an illegitimate
question, because, Reid maintained, a work's
aesthetic meaning is properly apprehended
only through attention to its embodiment.
This did not mean that expression does not
enter into art, and Reid did not want to
abolish it from discourse on or consideration of
art. He held that the question about expression
could be entirely legitimate; for instance, when
talking about art, and in pondering the subject-
matter or life-context of a work. In such
contexts, questions as to what an artist was
trying to express might legitimately arise; but
this, he argued, was a matter distinct from the
sui generis character he wished to ascribe to the
apprehension of aesthetic meaning.
Reid regarded embodiment as a defining
characteristic of the aesthetic in art. He wrote
'in the achievement of the aesthetic in art,
expression is absorbed into and transformed in
emergent embodiment' ('Education and
868
Aesthetic Meaning', p. 273); arid 'Embodiment,
meaning-embodied, is a new thing, a fiat, a
creation, a fresh existential entity in which
formed-body is only conceptually (and not in
aesthetic experience itself) distinguishable from
its meaning' (p. 273)
His account of embodiment invites questions
about the relationship in which it stands to
accounts of art that speak of the symbolic
nature of art. Following Susanne Langer, Reid
investigated the distinction made between the
symbol in art and the art symbol, pointing out
that, on the one hand, works of art may contain
ordinary, referential, symbolic meanings in
which the symbol, a word or a shape, say, is
separable from its meaning; and that, on the
other hand, the work of art is itself sometimes
spoken of as a symbol, the art symbol. Where
symbols are used as components in a work,
attention is often drawn to them by those who
talk about art, and Reid, upholding his funda-
mental distinction already described, writes:
'This intellectual consideration is a different
moment of experience from the aesthetic or
artistic moment; but though it has its dangers,
it need in no way conflict with aesthetic and
artistic experience ... when truly assimilated, it
enriches subsequent experiences, and illumi-
nates the experience' ('Symbolism in Art',
p. 190). When we find aesthetic meaning in a
work containing a symbol, it is, he says, trans-
formed or freshly created in the medium as a
new individual. In short, it is not something in
which meaning and symbol are separable, but
instead is an embodied meaning. From this
Reid concludes that it was a mistake on
Susanne Langer's part to speak, as she did in
her early writings, of the work of art as 'a
symbol' or of its parts as 'symbols', because 'a
symbol ... is a means to the apprehension of
something else, and a work of art is a self-
complete individual, contemplatively enjoyed
for its own sake' (Symbolism in Art, p. 191). In
his paper 'Susanne Langer and Beyond' (1965)
Reid scrutinized Langer's later, revised account
of 'the art symbol', and found himself in
complete agreement with her view that

although the arts use symbols in enriching
ways, it is not as symbols that they function
within art. They become elements in the
organic forms of art and their import, or
meaning, within art remains sui generis.
Reid held that the talk of criticism and the
talk of philosophical aesthetics were two very
different activities, each autonomous in its own
function, but also interdependent and comple-
mentary in certain respects. Aestheticians, he
observed, work to elucidate concepts and for-
mulate generalizations, but are dependent on
the language of criticism for much of their data.
Critics, in their talk of the arts, make assump-
tions that are bastion to their particular claims,
but which it is the task of the aesthetician to
analyse and question. Critics, he urged, need to
be sensitive to the conceptual assumptions they
make, and aestheticians must be able to expe-
rience works of art in the ways that critics expe-
rience them. The categories and generalizations
posited by aestheticians are not arbitrary or
external to the works to which they are applied,
for they arise from particular experiences of
art. Additionally, there is the fact that art is con-
stantly changing, constantly challenging the
fixity of hitherto accepted categories, and con-
stantly demanding a continual perceptual
openness on the part of its percipients. Reid
concludes that The philosopher, properly
starting from aesthetic experience, goes back,
through criticism, to attempted universalisa-
tion, or generalisation ... For the critic, the pull
is towards the work, and this being so, he may
forget his linkage with ideas that lie beyond the
work' ('On Talking About the Arts', p. 326).
In asserting that experience of art constitutes
a kind of knowing, Reid had to confront an
epistemological position which required that
anything that was to count as knowledge must
be able to be formulated propositionally. But,
in fact, he at no point wished to argue that the
knowledge he was positing for the experience
of art could be stated in the kinds of proposi-
tions associated with the sciences and similar
studies; for that, he said, would simply force
aesthetic knowledge 'into a mould which
869
REID
cannot contain it'. Science, he said, is essentially
propositional, but art is essentially non-propo-
sitional. Propositions of all kinds enter into
talk about art, but they are auxiliary to the
experience of art and are not the talk o/art, not
intrinsic to it in the way in which propositions
are the talk of, and intrinsic to, science. The
knowledge derived from the aesthetic experi-
ence of art is knowledge that is intuitive; it is
'intuition enriched by propositional and other
kinds of thinking, but is not in itself preposi-
tional ... art-experience is in an important sense
ineffable' ('Education and Aesthetic Meaning',
p. 277). For Reid, just as aesthetic experience
is sui generis, so is the particular kind of knowl-
edge that the experience yields sui generis. It is
also more than knowledge of other kinds. He
wrote: 'knowledge of art ... is knowledge in
which the whole embodied person participates
by being as well as knowing. It is knowledge in
which embodied imaginative being is an essen-
tial part of the knowing' (ibid., p. 279).
During the last thirty years of his life Reid's
views on the necessity and efficacy of a serious
programme of art education, along with those
of Harold OSBORNE and Sir Herbert READ,
were impacting fruitfully on educational theory
and practice. Reid was involved as consultant
with the working party that produced the ideas
and proposals enshrined in The Arts in Schools
(1982), and also with the exploratory work of
the Assessment of Performance Unit's Aesthetic
Development (1983). He died ten days before
he was to speak at the inauguration seminar of
the Confederation for Arts Education.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Knowledge and Truth (1923).
A Study in Aesthetics (1931).
Creative Morality (1937).
Preface to Faith (1939).
Ways of Knowledge and Experience (Oxford,
1961).
'Symbolism in Art', British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 1, no. 3 (June 1961), pp.
185-91.
Philosophy and Education (1962).
REID
'Art, Truth and Reality', British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 4, no. 4 (October 1964),
pp. 321-31.
'Susanne Langer and Beyond5, British Journal
of Aesthetics, vol. 5, no. 4 (October 1965),
pp. 357-67.
'On Talking about the Arts', Philosophy, vol.
41, no. 158 (October 1966), pp. 320-32.
'Education and Aesthetic Meaning', British
Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 9, no. 3 (July
1969), pp. 271-84.
Meaning in the Arts (New York, 1969).
Ways of Understanding and Education
(1986).
Other Relevant Works
'A Reply to Mr Morris-Jones', British Journal
of Aesthetics, vol. 2, no. 1 (January 1962),
pp. 67-9.
Osborne, Harold, Obituary, British Journal
of Aesthetics, vol. 26, no. 4 (Autumn
1986), pp. 309-10.
Further Reading
Morris-Jones, H., Review of Reid, L.A., of
Knowledge and Experience, British Journal
of Aesthetics, vol. 1, no. 4 (September
1961), pp. 280-82.
Ross, Malcolm, 'Louis Arnaud Reid', British
Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 27, no. 2 (Spring
1987), pp. 101-103.
Diane Collinson
REYBURN, Hugh Adam (1886-1950)
Hugh A. Reyburn was born in Leven, Fife on 29
July 1886 and died in Cape Town on 12
November 1950. He studied at the University of
Glasgow - where his teachers included Robert
LATTA and Henry JONES - receiving his MA (first
class, mental philosophy, 1909) and several
prizes and honours (Scott Scholarship, 1908;
870
Ferguson Scholarship for Scotland, 1909; Logan
Medal and Prize). He later received a DPhil
(1914) and an LL D (1948) from Glasgow. In
1909 Reyburn was appointed assistant to Jones,
the Professor of Moral Philosophy, but also
lectured at the Normal College in Glasgow
(1911). He succeeded R.F.A. HOERNLE in 1912
as Professor of Philosophy at the South African
College (later, the University of Cape Town).
Soon after arriving at Cape Town, Reyburn
sought the 'emancipation [of psychology] from
philosophy' and, in 1920, had the Chair of
Philosophy divided. Reyburn became Professor
of Logic and Psychology - and logic was taught
by a specially-appointed lecturer, W.C. Eales.
Reyburn expanded the place of psychology at
the university, was active in psychological
research, authored the first psychology textbook
in South Africa, and was a leading figure in uni-
versity affairs and intellectual culture. He had a
stroke in 1937, from which he recovered, but
which affected his lecturing; nevertheless, he
remained active in research until his death.
Reyburn's early work addressed central
issues in philosophical idealism. His 1916 'The
Ego-Centric Predicament' defended idealism
against the attacks of Ralph Barton Perry and,
in 'Idealism and the Reality of Time' (1913) he
challenged Bernard BOSANQUET'S and J.M.E.
McTAGGART's 'subjectivist' account of time for
excluding succession in the Absolute and not
adequately presenting finite individuality.
In 1921 a revised version of his doctorate
thesis, The Ethical Theory of Hegel, appeared.
One of Reyburn's aims was to show Hegel's
'social philosophy' as an introduction to his
system as a whole. The volume reflected a
prewar approach to Hegel's ethics and politics,
but did not take into account contemporary
challenges to Hegelianism, and ignored such
issues as art and religion.
By 1919 Reyburn's interests had shifted to
philosophical psychology. In 'Mental Processes'
(1919) he insisted that metaphysical psychology
must be able to serve as a 'working hypothesis',
and attacked Samuel ALEXANDER'S account of
mind. Later studies moved increasingly towards

the empirical. His 1924 Introduction to
Psychology exhibited a broad 'behaviourist'
account - though it did not deny consciousness
or the data of introspection - and mental
processes were described from a functional per-
spective. Many of the themes of his later
research are anticipated in this volume.
Through the 1930s and 1940s Key burn
worked on personality psychology, child devel-
opment and the measurement of intelligence.
Yet he maintained a lively interest in intellectual
history, economics and politics, and was the
first editor (1932-6) of The Critic, a literary
and cultural quarterly.
Reyburn was also the author of the first
detailed biography of Nietzsche in English
(1948). Here he examines Nietzsche's philoso-
phy from a study of his personality revealed in
his writings - though he was criticized by Karl
Lowith for overemphasizing Nietzsche's psy-
chological motivations and for missing
Nietzsche's call to 'overcome abstract morality'.
While Reyburn's legacy is not primarily in
philosophy, he was an influential figure in
South African intellectual life, and his turn to
psychology was characteristic of several
idealist-trained philosophers of the period.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Ethical Theory of Hegel: A Study of the
Philosophy of Right (Oxford, 1921).
An Introduction to Psychology (Cape Town,
1924).
(with H.E. Hinderks and J.G. Taylor),
Friedrich Nietzsche; ein Menschenleben
und seine Philosophie (Kempen, 1946); in
English, Nietzsche: The Story of a Human
Philosopher (1948).
Other Relevant Works
'Idealism and the Reality of Time', Mind, vol.
22 (1913), pp. 493-508.
The Ego-Centric Predicament', Mind, vol. 25
(1916), pp. 365-74.
'Mental Processes', Mind, vol. 28 (1919), pp.
19-40.
(with M.J. Raath), 'Primary Factors of
871
RHEES
Personality', British Journal of Psychology,
vol. 3 (1950), pp. 150-58.
Further Reading
Lowith, Karl, Review of Nietzsche: The Story
of a Human Philosopher, Philosophical
Review, vol. 59 (1950): 402.
Standard Encyclopaedia of Southern Africa
(Cape Town, 1970-79), vol. 9, p. 313.
William Sweet
RHEES, Rush (1905-89)
Rush Rhees was born in Rochester, USA on 19
March 1905 and died in Swansea on 22 May
1989. His great-grandfather, Morgan John
Rhys, a radical preacher and pamphleteer, fled
from Wales to America in 1794 to avoid pros-
ecution. Befriended by Benjamin Rush, a sig-
natory of the American Declaration of
Independence, he was helped to found a Welsh
colony in the Alleghenies. Such was Rhys's
admiration for Benjamin Rush that he named
his second son Benjamin Rush Rhees (the
surname changed after emigration). The history
of the family is to be found in John Rothwell
Slater's Rhees of Rochester, a biography of
Rhees's father who was President of the
University of Rochester, New York.
Rhees received his early education at
Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut.
From 1922 to 1924 he was a student at his
father's university, but was expelled from a
philosophy class by Professor George M.
Forbes for a radicalism which presumed to
refute everything. The story made the New
York Times. Rhees was reported as saying, 'I
am radical. Dr Forbes is not. That is why I am
debarred ... From a Puritan I have revolted
into an atheist.' President Rhees was away at
the time. He returned to find that his son had
left America.
RHEES
From America, Rhees went to Edinburgh,
where Norman KEMP SMITH and A.E. TAYLOR
were professors. In a letter to Baron von Hugel,
Kemp Smith described Rhees as 'a very pic-
turesque youth ... like the young Shelley ...
[who] aspires to be a poet'. The main influence
on Rhees, however, was John ANDERSON, who
was to become Challis Professor at Sydney.
Anderson's influence in social philosophy was
to be a lasting one. In 1928 Rhees graduated
with first class honours, and in the same year
was appointed assistant lecturer at Manchester,
where J.L. STOCKS was professor. In 1932-3
Rhees studied Brentano's theory of relations
and its bearing on issues concerning continuity,
with Alfred Kastil at Innsbruck. He continued
visiting Kastil in Vienna up to 1937, and there
was a possibility of editorial involvement with
Brentano's work. In 1935 Kastil wrote, 'the
relation of teacher to pupil had become
inverted'. In 1933, however, Rhees had gone to
study with G.E. MOORE at Cambridge, extend-
ing his studies on continuity. In 1936 he
informed Moore that he would not be submit-
ting his dissertation for a PhD. Moore wrote of
their time together, 'even if it should turn out
to have been of no ultimate benefit to you ... it
has been of benefit to me'. It was at Cambridge
that Rhees met WITTGENSTEIN, and became one
of his closest friends. Rhees always called
Anderson, Kastil, and, above all, Wittgenstein,
his teachers.
In applications for jobs, there was a ludi-
crous gap between the high regard of referees,
such as Wittgenstein and Moore, and Rhees's
disparaging views of himself. He informed insti-
tutions that he had written nothing worthy of
publication, and that appointing him would
be a risk. In 1937 he was a temporary replace-
ment for Stocks at Manchester, but thereafter
worked as a welder in a factory. When Rhees
asked Wittgenstein what job he should take, he
was told, as were others, The one you dislike
most.' In 1940 Rhees answered an emergency
call from Swansea. Professor A.E. Heath's col-
leagues W.B. GALLIE and Karl BRITTON had
departed on war service. Rhees was to stay
872
there, refusing all promotion, until his early
retirement in 1966. He was joined by R.F.
HOLLAND (1950), Peter WINCH (1951) and J.R.
JONES (1952). Rhees's influence on all three
was farreaching, as it was on colleagues in
other departments, and on generations of
students. The four taught together until 1964,
and became known as the Swansea School of
Philosophy, or Swansea Wittgensteinians, as
did some of their successors. Leaving Swansea
for London, Rhees became a visiting professor
at King's College, where he enjoyed the
company of Peter Winch and Norman
Malcolm, amongst others. He returned to
Swansea late in life, becoming an honorary
professor and fellow of the college. He had
been the dominant voice at the weekly
Philosophical Society which he founded in
1940, but, although continuing to attend, his
diminishing energies were devoted to his weekly
graduate seminar. Discussion was his life. He
died within weeks of it becoming impossible.
Rhees published little during his lifetime,
devoting himself in the main to editing
Wittgenstein's work, and to correcting what
he took to be misunderstandings of it. His
editing included: Philosophical Investigations
(1953); Philosophical Grammar (1969);
'Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough* (1931-8);
Philosophical Remarks (1975); Remarks on
the Foundations of Mathematics (1956 and
1978); and The Blue and Brown Books (1958).
He was criticized for his editing of the second
and third, because he omitted passages from
Wittgenstein's original manuscript. Rhees indi-
cated that he was not ignoring agreed stan-
dards of editing, but challenging modern con-
ceptions of scholarship. He was certain that
Wittgenstein expected his literary executors to
make decisions. In making his, Rhees said that
his only guide was what he thought
Wittgenstein would have wanted.
Rhees had to be persuaded to publish
Without Answers (1969) and Discussions of
Wittgenstein (1970). In the latter he included
critical discussions of what he took to be mis-
understandings of the Tractatus. He empha-

sized that, like the Investigations, it is a work
in logic, not in epistemology. In the picture
theory of meaning, the relation between
language and the world is an internal one, like
the relation between a picture and what it rep-
resents, or between a musical score and the
music. The internal relation cannot be said,
but is shown in the picture. The internal
relation cannot be proved, for what would the
proof be? One cannot ask what the picture is
about, as one can with material propositions.
Rhees argues that it is a mistake to think, as
Max BLACK did, that the picture implies an
ontology, an ultimate nature in the world. The
picture relation is different from saying what is
true. There can be negative and affirmative
expressions of a proposition but, Rhees insists,
contra ANSCOMBE, that the sense of a proposi-
tion is the same whether it is true or false.
Otherwise, one would not know what is true or
false. A method of projection is what is meant
by thinking the sense of a proposition. Rhees
insists that 'reference' is not treated psycho-
logically in the Tractatus. Reference is not
secured, as George Pitcher thought, via a
mental act of intention by the speaker. Any
intention already presupposes a picture.
Rhees shows how Wittgenstein came to find
difficulties in his Tractatus position. The work
had begun with the truth and falsity of material
propositions, that is with questions of their
sense. Logic, for Wittgenstein, was not an
abstract, idealized language. Without material
propositions there would be no logic. Logical
analysis only makes clearer what is already
shown in material propositions. On the other
hand, Wittgenstein had thought that all propo-
sitions had a common form, and that a general
rule for the combination of all propositions
could be found in the general form of logical
operation. All propositions were said to be
truth functions of elementary propositions,
which were said to show their sense immedi-
ately without reference to any other proposi-
tions. But it proved difficult to give an example
of an elementary proposition. According to the
Tractatus, 'red' determines how it is to be
873
RHEES
understood. Rhees shows how Wittgenstein
came to see that this confuses a name with its
bearer, and confuses a sample with its use. One
cannot use the sample to explain what colour
the sample is; the sample cannot operate as a
primary sign. In knowing that something is
red, one knows that it is not green. The exclu-
sion of the latter is not like a logical inference
in a calculus; one must be able to discriminate
between colours. Rhees shows Wittgenstein
moving away from the metaphysical desire for
'completeness' in language to an appreciation
of different ways in which propositions hang
together in the grammars shown in the lives of
people.
In editing The Blue and Brown Books Rhees
shows how Wittgenstein urges us to move from
the general question 'What is meaning?' to the
explanations one would give to someone who
asks what a word means. This was part of
overcoming a contempt for the particular.
Rhees does not mean that Wittgenstein had
settled for a therapeutic conception of philos-
ophy, content to clear up confusions between
different forms of language. He is still con-
cerned with the possibility of discourse. In The
Blue Book, the different examples are meant to
be different instances of saying something. But
Wittgenstein came to see that offering expla-
nations presupposes that the person instructed
can speak already. That is why, in The Brown
Book, the emphasis is on training, rather on
explanation. What one is trained to do differs,
but they are not different ways of doing the
same thing. The variety stops one from looking
for the unadulterated form. The analogy
between games and language in the
Investigations is meant to make the same point.
Rhees came to think, however, that
Wittgenstein had allowed the analogy to run
away with him. Showing why led not only to
Rhees's critique of Wittgenstein's philosophy,
but also to his extension of his thought. This
had been expressed in Rhees's 'Without
Answers', but was made far more explicit in
Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse,
published posthumously (1998).
RHEES
Rhees's papers were purchased by Swansea,
after his death, through the A.E. Heath
Memorial Fund. They form the Rush Rhees
Archive of sixteen thousand pages of manu-
scripts of various kinds. To date, seven books
have been published from it.
In Wittgenstein and the Possibility of
Discourse, Rhees argued that in abandoning
the analogy between language and a calculus,
Wittgenstein threw out what was its good
aspect as well as its bad, namely the intercon-
nectedness between what we say. Wittgenstein
had said that language is a family of language
games, and that each game is complete in itself.
He even said that the order 'Slab', given by
one builder to another, could be the whole
language of a tribe. Rhees argued that this
would not be an account of language, or of
saying anything. While the emphasis on 'rule
following', 'going on in the same way' and
'continuing a series' is extremely important in
throwing light on teaching the meanings of
words, and on the expected response we take
for granted in doing so, it throws little light on
our daily discourse, especially if one thinks of
speaking as the mastery of techniques. Rhees
says that if we make 'conversation' central, we
see how inadequate that emphasis is. Do con-
versations go on in the same way? Are they a
matter of following rules, or of mastering tech-
niques? Rhees emphasizes the dialogical char-
acter of discourse, and the way in which a
child, initially, picks up the sense of things from
the conversations which surround it. Those
surroundings widen, as life progresses, but they
are not uniform for people either between or
within cultures. Rhees is not giving descrip-
tions of ways of living, since that is not what
one does in saying something to another
person. Nevertheless, what one says will belong
to forms of life in which different movements,
historical and political events, traditions, liter-
ature, music, art, religion, humour and people's
reactions bear on each other in innumerable
ways. It should be obvious that philosophy
cannot determine what these bearings will be.
Rhees's argument against the possibility of a
874
logically private language, in the famous sym-
posium with A.J. AYER, and his exposition of
the heterogeneity of ethics in Wittgenstein's
later views, both in Discussions of Wittgenstein,
are subordinate to these issues.
In Wittgenstein's 'On Certainty' (2003)
Rhees insists that Wittgenstein's discussions in
his last work are not a turn to epistemology,
but a renewal of logical issues which go back to
the 1930s. For Rhees, the work highlights the
bearings things have for us in our ordinary and
scientific dealings with empirical matters.
Wittgenstein calls these our world picture. The
world picture is no more the foundation of our
material dealings than the logical pictures of the
Tractatus, since it is the character of these
dealings which makes the world picture what
it is. A world picture is the element in which we
think. If certain facts are not: doubted or ques-
tioned, this is not because of the kind of facts
they are, but because, given the world picture,
it makes no sense to do so.
Rhees emphasizes that a world picture is not
an absolute conception of the world (the
Tractatus desire for 'completeness'). In
Investigations II xii, Wittgenstein says that we
can see, retrospectively, that if certain general
facts of nature were different, many of our
language-games could not have taken the form
they do. However, this does not mean that,
given these facts, language-games had to take
that form. For example, scientific interests need
not develop. Some people consulted oracles.
Rhees argues also that the fact that certain reac-
tions in our language-games are primitive and
prelinguistic does not show that they deter-
mined their form. What is essential is how the
reactions are taken up in the language-games.
Only then are they prototypes of thought. The
language-games are unpredictable. They are
there like our lives.
In Moral Questions (1999) Rhees criticizes
the desire for 'completeness' in moral theories.
He shows that although answers are sought in
moral perplexities, the elimination of 'the
personal' cannot do justice to the kind of
answers they are, or to the responsibility

involved in seeking them. In discussing issues
such as euthanasia, abortion, suicide, sexuality
and animals, Rhees does not provide answers,
but shows the conceptual spaces in which
serious answers are sought. These emphases
were already in Without Answers, in its criti-
cisms of scientism, its discussions of political
values and of the kind of understanding art
affords.
In On Religion and Philosophy (1997) Rhees
contrasts the bearings religion has on human
life with what philosophers make of them. In
essays both critical and appreciative of religion
Rhees shows what a mixed phenomenon it is.
Through his own difficulties, he explores the
reality shown in religious language. The inter-
weaving of the personal and the impersonal
presents us with essays unrivalled since
Kierkegaard. Here, as in his Discussions of
Simone Weil (1999), Rhees explores both the
depths and dangers in the desire sacrificially to
become 'nothing' before God.
Rhees was a wonderful teacher. Whatever
the topic, he conveyed a sense of the unity of
philosophy. This was evident in his teaching of
Greek philosophy. In volume 1 of In Dialogue
with the Greeks, The Presocratics and Reality
(2004), he shows connections between attempts
to explain 'the nature of all things', and issues
concerning logic and language. In the second
volume, Plato and Dialectic, there are parallels
with Wittgenstein and the Possibility of
Discourse. Through discussions of Plato's
major dialogues, Rhees contrasts Socrates'
constant search for understanding, and Plato's
emphasis on dialogue, with the latter's desire
for 'completeness' in an absolute conception of
reality.
In the 1940s Rhees told Wittgenstein that
he was thinking of joining the Socialist
Trotskyite Party. He had contributed to the
journal Freedom. Wittgenstein dissuaded him,
saying that membership of a party would tempt
him to refrain from philosophical criticism of it.
More than anyone else, Rhees appreciated
Wittgenstein's desire to teach us differences.
But, like Wittgenstein, he saw that these are not
875
RHEES
like differences in preferences for the games we
play. They are differences in the lives we lead.
Along with the proximities between us, they
were a source of that wonder in Rhees that he
thought so essential to philosophy as he knew
it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Ed. with G.E.M Anscombe), Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
(Oxford, 1953).
(Ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and
Brown Books (Oxford, 1958).
(Ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Grammar (Oxford, 1969).
Without Answers, ed. D.Z. Phillips (1969).
Discussions of Wittgenstein (1970).
(Ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Remarks (Oxford, 1975).
'The Fundamental Problems of Philosophy',
ed. Timothy Tessin, Philosophical
Investigations, vol. 17, no. 4 (October,
1994), pp. 573-86.
'On Editing Wittgenstein', ed. D.Z. Phillips,
Philosophical Investigations, vol. 19, no. 1
(January, 1996), pp. 55-61.
On Religion and Philosophy, ed. with an
Introduction by D.Z. Phillips assisted by
Mario von der Ruhr (Cambridge, 1997).
Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse,
ed. with an Introduction by D.Z. Phillips
(Cambridge, 1998).
Discussions of Simone Weil, ed. by D.Z.
Phillips assisted by Mario von der Ruhr
(New York, 1999).
Moral Questions, ed. with an Introduction
by D.Z. Phillips (Basingstoke, 1999).
'On Wittgenstein', ed. D.Z. Phillips,
Philosophical Investigations, vol. 24, no. 2
(April 2001), pp. 153-162.
Wittgenstein's 'On Certainty', ed. with an
Afterword by D.Z. Phillips (Oxford,
2003).
In Dialogue with the Greeks, vol. 1, The
Presocratics and Reality, ed. with an
Introduction by D.Z. Phillips (Aldershot,
2004).
RHEES
In Dialogue with the Greeks, vol. 2, Plato
and Dialectic, ed. with an Introduction by
D.Z. Phillips (Aldershot, 2004).
Other Relevant Works
Anon., Independent, 3 July 1989.
Slater, John Rothwell, Rhees of Rochester
(New York and London, 1946).
D.Z. Phillips
RICHARDS, Ivor Armstrong (1893-1979)
Ivor Armstrong Richards was born in
Sandbach, Cheshire on 26 February 1893 and
died in Cambridge on 7 September 1979. He
was educated at Clifton College near Bristol
and Magdelene College, Cambridge, where he
studied under such diverse thinkers as the
logician W.E. JOHNSON, the Common sense'
realist G.E. MOORE, and the Hegelian idealist
J.M.E. McTAGGART. He had initially enrolled
as a history undergraduate, but he quickly
decided that the subject, 'a record of things
which ought not to have happened', did not suit
him. He switched over to moral sciences and
received first class honours in 1915, but was
forced to leave Cambridge that same year on
account of his poor health. After recuperating
from a bout of tuberculosis, during which he
developed an early interest in language, he
returned to Cambridge in 1918 to pursue
medicine. He intended his medical studies to be
a preparation for training in psychoanalysis.
But the Cambridge philosophy of the day (espe-
cially the work of G.E. Moore and Bertrand
RUSSELL) had a profound impact on him.
Though he was a philosopher by training,
Richards was invited to take up one of the first
posts in English at Cambridge University,
where the English school was founded in 1917.
From 1919 to 1922 he taught on the theory of
criticism, rhetoric and the modern novel. In
876
1922 he was appointed lecturer in English and
moral sciences at Magdelene College, where
he was elected to a fellowship in 1926. He
soon began to travel extensively and made his
first visit to China in 1927. In 1929 he was
appointed visiting professor at: the University of
Tsing Hua in China. He left China in 1930
and was a visiting lecturer at Harvard in 1931.
In 1939 he accepted a position at Harvard
University, where he taught until 1963. In 1944
Harvard conferred on him an Hon. LittD and
in the same year he was appointed professor. In
1963 he became professor emeritus. He
returned to Cambridge in 1974. In 1979 he
made a final lecture tour of China, in the course
of which he fell ill. He returned to Cambridge,
where he died in September 1979.
Richards was a prolific, versatile thinker. He
made significant contributions to semantics,
aesthetics, literary theory, translation studies
and linguistic pedagogy, though he is best
known in philosophy for his work on seman-
tics and literary aesthetics, Richards's early
work was partly driven by dissatisfaction with
existing theories of art and language. He
rejected the metaphysics of the nineteenth-
century British idealists (BRADLEY, Green and
McTaggart), late nineteenth-century aesthetics
and abstract formalism. He carried out various
frontal attacks on Benedetto Croce's idealism
and expressionist theory of art and Roger FRY'S
theory of aesthetic emotion. His earliest publi-
cations were philosophical papers in aesthetics
(notably 'Art and Science', 'Emotion and Art',
'Four Fermented Aesthetics', 'The Instruments
of Criticism: Expression', all published in
1919). The method used in his first book, The
Foundations of Aesthetics (1922), co-authored
with his friend C.K. OGDEN and the painter
James Wood, reflected these concerns and
applied the kind of definitional analysis which
Ogden and Richards were developing at the
time. Their claim was that people have meant
a considerable variety of things by Beauty and
that the Moorean technique of multiple defin-
ition might be usefully applied to the analysis
of sixteen theories of beauty, including objec-

tivism, social usefulness and imitation. The
authors singled out 'the theory of Beauty par
excellence', 'synaes thesis'. The term derived
from a psychological model of aesthetic value
and was meant to denote the state of equilib-
rium and harmony brought about by the satis-
faction of the maximum number of impulses,
a complete engagement of our personality and
self. Their theory of value defined positive
impulses as 'appentencies' and considered
anything that contributed to the satisfaction of
such impulses to be good or valuable:
'Equilibrium brings into play all our faculties ...
Through no other experience can the full
richness and complexity of our environment be
realised. The ultimate value of equilibrium is
that it is better to be fully than partially alive'
(Foundations of Aesthetics, p. 91).
In philosophy of language Richards is best
known for The Meaning of Meaning (1923),
co-authored with C.K. Ogden, in part a critical
response to the Cambridge neo-realist analytic
school (G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell). In
Richards's view, Moore's refusal to fully
espouse empirical realism, signalled by his
appeal to the intuitive faculty, merely reflected
the limits of traditional philosophy, 'a curious
survival of abstractionism', an unfortunate
return to Vague philosophical speculations'
that supported 'bogus entities'. A provocative
critique of hypostasis (reification), 'Word-
Magic' ('the superstition that words are in some
way parts of things or always imply things cor-
responding to them', p. 14) and the 'Proper
Meaning Superstition' (which downplays the
fundamental ambiguity of language), The
Meaning of Meaning introduced a causal
account of meaning that provided the basis for
a 'science of symbolism'. Symbolism was
defined as 'the study of the part played in
human affairs by language and symbols of all
kinds, and especially their influence on thought.
It singles out for special inquiry the ways in
which symbols help us and hinder us in reflect-
ing on things' (The Meaning of Meaning, p. 1).
Their semantic model combined pragmatism
(the semiotics of C.S. Peirce and the philo-
877
RICHARDS
sophical psychology of William James), behav-
iourist psychology (B.F. Skinner, J.B. Watson,
James WARD, G.F. STOUT, and the neurophys-
iologist C.S. SHERRINGTON) and linguistics.
They engaged with the work of Ludwig
Wittgenstein and Ferdinand de Saussure, and
their views on the relations between thought,
sign and reality. Again one of the strongest
influences was Moore's technique of multiple
definition, which they used to analyse twenty-
two meanings of 'meaning'. The motivation
was the thought that clarity about meaning
would help in getting clear about the proper
scope of philosophical enquiry, the nature and
uses of language, and the conditions of suc-
cessful communication.
The Triangle of Interpretation' at the centre
of the model was designed to clarify the relation
between thought and language, and contained
three basic elements: symbol (noun), reference
(or thought) and referent. The central claim
was that words carry out functions in context
and that meaning is therefore largely context-
dependent. Since the context is reducible to an
analysis in physical and psychological terms, a
perfected semiotics could in principle give an
exhaustive description of the context of a
sentence. The model was initially refined with
the introduction of five linguistic functions: the
referential function, the emotive function, the
expression of a sense of a relation to an
audience, the attitude of the speaker to the
object of discussion, and the general intention
of the utterance. However, their main concern
was a different, and in their view more urgently
needed, means of analysing language that
involved a distinction between two kinds of
meaning. The 'referential' (symbolic, cognitive)
use of language corresponds to the strictest sci-
entific or expository use of prose, and referen-
tial utterances are required to express the
validity and coherence of their references,
whereas the 'emotive' use of language serves to
convey or elicit feelings and attitudes, and thus
to cause adjustments to the emotional state of
a reader or listener. This fundamental
dichotomy laid the ground for Richards's sub-
RICHARDS
sequent work on the semantics and interpreta-
tion of literature. In J.O. URMSON's view, the
book provided 'the earliest statement of the
emotive theory of value in the modern British-
American tradition' (p. 15). It prefigured sub-
sequent work in epistemology (notably AJ.
AYER'S Language, Truth and Logic), ethics (in
particular C.L. Stevenson's Ethics and
Language) and, more generally, the rise of
logical positivism. The book also remains an
important landmark study in the development
of philosophical semantics and pragmatics.
The cognitive/emotive distinction underlies
many of the central arguments of Richards's
first non-collaborative work, Principles of
Literary Criticism (1924). Here Richards for-
mulated a psychological theory of literature
which held that literature is valuable since it is
a cause of valuable emotional states, thus
attempting to rehabilitate and justify the
reading of poetry. Poetry is one of the most
important manifestations of the emotive
function of language and the most valuable
emotive utterances are those which bring as
many of an individual's appetencies (interests or
desires) into as harmonious a balance as
possible. The function of the pseudo-statements
of poetry (a term made famous by the more
popular expression of similar views presented
in Science and Poetry, published in 1926) is to
organize and order the receptor's attitudes and
feelings. The value of poetry does not lie in the
truth of the propositions carried by poetic state-
ments, since ultimately these ought not to be
evaluated in terms of truth-conditions and thus
have no truth-value. Rather, the reading of
good poetry stimulates feelings and attitudes
and helps to bring about an equilibrium, a har-
monious interplay of conflicting impulses.
Richards did qualify his views on the role of
truth and reference in poetry, but the specific
nuances of the model, as well as the pragmatic
character of the cognitive/emotive distinction,
have been largely ignored by his critics. The
notion of pseudo-statement was partly intended
to solve the 'problem of belief, the question of
the role of truth and reference in poetic appre-
878
ciation and the connected issue of establishing
the proper role of belief in aesthetic evalua-
tion. Richards argued that although one might
disagree with statements of doctrine in a poem,
one can still appreciate the poem since such
statements are in fact pseudo-statements, and
poetic appreciation primarily involves the
affects, not intellectual or factual criteria.
Practical Criticism (1929) introduced the
method of close textual reading of poetry and
is one of the foremost contributions to the
emergence of modern literary criticism. The
book was based on an experiment he con-
ducted at Cambridge in which he distributed
unsigned and often unfamiliar poems to his
students every week and asked for their
written comments. He then offered detailed
analyses of approximately 400 responses and
drew up a list of the ten main obstacles in
reading, thus categorizing common faults
including 'stock responses', 'sentimentality',
'inhibition', 'doctrinal adhesions', 'technical
presuppositions' and 'general critical precon-
ceptions'. Following on from the fundamental
cognitive/emotive dichotomy and the logical
status of literary propositions defined by the
concept of pseudo-statement, Practical
Criticism insisted on the effects of literature
and the conditions for the proper reception
and appreciation of the text. Richards still
argued that the value of a poem depends on
the value of the feelings or attitudes stimulated
by the object and structure of belief in the
text, rather than the object of belief per se. The
book represents a fruitful attempt to combine
the earlier models with an experimental
empiricist method designed to clarify the
relation between the objective artwork and
the subjective response. Its emphasis on close
reading and careful linguistic analysis, coupled
with its practical appeal as a pedagogical tool,
made it one of the most influential contribu-
tions to modern critical practice. It also pre-
figured many of his later efforts to improve the
'channels' of communication and under-
standing. His early work had a decisive impact
on the rise of the formalist school of American

new criticism. In Britain his Cambridge
student William Empson extended the analysis
of poetic ambiguity in the seminal Seven Types
of Ambiguity (1930) and carried out a search-
ing philosophical critique of Richards's emo-
tivism in The Structure of Complex Words
(1951).
In the 1930s Richards further elaborated his
early ideas and made a number of significant
modifications to various aspects of his previous
models. In Mencius on the Mind (1932) he
offered multiple definitions of various
keywords in Mencius's psychological termi-
nology while insisting on the problems involved
in translating Chinese into English. Coleridge
on Imagination (1934) engaged with a charac-
teristically romantic conception of transcen-
dental metaphysics from the standpoint of
applied psychology. In The Philosophy of
Rhetoric (1936) and Interpretation in Teaching
(1938) he further developed the context
theorem, which relied on a principle of holism
stating that the meanings of words are never
determined individually (except in the strictest
technical language of certain sciences), but only
by their place and function in context. Richards
gradually moved away from his early attach-
ment to the basic tenets of logical positivism
and expanded on the contextualist theory of
interpretation. His work on semantic theory
after 1930 therefore maintained that meaning
cannot be analysed or reduced to propositional
form since the relevant context in any given
case is the entirety of the meanings, theories,
assumptions or beliefs current at the time or
determining the speaker's verbal disposition.
In this way, words acquire meaning or undergo
shifts of semantic implication through contex-
tual redefinition. In retrospect, this can be seen
to reflect near-contemporary developments in
philosophy of language and interpretation,
notably W.V.O. Quine's doctrines of meaning-
holism and ontological relativity.
The most influential work of this period,
The Philosophy of Rhetoric, introduced a new
rhetoric that would be the 'study of misunder-
standing and its remedies' and 'a philosophic
879
RICHARDS
inquiry into how words work in discourse'.
The old rhetoric had in his view done no more
than offer general rules to speakers who wished
to influence an audience. Richards argued that
the proper object of rhetoric is comprehension
rather than persuasion, the analysis of discourse
and the 'interinanimation' of words in context.
Some of the most influential arguments concern
his theory of metaphor, designed to clarify the
nature and structure of metaphor, in his view
a fundamental feature of thought and 'the
omnipresent principle of language' (Philosophy
of Rhetoric, p. 92). Setting out from the sub-
stitution or comparison models, he developed
an interaction theory of metaphor, maintaining
that the essence of metaphor lies in an interac-
tion between a metaphorical expression and
the context in which it is used. He defined
metaphor as 'the use of one reference to a group
of things between which a relation holds, for
the purpose of facilitating the discrimination of
an analogous relation in another group. In the
understanding of metaphorical language, one
reference borrows part of the context of
another in an abstract form' (Philosophy of
Rhetoric, p. 98). He construed a metaphor as
a double unit constituted by the tenor (the
'underlying idea' or 'principal subject') and the
vehicle (or 'figure'). The two halves of the
metaphor share some kind of common trait
that he called the ground. The meaning of the
metaphor is generated by the interaction
between the two basic elements that constitute
it. The theory was an extension of contextual-
ism since metaphor is defined as a 'transaction
between contexts' implied by the tenor and the
vehicle. Metaphorical meaning is generated by
an awareness that a word used as a metaphor
gains its meaning as we become aware of the
missing parts of the word's normal contexts.
The tenor/vehicle distinction subsequently
passed into critical currency.
From the 1930s onwards Richards enlarged
the scope of his pedagogic projects. He became
increasingly involved in C.K. Ogden's Basic
English project, and gradually moved away
from the more strictly philosophical themes of
RICHARDS
his earlier work. He published translations of
Plato's Republic and Homer's Iliad in Basic
English. The more urgent practical issues that
he turned to were nonetheless connected to his
more abstract theoretical and philosophical
inquiries, which had always been concerned
with the clarification and improvement of the
process of communication, and the role of
language and discourse in human understand-
ing. How to Read a Page (1942) is a study of
a hundred 'great words' (all belonging to Basic).
He also published Speculative Instruments
(1955) and Complementarities (1977). Late in
his career, Richards published four collections
of poetry and three verse plays. Internal
Colloquies: Poems and Plays, a collection of his
creative works, appeared in 1972.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(with C.K. Ogden and James Wood), The
Foundations of Aesthetics (1922).
(with C.K. Ogden), The Meaning of
Meaning: A Study of the Influence of
Language upon Thought and of the
Science of Symbolism (1923).
Principles of Literary Criticism (1924).
Science and Poetry (1926); 3rd edn, Poetries
and Sciences, with a Reorientation and
Notes (1970).
Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary
Judgement (1929).
Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in
Multiple Definition (1932).
Coleridge on Imagination (1934).
The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York,
1936).
Interpretation in Teaching (New York,
1938).
How to Read a Page: A Course in Efficient
Reading, with an Introduction to a One
Hundred Great Words (New York, 1942).
Basic English and its Uses (New York,
1943).
Speculative Instruments (Chicago, 1955).
Internal Colloquies: Poems and Plays (1972).
Beyond (1974).
Complementarities. Uncollected Essays, ed.
880
John Paul Russo (1977).
LA. Richards: Selected Works, 1919-1938,
ed. J. Constable, 10 vols (2001).
Further Reading
Russo, John Paul, 'A Bibliography of the
Books, Articles, and Reviews of LA.
Richards', in Brower et al. (eds), LA
Richards: Essays in his Honor.
Black, Max, Language and Philosophy:
Studies in Method (Ithaca, 1949).
Brower, R., J. Hollander and H. Vendler
(eds), LA. Richards: Essays in his Honor
(New York, 1973).
Empson, William, The Structure of Complex
Word (1951).
Hotopf, W.H.N., Language., Thought, and
Comprehension: A Case Study on the
Writings of LA. Richards (Bloomington,
Indiana, 1965).
Karnani, Chetan, LA Richards: A Critical
Assessment (New Delhi, 1989).
McCallum, Pamela, Literature and Method:
Towards a Critique of LA. Richards, T.S.
Eliot, and F.R. Leavis (Dublin, 1983).
Needham, John, 'The Completest Mode':
I. A.Richards and the Continuity of English
Criticism (Edinburgh, 1982).
Russo, John Paul, LA. Richards: His Life and
Work (Baltimore, 1989).
Schiller, J.P., LA. Richards's Theory of
Literature (New Haven, 1969).
Sharma, Rad Padarth, LA. Richards's Theory
of Language (New Delhi, 1979).
Shusterman, Ronald, Critique et poesie selon
LA. Richards: De la confiance positiviste
au relativisme naissant (Talence, 1988).
Urmson, J.O., The Emotive Theory of Ethics
(Oxford, 1969).
Robert Reay-Jones

RICHARDSON, Alan (1905-75)
Alan Richardson was born on 17 October
1905 and died in York on 23 February 1975.
He read philosophy at Liverpool University
(MA) and theology at Oxford (DD). He taught
theology at Oxford and Durham, and as
Professor of Christian Theology in the
University of Nottingham (1953-64). He then
became Dean of York. In 1973 he was made a
KBE (Knight Commander of the Order of the
British Empire). He was one of the most sig-
nificant and widely respected Anglican theolo-
gians of his day. Probably three distinctive
features mark his work.
Richardson's thought was notable, first, for
its sheer range. He was an influential biblical
scholar, especially of the New Testament, and
noted for his An Introduction to the Theology
of the New Testament (1958). He edited A
Word Book of the Bible (1950), and wrote
commentaries on Genesis and on John. No less
a philosophical theologian, however, he
produced Christian Apologetics (1947); Science
History and Faith (1950); Science and
Existence: Two Ways of Knowing (1957) and
the major work History Sacred and Profane
(1964). This expounded the nature of history as
a dimension of philosophical apologetics. His
lifelong interest in integrating biblical and philo-
sophical issues finds further expression in The
Miracle Stories of the Gospels (1941), The
Bible in the Age of Science (1961) and Religion
in Contemporary Debate (1966).
Second, on the biblical side, Richardson was
associated with the 'biblical theology' school.
This emphasized the unity of the Bible and the
distinctiveness of biblical categories. In philo-
sophical terms, however, it cohered with
Richardson's insistence that Christianity was
not a timeless system of ideas, but a narrative
of events embedded in history. Its truth
depended on contingent particularities and
divine actions to which witnesses bore testi-
mony, not upon speculative metaphysics.
A third distinguishing feature of Richardson's
theology was his belief in the rationality of
881
RICHARDSON
theology. Yet he resisted any reduction of its
truth-claims to mechanistic or positivist
hypotheses in the sciences. He sought to estab-
lish more personal, more 'existential', grounds
for theological truth, although he never dis-
paraged the importance of 'facts'. Facts remain
important; but 'fact and interpretation are
indissoluble' (The Miracle Stories of the
Gospels, p. 125).
Richardson placed the primary emphasis
upon how facts are understood and interpreted.
With R.G. COLLINGWOOD, he urged that how
a thinker weighs and interprets facts depends in
part on 'the man he is' (History Sacred and
Profane, pp. 201-203). The interpreter 'par-
ticipates in' the history that he interprets. On
miracle he writes: 'It is essential... to safeguard
the rationality of revelation. They [miracles]
were not irrational and inexplicable eruptions
into the natural order ... not contrary to nature,
but only to what is known by us about nature'
(Christian Apologetics, p. 154).
Richardson's understanding of faith coheres
with this. He writes, 'Faith is not a mere
guessing at indemonstrable truths ... Faith is
not a short cut: it is not a substitute for under-
standing, but a condition of it... Between faith
and reason there could be no conflict... it can
oppose only other faiths' (ibid., p. 235). Yet it
does conflict with 'rationalism'.
Richardson viewed theology as a 'science'.
'The theologian will go his way, revising and
modifying, enlarging and deepening, the cate-
gories of his science according as his study of
the facts directs him; he will follow the
argument where his reason leads him' (ibid.,
p. 59). Nevertheless, this does not exclude
respect for tradition, and it does not lead to
reductionism. 'It would be as irrational for a
theologian to reduce theological science to psy-
chology, as it would for psychology to reduce
its explanatory categories to those of physico-
chemical sciences' (ibid., p. 55). To overlook
the human, the existential or the transcendent
would be to contradict multiple and multiform
witnesses to theological truth.
RICHARDSON
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Miracle Stories of the Gospels (1941).
Christian Apologetics (1947).
History Sacred and Profane (1964).
Religion in Contemporary Debate (1966).
further Reading
Navone, J.J., History and Faith in the
Thought of Alan Richardson (1966).
Preston, Ronald H. (ed.), Theology and
Change: Essays in Memory of Alan
Richardson (1975).
Anthony Charles Thiselton
RICHMOND, James (1930-)
James Richmond was born in Troon in the
West of Scotland on 11 April 1931 and
educated at Marr College, Troon. He then
studied at the University of Glasgow, taking his
MA in 1952, subsequently proceeding in 1955
to a BD with first class honours in systematic
theology. Notable figures then at Glasgow were
the theologians Ronald Gregor Smith, who
mediated the ever-powerful influence of
German thought and notably that of Rudolf
Bultmann, and Ian Henderson, a redoubtable
champion of Scottish Presbyterian autonomy in
the face of Episcopalian 'power without glory'.
Having won many awards and scholarships at
the University of Glasgow, Richmond's excep-
tional promise was intimated by his winning of
the Brown Downie Fellowship against compe-
tition from students of all four Scottish divinity
faculties. This award enabled Richmond to
undertake advanced study of German in
Gottingen and West Berlin in 1955.
Matriculation as graduate student at Basle in
the winter semester of 1955 led James Richmond
into encounters with some of the twentieth-
century giants of Germanophone theological
endeavour. These included the strongly con-
882
trasting systematic theologians Karl Barth and
Fritz Buri, the New Testament scholars Oscar
Cullmann and Bo Reike, the philosopher Karl
Jaspers, and the theologian Emil Brunner in
Zurich. Following the classic path of the
Scottish divine, Richmond served as a Church
of Scotland minister from 1957 to 1960 whilst
continuing his research at Glasgow which led
to the award of a doctorate in philosophical
theology in 1960. In 1960 he became lecturer
at the University of Nottingham (1961-7), then
Danforth Visiting Professor at Union
Theological Seminary, New York City
(1967-8), before in 1968 joining the
Department of Religious Studies at Lancaster.
James Richmond's distinctive mediation of the
broad sweep of nineteenth and twentieth-
century European religious thought was
moulded by his advanced study of political
economy pursued whilst an undergraduate at
Glasgow. Richmond drew upon both Scottish
Common Sense and analytical philosophy and
allied these to a Ritschlian concern with value
judgement. Above all, Richmond's teaching
was grounded in history; he demanded serious
engagement with texts and he resisted the psy-
chological reductionism that was very much a
feature of the Lancaster ethos.
As intimated, James Richmond's major
endeavours were directed at research into nine-
teenth and twentieth-century German theology
and philosophy, besides other strands of
European and existentialist thought which were
to become the core elements of the justly
renowned two-paper 'Religious and Atheistic
Thought' course at Lancaster. Richmond's
research concern found published expression in
articles on Bonhoeffer and Buber, and then in
the book Faith and Philosophy (1966) and the
collection (edited with John Bowden) A Reader
in Contemporary Theology (1967). In his book
Theology and Metaphysics (1970) Richmond
set out to reassess natural theology. Whilst a
participant in the debates in English theology
that preceded and followed the publication of
Bishop J.A.T. Robinson's Honest to God
(1963), Richmond always engaged on a broad

front with continental thought and maintained
a well-defended but unfashionable apprecia-
tion of the necessary role of metaphysics in
theology. In the 1970s Richmond once more
turned his attention in earnest to German
theology and began a period of research in
Gottingen. This culminated in the publication
of his most considerable work, Ritschl, a
Reappraisal: A Study in Systematic Theology
(1978), which was later translated into German
and is recognized as a major and authoritative
account of a key figure in German theology. In
1980 James Richmond was awarded a personal
chair at Lancaster University, and in 1995 he
retired.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Faith and Philosophy (1966).
(Ed. with John Bowden), A Reader in
Contemporary Theology (1967).
Theology and Metaphysics (1970).
Ritschl, A Reappraisal: A Study in Systematic
Theology (1978).
Richard H. Roberts
RICKABY, John (1847-1927)
John Rickaby was born in Everingham, East
Riding of Yorkshire on 1 November 1847 and
died at St Beuno's in St Asaph, Denbighshire,
North Wales on 28 July 1927. His father was
the butler for the 10th Lord Herries, who gen-
erously sent John Rickaby and his brother
Joseph Rickaby (who also became a well-
known philosopher) to the Jesuit school of
Stonyhurst in Clitheroe, Lancashire along with
his own sons. Rickaby entered the Society of
Jesus in 1867 at Roehampton, Surrey.
Beginning in 1869 he studied philosophy at St
Mary's Hall, Stonyhurst and later theology at
St Beuno's. He was ordained in 1878 and in
1879 began his academic career as Professor of
883
RICKABY
Logic and General Metaphysics at St Mary's
Hall, Stonyhurst, where he taught until 1891,
when he became the Rector of St Bueno's from
1891 to 1901. He returned to St Mary's Hall,
Stonyhurst as a Professor of Ethics and Natural
Law in the first decade of the twentieth century,
in which capacity he wrote articles on the
cardinal virtues, conscience and fortitude for
The Catholic Encyclopedia in 1908 and 1909.
He finished his career at Wimbledon College,
London.
John Rickaby's fame stems from his con-
tributing the volumes The First Principles of
Knowledge (1889) and General Metaphysics
(1890) to the Stonyhurst Philosophical Series of
Manuals of Catholic Philosophy. Rickaby's
task in these works was to defend the episte-
mology and metaphysics of Aquinas against
the strict empiricism of Hume, Mill, Bain and
Huxley. Hence in The First Principles of
Knowledge Rickaby defends realism and argues
that the human mind can grasp the nature of
the external world. The reason why the empiri-
cists fail to see this, Rickaby declares, is because
they hold that knowledge is merely the associ-
ation of our sensations: in other words, the
empiricists wrongly liken the human mind to a
machine which combines sensations, function-
ing by a sort of mechanical or quasi-chemical
process. What the empiricists overlook, he
argues, is the active power of the intellect which
enlarges upon empirical data to grasp truths
about the world in acts of insight. For if we
reflect upon our spontaneous acts of cognition,
we find that our intellect does know the nature
of the external world, even if we cannot fully
account for how it does so. Our intellect, in the
very exercise of its faculties, perceives itself
knowing external objects. Still, he admits that
while the human mind can know the essences
of things, it has an imperfect acquaintance with
them and often knows them only partially and
indirectly through their accidental characteris-
tics.
In General Metaphysics Rickaby similarly
defends the Thomistic account of substances
and efficient causality against the attacks of
RICKABY
the empiricists. He argues that an object is not a
mere assemblage of sensible qualities but rather
is composed of a substance which exists on its
own and in which accidents inhere, such as a
projectile with a velocity. So too causality is not
merely a constant conjunction of events. Instead
causality implies the idea of a necessary link
between a cause and an effect, the dependency
of the effect upon the cause, and the power of a
cause to achieve an effect. Hence a cause is a
principle which through its influence determines
the existence of something else; it is a productive
power.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The First Principles of Knowledge (1889; 4th
edn, 1901).
General Metaphysics (1890; 3rd edn, 1898).
Further Reading
'The Late Father John Rickaby, S.J.', The
Tablet, vol. 150, no. 4552, 6 August 1927,
p. 188.
Alan Vincelette
RICKMAN, Hans Peter (1918-)
Hans Peter Rickman was born in
Czechoslovakia and began his university educa-
tion at Prague University, before going to Britain.
He studied for a BA and an MA at the University
of London and took his DPhil from Oxford in
1943. He was staff tutor in philosophy and psy-
chology at the University of Hull from 1949 to
1961. He was then appointed as senior lecturer
in philosophy at City University, London in
1962 and promoted to reader in 1967, and later
to professor. He is now visiting professor at City
University, London.
H.P. Rickman is a major translator of and
critical commentator on the works of Wilhelm
Dilthey. Rickman has produced three volumes
884
on this nineteenth-century philosopher and
numerous journal articles. Just as Dilthey does
not fit neatly into a box labelled 'philosopher',
so Rickman's work is not strictly philosophical,
but moves fluently into other areas as diverse as
modern existential psychiatry (following the
ideas of R.D. LAING), sociology, psychology, lit-
erature and the fine arts. The core to his inspi-
ration may be said to be an exploration of what
is distinctly human as well as situating the activ-
ities of humanness in the here and now of exis-
tence. Our interpretation of reality, according to
this way of seeing, arises from our sense of the
thing itself, the worth of the thing, and our sense
of responsibility towards it. Such interpretation
is subjective and relative and we make a mistake
if we claim it is objective. Nevertheless, the
hermeneutics here is particularity, but not indi-
vidualistic (unlike a Heidegarian treatment of
what it is to be human). This epistemology is
expressed in religion, in politics, in social rela-
tions and in creative elaborations. Thus
Rickman's work extends to investigation of the
imperative of art, matters of ethics, linguistic
analysis, hermeneutics, postmodernism and the
practice of deconstruction. Central to his work
is a defence of philosophical investigation and
refutation of the popular notion that philosophy
is a purely academic, highly technical subject
with no relevance to everyday life. His popular
writing, as published in Contemporary Review,
being a journal that publishes a broad spectrum
of material from several disciplines, illustrates his
commitment to bringing philosophic argument
to the non-specialist.
H.P. Rickman is known throughout Europe,
not just Britain, as an educator. It is as education
that his written work is clearly enunciated. From
the clarification of the conflict of the philosophy
of the Enlightenment and postmodernism (cf.
The Challenge of Philosophy) to the role of
reason in the evolution of sociological thought
(The Adventure of Reason) the human domain
is critically investigated.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Meaning in History: Dilthey's Thought on

History and Society (1961); published in
the USA as Pattern and Meaning in
History.
Preface to Philosophy (1964).
Living with Technology (1967).
Understanding and the Human Studies
(1967).
(Trans, and intro.), Dilthey Selected Writings
(Cambridge, 1976).
Wilhelm Dilthey: Pioneer of the Human
Studies (1979).
The Adventure of Reason: The Uses of
Philosophy in Sociology (1983).
Dilthey Today: A Critical Appraisal of the
Contemporary Relevance of his Work
(1988).
Philosophy in Literature (Madison,
Wisconsin, 1996).
The Challenge of Philosophy (2000).
The Riddle of the Sphinx: Interpreting the
Human World (Madison, Wisconsin,
2004).
Elizabeth McCardell
RITCHIE, Arthur David (1891-1967)
Arthur David Ritchie was born in Oxford on
22 June 1891 and died in Edinburgh on 12
March 1967. Brought up in St Andrews fol-
lowing his Edinburgh-born Hegelian father's
appointment to the Chair of Metaphysics and
Logic there, he went to school at Fettes College,
Edinburgh and studied at the University of St.
Andrews. His teachers included G.F. STOUT,
John BURNET and A.E. TAYLOR. He graduated
with first class honours in philosophy in 1911
and proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge.
The deepening scientific focus of his studies is
certainly marked by his 1914 to 1918 wartime
service as a chemist in the Naval Airship Service.
He was elected fellow of Trinity (1920-26). In
1920 he was Samuel ALEXANDER'S assistant at
885
RITCHIE
the University of Manchester, where he returned
in 1925 as lecturer in chemical physiology and
where he became Professor of Philosophy in
1937. In 1945 he succeeded Norman KEMP
SMITH as Professor of Metaphysics at the
University of Edinburgh. He retired in 1959.
Described as the last of the great polymaths,
Ritchie's worth qua philosopher has to be
assessed by reference to a variety of apparently
occasional or topical publications. He was not
the Kantian and exponent of speculative
idealism his sometime colleague Ernest
GELLNER'S obituarist on an Edinburgh
University website alleged. His milieu was
much nearer the Cambridge one summed up in
his first book's acknowledgements to Bertrand
RUSSELL, C.D. BROAD, W.E. JOHNSON and A.N.
WHITEHEAD. In his 1936 The Natural History
of Mind (Tarner Lectures) he made close use of
H.H. PRICE'S Perception.
The 1950 British Philosophers comes close to
COLLINGWOOD'S account of a British philo-
sophical tradition from Hobbes onward and
very much not on a Locke-Mill-Russell axis.
Ritchie acknowledges Stout, regretting the lack
of a more systematic statement of his teacher's
thinking other than through the very belatedly
published Gifford Lectures. Whitehead was a
prominent stated influence as fount of insights
and arguments in need of restatement and inte-
gration into the wider philosophical discourse,
but A.A. BOWMAN'S Sacramental Universe
(published 1941) led Ritchie to revise his appre-
ciation of Whitehead. In Essays in Philosophy
(1948), a very good key overall to Ritchie's
thought, the essay on Samuel Alexander affords
a masterly compression of the argument of
Space, Time and Deity and that book's huge
importance.
Ritchie's expressions of respect for R.G.
Collingwood insist on the superiority of the
latter's earlier over his later writings. As early
as Scientific Method (1923) there is a startlingly
overt statement that philosophy is an activity of
continuing review of provisional conclusions,
like the work of the experimental scientist
(about which the philosopher ought to be well
RITCHIE
informed). Scientific Method acknowledges
that W.E. Johnson, for instance, might soon
enough produce work which would render
obsolete its account of what Ritchie calls the art
of induction. For Ritchie's revisions on that
topic, he later referred readers to Science and
Politics (1947) and the 1948 Essays. In his
1931 The Relations of Mental and Physical
Processes' he has a keen eye for the absurdities
of quasi-physicalist statements ignorant of
physical, biological conditions. A nerve impulse
does not stop, it goes into something; a message
does not automatically stop with its recipient,
it goes somewhere, into some action.
The Natural History of Mind (1936) rejects
any Cartesian model, Aristotle is a locus clas-
sicus for studies of what (as Ritchie says) his
teacher Stout called 'Embodied Mind'. As a
textbook of neurophysiology for philosophers
or philosophy for neurologists, the book might
have double commendation. Ritchie's science is
not obsolete, because of his awareness of the
extent and nature of ignorance in that field at
that time. One of his purposes was to define the
scope of ignorance as a philosophical consid-
eration. Ritchie's 1950 paper 'A Defence of
Sense-Data' accuses RYLE'S Concept of Mind (a
book Ritchie very much disliked) of crass over-
simplification on the topic of perception. We
see that a round table is round, but rarely if ever
see the table as round. Too much can be taken
for granted.
Seeking to model philosophy on procedures
imitated from physics, and usually at second
hand, philosophers have frequently betrayed
serious ignorance both of the sciences and of
the evidential context of their secondhand bor-
rowings. 'A Note on Logical Positivism'
demands not a tautologous definition of 'veri-
fication' but proper awareness of actual verifi-
cation procedures, of the foundations of these
in recognition of variables and of the measures
required to cope with results which cannot be
read off simply, even in classroom 'experiments'
prepared to teach and test adolescents.
Logical positivism need hardly be alone in
implying a theory which if it had been accepted
886
long before would have rendered the bulk of
scientific discoveries impossible. It raised a
further issue by seeking a definition of science
so tightly restrictive as to refuse to biology the
name of science.
Bertrand Russell's History of Western
Philosophy prompted 'A Defence of Aristotle's
Logic' as an attack on Russell's attack on
Aristotle. In accord with his account of
'Collingwood's "The Logic of Question and
Answer'", Ritchie argues that whereas Russell's
mathematical logic was devised to ask certain
questions, Aristotle's Logic had been devised to
ask others and was no less sound. Russell was
not to be trusted on Aristotle, the fall of whose
logic would be accompanied by a much wider
fall, including that of W.E. Johnson's logic.
Russell rejects Aristotle as not answering
Russell's questions, and rejects Aristotle's ques-
tions because Russell's logic cannot answer
them.
Ritchie was concerned centrally with the rela-
tionships between different claims to knowing,
and with the nature of evidence. Studies in the
History and Methods of the Sciences (1958)
might superficially be taken for a quirky text in
the history of science, but it embodies Ritchie's
point that a great deal of ancient Greek science
remains part of the sound foundations of
current practice, as do numerous prescientific
conceptions; whereas among many postscien-
tific conceptions fallacies are not far to seek. He
challenged the spoken or unspoken project of
founding philosophy and the sciences on strictly
revolutionary conceptions: on hypotheses
which could be established only if at all in the
future; which had come into being to handle
new questions which older-founded hypotheses
could not meet; and whose apparent initial
success in meeting the new questions was taken
as grounds for seeking to apply them to old
questions hitherto well enough answered by
old means. For Ritchie, there was no reason to
innovate on the further hypothesis that extend-
ing new hypotheses to old questions held out
prospects of a royal road to a thoroughly com-
prehensive synthesis. The major new discovery

was not that that the old working hypotheses
were discredited, but that their newly discov-
ered limits required explicit specification.
Just as knowing a man demands (some)
knowledge of his biography, study of a science
is incomplete pursued in substantial ignorance
of its biography. The question concerns
sciences, not science. Each science has come
into being to find out about its own questions,
and its distinctness from other sciences, its
limits, cannot be infringed. Ritchie likes John
Burnet's tag, 'science is just the Greek way of
looking at things'. Technology preceded
science, good enough buildings were possible
before there was any precise measurement.
There is the wisdom of the foxes, and the
wisdom of Plato, says Whitehead, who in
Ritchie's view did not appreciate how close
each of these wisdoms is to the other.
Early Greek science and the Greek language
together came into being because for one thing
environmental factors allowed Greek minds
pause to wander, free of any continual demands
to meet practical needs. The Greeks devised
measurement whereas hitherto there had been
rules of thumb, and while their seafaring begat
habits of observation, geometry and mathe-
matics came into being away from the constant
reminders physical things provide of inexacti-
tudes. Things might just have been that way,
the variables and unaccountables of a lore of
strange facts. While the achievement within
Greek science of the hypothesis of a heliocen-
tric solar system was subsequently and erro-
neously argued out of currency, Aristarchus of
Samos did know some astronomical distances
with real accuracy. Ritchie takes the long sub-
sequent blackout of Greek science as a major
question.
The revival of science in the Renaissance
followed from a revival of Greek rhetoric, said
Burnet. The positive function of the scientific
observer had been rediscovered. Besides this,
Ritchie refers to new technology, very notably
in glass-making. New measurements became
possible. Newton could demonstrate that a
glass prism was more than a child's toy, in
887
RITCHIE
what Ritchie calls classical research. It left no
loose ends. Dalton's researches left too many
loose ends to be classical, however far he
advanced learning further from the nonsense of
alchemy into chemistry, mother of on the one
hand atomic theory, and on the other bio-
chemistry.
Rather a collation of evidence than argument
of a rationalistic type, Ritchie's history of
science for philosophers or philosophical
history of science raises questions of evidence
often where evidence has ceased to be looked
for. He poses questions as to the nature and
conditions of scientific advance and the relative
prestige of respective sciences.
The most useful perspective on evidence,
Ritchie continues, in a discussion extending
into Aristotle's Politics and the human sciences,
begins with attention to such as the delibera-
tions in a court of law, or in historical study.
The physical sciences, and especially the
exiguous notation used by physicists to com-
municate one with another, frequently afford
models devised to handle only the unproblem-
atic. Ritchie's studies of evidence extend into
whether Plato's was the historical Socrates
(defending John Burnet), and into New
Testament scholarship (he refers to his
Civilization., Science and Religion, 1945). His
accounts of the spuriousness of various secu-
larist moralizing creeds take him well beyond
apologetics and an account of the ontological
argument as rather exegesis, not proof. His
Christian theism involves no sacrifices of rigour
on scientific issues.
Where his teacher A.E. Taylor spoke of free
will, Ritchie spoke of 'Freedom' as the capacity
to determine what is the case and to act accord-
ingly. With this he contrasted 'belief in magic'
(all theories, he declared, are metaphors),
whether in 'Magic in Modern Polities' or delu-
sions akin to the dogma of trouble-free, theory-
free verifications. Ritchie sought to challenge
precipitate judgements founded on what he
called folklore or on prejudices sustained by
what he regarded as its inferior heir, the mass
media.
RITCHIE
The posthumously published George
Berkeley: A Reappraisal is a lively and properly
personal essay rather than a widely recom-
mended primer on the Irish philosopher.
Ritchie rehearses a rehabilitation of Berkeley
against the bad evidence widely accepted as
indicating a cranky Irish cleric with a bee in his
bonnet about a wholesome natural medicine.
The tar-water was in fact useful, unlike many
of the prescriptions or procedures of Berkeley's
day which Ritchie has too much taste to
describe.
Ritchie's account of Berkeley's argument for
passive resistance can be read profitably in the
light of his 1939 paper on the ethics of pacifism.
His contrast between natural rights and natural
law in the Berkeley book is perhaps the one
plain making of common cause with his father.
Berkeley is perhaps Ritchie's model of what a
philosopher might be.
Where Ritchie sets the New Theory of Vision
at the centre of Berkeley's thought, he sets at the
centre of his own thought a motif analogous to
identifying the interaction of sight with touch
and kinaesthetic feeling as the foundation of
seeing anything, and of judging distance.
Innumerable past correlations are the sine qua
non of any ability to see things. This motif is a
critique of what Ritchie in a concluding chapter
of Studies calls 'the visualist fallacy'. He argues
directly from Berkeley against Hume, and more
in terms of metaphor against delusions of the
ease with which depth can be seen directly.
Perception begins with handling, the infant's
primary experience is not of seeing but of
movement and touch. Visual perception is
founded on correlation of that with the sensory
input of the eyes. Scientific observation is
founded on a having got in and among things,
on active performance with the hands, which
may indeed have been operating a microscope.
One needs to know enough of what one is
looking at in order significantly to see it.
Ritchie's modesty is reflected in a far from
extensive bibliography, his declaration of debts
to Whitehead and to John Burnet, his advocacy
of Bowman. His work with Joseph J. RUSSELL
888
on the philosophy of science was certainly
reflected in the latter's posthumously published
book, Analysis and Dialectic.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Scientific Method: An Inquiry into the
Character & Validity of Natural Laws
(1923).
The Relations of Mental and Physical
Processes', Mind, vol. 61 (1931), pp.
171-84.
The Natural History of Mind (1936).
Civilization, Science and Religion
(Harmondsworth, 1945).
Science and Politics [pamphlet] (1947).
Essays in Philosophy: And Other Pieces
(1948). Includes all papers cited here not
listed separately.
Reflections on the Philosophy of Sir Arthur
Eddington [pamphlet] (Cambridge, 1948).
British Philosophers [British Council
pamphlet] (1950).
'A Defence of Sense Data', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 8 (1952), pp.
240-45.
Studies in the History and Methods of the
Sciences (Edinburgh, 1958).
George Berkeley: A Reappraisal, ed. with a
Preface by G.E. Davie (Manchester, 1967).
Robert R. Calder
ROBERTS, Tom Aerwyn (1924-99)
T.A. Roberts was born in Cleobury on 31 July
1924 and died in Wandsworth in 1999. He
took a first in philosophy from the University
of Wales in 1950 and a BA in theology from
Oxford in 1952. He was awarded a DPhil by
Oxford in 1957. He first taught as a lecturer in
historical theology at the University of Keele
(1954—61) but spent the rest of his career at the
University College of Wales at Aberystwyth,

where he was appointed as a senior lecturer in
philosophy in 1961. He was appointed Professor
of Philosophy in 1969 and served as Dean of the
Faculty of Arts (1970-72). When he retired in
1988 the Department of Philosophy was closed.
The simultaneous closure of the department at
Bangor meant that Welsh-speaking students
could no longer be taught philosophy in Welsh,
as they had been by Roberts among others. The
important Welsh dimension of Roberts's activ-
ities as a philosopher - he was for some time
editor of the Welsh journal Efryd Athron - is,
regrettably, not considered here.
Roberts had an early interest in the philo-
sophical basis of religious apologetics. In his
History and Christian Apologetic (1960) he
argued that the method of historians presup-
posed the basic uniformity of the universe and
that this had implications for talk about the 'his-
toricity' of the Christian faith. In his later article
on 'Gospel Historicity' (1965), however, he had
changed his opinion to some extent: 'The reason
why the historian's techniques embody this built-
in assumption has little to do with the subject
matter of history but has much to do with the
nature of language' (Religious Studies, vol. 1,
1965, p. 199). The problem of the revelation of
God in history', he went on later to claim, 'is ulti-
mately a logical kinsman of the metaphysical
problem of how we are to talk in language about
God at all'(ibid., p. 201).
Roberts's short monograph The Concept of
Benevolence (1973) is primarily a survey and
critical comparison of the views of Hutcheson,
Butler and Hume. But in his concluding
remarks it becomes clear that he himself was
partly interested in the topic as one aspect of the
interconnection of religion and morality, an
interest that is to the fore in his later papers. In
'Morality and Divine Commands' (1968) he
considers some of the philosophical difficulties
that face those who hold the view that the good
is what God commands. In his later 'Law,
Morality and Religion in a Christian Society'
(1984), however, he himself defends such a
view. This, perhaps his most important paper,
was occasioned by the philosophical debate
889
ROBINSON
that followed the Wolfenden Report. Roberts
gives critical attention to H.L.A. HART'S defence
and the jurisprudentialist Patrick (later Lord)
Devlin's attack on the 'liberal' assumptions of
the report, and himself defends a model of
Christian society according to which it would
be right to legislate against behaviour that was
clearly contrary to Christian teaching.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
History and Christian Apologetic (1960).
'Morality and Divine Commands',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
68 (1967-8), pp. 49-62.
The Concept of Benevolence: Aspects of
Eighteenth Century Moral Philosophy
(1973).
'Morality, Religious and Secular', Scottish
Journal of Religious Studies, vol. 4 (1983),
pp. 15-27.
'Law, Morality and Religion in a Christian
Society', Religious Studies, vol. 20 (1984),
pp. 79-98.
Other Relevant Works
'Gospel Historicity: Some Philosophical
Observations', Religious Studies, vol. 1
(1965), pp. 185-202.
(Ed.),/. Butler: Fifteen Sermons and
Dissertation upon the Nature of Virtue
(1970).
'Morality, Religious and Secular', Scottish
journal of Religious Studies, vol. 4 (1983),
pp. 15-27.
Stuart Brown
ROBINSON, Guy Shuyler (1927-)
Guy Robinson was born in the United States in
1927 and educated at Bard College (BA, 1949),
Harvard (MA, 1951) and Oxford University.
He was appointed assistant lecturer at Leeds in
ROBINSON
1957 but moved to Southampton in 1958,
where he was first a lecturer, then senior
lecturer in philosophy. He was for some years
Secretary of the Mind Association. After he
took early retirement in 1982, Robinson went
to Nicaragua, where he worked with con-
struction brigades. Following this he was a
research professor at MIT and Boston
University before moving to Dublin, where he
now lives.
Guy Robinson is best known in the field of
Marxist philosophy and philosophy of mind.
There his Marxist convictions are clearly enun-
ciated, as well as an influence of WITTGENSTEIN.
The discipline of philosophy, he claims, has
suffered from an ahistorical stance (in which
ideas are decontextualized from the history and
place that gives rise to them). The usual training
in philosophy via Descartes exacerbates this.
The Cartesian pursuit of 'higher truths' has
allowed for a proliferation of 'high-flown
thoughts' strangely detached from the concerns
of everyday life. Robinson notes that his own
training was through the work of Aristotle and
not via Descartes. This he says has had a
decisive influence on how he has regarded and
practiced philosophy. Such a stance, he believes,
has given him an outsider's perspective on
modern philosophy and encouraged him to
examine and question the problems that have
occupied philosophers in the modern era and to
search out their roots in the assumptions made
and their projects.
Just as damaging to philosophy, and maybe
even beyond philosophy, is, according to Guy
Robinson, the propensity of this discipline to
coin words and phrases unconnected to the
ordinary world. This, he suggests, issues from
academic philosophy's grounding in its tradi-
tion that searches for transcendent truths.
Robinson's essays, book reviews, as well as the
book, Philosophy and Mystification: A
Reflection on Nonsense and Clarity (1998), by
contrast, uses everyday words and situates ideas
within real contexts. This book, like his essays,
is both a work of philosophy and a work about
philosophy. The work is a collection of material
890
published in various journals and symposium
proceedings between 1964 and 1996.
Philosophy and Mystification is a reflection on
the nature, methods and resources of philo-
sophic inquiry, and one that is situated in the
concretely discussed central problems dogging
Western philosophy in the modern era: logical
necessity, machine intelligence, the relation of
science and religion, determinism, scepticism, as
well as the search for foundations and origins
that have characterized our time.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Philosophy and Mystification: A Reflection
on Nonsense and Clarity (1998).
Other Relevant Works
'How to Tell your Friends from Machines',
Mind, vol. 81 (1972), pp. 237-53.
'Scepticism about Scepticism', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society', suppl. vol. 51
(1977), pp. 237-53.
'Language and the Society of Others',
Philosophy, vol. 67 (1992), pp. 329-41.
Elizabeth McCardell
ROBINSON, Norman Hamilton Galloway
(1912-78)
Norman Hamilton Galloway Robinson was
born in Troon, Ayrshire on 7 October 1912
and died in St Andrews on 9 March 1978.
Educated at Ayr Academy, he became MA,
DLitt (Glasgow) and BD, DD (Edinburgh).
Following Church of Scotland pastorates in
Shetland, Fraserburgh arid Rothesay, he
became Professor of Divinity and Dean of the
Faculty at Rhodes University, Grahamstown,
South Africa (1954-6), and, from 1956 until
his death, Professor of Systematic Theology at
St Andrews University, adding divinity in 1967.
Robinson contributed articles on such

subjects as natural theology and religious
language to a number of philosophical and theo-
logical journals, and in his Rhodes inaugural
lecture, Theology and the Personal (1954), he
defended the view that
modern thinking since the scientific revolu-
tion of the seventeenth century has largely
failed to take account of the personal, that at
the present time there are welcome signs that
this defect is being remedied, and that
theology is greatly concerned in this matter
and has its own peculiar contribution to
make to it.
(Theology and the Personal, p. 1)
Theoretical questions concerning theological
ethics were Robinson's primary interest, as may
be seen in his four books. In Faith and Duty
(1950) he sets out from a conviction he never
surrendered: 'the apologetic task is an essential
part of the Christian commission, and it would
be a grave tragedy indeed if, in the hour of the
world's confusion, the Church were to allow its
apologetics to be swallowed up by dogmatics'
(p. ix). He argues that whereas Earth had
properly recalled Christian thought to the
primacy of God's revelation in Christ, he was
wrong to isolate dogmatics from all other
thought (not least natural theology). For their
part, contemporary ethicists, who have a lively
appreciation of the realities of the moral situa-
tion, are 'unable to comprehend the total
predicament of man' (ibid., p. 22) as sinful
before God and needing reconciliation.
The Claim of Morality (1952) comprises an
account of the course of ethics from Hobbes
onwards, which leads Robinson to press the
need for a coherent ethical system which can
accommodate 'the three different types of
moral judgment ("Act A is right or wrong";
Motive or character B is morally good or
morally bad, virtuous or vicious", and "State of
affairs C is good or bad")' (p. 15). He discusses
eighteenth-century sentimentalism and intel-
lectualism, utilitarianism, idealism and intu-
itionism. Constructively, he argues that The
891
ROBINSON
idea of right is simple, unanalysable and inde-
finable'; that right acts, like judgements, are in
themselves supra-temporal; and that such acts
'take place in a social context' (ibid., p. 259).
The criterion of Tightness is not found simply in
the moral goodness of motives, or in the char-
acter of specific acts, or in the consequences of
acts, but 'in an all-inclusive form of life, a com-
prehensive system of personal relationships
which is the good, the ideal' (ibid., p. 329).
Robinson describes Christ and Conscience
(1956) as an essay in 'ethico-evangelical
theology', in which he will weigh the truth and
errors of theological liberalism and the
strengths and weaknesses of Barthianism. His
guiding principle is that 'The claim of Christ is
a moral claim ... which renews the whole
moral world with all its claims and counter-
claims, and rebuilds it around Himself as
centre' (Christ and Conscience, p. 20). He dis-
cusses moral responsibility with reference to
H.D. LEWIS; and the Christian interpretation of
morality with reference to Emil Brunner. He
finds Barth's theology insufficiently ethical,
Reinhold Niebuhr confused, and the radical
empiricists and existentialists inadequate.
The Groundwork of Christian Ethics (1971)
includes discussion of a wider range of thinkers
than hitherto: Tillich, Joseph Fletcher, Harvey
Cox, Paul Ramsey and John MACQUARRIE
among them. His thesis is that Christianity does
not merely reaffirm or supplement natural
morality, but reorientates the moral life of
human beings.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Faith and Duty (195Q}.
The Claim of Morality (1952).
Theology and the Personal (Grahamstown,
1954).
Christ and Conscience (1956).
The Groundwork of Christian Ethics (1971).
Alan P.P. Sell
ROBINSON
ROBINSON, Richard George Frederick
(1902-96)
Richard Robinson was born in Watton,
Norfolk on 12 April 1902 and died in Oxford
on 6 May 1996. The son of a solicitor, he was
educated at Repton and at Oriel College,
Oxford, where he took first class honours in
Classical Moderations and Greats. He followed
this by studying for a BLitt at Oxford, where he
began his research on John COOK WILSON'S
logic. After a further year's study at the
University of Marburg, he became an instruc-
tor in philosophy at Cornell University. In 1930
he took a PhD at Cornell with further research
on Cook Wilson's logic, the fruits of which
were published as The Province of Logic
(1931). In 1946 he returned to Oriel College as
fellow and tutor in philosophy, where he
remained until his retirement in 1969.
Robinson's main contribution to academic
philosophy was in the area of classical philos-
ophy, particularly with regard to the works of
Plato and Aristotle. His Plato's Earlier Dialectic
(1941) examines the methods of argumentation
in Plato's early and middle dialogues, in par-
ticular by applying the insights gained through
modern developments in logic to those
methods. The result, in the words of one
reviewer, was that one 'cannot emerge from
reading this book without either agreeing with
Professor Robinson that Plato was a very bad
logician, or realizing that the philosophical pre-
suppositions of contemporary logic are seri-
ously defective' (Wild, p. 547). Robinson
defended his approach in the Preface to the
second edition by affirming his belief in the
evolution of human thought: that Plato had
failed to make a clear a number of problems
which had only become clear through later
developments in the field of logic did not make
him a bad logician, but a pioneering one:
'Greatness in science consists mainly in leaving
the subject more advanced than when you
entered it. It does not consist mainly in holding
the same views as a majority of men will hold
at a later date, or even in holding true views'
892
(Plato's Earlier Dialectic, 1953, p. vi). One
central issue where Plato's analysis needs to be
corrected is in the field of definition. As
Robinson goes on to make clear in Definition
(1950), he regards the search for a real defini-
tion (the definition of things as opposed to a
purely nominal definition, which is 'a process
either of equating two symbols or of reporting
or proposing a meaning for a symbol', p. 191)
as either chimerical or confused. Since such a
search characterizes much of Plato's earlier dia-
logues, Robinson is forced to conclude that a
major element of Plato's philosophy, at the
least, needs substantial clarification.
His most widely known work outside the
academy, An Atheist's Values (1964), was orig-
inally presented as a series of lectures in Oxford
and retains a certain breeziness of style and
content as a result. It also begins with an exam-
ination of a problem of definition. Robinson
rejects the question 'What is the good?' as inept,
because it assumes that there is just one good
(or at least a supreme good) and that the dis-
cernment of this good is a matter of discovery
rather than choice. Instead, he urges a plural-
ity of goods and the pursuit oi: wise judgement
in the choices made. The basis of wise judge-
ment is adherence to three principles: (1) any
kind of thing is bad if it, or the pursuit of it,
increases the misery of living things upon the
whole; (2) no kind of act may be forbidden
unless its discontinuance would lessen misery
upon the whole; and finally (3) anything is
good if the pursuit of it pleases somebody and
does not increase misery. Applying these prin-
ciples, Robinson judges that among the
personal goods are life, beauty, truth and virtue,
although he stresses that such a list is not
intended to be exhaustive. Among the virtues,
pre-eminent are those of reason and love. Taking
reason first, it is analysed as including eleven
elements: love of truth, respect for reasons, con-
sistency, deductiveness, preference for probabil-
ity, tentativeness, respect for evidence, submis-
sion to criticism, self-compatibility, impartiality
and the lessening of misery. As is made clear by
the inclusion of the final element, Robinson is

more interested in developing an analysis of
something very much like Aristotle's virtue of
practical wisdom - the ability to come to good
decisions - than in some narrower intellectual
skill. The virtue of love lies less in the self-sacri-
fice demanded in the New Testament and more
in amiability and good personal relations with
others. Turning from personal goods to political
ones, Robinson finds the two principal purposes
of the state in preserving peace and upholding
justice. Democracy, by giving each citizen the
greatest possible part in running the state, allows
the good of political freedom to be maximized.
Although An Atheist's Values does engage in
some polemic with religions, particularly with
Christianity, its main aim is to sketch and
promote the values that an atheist might hold,
rather than to attack religion as such. For the
most part, it is only insofar as Christianity advo-
cates contrary values, for example faith rather
than reason, self-sacrifice rather than amiability,
that it is criticized. Turning to the values that are
advocated, they are those of a civilized liberalism,
defended with lucidity and wit, the shadow of
Soviet communism hanging over the book as
much as that of dogmatic Christianity.
Robinson's work is characterized by many of
the virtues and vices of the best analytical phi-
losophy of the early to mid twentieth century.
It is clearly and elegantly written and probing
of ambiguity and vagueness in the areas dis-
cussed. However, these very strengths can lead
to a certain lack of sympathy with the ideas
examined and a consequent lack of charity in
their interpretation and criticism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Province of Logic (1931).
Plato's Earlier Dialectic (Ithaca, 1941; rev.
edn, Oxford, 1953).
Definition (Oxford, 1950).
(Trans, with Intro, and comm.), Aristotle,
Politics III and IV (Oxford, 1962; rev. edn
1995).
An Atheist's Values (Oxford, 1964).
Essays in Greek Philosophy (Oxford, 1969).
893
ROBINSON
Other Relevant Works
(Trans.), Werner Jaeger, Aristotle (Oxford,
1934; 2nd edn, 1948).
'Plato's Parmenides F, Classical Philology,
vol. 37, no. 1 (January 1942), pp. 51-76.
Tlato's Parmenides IF, Classical Philology,
vol. 37, no. 2 (April 1942), pp. 159-86.
'Argument and Moral Argument', Mind, vol.
70 (July 1961), pp. 426-9.
'Plato's Separation of Reason from Desire',
Phronesis, vol. 26 (1971), pp. 38-48.
The Concept of Knowledge', Mind, vol. 80
(January 1971), pp. 17-28.
'Begging the Question, 1971', Analysis, vol
31 (March 1971), pp. 113-17.
'Arguing from Ignorance', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 21 (April 1971), pp.
97-108.
'Ought and Ought Not', Philosophy, vol. 46
(July 1971), pp. 193-202.
'The Concept of Incorrigibility', Canadian
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 1 (June 1972),
pp. 427-41.
(with Jonathan Barnes), 'Untruisms',
Metaphilosophy, vol. 3 (July 1972), pp
189-97.
'Begging the Question, 1981', Analysis, vol.
41 (March 1981), p. 65.
Further Reading
Anon., The Times, 5 June 1996.
Mayo, Bernard, Review of An Atheist's
Values, Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 16,
no. 62 (January 1966), pp. 90-91.
Walter, Nicolas, The Independent, 14 June
1996.
Welsh, Paul, Review of An Atheist's Values,
Philosophical Review, vol. 76, no 2 (Apri
1967), pp. 257-62.
Wild, John, Review of Plato's Earlier
Dialectic, (Book review), Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, vol. 2, no. .
(June 1942), pp. 546-51.
Stephen Watt
ROSS
ROSS, William David (1877-1971)
W.D. Ross was born in Thurso on 15 April
1877 and died in Oxford on 5 May 1971. He
studied at Edinburgh University and Balliol
College, Oxford. He was appointed as fellow of
Merton College, Oxford in 1900, and in 1902
as fellow and tutor at Oriel College, where he
was Provost from 1929 to 1947. Ross was
Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University from
1941 to 1944, and was President of the British
Academy from 1936 to 1940. In 1938 he was
knighted.
Ross was an influential classical scholar. He
published books on Plato and Aristotle, edited
the Oxford translation of Aristotle's works
(1908-31) and translated Aristotle's
Metaphysics and Ethics. It is, however, as a
moral philosopher that his influence has been
greatest. His two books on moral philosophy
(The Right and the Good, 1930, and the
Foundations of Ethics, 1939) marked the
pinnacle of ethical intuitionism, a doctrine that
had been the dominant moral theory in Britain
for much of the preceding two centuries. In
these works Ross argues for a distinctive view
in the metaphysics of morals, in normative
ethics and in moral epistemology. He main-
tained that moral judgements report simple,
non-natural moral properties, that there is an
irreducible plurality of basic moral principles,
and that the most fundamental moral principles
are self-evident.
Ross held that judgements of the form 'x is
right' or 'x is good' express beliefs that x has the
property of being right or good. Following
many earlier intuitionists, he maintained that
these properties are simple - that is, they are not
combinations of two or more properties or
relations. Ross held that if a property is simple
it cannot be defined, and vice versa.
Consequently, he held that Tightness and
goodness are indefinable properties.
In chapter 1 of The Right and the Good
Ross defends his view that the term 'right' is
indefinable by considering and rejecting the
most plausible definitions. The method he uses
894
in rejecting these definitions is outlined in
chapter 4, when he considers definitions of
goodness. There he proposes two closely inter-
connected arguments. The first may be called
the 'transparency argument'. According to the
transparency argument, if the term 'good' could
be defined, the term would have to stand for a
certain complex property, for the definition
would consist in specifying what this complex
is. But if 'good' stood for a complex, we would
be able to use the term 'good' intelligently and
intelligibly only if we had this definition in
mind. Since we use this term intelligently and
intelligibly without having any definition in
mind, 'good' must stand for a simple property
(The Right and the Good, p. 92).
The second argument Ross proposes is
MOORE'S open question argument. According
to this argument, every attempt: to define 'good'
must fail, for it is always possible to enquire
whether something that answers to the
supposed definition is good. We can show, for
example, that being good is not the same as
being desired by somebody, for even if we
know that war is desired by someone, we may
still sensibly ask whether war is good (ibid.,
p. 92). If the definition were correct, however,
we could not sensibly ask this question, for if
the definition were correct, to think of some-
thing as good would be to think of it as desired
by somebody, and we cannot sensibly ask
whether something that is desired by somebody
is desired by somebody. If every attempt to
define goodness fails in this way, 'good' must
stand for a simple property.
Although the open question argument is dif-
ferent from the transparency argument, Ross
regards it as adding nothing to the transparency
argument. He says they both express the same
thought, namely that if good stood for a
complex we would have this complex in mind
when we use the term. Yet we have no such
complex in mind when we use the term 'good'.
Ross recognizes that not all definitions are
transparent, such that we must have them in
mind when we use the relevant term, but, he
insists, the possibility of such opacity only

shows that we cannot know in advance that all
definitions of 'good' must fail. What we must
do is consider any definition that seems at all
plausible, and ask ourselves whether this is
what we meant by 'good' all along (ibid.,
p. 93). If the answer to this question is 'no', then
we should reject the proposed definition. If we
reject all of the most plausible definitions of
'good' in this way, 'we may feel fairly confident
that "good" is indefinable' and stands for a
simple property (ibid.). Applying this method to
Tightness as well as goodness, Ross concludes
that they are both simple properties.
Ross also thought that Tightness and goodness
are non-natural properties. For Ross this means
that these properties cannot be understood in
wholly non-moral terms. Moral terms are eval-
uative or deontic terms, such as 'good',
'valuable', 'ought', 'duty', 'fitting', 'appropriate',
'merited', etc. Non-moral terms are psycholog-
ical, sociological, evolutionary or scientific terms,
such as 'desired', 'approved', 'society', 'survival',
etc. So, for example, a definition of 'right' as
'productive of the greatest pleasure' is naturalis-
tic, whereas a definition of 'right' as 'productive
of the greatest good' is non-naturalistic (The
Foundations of Ethics, pp. 6-7.)
If moral properties can be defined in terms of
natural properties then moral issues will be
decidable by means of empirical observation
alone. If moral properties cannot be defined in
this way then moral issues will not be decidable
by empirical investigation alone. Ross does not
deny that certain empirical considerations will be
relevant to deciding whether we ought to act in
certain ways. His point is just that even when all
of the empirical facts are in, there is still a further,
moral judgement to be made - namely, whether
these empirical facts make a certain act right, or
a certain thing good.
Ross did not clearly separate the question of
whether moral properties are simple from the
question of whether they are natural.
Consequently, he offers no argument against
the view that moral properties might be simple
natural properties. In one respect his failure to
distinguish these issues is unproblematic, for it is
895
ROSS
difficult to imagine any simple natural property
that might plausibly be identified with goodness
(or Tightness). And even if some plausible simple
natural property could be found, Ross could use
the same argument against this identification
that he did to establish the simplicity of
goodness. He could claim we should consider
whether we have always had this simple natural
property in mind when we think of something as
good (or right).
It is, however, important to keep the issue of
the simplicity of moral properties distinct from
that of their non-naturalness. What is impor-
tant for Ross and other intuitionists is that moral
properties are non-natural properties. Nothing
important would be lost if goodness and right-
ness turned out to be complex, and thus defin-
able, properties. Moore, for example, thought
that goodness is a simple non-natural property,
but that Tightness could be defined in terms of
goodness, and A.C. EWING argued that fitting-
ness is a simple non-natural property, and that
goodness could be defined in terms of fittingness.
Both Moore and Ewing thought that it was
important that there be at least one simple moral
property, for they thought that if both Tightness
and goodness could be defined then they would
have to be defined in naturalistic terms, and
ethics would be subsumed under some other
science. But this does not follow. One might, for
instance, maintain that the concept of a reason
is the concept of a non-natural property, and that
both goodness and Tightness could be defined in
terms of reasons. This view would not subsume
ethics under some other science.
In his normative theory Ross defends a form
of methodological intuitionism. Methodological
intuitionists maintain that there is a plurality of
first principles that may conflict, and that no
explicit priority rules for resolving such conflicts
can be provided (Williams, p. 182). This means
that principles of duty cannot ultimately be
grounded in a single foundational principle.
Following H.A. PRICHARD, Ross thought the
most plausible monistic theories attempt to
ground the right in the good; either the agent's
own good (ethical egoism), the goodness of the
ROSS
consequences of the action (consequentialism)
or in the intrinsic value of the act itself. In The
Right and the Good Ross argues that each of
these views is untenable, and for the view that
there is no necessary connection between the
right and the good. In the Foundations of
Ethics he modifies this view slightly.
[A]n action will be completely good only if it
manifests the whole range of motivations by
which an ideally good man would be affected
in the circumstances, a sensitiveness to every
result for good or for evil that the act is
foreseen as likely to have, as well as to any
special prima facie obligations or disobliga-
tions that may be involved; and only if it
manifests sensitiveness to all these consider-
ations in their right proportions. But if the
agent is responsive to all the morally relevant
considerations in their right proportions, he
will in fact do the right act. Thus no action
will have the utmost moral excellence which
an action in the circumstances can have,
unless it is also the right action.
(The Foundations of Ethics, pp. 308-309)
Ross still held that an act could be right without
being in any way good, and that it can be good
without being right. All he concedes here is
that an action cannot be best unless it is also
right.
In opposition to monistic theories, Ross
proposes a theory of prima facie duties. This
theory rests on a distinction between 'prima
facie duty' and 'duty proper', or what Ross
sometimes calls our 'actual duty' (The Right
and the Good, pp. 19-20). This is not a dis-
tinction between what merely seems to be our
duty and what really is our duty. Indeed, strictly
speaking it is not even a distinction between
types of duty.
The phrase 'prima facie duty' must be apol-
ogized for, since (1) it suggests that what we
are speaking of is a certain kind of duty,
whereas it is in fact not a duty, but something
related in a special way to duty. Strictly
896
speaking, we want not a phrase in which
duty is qualified by an adjective, but a
separate noun. (2) 'Prima' facie suggests that
one is speaking only of an appearance which
a moral situation presents at first sight, and
which may turn out to be illusory; whereas
what I am speaking of is an objective fact
involved in the nature of the situation, or
more strictly in an element of its nature,
though not, as duty proper does, arising from
its whole nature.
(The Right and the Good, p. 20)
For a feature of an act to be prima facie right
is not for that feature to ground some kind of
duty, a defeasible one, but is for this feature to
count in favour of doing the act. Count in
favour how? By giving us a moral reason to do
it. Similarly, for some feature of an act to be
prima facie wrong is not for that feature to
ground some sort of prohibition, but is for that
feature to count against doing that act, and
once again, the way in which it counts against
doing this act is by providing a moral reason
not to do it. A moral reason not to do some act
cannot be understood as a type of duty not to
do that act. For I may have a moral reason not
to do the act it is my duty to do, and this cannot
mean that it is my duty not to (do the act it is my
duty to do. So prima facie duties should be
understood as features that give us genuine
moral reasons (rather than as apparent duties)
to do certain actions.
Because the term 'prima facie duty' is so mis-
leading Ross was keen to find some other term.
At the time of writing The Right and the Good
he could not think of a better term. He con-
sidered the term 'claim' (suggested by Prichard),
but rejects it on the ground that it captures
what he wants to express from the wrong point
of view - from the point of view of the other
person, the person who has a claim against
me, rather than of the agent - and because it
does not capture the fact that we have a prima
facie duty to ourselves (p. 20). In The
Foundations of Ethics, however, he accepts
both the terms 'responsibility' (p. 85) and 'fit-

tingness' (pp. 51-5) as better ways of express-
ing what he was getting at with the term 'prima
facie duty'.
Ross does not merely provide a list of prima
facie duties, but attempts to systematize these
as much as possible. He does this by consider-
ing which of the prima facie duties are basic
and which derivative, with the aim of finding
out which are the most fundamental. This is
basically the same enterprise consequentialists
and Kantians are engaged in. The only differ-
ence is that they think that there is one foun-
dational moral principle, whereas Ross denies
this. For Ross, there are five foundational prin-
ciples: fidelity, reparation, gratitude, production
of the good and avoidance of the bad (The
Right and the Good, pp. 26-7). Ross insists
that any attempt to reduce the number of foun-
dational moral principles further will distort
the facts.
This pluralism applies not only to the right,
but to the good also. There is, Ross maintains,
no master value, such as pleasure, well-being or
happiness, in terms of which the value of all
other goods can ultimately be understood.
There are, rather, a number of things which are
good on their own account and whose value
does not, therefore, need to be derived from the
value of anything else.
In The Right and the Good Ross argues that
there are three simple ultimate goods, and one
complex good (pp. 134^1). The simple goods
are virtue, pleasure and knowledge. The
complex good is justice, which Ross under-
stands as the distribution of happiness
(pleasure) in proportion to merit (virtue). The
value of justice cannot, however, be reduced to
the value of virtue and pleasure separately. We
can see this if we consider two worlds with
equal amounts of virtue, vice, pleasure and
pain. In the first world the virtuous are happy
and the vicious miserable, while in the second,
the virtuous are miserable and the vicious
happy. Although both worlds contain the same
amount of virtue, pleasure, vice and pain, they
are not equally good. The first is better than the
second. To accommodate this we must, Ross
897
ROSS
thinks, allow that justice is a distinct and irre-
ducible ultimate good.
Ross held that the foundational moral values
are self-evident, and so can be known directly by
means of intuition. We can know foundational
values directly because foundational moral prin-
ciples or propositions are self-evident. To say
that these propositions are self-evident is to say
that they can be known a priori on the basis of
an understanding of them. Ross did not think
that moral principles are what we first come to
know. His view is that we first come to know
particular instances of these principles, and then
by a process of intuitive induction, come to see
the truth of the relevant universal principles. So,
for example, we first see that particular acts of
promise-breaking are prima facie wrong, and
then come to see that promise-breaking is of a
nature to be prima facie wrong (The Right and
the Good, pp. 32-3). In this way, we come to
know the universal moral principle that promise-
breaking is prima facie wrong.
Intuitive induction is not to be confused with
empirical induction. Empirical induction
allows us to judge how probable some
outcome is on the basis of previous evidence.
So, for example, I may judge that it is highly
probable that the last apple in the barrel is
rotten because the other fifty apples I have
pulled out of the barrel were rotten. Intuitive
induction is not a way of arriving at a judge-
ment of probability, but allows us to move
directly from some particular fact to knowl-
edge of the universal law this fact instantiates.
We use intuitive induction when, for
instance, we come to see the universal truth
of modus ponens from a particular example,
or the universal truth that two plus two
equals four on the basis of our recognition
that when we put two balls together with
two other balls there will be four balls.
Unlike empirical induction, one need only
be given one example of a principle to know
by intuitive induction the universal principle.
(Broad et al., p. 214)
ROSS
Ross did not maintain that all moral proposi-
tions are self-evident. Only the most funda-
mental moral propositions can be known in this
way, according to Ross. Particular judgements
based on these foundations about what we
(actually) ought to do in specific situations are,
for Ross, not self-evident, or even knowable.
For Ross, we can only have a probable opinion
about duty proper.
Self-evident moral principles need not be
obvious, at least, not obvious to everyone.
[T]he nature of the self-evident is not to be
evident to every mind however undeveloped,
but to be apprehended directly by minds
which have reached a certain degree of
maturity, and for minds to reach the neces-
sary degree of maturity the development that
takes place from generation to generation is
as much needed as that which takes place
from infancy to adult life.
(The Right and the Good, p. 12)
A prima facie duty is self-evident,
not in the sense that it is evident from the
beginning of our lives, or as soon as we
attend to the proposition for the first time,
but in the sense that when we have reached
sufficient mental maturity and have given
sufficient attention to the proposition it is
evident without any need of proof, or of
evidence beyond itself.
(The Right and the Good, p. 29)
To many ears, talk of 'mental maturity' and
'developed minds' may sound arrogant, chau-
vinistic or at best unacceptably complacent.
But Ross was neither arrogant nor complacent.
He thinks there is moral progress, but he does
not claim that we should accept uncritically
whatever moral system we inherit as the most
developed and mature thinking on the issue. A
sincere questioning in ethics reflects, he believes,
'a desire to get down to bedrock in morality;
and this is all to the good'. He goes on to write:
898
Moral codes that will not survive such ques-
tioning do not deserve to sui*vive it, and those
that do deserve to survive it will do so.
Magna est veritas et praevalet. Acquiescence
in moral codes merely because they are
accepted by the society in which one lives
spells death to progress in moral insight.
(The Foundations of Ethics, p. 21)
These passages were not written by someone
who thought that his own thinking, or the
moral thinking in his own culture, was so devel-
oped and mature that it is beyond question.
Ross does not dogmatically assert the self-
evidence of any moral proposition that seems
true to him, but claims this status only for those
apparently basic moral convictions that survive
careful reflection. Such reflection is aimed at
getting a clear understanding of the proposition
in question in order to ascertain whether we
really do think it expresses a morally basic
truth. It also aims at providing arguments for
its truth and self-evidence. If the proposition
survives such reflection, then Ross can do more
than merely assert the truth of the moral propo-
sition to someone who rejects it. He can take
the other person through the i:orm of reflection
that convinced him of the truth and self-
evidence of this proposition.
It may be thought that this is incoherent,
that someone who thinks that some proposition
is self-evident cannot offer an argument for
that proposition. But there is nothing about
the fact that a proposition can be known solely
on the basis of an understand ing of it that rules
out the possibility that it can be known in some
other way as well, i.e. that it is epistemologically
overdetermined. It may not be that every self-
evident proposition is epistemologically overde-
termined, but the thought thai: some are is in no
way absurd.
In The Right and the Good Ross seemed to
deny this. He there states that self-evident moral
propositions 'cannot be proved, but... just as
certainly need no proof (p. 30). But elsewhere
in The Right and the Good he makes only the
more restricted claim that such propositions

do not need any proof (p. 29), and despite the
fact that he sometimes makes the further claim
that they cannot receive any proof (justifica-
tion), I do not think this further claim expresses
his considered view. Three years before the
publication of The Right and the Good Ross
had explicitly stated that 'the fact that some-
thing can be inferred does not prove that it
cannot be seen intuitively' ('The Basis of
Objective Judgements in Ethics', p. 121). If he
thinks that some proposition can be inferred
from (justified by) other propositions and be
self-evident, he clearly thinks that its being self-
evident does not rule out the possibility of a
proof. So the occasions in The Right and the
Good where he denies this are, I think,
instances where Ross was not as careful in
what he said as he should have been.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Right and the Good (Oxford, 1930;
repr. with an Introduction by Philip
Stratton-Lake, Oxford, 2002).
The Foundations of Ethics (Oxford, 1939).
Other Relevant Works
'The Basis of Objective Judgements in Ethics',
International Journal of Ethics, vol. 37
(1927), pp. 113-27.
'The Nature of Morally Good Action',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
29 (1928-9), pp. 251-74.
'The Ethics of Punishment', Journal of
Philosophical Studies, vol. 4 (1929), pp.
205-11.
Further Reading
Audi, R., 'Intuitionism, Pluralism, and the
Foundations of Ethics', in W. Sinnott-
Armstrong and M. Timmons (eds), Moral
Knowledge? (New York, 1996).
Brink, D.O., 'Common Sense and First
Principles in Sidgwick's Methods', Social
Philosophy and Policy, vol. 11 (1994), pp.
179-201.
Broad, C.D. et al., Five Types of Ethical
Theory (1930).
899
ROSS
Dancy, J., 'An Ethic of prima facie Duties', in
A Companion to Ethics (Oxford, 1991).
, 'Wiggins and Ross', Utilitas, vol. 1
(1998), pp. 281-5.
Darwall, S., 'Moore to Stevenson', in R.J.
Cavalier (ed.), Ethics in the History of
Western Philosophy (New York, 1989),
pp. 366-98.
, 'Under Moore's Spell', Utilitas, vo
10 (1998), pp. 286-91.
Gaut, B., 'Moral Pluralism', Philosophical
Papers, vol. 22 (1993), pp. 17-40.
Hooker, B., 'Ross-Style Pluralism versus
Rule-Consequentialism', Mind, vol. 105
(1996), pp. 531-52.
, 'Reply to Stratton-Lake', Mind, vol.
106 (1997), pp. 759-60.
Hudson, W.D., Ethical Intuitionism (1967).
Lucas, J.R., 'Ethical Intuitionism IF,
Philosophy, vol. 46 (1971), pp. 1-10.
McNaughton, D., 'An Unconnected Heap of
Duties?', Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 46
(1996), pp. 433-47.
, 'Intuitionism', in H. LaFollette (ed.),
The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory
(Oxford, 2000), pp. 268-87.
Pietroski, P., 'Prima facie Obligations: Ceteris
Paribus Laws in Moral Theory', Ethics,
vol. 103 (1993), pp. 489-515.
Searle, J.R., 'Prima facie Obligations', in J.
Raz (ed.), Practical Reasoning (Oxford,
1978), pp. 81-90.
Stratton-Lake, P., 'Can Hooker's Rule-
Consequentialist Principle Justify Ross's
prima facie Duties?', Mind, vol. 106
(1997), pp. 751-8.
, Ethical Intuitionism: Re-Evaluations
(Oxford, 2002).
Strawson, P.P., 'Ethical Intuitionism',
Philosophy, vol. 24 (1949), pp. 23-33.
Urmson, J.O., 'A Defence of Intuitionism',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol
75 (1974-5), pp. 111-19.
Wiggins, D., 'The Right and the Good and
W. D. Ross's Criticism of
Consequentialism', Utilitas, vol. 10 (1998),
pp. 261-80, and in Anthony O'Hear (ed.),
ROSS
Philosophy, the Good, the True and the
Beautiful, Philosophy, suppl. vol. 47
(2000), pp. 175-95.
Williams, B., 'What Does Intuitionism
Imply?', in J. Dancy (ed.), Human Agency
(Stanford, 1988), pp. 189-98; and in
Making Sense of Humanity and Other
Philosophical Papers 1982-1993
(Cambridge, 1995).
Philip Stratton-Lake
ROTH, Leon (1896-1963)
Leon Roth was born in Hackney, East London
on 31 March 1896 and died in Auckland, New
Zealand on 1 April 1963. He was the third
son of Polish Jewish immigrants. His father
Joseph was a builder and his younger brother
Cecil became an eminent historian of Judaism.
Roth was educated at the City of London
School and at Exeter College, Oxford, where he
gained his MA and DPhil. In World War I,
from 1916 to 1918, he undertook military
service in France. In 1923 he gained a post at
Manchester University, which he held until
1928, when he emigrated to Palestine to
become the first Professor of Philosophy at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where the
Philosophy Department developed under his
leadership and encouragement. He later
became Rector of the Hebrew University, but
resigned his post in 1953 and returned to
Britain, due to his opposition to the social and
political policies pursued by the government
of the newly created State of Israel, particu-
larly the treatment of Arab refugees. In
common with some of his colleagues at the
Hebrew University, including Martin Buber
and Judah Magnes, the previous Rector, Roth
believed that Israel should have been consti-
tuted as a binational state, with rough parity
between its Arab and Jewish populations. After
900
1953 he translated philosophical classics from
the Western tradition into Hebrew and trav-
elled widely on lecture tours. He died suddenly
in Auckland in April 1963, after having com-
pleted a series of lectures there.
Whilst at Manchester University, Roth devel-
oped an interest in the seventeenth-century
rationalist tradition, which resulted in the pub-
lication of three books, including, in 1926, his
edition of the correspondence between
Descartes and Huygens, on the strength of
which he was made an Off icier d'Academie in
France. His first book, Spinoza, Descartes and
Maimonides (1924), showed Roth to be a
pioneer, at least amongst British scholars, in
seeking to explore Spinoza's debt to the Jewish
intellectual and religious tradition. Roth found
many points of affinity with the great (though
in Britain then little studied) medieval Jewish
Aristotelian philosopher, Moses Maimonides.
According to Roth's interpretation, Spinoza,
though much indebted to Descartes, was
nonetheless very opposed to him at many
points, such as his voluntarism, and should not
be considered a Cartesian.
Roth maintained an interest in the rational-
ists in his later career at the Hebrew University,
publishing an edition of Descartes's Discourse
on Method (1937). But increasingly his research
interests came to be dominated by studies of
Maimonides, and by his concern to present
both to his co-religionists and to a wider
audience his views of Judaism, which in the
Preface to Judaism: A Portrait (1960) he dis-
armingly characterizes as 'growing heresies'.
Roth claims that Judaism is the prototype of
monotheism and, as such, deserves study by
both its own adherents and those of all other
monotheistic religions. Its two essential
elements are a belief in (in the sense of placing
trust in) one God, and the attempt to live a
righteous way of life, however 'righteousness'
is to be interpreted. A convert to Judaism who
meets these requirements is to be regarded as a
full member of the Jewish community,
whatever his racial origins. The issue of
Jewishness is thus one of religion, not race, and

Judaism is 'open' in the sense that it can accept
anyone, even though it is not a proselytizing
religion.
Roth's systematic approach to Judaism,
which he says is typical of any philosophical
treatment, contains some degree of scepticism.
He insists that it is impossible for us, as finite
and fallible beings, fully to understand the
nature of God, but that we have the capacity to
understand what God does. Thus, according to
Roth, we can come to know that there is in the
universe an objective and absolute prescriptive
moral order created by God. He therefore res-
olutely opposes cultural relativism and descrip-
tivism in ethics. This moral order is the source
of God's demands of, and thus the duties
enjoined on, the Jewish community, who
should act according to God's precepts, though
with the flexibility required by different
concrete moral situations such as were or are
found in different historical circumstances.
Judaism is thus a living, developing tradition, to
be disciplined but not constrained by the tra-
dition of the Torah or Law, which includes the
Jewish Bible and the Talmud, or set of explana-
tory commentaries on the Bible. Believers
should obey the moral rules instituted by God,
not as external commands, but from their own
internal motivation to do what is fair, just or
compassionate. Moral maturity, following
Moses Maimonides and ultimately Aristotle, is
dependent on an individual's moral training
and experience. Ethics is not to be considered
in utilitarian, and particularly not in eschato-
logical, terms, although rewards can be offered
to children in their moral education. The focus
of Judaism is firmly to live a good life in this
world, without the expectation of a paradisial
afterlife. The ethical programme of Judaism is
for all human beings to transform themselves
and the history of Judaism, and more widely of
humankind as a whole, is of the progress made
towards this moral goal. Thus the course of
history is purposive or teleological.
In addition to the moral order, God has
created the universe with a natural order or
structure, about which it is a human's duty to
901
ROTH
learn. Thus Roth says that Judaism has always
been sympathetic to science, and to learning in
general. As there is a natural order, Roth
rejects, not the possibility of miracles, which he
understands as violations of the laws of nature,
but their actuality, as God would not want to
disrupt the workings of his creation nor our
opportunity to learn about them. What we
consider to be truths about the universe and its
order are, following Moses Maimonides,
always to be regarded as provisional, and so
any event which we take to be miraculous
could in fact be an occurrence for which we do
not yet fully understand the reasons.
Roth decisively rejects the view that any
mystical elements are to be found within
Judaism. He considers mysticism to be a form
of abstractionism, in that it holds that 'all is
one': ultimately, there are no particular or
discrete entities to be distinguished from each
other, and the self is swallowed up into a larger
whole. By contrast, Roth insists that Judaism is
ultimately concerned with the concrete situa-
tion and the particular and unique human
being. This hostility to mysticism dictates his
treatment of the works of Judah Halevi, the
thirteenth-century Jewish poet and philoso-
pher. Whilst recognizing that Halevi wrote at
a time of crisis, under the influence of the
Jewish mystical text the Zohar, and when the
Jewish communities of Spain became the
victims of the hardening attitude of Christians
in their reconquest of Spain from the Moors,
Roth rejects Halevi's works because they are
unacceptably dominated by an 'other-worldly'
mysticism and the narrow geographical nation-
alism of the aspiration that all Jews should
return to their ancient homeland of Palestine.
In sixteenth-century Eastern Europe, the
Zohar gave rise to another mystical movement
that of the Kabbala, a set of doctrines which
includes the teaching that the Diaspora, or
'scattering' of the Jews, symbolized by the
release or emanation of divine sparks from the
essence of God, was a divine punishment only
to be corrected by the return of the Jews to their
ancient homeland. Again, Roth considers the
ROTH
mysticism of the Kabbala, with its esoteric
retreat into groundless metaphysical specula-
tion, to have been a laudable but erroneous
response to the anti-Semitic persecution of the
times, which resulted in the wholesale massacre
of Polish Jews by Cossacks under their leader
Chmelnitzki in 1648. Roth held reason, includ-
ing our capacity for knowledge of various
truths and moral precepts, to be the basis for
religion, whereas 'impulse and passion' gave
rise to 'myth-weaving', mysticism and specula-
tive metaphysics. In the bluntest statement of
Judaism: A Portrait Roth states, 'Religion is
... possibly the greatest of the bridges which has
been built over the human "mess" ... the return
to myth-making will not help' (Judaism,
p. 154).
Roth also deals with what he considers to be
the two most pressing problems of contempo-
rary Judaism, the first of which stems from the
issue of citizenship. From the eighteenth century
onwards, especially in Western Europe, the
once-maligned Jewish minority gained full cit-
izenship, and thus (even if only theoretically or
legally) full entry into the wider society of the
country in which they lived. Judaism, in
common with all other religions, became purely
a matter of private concern and conviction,
instead of a public and communal activity, and
there is thus now the permanent threat that
Judaism will be cut off from its roots. In Eastern
Europe, Roth observes, the situation was not
quite the same: the granting of citizenship was
never as secure as in Western Europe, and the
Jewish communities in Eastern Europe were,
until the Holocaust, much larger and more
cohesive.
The second problem confronting Judaism is
the issue of the State of Israel and its continu-
ing secularization. Many Jews, particularly
those from Israel itself, now consider their
primary loyalty to be, not to the God of
Judaism, but to the State of Israel. Roth
observes that many of those who exerted
pressure for the foundation of the State of Israel
were themselves influenced by late German
romanticism, and thus the God of the Jews has
902
become secularized as the 'national creative
power', the 'national spirit' or the 'national
will to survive'. There is no recognition of God
as creator, just as there is no attempt to make
human life holy or hallowed. Judaism is
reduced to the political and social life of Israel,
which has become a nation like any other,
instead of a people with the hallowed mission
of leading others to recognize the God of
Judaism.
Roth's distinctive contribution to philoso-
phy was as a philosopher of Judaism. His
emphasis that Judaism, and more widely
monotheistic religions in general, are founded
on reason, order and moral discipline serves as
an antidote to the fanatical and fundamental-
ist strains which predominate in monotheistic
religions at the present time. His universalism
was expressed in his repudiation of the view
that the fate of Judaism is inevitably bound up
with the fate of the Israeli state, and the incor-
poration into Judaism of the Jew of the
Diaspora and the convert. His insistence that
the essential ethical, social and political aspects
of Judaism, as of other monotheistic religions,
should not remain as theory but should result
in concrete action can perhaps best be exem-
plified by his courage in resigning from the
Hebrew University, and his subsequent emi-
gration from the State of Israel.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Spinoza, Descartes and Maimonides (1924).
Correspondence of Descartes and
Constantyn Huygens, 1635-1647 (1926).
Jewish Thought in the Modern World
(1927).
The Science of Morals: An Essay in Method
(1928).
Spinoza (1929).
Descartes3 Discourse on Method (1937).
Illustrations of Post-Biblical Jewish Ethical
and Religious Thought (1938).
The Hebrew University and its Place in the
Modern World (1945).
The Guide for the Perplexed: Moses
Maimonides (1948).

Education and Human Values (1949).
Jewish Thought as a factor in Civilisation
(1954).
Judaism: A Portrait (1960).
Is there a Jewish Philosophy? Rethinking
Fundamentals (1999).
Other Relevant Works
Studies in Rationalism, Judaism and
Universalism: In Memory of Leon Roth,
ed. Raphael Lowe (1966).
Further Reading
Jessop, I.E., 'Leon Roth: 1896-1963',
Proceedings of the British Academy, vol.
50 (1963), pp. 317-29.
Kathryn L. Plant
RUNCIMAN, Walter Garrison (1934-)
W.G. (Garry) Runciman was born on 10
November 1934, the eldest son of the 2nd
Viscount Runciman of Doxford. He was
educated at Eton and at Trinity College,
Cambridge, where he was a scholar studying
classics and history, and became a fellow after
national service in the Grenadier Guards
between 1953 and 1955. Whilst on a Harkness
Fellowship, Runciman became interested in
sociology - meanwhile he became a fellow of
Trinity in 1959.
Runciman is now a senior research fellow at
Trinity College, Cambridge and President of the
British Academy. He is also a practising capi-
talist as Chairman of the shipping company
Andrew Weir and Co. Ltd. It was while on the
Harkness scholarship that Runciman turned
to sociology. Despite publishing on Plato, he
confesses in an autobiographical sketch that 'I
was only writing about Plato because I thought
it was my best chance of a Trinity Fellowship
which, if I won it, I would use to turn myself
903
RUNCIMAN
into a sociologist' (Confessions of a Reluctant
Theorist, p. 17).
Runciman claims to resolve the long-standing
debate over the status of the social as against
the natural sciences. Specifically, he argues that
there is no special problem of explanation in the
human sciences, and in this he was influenced
by J.L. AUSTIN'S How to Do Things with
Words:
The ... implication which I drew from
Austin's notion of illocution was that all
sociologists ... ought to make explicit which
of four separate and distinguishable things
they are doing in enunciating the proposi-
tions to which they are soliciting their
reader's assent - reporting the fact of some
item or sequence of social behaviour,
explaining what has caused it to be what it
is reported as being, describing what it has
been like for those whose behaviour it is or
evaluating whether it is a good thing or a bad
one ...
(Confessions of a Reluctant Theorist, p. 9)
This fourfold distinction between reportage,
explanation, description and evaluation of
human behaviour forms the basis of the sub-
stantive theory in the second volume of A
Treatise on Social Theory (1989). This presents
Runciman's overall theory that the set of social
practices of a person determines the outcome of
a competition for power over the means of
production, for honour, and the power to
persuade, and for political and military power.
Success in these competitions creates motiva-
tions to continue successful practices and to
mimic them, via a series of feedback loops.
Successful practices also provide the agents in
question with the power to organize the social
environment to their liking. The theory is a
form of social evolutionism and Runciman is
explicit about the influence of Edward O.
Wilson on his thinking. Apart from the
Treatise, Runciman's The Social Animal is an
introductory text in sociology, which contains
highlights of his general theory.
RUNCIMAN
Runciman is a polymath and a contributor to
wide range of scholarly journals as well as more
general journals such as the New Left Review
and the London Review of Books. Aside from
his strictly philosophical papers, Runciman's
importance probably lies in his establishment of
sociology as a methodologically sound disci-
pline.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Plato's Later Epistemology (1962).
Social Science and Political Theory (1963).
(with A.K. Sen), 'Games, Justice and the
General Will', Mind, vol. 74 (1965), pp.
554-62.
Relative Deprivation and Social Justice
(1966).
'Social Equality', Philosophical Quarterly',
vol. 17 (1967), pp. 221-30.
'False Consciousness', Philosophy, vol. 44
(1969), pp. 303-13.
'Sociology in its Place' and Other Essays
(1970).
A Critique of Max Weber's Philosophy of
Social Science (1972).
'Describing', Mind, vol. 81 (1972), pp.
372-88.
'Relativism: Cognitive and Moral',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 48 (1974), pp. 191-20.
A Treatise on Social Theory, vol. 1 (1983);
vol. 2 (1989); vol. 3 (1997).
'On the Tendency of Human Societies to
Form Varieties' [the 1986 Radcliffe-Brown
Lecture in Social Anthropology],
Proceedings of the British Academy, vol.
72 (1986), pp. 149-65.
Confessions of a Reluctant Theorist (1989).
'The "Triumph" of Capitalism as a Topic in
the Theory of Social Selection', New Left
Review, vol. 210 (March-April 1995), pp.
33-47.
The Social Animal (1998).
Jon Pike
904
RUSSELL, Bertrand Arthur William, 3rd
Earl Russell (1872-1970)
Bertrand Russell was born on 18 May 1872 at
Ravenscroft, near Tintern in Monmouthshire
and died on 2 February 1970 at Plas Penrhyn,
Merionethshire, his home in Wales. He was
the second son of Viscount Amberley and
Katherine, daughter of the second Lord Stanley
of Alderley, and the second grandson of Lord
John Russell, who was created the first Lord
Russell after a long political career during
which he twice served as Prime Minister for
Queen Victoria. In his youth, Russell was raised
primarily by his grandmother, Lady Russell,
his mother, father and grandfather having died
when he was two, four and six respectively.
Being freethinkers, his parents had willed that
he and his brother, Frank, be raised in the
custody of two atheists, but the will was over-
turned and both boys were made wards in
Chancery upon petition of their grandparents.
Educated at home by a series of Swiss and
German tutors, Russell found the adult, reli-
gious atmosphere at Pembroke Lodge, his
grandparents' estate, gloomy and repressive.
Cambridge was his first exposure to a larger
social, intellectual and political world, and he
embraced academic life enthusiastically upon
his arrival there in 1890. He obtained a first in
mathematics in 1893, and completed the Moral
Sciences Tripos the following year. He
remained at Trinity until 1916, when he was
fined £110 and dismissed from college as a
result of anti-war protests. Although he had
been awarded membership in the Royal Society
eight years earlier, it appeared that his academic
career had come to an end. Two years later he
was again arrested. This time he was jailed for
five months.
Despite such setbacks, Russell became both
famous and infamous for his contributions to
a large variety of philosophical topics and an
equally large variety of popular and unpopular
social causes. Like Giuseppe Peano and Gottlob
Frege, the two logicians who most influenced
his logical writings, he helped erect the scaf-

folding of modern symbolic logic. Like
Voltaire, to whom he also often has been
compared, he wrote with style and wit and had
an enormous audience. Throughout much of
his life, he was Britain's most influential and
famous philosopher.
Russell became known as a result of his
writings, not only in logic and philosophy, but
in a wide variety of other areas including edu-
cation, history, social and political theory, and
religious studies. His most influential contri-
butions include his defence of logicism (the
view that mathematics is in some important
sense reducible to logic), and his theories of
definite descriptions and logical atomism.
Along with G.E. MOORE, Russell is generally
recognized as one of the founders of analytic
philosophy. Along with Kurt Godel, he is also
regularly credited with being one of the most
important logicians of the twentieth century.
Awarded the Order of Merit in 1949 and the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, Russell
remained a prominent public figure until his
death at the age of ninety-seven.
Russell's contributions to logic and the foun-
dations of mathematics include his discovery of
Russell's paradox, his detailed development of
logicism, his development of the theory of types
and his refining of the first-order predicate
calculus.
Russell discovered the paradox that bears
his name in 1901, while working on his
Principles of Mathematics (1903). The paradox
arises in connection with the set of all sets that
are not members of themselves. Such a set, if it
exists, will be a member of itself if and only if
it is not a member of itself. The paradox is sig-
nificant since, using classical logic, all sentences
are entailed by a contradiction. Russell's dis-
covery thus prompted a large amount of work
in logic, set theory, and the philosophy and
foundations of mathematics.
Russell's own response to the paradox came
with the development of his theory of types in
1903. It was clear to Russell that some restric-
tions needed to be placed upon the original
comprehension (or abstraction) axiom of naive
905
RUSSELL
set theory, the axiom that formalizes the intu-
ition that any coherent condition may be used
to determine a set (or class). Russell's basic
idea was that reference to sets such as the set of
all sets that are not members of themselves
could be avoided by arranging all sentences
into a hierarchy, beginning with sentences
about individuals at the lowest level, sentences
about sets of individuals at the next lowest
level, sentences about sets of sets of individuals
at the next lowest level, and so on. Using a
vicious circle principle similar to that adopted
by the mathematician Henri Poincare, and his
own so-called 'no class' theory of classes,
Russell was able to explain why the unrestricted
comprehension axiom fails: propositional func-
tions, such as the function 'x is a set', may not
be applied to themselves since self-application
would involve a vicious circle. On Russell's
view, all objects for which a given condition (or
predicate) holds must be at the same level or of
the same 'type'.
Although first introduced in 1903, the theory
of types was further developed by Russell in his
1908 article 'Mathematical Logic as Based on
the Theory of Types' and in the monumental
work he co-authored with Alfred North
WHITEHEAD, Principia mathematica (1910,
1912, 1913). Thus the theory admits of two
versions, the 'simple theory' of 1903 and the
'ramified theory' of 1908. Both versions of the
theory later came under attack for being both
too weak and too strong. According to some,
the theory was too weak since it failed to
resolve all of the known paradoxes. According
to others, it was too strong since it disallowed
many mathematical definitions which, although
consistent, violated the vicious circle principle.
Russell's response was to introduce the axiom
of reducibility, an axiom that lessened the
vicious circle principle's scope of application,
but which many people claimed was too ad
hoc to be justified philosophically.
Of equal significance during this period was
Russell's defence of logicism, the theory that
mathematics was in some important sense
reducible to logic. First defended in his 1901
RUSSELL
article 'Recent Work on the Principles of
Mathematics', and then later in greater detail in
his Principles of Mathematics and in Principia
mathematica^ Russell's logicism consisted of
two main theses. The first was that all mathe-
matical truths can be translated into logical
truths or, in other words, that the vocabulary
of mathematics constitutes a proper subset of
that of logic. The second was that all mathe-
matical proofs can be recast as logical proofs or,
in other words, that the theorems of mathe-
matics constitute a proper subset of those of
logic.
Like Frege, Russell's basic idea for defending
logicism was that numbers may be identified
with classes of classes and that number-theo-
retic statements may be explained in terms of
quantifiers and identity. Thus the number 1
would be identified with the class of all unit
classes, the number 2 with the class of all two-
membered classes, and so on. Statements such
as 'There are two books' would be recast as
statements such as There is a book, x, and
there is a book, y, and x is not identical to y.'
It followed that number-theoretic operations
could be explained in terms of set-theoretic
operations such as intersection, union and dif-
ference. In Principia mathematica Whitehead
and Russell were able to provide many detailed
derivations of major theorems in set theory,
finite and transfinite arithmetic, and elementary
measure theory. A fourth volume was planned
but never completed.
In much the same way that Russell used logic
in an attempt to clarify issues in the foundations
of mathematics, he also used logic in an attempt
to clarify issues in philosophy. As one of the
founders of analytic philosophy, Russell made
significant contributions to a wide variety of
areas, including metaphysics, epistemology,
ethics and political theory, as well as to the
history of philosophy. Underlying these various
projects was not only Russell's use of logical
analysis, but also his long-standing aim of dis-
covering whether, and to what extent, knowl-
edge is possible. 'There is one great question,'
he writes in 1911. 'Can human beings know
906
anything, and if so, what and how? This
question is really the most essentially philo-
sophical of all questions.'
More than this, Russell's various contribu-
tions were also unified by his views concerning
both the centrality of scientific knowledge and
the importance of an underlying scientific
methodology common to both philosophy and
science. In the case of philosophy, this method-
ology expressed itself through Russell's use of
logical analysis. In fact, Russell often claimed
that he had more confidence in his methodol-
ogy than in any particular philosophical con-
clusion.
Russell's conception of philosophy arose in
part from his idealist origins. This is so, even
though he believed that his one, true revolution
in philosophy came about as a result of his
break from idealism. Russell saw that the
idealist doctrine of internal relations led to a
series of contradictions regarding asymmetrical
(and other) relations necessary for mathemat-
ics. Thus, in 1898, he abandoned the idealism
that he had encountered as a student at
Cambridge, together with his Kantian method-
ology, in favour of a pluralistic realism. As a
result, he soon became famous as an advocate
of the 'new realism' and for his 'new philoso-
phy of logic', emphasizing as it did the impor-
tance of modern logic for philosophical
analysis. The underlying themes of this 'revo-
lution', including his belief in pluralism, his
emphasis upon anti-psychologism and the
importance of science, remained central to
Russell's philosophy for the remainder of his
life.
Russell's methodology consisted of the
making and testing of hypotheses through the
weighing of evidence (hence Russell's comment
that he wished to emphasize the 'scientific
method' in philosophy), together with a
rigorous analysis of problematic propositions
using the machinery of first -order logic. It was
Russell's belief that by using the new logic of his
day, philosophers would be able to exhibit the
underlying 'logical form' of natural language
statements. A statement's logical form, in turn,

would help philosophers resolve problems of
reference associated with the ambiguity and
vagueness of natural language. Thus, just as we
distinguish three separate senses of 'is' (the is of
predication, the is of identity and the is of exis-
tence) and exhibit these three senses by using
three separate logical notations (?%, x = y and
3x respectively), we will also discover other
ontologically significant distinctions by being
aware of a sentence's correct logical form. On
Russell's view, the subject-matter of philosophy
is then distinguished from that of the sciences
only by the generality and the a prioricity of
philosophical statements, not by the underlying
methodology of the discipline. In philosophy, as
in mathematics, Russell believed that it was by
applying logical machinery and insights that
advances would be made.
Russell's most famous example of his
'analytic' method concerns denoting phrases
such as descriptions and proper names. In his
Principles of Mathematics Russell held the view
that every denoting phrase (e.g., 'Scott', 'blue',
'the number two', 'the golden mountain')
denoted, or referred to, an existing entity. By
the time his landmark article, 'On Denoting',
appeared two years later, in 1905, Russell had
modified this extreme realism and had instead
become convinced that denoting phrases need
not possess a theoretical unity.
While logically proper names (words such as
'this' or 'that' which refer to sensations of
which an agent is immediately aware) do have
referents associated with them, descriptive
phrases (such as 'the largest number less than
pi') should be viewed as a collection of quanti-
fiers (such as 'all' and 'some') and proposi-
tional functions (such as 'x is a number'). As
such, they are not to be viewed as referring
terms but, rather, as 'incomplete symbols'. In
other words, they should be viewed as symbols
that take on meaning within appropriate
contexts, but that are meaningless in isolation.
Thus, in the sentence 'The present King of
France is bald,' the definite description 'The
present King of France' plays a role quite dif-
ferent from that of a proper name such as
907
RUSSELL
'Scott' in the sentence 'Scott is bald.' For
example, letting K abbreviate the predicate 'is
a present King of France', B abbreviate the
predicate 'is bald', and s abbreviate the name
'Scott', Russell represents the former as 3%[(K^:
& \/y(Ky z> y = x)) & Bx] and the latter as Bs.
This distinction between distinct logical
forms allows Russell to explain three important
puzzles. The first concerns the operation of the
Law of Excluded Middle and how this law
relates to denoting terms. According to one
reading of the Law of Excluded Middle, it must
be the case that either 'The present King of
France is bald' is true or 'The present King of
France is not bald' is true. But if so, both sen-
tences appear to entail the existence of a present
King of France, clearly an undesirable result.
Russell's analysis shows how this conclusion
can be avoided. By appealing to the above
analysis, it follows that there is a way to deny
the sentence 'The present King of France is
bald' without being committed to the existence
of a present King of France, namely by accept-
ing that 'It is not the case that there exists a
present King of France who is bald' is true.
The second puzzle concerns the Law of
Identity as it operates in (so-called) opaque
contexts. Even though 'Scott is the author of
Waverley' is true, it does not follow that the
two referring terms 'Scott' and 'the author of
Waverley' are interchangeable in every situa-
tion. Thus although 'George IV wanted to
know whether Scott was the author of
Waverley' is true, 'George IV wanted to know
whether Scott was Scott' is, presumably, false.
Russell's distinction between the logical forms
associated with the use of proper names and
definite descriptions shows why this is so.
To see this, we once again let s abbreviate the
name 'Scott'. We also let w abbreviate
'Waverley' and A abbreviate the two-place pred-
icate 'is the author of. It then follows that the
sentence 's = s' is not at all equivalent to the
sentence 63x[Axw & \/y(Ayw z> y = x) & x = s]'.
The third puzzle relates to true negative exis-
tential claims, such as the claim 'The golden
mountain does not exist.' Here, once again, by
RUSSELL
treating definite descriptions as having a logical
form distinct from that of proper names, Russell
is able to give an account of how a speaker may
be committed to the truth of a negative existen-
tial without also being committed to the belief
that the subject term has reference. That is, the
claim that Scott does not exist is false since the
sentence '~3x(x = s)' is self-contradictory. (After
all, there must exist at least one thing that is
identical to s since it is a logical truth that s is
identical to itself!) In contrast, the claim that a
golden mountain does not exist may be true
since, assuming that G abbreviates the predi-
cate 'is golden' and M abbreviates the predicate
'is a mountain', there is nothing contradictory
about '~3x(Gx dc Mx)\
Russell's emphasis upon logical analysis also
had consequences for his metaphysics. In
response to the traditional problem of the
external world which, it is claimed, arises since
the external world can be known only by infer-
ence, Russell developed his famous 1910 dis-
tinction between 'knowledge by acquaintance
and knowledge by description'. He then went
on, in his 1918 lectures on logical atomism, to
argue that the world itself consists of a complex
of logical atoms (such as 'little patches of
colour') and their properties. Together they
form the atomic facts which, in turn, are
combined to form logically complex objects.
What we normally take to be inferred entities
(e.g., enduring physical objects) are then under-
stood to be 'logical constructions' formed from
the immediately given entities of sensation, viz.
'sensibilia'. It is only these latter entities that are
known non-inferentially and with certainty.
According to Russell, the philosopher's job is
to discover a logically ideal language that will
exhibit the true nature of the world in such a
way that the speaker will not be misled by the
casual surface structure of natural language.
Just as atomic facts (the association of univer-
sals with an appropriate number of individuals)
may be combined into molecular facts in the
world itself, such a language would allow for
the description of such combinations using
logical connectives such as 'and' and 'or'. In
908
addition to atomic and molecular facts, Russell
also held that general facts (facts about 'all' of
something) were needed to complete the picture
of the world. Famously, he vacillated on
whether negative facts were also required.
In the broader public sphere, Russell also
has had widespread influence. This influence
stems largely from three main sources: his long-
standing social activism, his many writings on
the social and political issues of his day, and his
popularizations of technical writings in philos-
ophy and the natural sciences.
Among Russell's many popularizations are
his two best-selling works, The Problems of
Philosophy (1912) and A History of Western
Philosophy (1945). Both of these books, as
well as his numerous but less famous books
popularizing science, have done much to
educate and inform generations of general
readers. Naturally enough, Russell saw a link
between education, in this broad sense, and
social progress. At the same time, Russell is
also famous for suggesting that a widespread
reliance upon evidence, rather than upon super-
stition, would have enormous social conse-
quences: 'I wish to propose for the reader's
favourable consideration.,' says Russell, 'a
doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly para-
doxical and subversive. The doctrine in
question is this: that it is undesirable to believe
a proposition when there is no ground
whatever for supposing it true.'
Still, Russell is best known in many circles as
a result of his campaigns against the prolifera-
tion of nuclear weapons and against Western
involvement in the Vietnam War during the
1950s and 1960s. However, Russell's social
activism stretches back at least as far as 1910,
when he published his Anti-Suffragist Anxieties.
Russell also ran unsuccessfully for Parliament
(in 1907, 1922 and 1923) and, together with
his second wife, founded and operated an
experimental school during the late 1920s and
early 1930s.
Although he became the 3rd Earl Russell
upon the death of his brother in 1931, Russell's
radicalism continued to make him a contro-

versial figure well through middle age. While
teaching in the United States in the late 1930s,
he was offered a teaching appointment at City
College, New York. The appointment was
revoked following a large number of public
protests and a 1940 judicial decision which
found him morally unfit to teach at the college.
In 1954 he delivered his famous 'Man's Peril'
broadcast on the BBC, condemning the Bikini
H-bomb tests. A year later, together with Albert
Einstein, he released the Russell-Einstein
Manifesto calling for the curtailment of nuclear
weapons. In 1957 he was a prime organizer of
the first Pugwash Conference, which brought
together a large number of scientists concerned
about the nuclear issue. He became the
founding President of the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament in 1958 and was once
again imprisoned, this time in connection with
anti-nuclear protests, in 1961. The media
coverage surrounding his conviction only
served to enhance Russell's reputation and to
further inspire the many idealistic youths who
were sympathetic to his anti-war and anti-
nuclear protests. Upon being awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, Russell used
his acceptance speech to emphasize, once again,
themes related to his social activism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry
(Cambridge, 1897).
The Principles of Mathematics (Cambridge,
1903).
'On Denoting', Mind, vol. 14 (1905), pp.
479-93; repr. in Essays in Analysis (1973),
pp. 103-19.
'Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory
of Types', American Journal of
Mathematics, vol. 30 (1908), pp. 222-62;
repr. in Logic and Knowledge (1956), pp.
59-102; and in Jean van Heijenoort, From
Frege to Godel (Cambridge, Mass., 1967),
pp. 152-82.
'Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge
by Description', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 11 (1910-11), pp.
909
RUSSELL
108-28; repr. in Mysticism and Logic
(1963), pp. 152-67.
(with Alfred North Whitehead), Principia
mathematica^ 3 vols (Cambridge, 1910,
1912, 1913); 2nd edn, vol. 1 (1925), vols 2
and 3 (1927); abridg. as Principia mathe-
matica to *56 (Cambridge, 1962).
The Problems of Philosophy (London and
New York, 1912).
Our Knowledge of the External World
(Chicago and London, 1914).
Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916);
repr. as Why Men Fight (New York,
1917).
Political Ideals (New York, 1917).
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
(London and New York, 1918); repr. as A
Free Man's Worship and Other Essays
(1976).
The Philosophy of Logical Atomism', The
Monist, vol. 28 (1918), pp. 495-527; vol.
29 (1919), pp. 32-63,190-222, 345-80;
repr. in Logic and Knowledge (1956), pp.
177-281.
Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
(London and New York, 1919).
The Analysis of Mind (London and New
York, 1921).
A Free Man's Worship (Portland, Maine,
1923); repr. as What Can a Free Man
Worship? (Girard, Kansas, 1927).
'Logical Atomism', in J.H. Muirhead,
Contemporary British Philosophers
(1924), pp. 356-83; repr. in Logic and
Knowledge (1956), pp. 323-43.
On Education, Especially in Early Childhood
(1926); repr. as Education and the Good
Life (New York, 1926); abridg. as
Education of Character (New York, 1961).
The Analysis of Matter (London and New
York, 1927).
Why I Am Not a Christian (London and
New York, 1927).
Marriage and Morals (London and New
York, 1929).
The Conquest of Happiness (London and
New York, 1930).
RUSSELL
Power: A New Social Analysis (London and
New York, 1938).
An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London
and New York, 1940).
A History of Western Philosophy (New
York, 1945; London, 1946).
Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits
(London and New York, 1948).
Authority and the Individual (London and
New York, 1949).
The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
(Minneapolis, 1949); repr. as Russell's
Logical Atomism (Oxford, 1972).
Human Society in Ethics and Politics
(London and New York, 1954).
Logic and Knowledge: Essays, 1901-1950
(London and New York, 1956).
Portraits From Memory and Other Essays
(London and New York, 1956).
My Philosophical Development (London and
New York, 1959).
The Autobiography ofBertrand Russell, 3
vols (1967,1968,1969).
The Collected Papers ofBertrand Russell, 34
vols (London and New York, 1983-).
Further Reading
Ayer, Alfred Jules, Russell (1972).
Blackwell, Kenneth and Harry Ruja, A
Bibliography ofBertrand Russell, 3 vols
(1994).
Clark, Ronald, The Life ofBertrand Russell
(1975).
(ed.), The Selected Letters ofBertrand
Russell, 2 vols (1992, 2001).
-, The Cambridge Companion to
Bertrand Russell (Cambridge, 2003).
Hager, Paul J., Continuity and Change in the
Development of Russell's Philosophy
(Dordrecht, 1994).
Hylton, Peter W., Russell, Idealism and the
Emergence of Analytic Philosophy
(Oxford, 1990).
Irvine, Andrew D. (ed.), Bertrand Russell:
Critical Assessments, 4 vols (1999).
Irvine, Andrew D. and Gary A. Wedeking
(eds), Russell and Analytic Philosophy
910
(Toronto, 1993).
Jager, Ronald, The Development ofBertrand
Russell's Philosophy (1972).
Monk, Ray, Bertrand Russell, 2 vols (1996,
2000).
Moorehead, Caroline, Bertrand Russell (New
York, 1992).
Schilpp, Paul Arthur, The Philosophy of
Bertrand Russell, 3rd edri (New York,
1963).
Slater, John, Bertrand Russell (Bristol, 1994).
Andrew D. Irvine
RUSSELL, Edward Stuart (1887-1954)
Edward Stuart Russell was born in Port
Glasgow, Renfrewshire on 25 March 1887
and died in St Leonards-on-Sea on 24 August
1954. His father, John Naismith Russell was
a Free Church minister and. his mother, Helen
Cockburn Young, was the daughter of a
blacksmith. Russell attended the Greenock
Academy before going to the University of
Glasgow, where he gained his MA in zoology
in 1907. His early researches focused on local
marine invertebrates, and his early studies of
mollusc and coelenterate morphology were
influenced by his contact with John Arthur
THOMSON and Patrick Geddes in Aberdeen.
Their anti-reductionistic and non-mechanistic
approach to biology and evolutionary theory
found a sympathetic student in Russell. In
1909 he joined the Board of Agriculture and
Fisheries and began a successful career as a
researcher of fish stock management. He
became the Director of Fishery Investigations
for England and Wales in 1921, a post he
held until 1945. He managed a successful lab-
oratory at Lowestoft, edited the international
Journal du Conseil (1938-46) and published
a classic study, The Overfishing Problem
(1942). Russell retired in 1947.

Russell is best remembered for his Form and
Function (1916, which analyses the history of
animal morphology as a struggle between for-
malist and functionalist schools. In a division
still important to the philosophy of biology,
he characterized formalists as claiming that an
organism's structure is determined by inherent
laws of development, while functionalists
explain structure in terms of the functional
adaptations to environmental demands. In this
survey Russell criticized the functionalism of
orthodox Darwinians as too materialistic.
Organisms could not be reduced to self-repli-
cating machines being selected by nature. He
characterized animals as 'active, living pas-
sionate beings like ourselves and we shall seek
in our morphology to interpret as far as may be
their forms in terms of their activity' (Form
and Function, p. 364). Russell's approach was
a combination of anti-mechanistic common
sense philosophy and neo-Lamarckian evolu-
tion that sought to consider animals as active
agents in their own evolution.
His later work attempted to develop this
functional biology. In his The Study of Living
Things (1924) he cast himself as a latter-day
Aristotelian fighting a materialistic model of
biology. His holistic alternative, 'psychobiol-
ogy', was intended to be a way of understand-
ing the behaviour and minds of organisms. All
living beings contained an active inner striving
or 'horme' which shaped their development by
governing their interaction with their environ-
ment. Organisms were not mere objects, but
goal-directed subjects who had to be under-
stood on a psychological level. Russell sought
to explain biology in terms of empirical obser-
vations and to eliminate the popular theoreti-
cal construct of materialism which analysed
and so destroyed the 'unity, cooperation and
intention' of animals (Study of Living Things,
p. 30).
Russell's rejection of materialistic analysis
extended to the burgeoning field of genetics; he
simply could not conceive that heredity could
be explained in terms of such an abstract,
mechanical entity as the gene. He repeatedly
911
RUSSELL
sought to emphasize what was immediately
apparent to any observer, the directive activity
of the organism as a whole. His critique on
mechanistic biology was continued in his
posthumous Diversity of Animals (1962),
which attacked the neo-Darwinian evolution-
ary synthesis.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Form and Function (1916).
The Study of Living Things: A Prolegomena
to Functional Biology (1924).
The Interpretation of Development and
Heredity: A Study in Biological Method
(1930).
The Behaviour of Animals (1934).
The Overfishing Problem (1942).
The Directiveness of Organic Activities
(1945).
The Diversity of Animals: An Evolutionary
Study (Leiden, 1962).
Further Reading
Roll-Hansen, Nils, CE. S. Russell and J. H.
Woodger: The Failure of Two Twentieth-
Century Opponents of Mechanistic
Biology', Journal of the History of Biology,
vol. 17 (1984), pp. 399-428.
Richard K. England
RUSSELL, Joseph Johnston (1923-75)
Joseph Johnston Russell was born in Glasgow
and died in Kingston, Ontario. He matricu-
lated in medicine at the University of Glasgow
in 1941, transferring in 1943 to the Faculty of
Arts. Graduating in 1948 with first class
honours in philosophy and English literature,
he was appointed lecturer in logic. In 1963 he
accepted an appointment at the University of
Kansas in Lawrence; from 1966 until his death
he was Professor of Philosophy at Queen's
RUSSELL
University, Kingston, Ontario. He held the
University of Edinburgh's Shaw Fellowship in
Philosophy (1950-52), and a Commonwealth
Fund Fellowship at Yale, working on the
Philosophy of Mathematics (1952-4).
He was a member of the Glasgow interdis-
ciplinary group of the Karl Jaspers pupil Karl
Abenheimer and Heidegger's associate Joseph
Schorstein (both exiles from Nazism) with R.D.
LAING, John MACQUARRIE and the existential
theologian Ronald Gregor Smith. With a com-
mitment towards a fundamental philosophical
anthropology, the range of Russell's concerns
is only hinted at in his one very big epistemo-
logical book.
Analysis and Dialectic was provisionally
accepted for publication in the Muirhead
Library in 1965. Believing the book's range of
discussion crucial - he refrained from journal
publication while working on it - Russell, by
then in Kansas, could not countenance the exci-
sions stipulated. The book remained stalled,
and with his final breakdown in health
remained unpublished until ten years after his
untimely death.
The discrediting of speculative philosophy
by the successes of the sciences, says Russell,
turned philosophy towards phenomenology:
whether the attempts of Neurath and Carnap
to revive empiricism, which he criticizes - the
need for metaphysics is warranted by the per-
sistence of uncheckables - or Husserl's project.
Russell has made a critical appropriation from
Husserl's successively revised work, whose
objectives in common with modern British phi-
losophy need contrasting with continental exis-
tence philosophies which cite but do not rep-
resent Husserl.
Russell argues the current intellectual insol-
vency of numerous contemporary projects in
relation to their sometime declared objectives.
The integration of their results 'into the total
pattern of action' (including into continuing
dialogue) brooks no outside interference with
scientific projects. Yet plainly the various pro-
tracted efforts towards a unification of mathe-
matics as the science of the form of reality are
912
(Russell argues in great detail) in disarray.
Mathematics has proved incapable of founding
itself from within its pure theory. As for the
mixed theory (necessarily dependent on math-
ematics) which was physical theory, that might
be considered even a representation of chaos.
What are the foundations of morality, follow-
ing disintegration of the social structures within
which functional relationships applied and
where a now old language of morals still has
sole reference?
The ultimate insolvency consists (ibid.,
p. 209) in an expectation that all investigations
can proceed from an assured beginning by way
of a guaranteed technique to a satisfactory
outcome. Pursued to complete self-consistency,
conceptual clarification ends up frozen, inap-
plicable in practice, thus without foundation.
The project of 'formal truth' errs with Aristotle
in taking form to be imposed on matter,
whereas the concepts of form and matter are
derived together within a unity.
Any notion of a pure language established by
analytical revision re-enacts a fallacious dualism
between emotion and reason. Revisionist cases
against the adequacy of languages neglect the
recognizable degrees of rigour effective in use
and interpretation. The Wittgensteinian
'language-game' models one pattern within the
whole of the integrated patterns of discourse.
Poetry can afford reminders of intonation, of
irony; WHITEHEAD'S language in Process and
Reality is one reminder on the margin of these
integrated patterns. Technical discourses
properly applied within their subject-matters
are also ordinary language. Peter STRAWSON'S
contrast between 'descriptive' and 'revisionary'
metaphysics has provisional clarificatory force,
but does no description revise?
Philosophy is almost by definition not revi-
sionary so much as prescriptive. Metaphysics is
a form of action: of continuing labour of
analysis and integration or unification into the
total pattern of action. Absence of guaranteed
outcome is the metaphysician's warrant, with
the demand for the unity of theory and practice
which rejects alike pragmatism's 'primacy of

the practical' and the Marxist praxis in which
Marxist theory has primacy.
Metaphysical absurdity is disjunction
between theory and practice. The unity of
theory and practice, once conceptual ambigu-
ities have been cleared up, is to be essayed as the
resolution of dialectical ambiguities: The philo-
sophical situation is the situation in which the
form of action is no longer received' (ibid.,
p. 122). Unity of theory and practice must also
be differentiated from options diplomatic (cf.
Leibniz, suspension of theoria where provi-
sional practice is legitimized by unmanageable
alternatives) and sophistical - which deny there
is any problematic whatever.
Kant's distinction between respective realms
of phenomena and nuomena collapses as incon-
sistent with Kant's underlying realism about
things and situations. Foundations on divisions
between Appearance and reality, or knowledge
and faith, disintegrate. Existence philosophies
commonly entail an anything goes. Nietzschean
denial of factual truth, proclaiming 'life-enhanc-
ing' myth as 'truth', cannot be articulated
without recurring to factual truth. His 'absolute
presuppositions' at once both propositions and
non-propositions, COLLINGWOOD diverts the
metaphysical project of action into a method of
historical retrospect.
The metaphysician pursues truth as a value
within a realm of valuables. After clarificatory
analysis has finished, there remains what
Russell calls the 'assaying' of dialectical theses,
to which he devotes a discourse on method.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Analysis and Dialectic: Studies in the Logic
of Foundation Problems (The Hague,
1985).
Robert R. Calder
913
RUSSELL
RUSSELL, Leonard James (1884-1971)
Leonard James Russell was born in
Birmingham on 18 October 1884 and died
there on 8 March 1971. The son of the Revd
E.T. Russell, in 1902 he entered the University
of Glasgow, where he studied mathematics and
natural philosophy and won many academic
prizes before receiving the degrees of MA and
BSc. In 1908, at the urging of Robert LATTA,
Russell moved to Cambridge (Emmanuel
College) where he studied under W.E.
JOHNSON. From 1910 to 1923 he held a
position as lecturer in logic at the University of
Glasgow, during which time he obtained the
degree of DPhil and published a text designed
for teachers (An Introduction to Logic from the
Standpoint of Education, 1914). Russell suc-
ceeded C.D. BROAD as Professor of Philosophy
at the University of Bristol (1923-5), and then
became Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Birmingham (1925-50). He was also
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of
Birmingham, and the University of Glasgow
awarded him an honorary LL D. He was Acting
Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University
(summer 1932); held the Nuffield Foundation
Visiting Lectureship to Australia (1951); and
was Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Emory
University (1962-3, 1966). Russell occupied
administrative positions as Dean of the Faculty
of Arts, University of Birmingham (1937-40);
Acting Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of
Birmingham (1941-3); and sponsor, University
College of North Staffordshire (1949-52). From
1932 to 1933 Russell was simultaneously
President of the Aristotelian Society and
President of the Mind Association. He was also
something of an ambassador for philosophy,
both within Britain and for Britain abroad, and
partly in recognition of this he was made a fellow
of the British Academy in 1954. He married
Alice Green in 1911 and had two children (a son
and a daughter).
Respected as a philosopher of wide-ranging
interests and competencies, Leonard Russell's
writings fall roughly into the areas of (1) theory
RUSSELL
of knowledge and practice; (2) ethics; (3) logic
(broadly construed to include metaphysical and
formal logic as well as the relation between
logic and language); and (4) history of philos-
ophy (particularly Leibniz). His most substan-
tial contributions were in the first two cate-
gories, which for him are closely related. These
are dealt with in the following, as are his
writings on Leibniz.
Russell's An Introduction to Philosophy
(1929) contains many of the broader, human-
istic elements that characterize his efforts in
the theory of knowledge and ethics. This book
arose from a series of radio talks, the title of
which - The Modern Outlook: How it Arose
- reflects Russell's interest in the rapidly altering
status of religion in the belief systems and prac-
tices of society. Russell's work reveals a strong
awareness of the de-Christianization or secu-
larization of modern culture, which for him is
directly if not wholly attributable to the rise of
empirical scientific culture. Thus, the increasing
prevalence of the culture of science, starting
from the time of Bacon and Descartes, is 'the
most significant thing that has happened to
man since the rise of Christianity' (An
Introduction to Philosophy, p. 1). Russell
believes that a comprehensive appreciation of
human knowledge and belief in all its forms
requires that we grasp the place of science in
relation to other human endeavours.
Russell's general philosophical outlook is
well summarized by the following:
The mystic sought the divine vision through
fasting and prayer; the philosopher stormed
the citadel of reality by logic and reasoning.
The scientist turned away from both ways;
and was content to make toilsome progress
by collecting evidence, sifting and comparing,
weighing and measuring, limiting the field of
enquiry, remaining in willing ignorance on
everything beyond his field ... [I]n truth I
think a sound method has something of all
three.
(An Introduction to Philosophy, p. 6)
914
There is a wariness on Russell's part toward the
partial domination of his age by positivism
which, he thinks, would almost have art, ethics
and religion 'submit to the methods of the lab-
oratory' (ibid., p. 7). Entailed here is not a dis-
satisfaction with science itself; rather, the object
of Russell's suspicion is the elevation of any
single branch of inquiry - in this case science as
championed by positivist philosophy - beyond
its place in a kind of harmony of ways in which
human beings express themselves. Such an
imbalance, he thinks, is precisely the problem
with, for example, Kant's solution to the
question of freedom in a law-governed,
mechanical universe. Because there is at times
a flourish in Russell's pen, another passage is
worth citing at length:
We cannot live in one world universe and do
our thinking in another. We must live and
think in the same universe. We advance by
the interaction between life and thought. If
Kant was right (as I think we was) in insist-
ing that reason must not speculate in the
void, but must always work in the world
with which we are in touch through the
senses, he was wrong in supposing that what
science was confident of in his day was the
last word. We can advance only by letting all
the sides of our nature play on the complex
questions before us.
(An Introduction to Philosophy,
pp. 69-70)
In the end, for Russell, 'clashes and perplexity,
and conflicts' (ibid., p. 70) between the various
aspects of our nature are the stuff of our
humanity, and it is only by means of such
turmoil that we progress.
The specifics of this general philosophical
demeanour are worked out in a series of
articles on epistemology and ethics. In episte-
mology Russell's position may be character-
ized as a kind of 'social empiricism' (to
borrow a phrase from Bertrand RUSSELL), by
which in (Leonard) Russell's case is meant an
empiricism that takes our life situation, rather

than specific acts of consciousness, as the basis
of knowledge:
a mere feeling, separated from the bodily side
of the state ... of which it forms a part, and
from any possible social situation in which [it]
is born and made significant, would be a mere
mystery to us, even if we were capable of
apprehending it with any distinctness. It
belongs to the social situation ...
('Epistemology and the Ego-Centric
Predicament', p. 151)
Russell's departure from orthodox or naive
empiricism involves repudiation of a 'momen-
tary empiricism' in which we are more directly
aware of our own sensory states than of
anything else. The assumption that we are more
certain in the awareness of our own sensory
states is no more warranted, he thinks, than
empirical science's unwarranted (from momen-
tary empiricism's perspective) and competing
assumption of a world of stable, permanent
objects beyond perception.
Here Russell seeks a middle path, which for
him is the view that, first at the individual level,
it is the 'life' - the actions and reactions - of the
'entire organism' that conditions the forms of
our awareness. At the social level, awareness is
determined by what, in his two-part 'Ideals
and Practice', he terms 'Ways of Life', or by
what he elsewhere terms the 'climate of
opinion' ('The Concrete Background of
Philosophy', 1960). The point is that Russell
sees human knowing and activity as insepara-
ble, and in 'Two Ways of Knowing - by
Contemplation and by Doing' (1960) he
attempts to demonstrate how an activity - a
practice - can count as a way of knowing and
can play a role in the justification of a belief.
Indeed, a justificatory role for practice is what
Russell seeks in all these writings. What may
remain unanswered by his investigations,
however, is what if anything determines the
unity or entirety of the organism, i.e. the 'life'
at the individual level, or the 'way' or 'climate'
at the socio-cultural level.
915
RUSSELL
It should be clear that, set in a life context,
there is no such thing for Russell as a 'mere
theory' or 'mere description'. This is the basis of
his most important epistemological principle,
that scientific laws or general descriptions are
proposals rather than propositions. In
'Propositions and Proposals' (1951) he contends
that we should take the metaphysical princi-
ples of philosophy, as well as the broader prin-
ciples of science and religion, as methodological
recommendations, not as assertions of fact. In
certain respects, this distinction can be seen as
a replacement for Bertrand Russell's well-
known distinction (which arguably goes back to
Plato) between knowledge by description and
knowledge by acquaintance. It can also perhaps
be understood as a variant of, for example, J.L.
AUSTIN'S distinction between the performative
and descriptive uses of language, or of W.H.
WALSH'S argument (in Metaphysics, 1963) that
metaphysical principles are recommendations
about how we should take facts rather than
factual statements about the way of the world.
A succinct statement of this distinction
between propositions and proposals appears
in his 1946 paper 'The Principle of Causality'
(cf. the review of Bertrand Russell's Human
Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, p. 20).
There Russell claims that logical empiricists
can avoid the charge that their doctrine that
'any statements which can neither be
rendered probable nor unlikely by empirical
evidence, and which are not purely analytic,
are meaningless' is itself meaningless because
it 'does not conform to any of its own
requirements'. Logical empiricists, counters
Russell, can claim that their position can be
treated as a mode of procedure - a proposal
- and not as an affirmation. However, it is
not clear that Russell can remain the empiri-
cist he wishes to be. For his position may be
susceptible to the same criticism from which
he seeks to rescue empiricism. His claim that
scientific laws are proposals and not propo-
sitions seems itself to be an item of preposi-
tional knowledge that cannot be verified
empirically; and if this is so, why should it be
RUSSELL
believed? Nor can Russell argue that his claim
that scientific laws are proposals and not
propositions is not itself a proposition, but
rather a (further) proposal; for that simply
sets up a regress.
Russell's ethical views directly parallel his
epistemological position: just as the theoretical
and experiential are inseparably linked in epis-
temology, so in ethics are the domains of theory
and practice inseparable. Because all theory is
informed by our 'Ways of Life' or 'climate of
opinions', the 'study of institutions and their
inter-relations, and of the way they affect and
are affected by the behaviour of the persons
living in them, is ... an essential part of the
study of conduct from the standpoint of ethics
...' ('Is Anthropology Relevant to Ethics?',
p. 72). For Russell, then, moral statements get
their sense from our practice, and so he counts
himself among those for whom anthropology
and sociology are directly relevant to ethics. In
this respect, he rejects Kant's interpretation of
a moral statement as a categorical imperative.
Instead, he advances a view more in keeping
with his own theory of knowledge: a moral
statement has the character of 'any proposal
put forward to a body of people for common
action' ('Moral Statements as Proposals',
p. 17). In this sense, Russell's doctrine of pro-
posals serves the twofold function of replacing
descriptions in the theory of knowledge and
commands in ethics.
Finally, Russell's work in the history of phi-
losophy began under the influence of the
Leibniz scholar Robert Latta, who originally
arranged for Russell's position as lecturer in
Glasgow (on the strength of his background in
natural science and philosophy). In contrast to
the logic-oriented discussions of Leibniz by
Bertrand Russell and L. Couturat, Leonard
Russell focuses on the place of science in
Leibniz's thinking. On his interpretation,
Leibniz is represented as an unwilling idealist
who in the name of science constantly battled
'to escape the extreme [i.e. idealist] interpre-
tation of the doctrine of substance to which
[had led] his metaphysical and logical specu-
916
lations of 1686 [i.e. the year of the Discourse
on Metaphysics]' ('The Correspondence
Between Leibniz and de Voider', p. 176; cf.
'Leibniz's Account of Phenomena', pp.
185-6). With respect to the concept of force
so central to Leibniz's corrections of the
Cartesian physics, Russell argues ('Leibniz's
Philosophy of Science') that Leibniz's deriva-
tion of it is not from metaphysics, i.e. from the
doctrine of substantial forms, but is primarily
empirical. In his obituary notice of Russell in
1971, William KNEALE claimed that Russell's
papers on Leibniz were among his best,
though apparently Russell felt his efforts to do
justice to Leibniz's thought were hampered
by the practical difficulties of having access to
the full corpus of Leibniz's writings. His
dealings with Leibniz did, however, leave
some mark of influence upon Russell's own
forays into metaphysics (beyond an early
exchange with Bernard BOSANQUET). In his
inaugural address on change to the
Aristotelian Society ('Substance and Process',
p. 17) he cites with approval Leibniz's sug-
gestive distinction between 'inclining' and
'necessitating', a distinction Russell employs to
explain the possibility of actions in free and
creative substances moved by an urge or a
drive. In this Leibnizian conception Russell
detects 'no inherent impossibility'.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An Introduction to Logic from the
Standpoint of Education (1914).
An Introduction to Philosophy (1929).
'Ideals and Practice, Part F, Philosophy, v.ol.
17 (1942), pp. 99-116.
'Ideals and Practice, Part IF, Philosophy, vol.
17 (1942), pp. 195-20.
'Epistemology and the Ego-Centric
Predicament', in Philosophical Studies:
Essays in Memory ofL. Susan Stebbing
(1948), pp. 140-54.
'The Concrete Background of Philosophy',
Proceedings of the British Academy, vol.
37 (1951), pp. 51-69.
'Two Ways of Knowing - By Contemplation

and by Doing', Indian Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 2 (1960), pp. 83-95.
Further Reading
The Basis of Bosanquet's Logic', Mind, vol.
27 (1918), pp. 432-63.
'The Basis of Bosanquet's Logic', Mind, vol.
29 (1920), pp. 472-7.
'Some Problems in the Philosophy of
Leibniz', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 23 (1922-3), pp. 199-214
The Correspondence Between Leibniz and de
Voider', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 28 (1927-8), pp. 155-76.
'Substance and Process', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 12 (1933),
pp. 1-17.
The Principle of Causality', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 46 (1945-6.
pp. 105-26.
Review of Bertrand Russell, Human
Knowledge - Its Scope and Limits,
Philosophy, vol. 24 (1949), pp. 253-60
'Propositions and Proposals', Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 29 (1951), pp
155-63.
'Moral Statements as Proposals', Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 30 (1952), pp
17-32.
'Leibniz's Account of Phenomena',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
54 (1953-4), pp. 167-86.
'Belief and Action', in Contemporary British
Philosophy, 3rd ser., ed. H.D. Lewis
(1956), pp. 403-23.
The Justification of Beliefs', Philosophy, vo.
33 (1958), pp. 121-31.
'Leibniz's Philosophy of Science', Studia
Leibnitiana, vol. 8 (1976), pp. 1-17.
'Leibniz on the Metaphysical Foundation of
Science', Studia Leibnitiana, vol. 9 (1977)
pp. 101-10.
Further Reading
Bosanquet, B., The Basis of Bosanquet's
Logic', Mind, vol. 28 (1919), pp. 203-12.
, The Basis of Bosanquet's Logic',
917
RYLE
Mind, vol. 30 (1921), pp. 191-4.
Kneale, William, Biographical memoir of
Leonard James Russell, Proceedings of the
British Academy, vol. 57, pp. 513-24.
David Scott
RYLE, Gilbert (1900-76)
Gilbert Ryle was born in Brighton on 19
August 1900 and died in Whitby hospital,
Yorkshire on 6 October 1976. He and his twin
sister, Mary, were the eighth and ninth children
in a family of ten. Their father was a doctor and
their paternal grandfather was the first bishop
of Liverpool. Schooled at Brighton College,
Ryle went up to Oxford in 1919 as a member
of Queen's College, where his tutor was H.J.
PATON. He gained first class honours in
Classical Honour Moderations (1921) in the
honours school of literae humaniores (1923),
and in the then newly established honours
school of PPE (1924). He was appointed a
lecturer at Christ Church in 1924, and student
and tutor the next year. A.J. AYER was one o.
his pupils. After wartime service in the Welsh
Guards, he was appointed Waynflete Professor
of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1945, a chair
that he held until his retirement in 1968.
At Oxford, Ryle was instrumental in insti-
tuting the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy,
which became the training ground for genera-
tions of philosophy teachers. His generosity to
beginners in philosophy is legendary. He never
tried to tell students what to think, but with
coaxing and patience hoped to start them pon-
dering on what they were saying, so they might
have a practice to perfect and material to try it
on. His larger services to philosophy include
editing Mind from 1947 to 1971, and arrang
ing joint conferences for philosophers from
Britain and France. As editor of Mind, he reg-
ularly published young philosophers' first
RYLE
articles, often after trenchant criticism for
which he refused to print the authors' thanks.
Ryle, who deplored the labelling of philoso-
phers and their ideas, was widely regarded as the
leader, or perhaps co-leader with J.L. AUSTIN, of
the Oxford school of linguistic philosophy, or
linguistic analysis, that is supposed to have flour-
ished in the 1950s. As he feared, the label got in
the way of the appreciation of his work, so that
while he is generally respected, he may be the
twentieth-century British philosopher who is
least understood. He is chiefly remembered for
his work in philosophy of mind, particularly for
his critical assault on Cartesian mind-body
dualism. But for him, his anti-Cartesianism had
a purpose beyond itself as an illustration of how
to expose the nonsense of a philosophical 'ism'.
He wrote three major books: The Concept of
Mind (1949), a classic in twentieth-century phi-
losophy; Dilemmas (1954); and Plato's Progress
(1966). He also published many articles and
book reviews. Most of the articles and some of
the reviews are reprinted in Collected Papers
(1971) and in two posthumous collections, On
Thinking (1979) and Aspects of Mind (1993).
The fifteen or so uncollected book reviews are
valuable sources for his opinions of other
philosophers, and for displays of his philosoph-
ical methods.
Ryle followed G.E. MOORE and WITTGENSTEIN
in their practice of clearing away earlier philoso-
phers' mistakes, mistakes that were the result of
failing to notice what was right in front of them.
Moore, for example, showed that philosophical
idealism, the doctrine that everything is either
mind or mind-dependent, rests on the mistake of
failing to notice such things as the difference
between seeing the colour blue and blue itself.
When philosophers' mistakes are cleared away,
we are left with what was always there, but
with the advantage of an unencumbered view.
To accept the Moorean-Wittgensteinian pro-
gramme is, of course, to accept their faith that
by raking away the philosophical rubbish, there
is something to be got to, not specifiable in
any general way, and doubtless in consider-
able variety, but nonetheless there, and thus
918
the standard against which mistaken philo-
sophical doctrine may be shown up.
Philosophers might then be seen to have two
jobs, not only clearing away mistakes, but also
elucidating what the clearing away reveals.
Ryle vigorously eschewed the second job, enlist-
ing solely to clear away mistakes.
While honouring the examples of Moore and
Wittgenstein, Ryle had his own methods for
carrying out their common task. Sometimes
when he was asked why he made some claim, he
would say no more than that one has a nose for
it. Indeed, his methods might be characterized as
three kinds of sensitivity: category sensitivity,
sensitivity to conceptual content and sensitivity
to the use of terms. Category sensitivity is
roughly a sense of what goes with what, and of
what things are conceptually subordinate or
superordinate to other things. Its use is in
spotting such category mistakes as putting
together things that do not belong together, or
failing to recognize a hierarchy of types.
'Saturday is in bed' is categorial nonsense. Why?
One just knows that while Saturday goes
between Friday and Sunday, it is not the sort of
thing that can go between bed sheets. Failing to
notice a hierarchy of types is a more complex
mistake: a young child is taken to see a circus
parade, and having seen the clowns, animals
and calliope pass, begins to cry, because she has
not yet seen the parade. But a parade is not a
parade-item like the elephants; it is a superordi-
nate type that collects clowns and elephants.
The detection of categorial nonsense depends, of
course, on a supply of categorial sense, the sine
qua non of category sensitivity. Ryle did not
suppose that he, or anyone else, could give us a
final, definite list of categories. He did suppose,
however, that people who had been properly
brought up and whose wits were in working
order would have a supply of categories that
would enable them to move comfortably and
easily through their usual occasions and occu-
pations. Reliance on category sensitivity was
crucial to Ryle's refutation of Cartesian dualism,
and his general programme of dissolving philo-
sophical dilemmas.

A sensitivity to conceptual content enabled
Ryle to see that 'knowledge' includes some-
thing besides knowing that, namely knowing
how, and that consequently 'intelligence'
should be understood not only as people's
knowing truths, but also as their practices for
enquiring after truth, and indeed their capacity
to learn how to do many things and to practise
those competences intelligently. A sensitivity
to the uses of a term enabled Ryle to see that
our use of 'thinking' to mean 'having beliefs' is
quite different from using it to mean 'ponder-
ing', the practice of thinking to solve a problem.
Along with Ryle's methods, three other factors
make his treatment of philosophical topics
uniquely his own - his sense of humour, his
accessible style, and his expositions salted with
illuminating analogies.
Ryle saw philosophy as harbouring a host of
false oppositions - dilemmas generated by
category mistakes - that force us to choose
between unpalatable, and ultimately untenabl.
positions. The subject was, therefore, due for a
radical housecleaning, and Ryle took the
dilemma of Cartesianism's mind-body dualism
versus Hobbesian-Watsonian corporeal
monism as a first promising target for his
methodological broom. The result was The
Concept of Mind, the foundation for modern
philosophy of mind, despite the fact that some
of the newer rooms in that now many-cham-
bered mansion are in gross violation of the
original building permit.
Cartesianism divides a human being into a
mind thing and a body thing, and generates the
question, 'Which thing is the true person?' In
answer, Cartesianism makes the category
mistake of assigning qualities of intellect and
character to the mind, to make it the true
person. To expose the mistake, Ryle simply
points out what we all know: it is the perfor-
mances and characters of people that we know
how to assess, and do assess. We call people,
and not minds, 'careful', 'stupid', 'logical',
'unobservant', 'ingenious', 'vain', ' methodi-
cal', 'credulous', 'witty', 'self-controlled', and so
on. If we have a use for 'mind', it is our most
919
RYLE
general word for the wide range of thinking and
doing that a person carries on with more or less
skill. 'Mind' is not the name of a nebulous
place where mental processes occur, or a con-
tainer where mental contents are stored, for
there is no such place and no such container. In
denying 'mind' in these senses, Ryle is not,
despite what his critics have said, denying that
people can talk silently to themselves, read
silently, ponder without speaking aloud, do
sums in their heads, dream, entertain images
and memories, and keep these practices to
themselves by not saying what they are doing.
His point rather is that philosophers should
attend to what people are doing, even when the
doing is not overt, and they should not attempt
to transmute these doings into the occurrence
of occult mental processes or the possession of
occult mental contents.
Since Cartesianism's body thing is a physical
object, its movements are necessarily subject to
the laws of motion: no bodily movement until
the body is moved by something else. To get the
body machine moving, Cartesianism assigns
the starter role to mental processes - thoughts,
decisions, aversions, acts of will - originated by
the mind: Ryle's 'ghost in the machine'. For
Ryle, this story is a tangle of category mistakes.
First, the body is conceived as something that
is no longer the body of a person. Then the
things that a person does, such as reviewing
courses of action, say, and deciding what to do
before acting, are improperly assigned to 'the
ghost'. When the mistakes are put aside,
however, we can see that a person's actions
are not simply bodily movements. They are the
doings, the practices, of a person, and are
understandable as expressions of a person's
purposes, plans and decisions. The physical
model of force-impelled motion, even when
raised to the rarefied level of ghostly mental
pushes, is not an appropriate model for explain-
ing people's behaviour.
Does Ryle's dispensing with Cartesianism's
dualism impale him on the other horn of the
dilemma, namely Hobbesian-Watsonian
monistic materialism? No, for it harbours
RYLE
category mistakes that parallel those of
Cartesianism. The qualities of intellect and
character that properly belong to a person are
improperly assigned to the body, and the
notion of purposive action is improperly
replaced with bodily jerks brought on by
external pressures. Mention of the mistakes
dissolves the doctrine. Many of Ryle's critics
have missed this part of his argument. They
suppose that his denial of a mind thing leaves
only the body thing standing, so that the mental
is reduced to manifestations of bodily behav-
iour. People, however, as well as being neither
solely minds, nor maladroitly conjoined minds
and bodies, are not solely bodies either. Ryle
reminds us that the doings of people, including
their thinking, must be ascribed as they have
always been properly ascribed, to people them-
selves. In making this move, Ryle has been
taken to be replacing the concept of mind with
the concept of human being, or, more formally,
a concept of person. He strenuously denied
any such intention; his assault on Cartesianism
was undertaken merely as a demonstration of
method, with no doctrinal intent. Nonetheless,
in his analysis of mental concepts, he regularly
assumes that they are to be understood as the
doings and sufferings of persons, and a fair
number of philosophers, directly or indirectly
influenced by him, have gone on to develop a
person-centred philosophy of mind.
Ryle's categorial refutation of the Cartesian
mind-thing myth occurs in the first few pages
of The Concept of Mind, preparing the way for
the project that occupies the remainder of the
book: mapping the logical geography of mental
concepts by studying their applications and
their correlations with one another and with
other concepts. The book's principal topics are
intellect, will, emotion, self-knowledge, sensa-
tion and observation, and imagination. In
general, Ryle would steer us away from
thinking of a person's mental life as the occur-
rence of occult processes or episodes in a mind
thing, or as the work of mental faculties.
Rather, he would direct attention to people
themselves, to their doings, including their
920
thinking, to the ways they conduct their
thinking and doing, and to the habits and com-
petences they acquire for conducting their
thinking and doing. In discussing intellect, for
example, he talks not about a faculty, the intel-
lect, but about people's acquisition and use of
knowledge. In an original move, he shows
knowledge to be not only our knowing that,
but also our knowing how, not only our pos-
sessing acquired truths, but also our possessing
acquired dispositions, particularly competences.
Indeed, he claims that knowing that depends on
knowing how, for, among other reasons, if we
did not know how to seek truths, we should
have none to know.
Dispositions play a large role in The Concept
of Mind, for an understanding of their place in
people's doings tells strongly against the sup-
position that people could not act without the
aid of a ghostly starter mechanism. Some of our
dispositions are habits, things we do, and
usually need to do, without thinking, such as
walking over level ground, or coordinating the
foot and hand movements required to shift the
gears of a motor vehicle. Other of our disposi-
tions are higher-order competences, such as
skill in translating Latin prose, or playing the
piano, or driving a car in heavy traffic. To
know how to do something is to have learned
how and not forgotten. To know how to do
this or that is not necessarily to be exercising a
competence at a given moment. Rather,
someone who knows French is ready to engage
in a broad range of doings - conversing in
French, asking directions, reading signs,
laughing at jokes, making jokes herself, and so
on and so on - as occasions require. While
determinable, a higher order competence is not
determinate. We judge whether someone has a
competence by how well she performs, by
whether she can regulate her performances,
correct and learn from her lapses, improve on
her successes, and profit from the example of
others. Her keeping her understanding of a
French speech to herself is not a reason for
regarding it as an essentially private mental act
or occurrence, for the understanding depends

first on her having followed public lessons intel-
ligently, and passed public tests of her compe-
tence. Ryle adheres to the Wittgensteinian prin-
ciple that a person's mental life may be carried
on in public, where it may be observed not
only by others but noted by the person herself
as well.
Kyle's consideration of thinking is part of
his consideration of intellect. We use 'thinking'
at least to cover believing that this or that is so,
to cover attending to what one is doing, and to
cover pondering or searching for the solution to
a practical problem or the answer to a theo-
retical question. Hence Ryle's point that
thinking, like work, is polymorphous: philoso-
phers should not tie themselves to a single char-
acterization of it. He treats thinking, or believ-
ing that something is so, as a disposition to do
or say certain things, or to avoid doing or
saying certain things, in accordance with the
belief. As for thinking what one is doing, or
paying attention to what one is doing, or
attending to what one is doing, there are not
two things going on, the doing and the thinking
what one is doing; there is only one thing, the
doing, but done in a certain way: with care,
with a readiness to meet difficulties and attempt
to overcome them, with a readiness to improve
one's technique, to capitalize on favourable
opportunities and openings, and so on. In short,
Ryle's point is that attending to what one is
doing is adverbial to the doing, as is not attend-
ing to what one is doing, or doing it carelessly,
recklessly, and so on. Pondering is thinking
done to solve problems that may range from
thinking about how to fit a carpet into an oddly
shaped room, to the more sophisticated
thinking about how to build a theory. Ryle
devoted a few pages of The Concept of Mind
and many later papers to this topic. Pondering
is first of all an activity, something that people
do. It is not confined to using words.
Composers may try out tunes by humming
them aloud or in their heads, or by playing
them on a piano. Architects may ponder with
pencil sketches on paper, artists with paint
strokes on canvas, and sculptors by kneading
921
RYLE
clay this way and that. Pondering cannot be a
generalizable practice, for it must be carried
on to suit its subject. Ryle found the highest
order of pondering, theory building, difficult to
characterize. He opposed the neat story told by
epistemologists about the theory builder's
finding premises and stringing them together to
make an argument that proves a conclusion.
'Premise', 'conclusion', 'argument' and 'proof
belong to the language of presenting a theory
once it has been discovered. Ryle saw success-
ful theory building as dependent on the theory
builder's many trials, testings and false starts as
he sorts through possible answers to find the
solution to his problem. The knack of thinking
up and trying out possible solutions for a
problem is at the heart of theory building.
Perhaps Ryle's best account of how the knack
might be acquired is the analogy he draws with
a boy's learning to swim by following the direc-
tions and demonstrations of a coach. The boy
swims when he applies the coach's lessons to
the movement of his arms and legs. In effect, the
coach induces the boy to teach himself to swim.
Once the boy learns to swim with the pre-
scribed strokes, he can go on to teach himself
new strokes, and perhaps even invent a few of
his own. Thus Ryle connects the pondering
involved in theory building with self-teaching,
and suggests that the best teachers will develop
a pupil's knack for self-teaching.
In Dilemmas Ryle discusses the fatalist
doctrine 'What is was to be', Achilles' inter-
minable effort to overtake the tortoise, pleasure,
the world of science versus the everyday world,
technical and non-technical concepts, percep-
tion, and formal and informal logic. For each
topic, his aim is to show how disrespect for the
limits of a concept's usefulness, or disregard for
how it fits with other concepts, can lead to
intellectual confusion. He illustrates with his
chosen examples how confusions induced by
conceptual carelessness may be sorted out. But
each such confusion is its own knot, and only
trials and shortfalls will tell what methods will
untie it. In that respect, Dilemmas may be as
interesting for the moves that Ryle must have
RYLE
made off the page as for those he makes on it.
He came to a better understanding of pleasure
by shifting to a consideration of enjoying. But
how many synonyms for 'pleasure' did he try
before he hit on 'enjoying'? He illuminated the
supposed conflict between the world of science
and the everyday world by considering the
ways both a college student and the college
auditor may talk of college events and neither
contradict the other. But how many analogies
did he try before he hit on that one?
Ryle was a wide-ranging student of philoso-
phies, with more appetite, and even patience,
for variety than most philosophers are granted.
He familiarized himself with phenomenology
and wrote about it seriously at a time when few
English-speaking philosophers paid it any atten-
tion. He had a sustained interest in ancient phi-
losophy which fertilized his own work,
provided subjects for half a dozen papers, and
led him to write Plato's Progress, in which his
thesis is that Plato was not a 'static philoso-
pher'. If Platonism equates with sticking to the
theory of Forms forever, then Plato was not a
Platonist. Rather he was an evolving thinker
not to be identified with any single doctrine. To
sustain the thesis, Ryle offered reconsiderations
of the order of events in Plato's life, of the
order in which Plato composed his dialogues,
and of Plato's relation to his contemporaries.
Not surprisingly, given the scanty and contro-
versial materials on which conclusions about
Plato and his work must be based, Plato's
Progress met with strong criticism from pro-
fessional classicists. Nor can a friendly, but
unschooled, reader find much comfort in what
seems to be an assemblage of musings, perhaps
preparatory for a book, but not yet a book.
Fortunately Ryle did produce the book, or at
least a hefty sketch for it, in his 'Plato' article in
the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967). It is a
masterful introduction for a reading pro-
gramme in the dialogues; just what a good
tutor might say to his pupils as they begin their
studies. Ryle relates the dialogues to Plato's
life, and gives directions for following various
topics through the sequence of dialogues. One
922
of the topics is, of course, knowledge, and fol-
lowing Plato through his pursuit of the concept
over the whole course of the dialogues, one
can see with Ryle that Plato was indeed not a
static philosopher.
On Ryle's map of the disciplines, philosophy
is given a territory separate from both formal
logic and the sciences. Philosophers attend to
what we can and cannot say, and sort out the
confusions and boundary line disputes that
arise where one of our modes of discourse
encroaches on another. Thus he denies to
philosophers two of their traditional feats: tran-
scendental leaps to the ideal entities of a world
above the everyday world, and descendental
dives to the scientific minutiae of a world below
the everyday world. The pain these denials
caused old-guard philosophers may be
measured by the outpouring of opposition that
Ryle's work aroused. (See, for example, AJ.
Ayer, Clarity Is Not Enough, 1963.) As for
any this-worldly, new guard that Ryle's drum
may have mustered, its strength is yet to be
counted.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Systematically Misleading Expressions',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
32 (1931-2).
Philosophical Arguments [inaugural lecture]
(Oxford, 1945).
The Concept of Mind (1949).
Dilemmas (Cambridge, 1954).
Plato's Progress (Cambridge, 1966).
Collected Papers, vol. 1, Critical Essays, vol.
2, Collected Essays 1929-68 (1971).
On Thinking, ed. K. Kolenda (Oxford,
1979).
Aspects of Mind, ed. Rene Meyer (Oxford,
1993).
Other Relevant Works
John Locke on the Human Understanding
(Oxford, 1933).
The Nature of Thought' [review of Brand
Blanshard], Philosophy vol. 15 (1940), pp.
324-9.

'Epistemology', Concise Encyclopaedia of
Western Philosophy and Philosophers, ed.
J.O.Urmson(1960).
'A Rational Animal' [lecture] (1962).
Tlato', in Paul Edwards (ed.), Encyclopedia
of Philosophy (New York, 1967), vol. 6,
pp. 314-33.
Further Reading
Anon., 'Gilbert Ryle', Revue Internationale
de Philosophic, no. 1 (March 2003).
Ayer, A.J., 'Philosophy and Language',
Clarity is not Enough, ed. H.D. Lewis, pp.
401-28 (1963).
, Part of my Life (1977).
Kolenda, Konstantin, 'Recovery of the
Human', Rice University Studies, vol.. 5
(1972), pp. 89-103.
, (ed.), Gilbert Ryle on Thinking, with
an Introduction by GJ. Warnock (Oxford,
1979).
Mabbott, John, Oxford Memories (Oxford,
1986).
Magee, Brian, (ed.), 'Conversation with
Gilbert Ryle', Modern British Philosophy,
(1971).
923
RYLE
Meyer, Rene, Thinking and Perceiving
(Mukleneuk, South Africa, 1975).
Palmer, Anthony, 'Categories of Linguistic
Expression', in Concept and Object
(1988), chap. 5.
Sprague, Elmer, Persons and their Minds
(Boulder, Colorado, 1999).
Urmson, J. O., 'Gilbert Ryle', in Paul
Edwards (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(New York, 1967), vol. 7, pp. 269-71.
Warnock, G.J., 'Categories and Dilemmas',
English Philosophy Since 1900 (Oxford,
1958), chap. 7.
, 'Gilbert Ryle's Editorship', Mind,
vol. 85 (1976), pp. 47-56.
White, Alan R., Philosophy of Mind (1967).
Wood, Oscar P. and George Pitcher (eds),
Ryle: A Collection of Critical Essays (New
York, 1960).
Elmer Sprague
 s
SAMUEL, Herbert Louis (1870-1963)
Herbert Samuel was born on 6 November
1870 in Liverpool and died at his London
home, 32 Portchester Terrace, Bayswater, on 5
February 1963. His parent's families, who were
Ashkenazi Jews, had emigrated from Eastern
Europe in the late eighteenth century. The
Samuel family made its fortune in the banking
boom of the 1850s and 1860s, and Samuel
was able to devote himself to politics and phi-
losophy without having to earn a living, He
rejected Judaism at the age of twenty, though
he maintained his links with the community,
He was educated at University College School
and Balliol College, Oxford, where he obtained
a first. Samuel involved himself in liberal
politics, on the left of the party, arguing for
social reform and the alleviation of poverty,
and associated closely with the Fabians. With
Ramsay Macdonald, he was prominent in the
'Rainbow circle' of liberals and socialists, and
his first major work was the reformist
Liberalism: An Attempt to State the Principles
and Proposal of Contemporary Liberalism in
England (1902).
Samuel entered Parliament at a by-election in
1902 and went on to have a very distinguished
political career, beginning in the Liberal gov-
ernment from 1905. He entered the cabinet in
1909, holding a number of posts including
Home Secretary, but his alliance with Asquith
meant he suffered once Lloyd George was in
the ascendant. He served as head of the gov-
ernment of Palestine up to 1925, with some
924
success, was instrumental in resolving the
General Strike in 1926, and returned to the
Home Office in the National Government after
the crisis of 1931. He led the Liberal Party
from that crisis until he lost his own seat in
1935. Raised to the House of Lords, Samuel
headed the Council for German Jewry in the
years running up to the war. During and after
the war, he achieved public prominence as a
member of the BBC's Brains Trust. Samuel was
President of the British Institute of
Philosophical Studies from 1931 to 1959, suc-
ceeding Lord Balfour, and overseeing its change
of name to the Royal Institute of Philosophy in
1947, widely held to be a reward for surviving
the Blitz.
His most successful philosophical work was
Belief and Action, which was published in 1937
and sold over 100,000 copies: it contains a
plea for a rational scientific and common sense
approach and 'points a way out for the confu-
sions of our time'. According to Samuel,
religion is a necessary component of personal
and social health, but unfortunately 'whenever
theologians have been dominant, life has been
retrospective' (Belief and Action, p. 172). He
rejects speculative metaphysics and 'cherished
the idea of a unity of knowledge formed by the
synthesis of the facts of science and the findings
of philosophy' (Robertson, p. 98). Albert
Einstein complimented Samuel on his account
of science; however, apart from in the pages of
Philosophy, the Royal Institute's own journal,
professional philosophers tended to ignore
Samuel's work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Liberalism: An Attempt to State the
Principles and Proposal of Contemporary
Liberalism in England (1902).
Practical Ethics (1935).
Belief and Action (1937).
An Unknown Land (1942).
The World after the War', Philosophy, vol.
18 (1943), pp. 60-67.
'Philosophy without Science', Philosophy,
vol. 23 (1948), pp. 60-64.
Creative Man - A Collection of Essays and
Addresses (1949).
Essay in Physics (1951).
'A Criticism of Present-Day Physics',
Philosophy, vol. 27 (1952), pp. 51-7.
'Man's Ideas About the Universe',
Philosophy, vol. 28 (1952), pp. 195-206
'Philosophy and the Life of the Nation',
Philosophy, vol. 31 (1956), pp. 197-212
In Search of Reality (1957).
A Threefold Cord: Philosophy, Science,
Religion (1961).
Other Relevant Works
Memoirs (1945).
Further Reading
Bowie, John, Viscount Samuel - A Biography
(1957).
Robertson, L.C., 'Viscount Samuel OM',
Philosophy, vol. 34 (1959), pp. 97-8.
Wasserstein, Bernard, Herbert Samuel - A
Political Life (Oxford, 1992).
Jon Pike
SAW, Ruth Lydia (1901-86)
Ruth Saw was born in Carshalton, Surrey (her
birth was recorded in nearby Epsom on 1
August 1901) and died there on 23 March
1986. Apart from seven years in the United
925
SAW
States she lived her whole life in Carshalton.
The daughter of Samuel James Saw and his
wife Matilda Louisa, she was educated at the
County School for girls in Walsingham, Surrey
and at Bedford College London, where she
studied under Susan STEBBING.
She lectured at Smith College in
Northampton, Massachusetts from 1927 to
1934 and was a lecturer at Bedford and
Birkbeck Colleges London, from 1939 to 1944.
She became a Reader at Birkbeck in 1946 and
was Head of the Department there from 1953
until her retirement in 1964. In 1961 she was
appointed to the first University of London
professorship in aesthetics. She served as
President of the Aristotelian Society in 1965,
and she was a founder of the British Society for
Aesthetics and its president in 1969.
Logic - including a strong interest in
problems of induction - was her earliest
interest, and it continued to show itself in all
her writings, but her concern with metaphysics
and the history of philosophy dominated her
mid career, and her interest in aesthetics played
an ever-larger part in her activities in the years
leading up to her retirement and beyond. The
focus of that interest, however, was on art in
its relation to people and on its function in
understanding the concept of the person.
Ruth Saw's important published work in
metaphysics was concentrated in her books
about Spinoza and Leibniz. But in a time when
the history of philosophy was frequently
regarded as only tangentially related to the
doing of philosophy proper, she saw it as
central. She believed that the best way to phi-
losophize about the questions traditionally held
central in philosophy was to reflect carefully on
major historical figures and to see into their
patterns of thought in a way that would cast
light on the issues that still press us without dis-
torting their own intentions or failing to take
account of the questions they were trying to
answer. The Vindication of Metaphysics (1951)
was subtitled 'A Study in the Philosophy of
Spinoza', and its considered judgements still
carry weight among those troubled by the dif-
SAW
ficulties of Spinoza's system. But, as the title
implied, she meant to raise questions about the
possibility and importance of metaphysics.
In the years in which she was writing, the
creation of metaphysical systems was widely
thought - at least in British philosophical circles
- to be a discredited activity. She used her stud.
to cast light on the problems that metaphysical
systems addressed. She noted that a meta-
physician and a logical positivist must seem to
have little to say to one another, and that dis-
cussions between them may descend to
exchanges which are 'simply to call names'
(Vindication of Metaphysics, p. 163). She cited
A.J. AYER (a frequent and not always unsym-
pathetic visitor to Birkbeck College in those
years) and the much-touted principle that the
meaning of propositions lies in their verifica-
tion, and she noted that in those terms there
does not seem to be much that the metaphysi-
cian has to say. But she urged her readers to
rethink the situation.
The test simply is whether people who are
both reasonable in the ordinary sense of the
word and strong believers are better able to
live satisfactorily with themselves in soli-
tude and with other people in society,
whether such a reasonable person finds
himself becoming confirmed ever more
strongly in his beliefs and with an increased
satisfaction in himself and in his relations
with other people.
(Vindication of Metaphysics, p. 163)
In her own mind the test suggests that what is
at issue is our self-understanding and our
understanding of our relations with other
persons, and metaphysical issues have most
importantly to do with what it is to be a
person. If we can develop a sense of what it is
to be a human being and if that enables us to
live peaceably and constructively with others,
then we have something to hang on to. While
many thinkers have thought of Spinoza as a
kind of metaphysical geometer, Saw views him
as providing a notion of rational order and
926
human capacity in which we can live on these
terms.
Spinoza's account of knowledge makes it
possible to give an account of our relation-
ships with other people which satisfies these
common-sense demands. We are acquainted
with other people both in the sense that we
live with them, experience emotions in their
presence, arouse emotions in them and
know their moods and emotions, as we
know our own, when we understand their
causes and can 'place' them in an adequate
system of knowledge.
(Vindication of Metaphysics, p. 168)
Her Leibniz (1954) is a more traditional
history, though, as A.J. Ayer noted in an
admiring Preface, she takes Leibniz's passion
for metaphysics as central and as most inter-
esting despite the tendency of the time to see his
value in his work as a logician. The book ends
not with a defence of Leibniz but with a critique
of the problem posed by Leibniz's joint insis-
tence that each and every monad (monads are
the ultimately real and basic entities of the
world) mirrors the whole and that the simple
properties of the world are all compossible, yet
monads are not interchangeable but form a
unique and necessary order. Still, she insists
that the contemporary view of matter held by
physicists is very Leibnizian and that his work
continues to be influential.
Her inaugural lecture on 19 October 1962 to
the Chair of Aesthetics at the University of
London returned to the preoccupation with
persons and their understanding which
underlay the Spinoza book. It was called
'Conversation and Communication'. She begins
by saying that it is 'noteworthy' that our means
of communication are very great and yet our
failures of communication are even greater.
We are quite good at discourse that intends to
convey facts and even - despite many philoso-
phers - feelings or other states of mind. But
genuine conversation is another matter. There
are apparent conversations in which someone

is trying to win a point, to say something out
loud so third parties will hear it or to seek some
other end, but real conversation is what dis-
tinguishes persons from other entities, and it
never has an ulterior motive. The relations in a
real conversation are two-termed or at least
have only as many terms as there are partici-
pants.
The possibility of entering into conversation
brings out the nature of personhood - person-
hood centrally involves the ability to do some-
thing not just for its own sake but for the sake
of enjoying the community of others in a way
that does not use others for one's own
purposes.
Three years later, Ruth Saw's presidential
address to the Aristotelian Society followed the
same theme. But it revives her early interest in
logic and moves forward to aesthetics. It is
called The Logic of the Particular Case' and it
tries to show how universal principles can be
focused and instantiated in particular cases.
People and works of art are very different but
they are both understandable as 'concretised
universals' (The Logic of the Particular Case',
p. 4). The way in which we initially seek to
understand both works of art and human indi-
viduals is by grasping the ideas and principles
that are instantiated in the form of art works
and the actions of the person, but the relation-
ship is such that the work of art does not
exhaust the ideas and the person is not a mere
embodiment of principles. There is a unique-
ness that comes out in the special relation
between the reader or viewer of the work of art
and between persons in the case of human com-
munities. Saw returns in her discussion of
persons to the notion of conversation which
formed the centre of her inaugural lecture, and
what emerges is really a metaphysics of com-
munity. In a genuine conversation it is by our
relation to others that our real nature emerges.
'It is as if we knew that we had all been placed
on earth together' to enlarge and enrich our
common experience (ibid., p. 6).
Aesthetics, An Introduction (1972) follows
the themes of communication and personhood,
927
SAW
but is true to its title and succeeds in being an
even-handed introduction at least to the debates
about aesthetics at that time. The reader will
notice that it concentrates on literature which
played a major role in Saw's personal life, and
painting which stirred her mind to focus on
many of the problems of aesthetics. Music
figures much less often.
It is clear that she was fascinated by the role
of art as communication, though she gives a
balanced account of the disputes between those
who see art as expression and those who see it
as communication, a dispute which, as she
notes, really becomes clear when one asks what
it is for a work of art to succeed. If expression
is the goal, it does not matter if anyone ever
reads the book or sees the picture. If commu-
nication is the goal then a work of art fails if it
cannot, in principle, reach anyone.
Whatever the outcome of that debate (and it
might go either way if it is a debate about pri-
orities and not about the exclusive essence of
art), she is clear that communication matters in
human terms. It matters to her perhaps above
all because the notion of art as communication
forces us to recognize the ultimate equality of
human beings and the way in which being
human is related to the possibilities of our asso-
ciation. She says
a word should be said about importance and
unimportance applied to persons. Strictly
speaking this implies an impossible combi-
nation, something like 'heavy angel'.
'Importance' refers to the place of a citizen in
a community, not to the worth of a human
being considered as a person. The worth of
a person refers to the sense in which we are
all equal in the sight of God.
(Aesthetics, An Introduction, p. 208)
She had no doubt that we are all equal in the
sight of her God. She was a lifelong Anglican,
but readers of her book on Spinoza will know
that her conviction about that was strongly
sustained by philosophical reflection. Her
God was clearly no tyrant in the sky but a
SAW
reasonable and fair-minded participant who
cared about the lives of the ordinary people
with whom he was involved.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'The Grounds of Induction in Professor
Whitehead's Philosophy of Nature', in
Philosophical Studies, Essays in Memory of
L. Susan Stebbing (1948).
The Vindication of Metaphysics: A Study in
the Philosophy of Spinoza (1951).
Leibniz (1954).
'Conversation and Communication' [inau-
gural lecture to the Chair of Aesthetics at
the University of London] (1962).
'The Logic of the Particular Case',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
66 (1965-6), pp. 1-14
Aesthetics, an Introduction (1970).
Incorporates versions of papers from
Philosophy (1961), Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. (1962) and
the British Journal of Aesthetics (1969).
Leslie Armour
SCHAPER, Eva (1924-92)
Eva Schaper was born in Iserlohn, Germany
and died in Glasgow on 11 June 1992. She
was educated in Germany, receiving her doc-
torate in philosophy from Minister in 1950. She
was a postgraduate in the Department of Logic
at Glasgow University in 1951 and assistant
lecturer in logic from 1952 to 1954. She was
lecturer in philosophy at University College of
North Wales in Bangor from 1954 to 1958. She
was lecturer in logic at the University of
Glasgow from 1958 to 1967, senior lecturer
from 1967 to 1972, reader from 1972 to 1977,
Titular Professor of Logic from 1977 to 1990,
and served as Head of the Department of Logic
at Glasgow from 1982 to 1984 (until its amal-
928
gamation with the Department of Moral
Philosophy), after which she was named to the
University Court. She was President of the
British Society for Phenomenology from 1976
to 1980 and served as consulting editor of the
Cambridge works of Kant in English. Schaper
remained at Glasgow as honorary research
fellow after her retirement in 1990. She was
Vice-President of the British Society for
Phenomenology from 1970 to 199 to 1992,
serving as President of that Society at the time
of her death in 1992.
Schaper is best known for her work in aes-
thetics. Her Studies in Kant's Aesthetics (1979)
helped to open up the field of Kantian aesthet-
ics within the analytic tradition. Her work on
the role of the imagination in Kant's philosophy
received deserved attention. Schaper was highly
critical of what she called the 'metaphysical,
'psychological,' and 'dualistic' interpretations of
the imagination. The work of imagination in
Kant philosophy is not transcendental, she
contends, but is 'parasitic upon experience of a
real, non-imagined world' (Studies in Kant's
Aesthetics, p. 17). Aesthetic judgements build
upon non-aesthetic judgements. Schaper claims
that aesthetic discourse does not demand
special aesthetic concepts, but involves the con
structive use of descriptive and prescriptive
concepts outlined in Kant's first two Critiques.
Schaper's work on Kant is a development of
her earlier Prelude to Aesthetics (1968). Rather
than distinguish between aesthetic and non-
aesthetic concepts, Schaper outlines how
concepts function aesthetically 'in specific kinds
of discourse' (Prelude to Aesthetics, p. 15).
When a concept functions aesthetically, it
retains something of its original, non-aesthetic,
use while also opening up a new domain or
sphere of reference. Schaper describes this
process as 'aesthetic transposition'. The 'key
into which concepts are transposed when we
use them aesthetically' is 'the key of contem-
plation', a relation that considers the object
'for itself alone, for its own sake, with no
ulterior motives, practical plans, or hopes of
gain' (ibid., p. 17). Schaper's work still stands

as an important contribution to analytic inves-
tigations into aesthetics and to aesthetic theory
in general.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Prelude to Aesthetics (1968).
Studies in Kant's Aesthetics (Edinburgh,
1979).
The Pleasures of Taste', in Pleasure,
Preference and Value: Studies in
Philosophical Aesthetics, pp. 39-56.
(Ed.), Pleasure, Preference and Value: Studies
in Philosophical Aesthetics (Cambridge,
1983).
(Ed.), 'Pleasure, Preference and Value: Studies
in Philosophical Aesthetics', Critica, vol.
16, no. 48 (December 1984), pp. 105-109.
'Towards the Aesthetic: A Journey with
Friedrich Schiller', British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 25 (1985), pp. 153-68
(Ed. with Wilhelm Vossenkuhl), Reading
Kant: New Perspectives on Transcendental
Arguments and Critical Philosophy
(Oxford, 1989).
'Taste, Sublimity, and Genius', in Paul Guyer
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant
(New York, 1992), pp. 367-93.
Other Relevant Works
Kuehn, M., Review of Studies in Kant's
Aesthetics, Philosophical Books, vol. 24
(1983), pp. 150-53.
Philip Rose
SCHILLER, Ferdinand Canning Scott
(1864-1937)
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller was born in
Schleswig-Holstein on the Danish side of the
border on 16 August 1864 and died in Los
Angeles on 9 August 1937. His father, of
German origin, was a Calcutta merchant who
929
SCHILLER
gave his three sons British educations. After
Rugby School, Schiller entered Oxford and
Balliol, where Master Benjamin Jowett, T.H.
Green, Edward Caird, William Wallace and
Richard Nettleship were founding British neo-
idealism in the 1880s. Schiller was awarded
firsts in Classical Moderations and in Greats,
the Taylorian Scholarship for German in 1887
and the MA degree. He was an instructor in
logic and metaphysics at Cornell University
from 1893 until 1897, when Oxford's Corpus
Christi College called him back home, to be
assistant tutor, then tutor, senior tutor and
fellow. From 1900 to 1926 Schiller served as
Treasurer of the Mind Association. He was
President of the Aristotelian Society, President
of the British Society for Psychical Research
and a fellow of the British Academy. He retired
from Corpus Christi in 1926, and became a
professor at the University of Southern
California, teaching there until 1935.
F.C.S. Schiller was the primary English rep-
resentative of pragmatism, defending its prin-
ciples and elaborating its theories for a mostly
European audience. From his post at Oxford
Schiller conducted incisive and polemical
debates with absolute idealists, particularly
F.H. BRADLEY, and also realists, especially
Bertrand RUSSELL, concerning the proper role of
reason in ascertaining the nature of reality, per-
sonhood and value. Schiller championed the
nascent evolutionism, voluntarism and personal
idealism which was emerging in the United
States, Great Britain, France and Italy in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His
self-titled 'humanism' offered a philosophy that
gave special priority to the individual con
sciousness and free will for theorizing on the
true, the good and the right. 'Man is the
measure of all things' was Schiller's humanistic
doctrine, of which pragmatism was a particu-
lar application. His enormous productivity was
distributed across religion, psychology, educa-
tion, history and nearly every area of philoso-
phy, including epistemology, philosophy of
science, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and
ethics. Of central importance for Schiller was
SCHILLER
the nature of meaning in relation to thought,
language, logical inference, knowledge and
truth.
Schiller's closest allies were William James,
Henry STURT, Alfred SIDGWICK and Giovanni
Papini. Their common tie was a belief in the
reality of human power and growth in an
accommodating universe. Schiller made an
early commitment to exploring evolution's
impact on philosophy, anonymously publishing
Riddles of the Sphinx: A Study in the
Philosophy of Evolution (1891) at the age of
twenty-seven. This popular book, running
through three editions, displays his lifelong
quest to establish a kind of anti-materialistic
and non-sceptical relativism in which revisable
knowledge grounded on human interests is
attainable. There are also strong signs of
Nietzschean influences in this work; Schiller
went the farthest in that direction of all the major
pragmatists. In James's Principles of Psychology
(1890) he then discovered a biological theory of
consciousness as an interactive process of growth
within a selectively perceived environment. Both
James and Schiller followed the primary philo-
sophical implication: all thought must service
the organism's survival efforts in a plastic and
malleable world. Schiller promptly expanded
upon James's will-to-believe doctrine, declaring
truth to be what proves to be valuable, and for-
mulated a subjectivist version of James's stream
of consciousness theory, declaring that reality
must only be as it is knowable by an individual
mind. Schiller asserted the ontological ultimacy
of the creative personal mind because it is the
most real thing knowable, and held that personal
values must always be the final judge of all
knowledge.
It must not be forgotten that the strong tide
of absolute idealism in turn-of-the-century
British thought was stoutly resisted by a group
of self-titled 'personal' idealists. Andrew Seth
PRINGLE-PATTISON, Hastings RASHDALL and
Schiller were the most prominent dissenters.
Rashdall and Schiller, together with six more
Oxford personalists, contributed essays to
Personal Idealism (1902), edited by Henry
930
Sturt. Sturt was notorious for his public
contempt for the rationalism inherent in British
absolute idealism and embodied in Oxford's
mode of education. Schiller supported this
attack, arguing in his contribution 'Axioms as
Postulates' that scientific and logical principles
are human constructions imposed on reality
for practical ends. Schiller later devoted a book,
Formal Logic (1912), to deploring the delete-
rious effects, both personal and social, of pro-
mulgating deductive logic as the only mode of
thought. Besides promoting social authoritari-
anism, deductive rationalism in philosophy
encourages the mistaken view that logical prin-
ciples are transhuman entities standing in judge-
ment upon actual psychological processes.
Schiller's stance on the psychological nature of
logic brought him into agreement with Alfred
Sidgwick, an early pioneer of informal logic
and argumentation.
Freed from the tight strictures of a universe
conceived through any rationalistic methodol-
ogy, underlying both materialistic determinism
and absolutist teleology, Schiller (like James)
exulted in the 'open universe' of genuine pos-
sibilities for personal evolution towards greater
harmony within both the social world and the
natural world. For European intellectuals in
the first decade of the twentieth century, 'prag-
matism' meant James and Schiller (Charles
Peirce and John Dewey were largely unknown),
and it was precisely their shared vision of
freedom for the growth of human power which
repulsed many but inspired a few, including
Giovanni Papini. Papini, together with
Giuseppe Prezzolini, led a humanist movement
in Rome largely inspired by an unstable
mixture of James, Schiller, Bergson and
Nietzsche. Prezzolini's radical voluntarism led
to his philosophy of the 'Man-god': the novel
pragmatic Superman whose will asserts itself as
the omnipotent transformer of his world.
Neither Papini nor Schiller went that far; realit.
remained a cooperative yet quasi-independent
partner to human efforts. While natural
processes cannot be identified apart from the
results of human transformations of the world

(how can nature be known at all before such
transformations?), reality surely imposes many
constraints on our partially free enterprises.
Reality should be pragmatically conceived
as not yet complete, still in the process of
growth, stimulated towards definite forms by
human activity. Human creations are not
merely rearrangements of pre-existing raw
materials. All our creations, including knowl-
edge, transform reality into genuinely novel
things, thereby creating truly new realities and
adding to the amount of being. The dictum
that matter (or energy, etc.) can neither be
created nor destroyed is but a convenient fiction
successfully imposed on the world for a cir-
cumscribed kind of scientific investigation, and
cannot, like any such principle, be taken as
reigning absolutely over all dealings with the
universe. The best term for reality is the
Aristotelian notion of hule, signifying the inde-
terminate potentiality of objective nature which
can be known only insofar as human interac-
tion creatively establishes actuality. The sub-
jective nature of knowledge's origins cannot
plunge personal idealism into either solipsism
or panpsychism, since knowledge is created in
this wider human-environment matrix.
At the heart of this metaphysical vision is a
post-Kantian empiricist epistemology, placing
Schiller in the company of positivists such as
Ernst Mach, Henri Poincare and Rudolf
Carnap, and pragmatic empiricists, especially
John Dewey and C.I. Lewis. Schiller's version
of pragmatism was announced in 'Axioms as
Postulates' and elaborated by several essays in
Humanism (1903) and Studies in Humanism
(1907). Pragmatic empiricism cannot endorse
the psychological passivity of positive experi-
ence, denying that inductive generalizations
from atomic facts in turn structure further expe-
rience. The mind must impose its own princi-
pled ordering on experience in order for there
to be any meaningful facts, leaving to induction
only a limited efficacy for suggesting higher-
order principles. Kantianism, while rescuing
the normative character of principles from pos-
itivism's clutches, mistakenly elevates their nec-
931
SCHILLER
essary role to an a priori and universal status.
If the mind is instead an actively biological
process, its own habits control our behavioural
habits, which in turn may track cooperating
natural processes. To the degree that successful
cooperation can be reliably established, our
mental habits are Verified' as (fallibly) true.
Both the correspondence theory of truth upheld
by realists and the coherence theory of truth
upheld by absolutists vainly try to legislate a
priori the nature of truth, and both reap the
inevitable sceptical consequences.
Psychological habits are both 'axioms' and
'postulates': they are regular, normative, social
and transformable. Regularity implies stability
without rigid fixity or universal dominion; as
Schiller observes, laws of thought are not
natural laws without exception since even a
philosopher may contradict himself or herself.
That he or she can recognize his or her error is
made possible by the normative nature of
mental laws. Most mental laws are socially
normative in a double sense: the most general
(e.g., that there is an external world, that this
world displays uniformities) have their evolu-
tionary roots in our common humanity, and
many more have historical roots in the evolu-
tion of one's culture. To the extent that mental
laws come under reflective scrutiny (in situa-
tions where their operations produce more
failure than success) there arises an opportunity
deliberatively to transform them. This oppor-
tunity grounds their status as 'postulates' in
the sense that we grasp their contingent status
as dependent on continued human allegiance.
In the first chapter of Studies in Humanism
Schiller asserts that the meaning of a rule lies in
its application; long before WITTGENSTEIN'S
endorsement, many of the wider implications of
this pragmatic approach to rules were explored
in Schiller's writings.
The higher-order axioms of logical and
mathematical science remain epistemologically
necessary as structuring experience even while
they are contingently sustained by the scientific
community. Schiller argued that logical neces-
sity is only psychological certainty produced by
SCHILLER
our conviction in the meaning of terms, and
that valid syllogisms are just exercises in
begging the question. Genuine learning requires
altering the meanings of terms in response to
novel experiences, as all scientific progress
shows. Meaning cannot be either an inherent
property of objects or a static relation between
objects, but an activity or attitude taken up
towards objects by a subject. To attribute
meaning and to attribute value are practically the
same thing. Understanding the contextual value,
the situational practical relevance, of a state-
ment is needed for grasping and applying its
meaning. The theory of propositions, the life-
blood of modern rationalisms, abstracts all psy-
chological value from statements to create an
illusion of transhuman truth.
In 'Scientific Discovery and Logical Proof
(1917), 'Hypothesis' (1921) and Logic for Use
(1929) Schiller constructed a sophisticated phi-
losophy of science grounded in a distinction
between the logic of discovery and logic of ver-
ification, and a denial of the notion that facts can
be ascertained independently of a guiding
hypothesis. Schiller develops a theory of the
theory-observation relation, his own version of
abductive logic, and an explanation of how
causal analysis is dependent on the inquirer's
selection of relevant factors. Also of note is
Schiller's agreement with Peirce and Dewey on
the side of realism against nominalism, demon-
strating why pragmatism cannot be categorized
with positivistic empiricism or instrumentalism.
No metaphysical truth can be attributed to
any laws; whether reality is such that we should
conceive it according to one or another mental
law depends on the results of a posteriori exper-
imental science. Science should embrace theo-
retical relativism, since there can be no reason-
able expectation that the science's separate
bodies of postulates could ever be reduced to the
principles of any one of them. Metaphysics at
best may suggest novel postulates attempting to
harmonize scientific principles, but these too are
subject to experimental confirmation. No
absolute harmonization could be possible, and
thus metaphysical pluralism is recommended,
932
because complete agreement on metaphysics is
obstructed by temperamental and valuational
disparities across humanity. Science and meta-
physics thus rest on ethics.
Pluralism also characterizes Schiller's moral
theory and axiology, further developed in his last
books. His definition of value as an uncon-
strained personal attitude towards an object of
interest forbids reducing of value to anything
else. Moral laws and religious doctrines represent
long-tested useful beliefs, revisable in the face of
new demands and problems. With James,
Schiller found a finite evolving personal God
congenial to moral progress towards cosmic
harmony. With Bergson, Schiller conceived
nature as the source of evil insofar as its processes
resist God and evolution.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
[A Troglodyte] Riddles of the Sphinx: A Study
in the Philosophy of Evolution (1891; 2nd
edn, 1894); 3rd rev. edn, Riddles of the
Sphinx: A Study in the Philosophy of
Humanism (1910).
'Axioms as Postulates', Personal Idealism, ed.
Henry Sturt (London and New York, 1902),
pp. 47-133.
Humanism: Philosophical Essays (London and
New York, 1903; 2nd rev. edn, 1912). Four
essays, with nine from Studies in Humanism,
in Humanismus: Beifrdge zu einer pragma-
tischen Philosophie, trans. R. Eisler (Leipzig,
1911).
Studies in Humanism (London and New York,
1907; 2nd edn, 1912); trans, by S.
Jankelevitch, Etude sur I'humanisme, Paris
(1909).
'Is Mr. Bradley Becoming a Pragmatist?', Mind,
vol. 17 (1908), pp. 370-83.
'The Present Phase of 'Idealist' Philosophy',
Mind, vol. 19 (1910), pp. 30-45.
Formal Logic: A Scientific and Social Problem
(1912; 2nd edn, 1931).
'Realism, Pragmatism, and William James',
Mind, vol. 25 (1915), pp. 516-24.
'Scientific Discovery and Logical Proof, in C.J.
Singer (ed.), Studies in the History and

Method of Science, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1917),
pp. 235-89.
'The Meaning of 'Meaning', Mind, vol. 29
(1920), pp. 385-414.
'Hypothesis', in CJ. Singer (ed.), Studies in the
History and Method of Science, vol. 2
(Oxford, 1921), pp. 414-46.
'Mr. Russell's Psychology', Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 19 (1922), pp. 281-92.
Problems of'Belief'(1924).
'Psychology and Logic', in W. Brown (ed.),
Psychology and the Sciences (1924), pp.
53-70.
Logic for Use: An Introduction to the
Voluntarist Theory of Knowledge (1929).
Must Philosophers Disagree? And Other
Essays in Popular Philosophy (London and
New York, 1934).
Our Human Truths (New York, 1939).
Other Relevant Works
'Why Humanism?', Contemporary British
Philosophy: Personal Statements, 1st ser., ed.
J.H. Muirhead (1924), pp. 385-410.
Humanistic Pragmatism: The Philosophy of P.
C. S. Schiller, ed. Rueben Abel (New York,
1966).
Further Reading
Abel, Reuben, The Pragmatic Humanism ofF.
C. S. Schiller (New York, 1955).
Marrett, R.R., 'Ferdinand Canning Scott
Schiller', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 23 (1937), pp. 538-50.
Searles, H. and A. Shields, A Bibliography of
the Works off. C. S. Schiller (San Diego,
1969).
Slosson, Edwin, 'F. C. S. Schiller', in Six Major
Prophets (Boston, 1917), pp. 190-233.
White, Stephen, A Comparison of the
Philosophies ofF. C. S. Schiller and John
Dewey (Chicago, 1940).
Winetrout, Kenneth, F. C S. Schiller and the
Dimensions of Pragmatism (Columbus,
Ohio, 1967).
John R. Shook
933
SCHMITT
SCHMITT, Charles Bernard (1933-86)
Charles Schmitt was born in Louisville,
Kentucky on 4 August 1933 and died in Padua
on 15 April 1986. He was educated in
Louisville at St Xavier High School. In 1956 he
graduated as a chemical engineer from the
University of Louisville. After working for
American Cyanamid, he enrolled to do a PhD
in Renaissance philosophy at Columbia
University, New York with the great German
emigre historian of philosophy Paul Oskar
Kristeller, his interest in the history of science
and philosophy having originally been spurred
and facilitated by a good knowledge of Latin
from his Catholic schooldays, and the 'Great
Books' course laid on in Louisville public
library. He completed his PhD on
Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola in 1963
and took up appointments successively at
Fordham and UCLA. In 1967 he made another
decisive move, this time to England, to take up
a temporary position at the University of Leeds.
In 1973 he was appointed Lecturer at the
Warburg Institute, University of London.
Three topics dominate Schmitt's investiga-
tions: scepticism, Aristotelianism and the
history of universities. Each of these is exem-
plified by major publications. The first two
developed strands from his doctoral disserta-
tion, published as Gianfrancesco Pico della
Mirandola (1469-1533) and his Critique of
Aristotle (1967). This was followed by Cicero
Scepticus (1972), which continued the work
on the history of scepticism initiated by his
friend, Richard H. Popkin, and the Critical
Survey and Bibliography of Studies on
Renaissance Aristotelianism (1971), which laid
the ground for extensive further studies of the
Aristotelian legacy. By showing the centrality of
Aristotelianism to European thought well into
the period of the scientific revolution (in books
such as Aristotle and the Renaissance, 1983,
and John Case, 1984), he revolutionized the
received picture of Renaissance philosophy.
Thirdly, his founding of the journal History of
Universities in 1981 reflects his recognition of
SCHMITT
the importance of social and institutional
context in the history of science and philoso-
phy. These major areas of Schmitt's work were
not separate from one another, and do not do
full justice to the breadth of his range - which
extended to Platonism and humanism and
which reflects his sense of the interconnected-
ness of the thought of the Renaissance (he
himself eschewed the term 'interdisciplinary'
to describe his approach). His huge range and
deep sense of the unity of Renaissance philos-
ophy is exemplified magisterially in The
Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy,
which stands out among the Cambridge
Histories for the way in which it organizes the
thought of the period along Renaissance lines,
according to the divisions of knowledge
familiar to its subjects rather than according to
modern disciplinary boundaries and subdivi-
sions. In addition to these major publications,
Schmitt published some 117 articles and over
150 book reviews. But his remarkably pro-
ductive career as a scholar was cut short by his
early death in April 1986.
With its focus on original sources, read in
their original languages, his subscription to
the broad thesis that European philosophy in
the Renaissance was reshaped by the impact of
newly rediscovered classical philosophy, in the
recovery of which the humanists played a
crucial role, Charles Schmitt's scholarship
bears the stamp of his teacher Kristeller,
whom, with F.E. Cranz, he helped edit
Catalogus translationum and commetarium
(1971-). In other respects his approach to phi-
losophy was shaped by his knowledge of the
history of science. But in its breadth and thor-
oughness and the tentative way in which he
drew his conclusions, as well as the coopera-
tive way in which he conducted his research,
his methodology benefited from his earlier
training as a scientist. His work focused not on
individuals and arguments, but the fortuna of
philosophical texts (or their distribution across
time), on the body of writings surrounding
them (e.g., glosses and commentaries) and the
schools of thought within which they were
934
read and transmitted. In consequence, an
important part of his work was bibliographi-
cal, consisting in surveying, itemizing and cat-
aloguing - a project which he shared with and
was encouraged in by his friend, Charles Lohr,
whose survey of Aristotle commentaries he
and Cranz complemented with a survey of
Aristotle translations. Charles Schmitt's study
of the diffusion of philosophy enabled him to
focus on the development of philosophy and
science through the transformation of philoso-
phies by their reception arid reinterpretation
with later cultures. His death before he had
realized his full potential as a scholar has
meant that, in spite of his having radically
altered the received picture of Renaissance
thought, his impact on the practice of the
history of philosophy has not been as extensive
as it deserved to have been.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gianfrancesco Pico delta Mirandola
(1469-1533) and his Critique of Aristotle
(The Hague, 1967).
A Critical Survey and Bibliography of Studies
on Renaissance Aristotelianism (Padua,
1971).
Cicero Scepticus: A Study of the Influence of
the Academica in the Renaissance (The
Hague, 1972).
Studies in Renaissance Philosophy and
Science (1981).
Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge,
Mass., 1983).
John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance
England (Kingston-Montreal, 1984).
(Ed.), History of Universities (Amersham,
1981-5; Oxford, 1986-)
(Ed. with Quentin Skinner and Jill Kraye),
The Cambridge History of Renaissance
Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988).
Reappraisals in Renaissance Thought, ed.
with an Introdution by Charles Webster
(1989).
(with Brian Copenhaver), Renaissance
Philosophy (Oxford, 1992).

Further Reading
Henry, John and Sarah Hutton (eds), New
Perspectives on Renaissance Thought
(1990).
Lohr, C.H., 'Medieval Latin Aristotle
Commentaries', Traditio, vol. 23 (1967),
pp. 313-413; vol. 24 (1968), pp. 149-245
vol. 26 (1970), pp. 135-216; vol. 27
(1971), pp. 251-351; vol. 28 (1972), pp.
281-396; vol. 29 (1973), pp. 93-197; vol
30 (1974), pp. 119-44; and Bulletin de
philosophic medievale, vol. 14 (1972), pp.
116-26; vol. 15 (1973), pp. 131-6.
, 'Renaissance Latin Aristotle
Commentaries', Studies in the Renaissance,
vol. 21 (1974), pp. 228-9; Renaissance
Quarterly, vol. 28 (1975), pp. 689-741;
vol. 29 (1976), pp. 714-45; vol. 30 (1977)
pp. 681-741; vol. 30 (1978), pp. 532-603;
vol. 32 (1979), pp. 529-80; vol. 33 (1980),
pp. 623-734; vol. 35 (1982), pp. 164-256.
Sarah Hutton
SCOTT, John Waugh (1878-1974)
John Waugh Scott was born in Lesmahagow,
Lanarkshire on 9 November 1878 and died in
Cambridge on 10 July 1974. He attended
Hamilton Academy, then Glasgow University.
Graduating with first class honours in mental
philosophy (1903), he won a 1905 Ferguson
Scholarship. Appointed lecturer in moral phi-
losophy at Glasgow, from 1920 to 1944 he
was Professor of Logic and Philosophy,
University of Wales, Cardiff, thereafter profes-
sor emeritus. He was Mills Lecturer, Universit.
of California (1921-2).
He wrote variously on socio-political topics
- and economics - for journals including A.R.
Orage's important The New Age (sometimes as
'W.D. Law'). In a Glasgow discussion group on
socio-political issues with Hector
935
SCOTT
HETHERINGTON, A.A. BOWMAN and the politi-
cian-journalist Thomas Johnstone, his later
work on problems of long-term and mass
unemployment and with the National
Homecraft Association (Honorary Secretary,
1925-43) contributed to planning the 1939 to
1945 wartime 'Dig for Victory' scheme.
Outstanding editorial work on A.A. Bowman's
A Sacramental Universe was followed by
Scott's design and supervision of the three-
volume Synoptic Index to the Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society to 1969.
Scott reflected back his wider concerns into
scrutiny of issues raised by the rising philoso-
phy discussed in his 1916 Glasgow PhD,
reworked in essays and (1919) for a wider read-
ership. With a provisional commitment to
idealism, he published less in systematic
advocacy than in arguing inadequacies in
'realisms' represented by Bertrand RUSSELL and
Henri Bergson. Each of these dogmatically
assumed a 'given' which Scott held to be no less
a construction than any idealist or neo-Kantian
account of reality. The constructing activity of
mind is not, he maintained, necessarily inca-
pable of finding out what is there.
These 'realisms' struck Scott as manifesting
identical habits of thought with the syndicalism
of Georges Sorel's revolutionist Reflexions sur la
violence, which with Russell's 1916 Principles of
Social Reconstruction prescribed a dissatisfied
individualism. Current attacks on 'metaphysics'
seemed related to efforts to supplant established
continuities of moral and socio-political dis-
course essential to humane civilization and pur-
posive reform. 'Realist' theoreticians belittled
crucial human concerns in the cause of exalting
an unknown future unlikely to deliver what
they would wish. There was gross disregard of
implications.
Scott attacked anti-intellectualism in religion,
and in Bergson's Evolution creatrice, and
taking oneself and everything else as one seems
to find them. Surely Bergson's best-seller rein-
stated its author's bete noire of materialism, dis-
guised by an optimism Bergson inherited from
his first master Herbert Spencer.
SCOTT
Reality is not something entirely other in
character from man. Regarding its ultimate
character as spiritual, Scott referred to the
dearth of descriptive, predictive or explanatory
capacity of the new physics influential on the
'realists', and their blindness to such factors as
(his instance) heroism. Separately, Scott con-
victed Russell of a confusion of terms in mis-
reading both Meinong and idealist discourse.
Scott's exegesis of idealist teaching had an
apparently unusual defender in his pupil John
ANDERSON. Current questions concerning
Anderson's relation to absolute idealism might
be enlightened by, among other things, the
immunity of the realism of Studies in Empirical
Philosophy to most of Scott's strictures.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Pessimism of Creative Evolution', Mind,
vol. 22 (1913), pp. 344-60.
'Realism and Polities', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 18 (1917-18), pp.
224-46.
Syndicalism and Philosophical Realism: A
Study in the Correlation of Contemporary
Social Tendencies (1919).
Karl Marx on Value (1920).
Kant on the Moral Life: An Exposition of
Kant's 'Grundlegung (1924).
'The Independence of the Objective',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
33 (1932-3), pp. 333-9.
'Humanity and History' [presidential
address], Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 13 (1934), pp. 1-15.
Other Relevant Works
Unemployment: A Suggested Policy (1925).
Self-Subsistence for the Unemployed: Studies
in a New Technique (1935).
(Ed. and ann.), A.A. Bowman, A Sacramental
Universe (Princeton, 1941).
Synoptic Index to the Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, 3 vols (1901-69).
Robert R. Calder
936
SCRUTON, Roger Vernon (1944-)
Roger Scruton was born in Buslingthorpe,
Lincolnshire on 27 February 1944. He was
educated at the Royal Grammar School, High
Wycombe and at Jesus College, Cambridge
(MA, PhD). He was a research fellow at
Peterhouse College, Cambridge from 1969 to
1971. On leaving Cambridge, he was succes-
sively lecturer (1971-9), reader (1979-85) and
finally Professor of Aesthetics (1985-92) at
Birkbeck College, London. During this period
at Birkbeck, he was also called to the English
bar (Inner Temple). He was then Professor of
Philosophy at Boston University from 1992 to
1995. Since then, having resolved 'to be
employed by no-one, and to live by my wits'
(On Hunting, p. 37), he has worked, among
other occupations, as a writer and broadcaster,
whilst holding visiting posts at a number of
academic institutions. He was editor of the
conservative journal The Salisbury Review
from its inception in 1982 until 2000.
Scruton is that rare figure in the English-
speaking world, a professional philosopher
whose work has achieved influence beyond the
academy. During his career, he has moved from
being a university academic with a respected
technical expertise in aesthetics to a public intel-
lectual whose conservative views on cultural
and social issues are both sought and ridiculed
by the media. However, the two aspects of his
career can be regarded as reflecting an under-
lying philosophical unity. In his first major
work, Art and Imagination (1974), Scruton
argues that aesthetic judgements are not true o
false descriptions of objects as such, but rather
reflect our imaginative experience of that
object. Taking forward this idea, he goes on to
argue in the paper 'Emotion and Culture' (in
The Aesthetic Understanding, pp. 138-52) that
our understanding of objects in general is often
mediated by a common culture which 'provides
concepts that classify the world in terms of the
appropriate action and the appropriate
response', which allow a person 'to find his
identity in the world and not in opposition to

it' (The Aesthetic Understanding, p. 151). This
imaginative construction of the world by a
shared traditional culture - the Lebenswelt, as
Scruton often styles it using a term borrowed
from Husserl - and the dangers if such a culture
should be lost form the dominant theme of his
work, both academic and popular.
In Sexual Desire (1986), for example, Scruton
attempts a defence of a traditional understand-
ing of sexual relationships and the institution of
marriage. His defence rests on the way in which
the exclusivity and enduring nature of tradi-
tional marriage is required for certain sorts of
value to exist: 'there could be neither arousal, nor
desire, nor the pleasures that pertain to them,
without the presence, in the very heart of these
responses, of the moral scruples which limit
them' (Sexual Desire, p. 362). Opposed to this
Lebenswelt is the pseudo-scientific world of
Freud and the Kinsey Report, in which the
coming together of persons is objectified and
thus reduced. It is certainly possible, in Scruton's
view, to see the world as de-romanticized, to
see sex as merely instinct and the release of
physical tension; but if this occurs, then the pos-
sibility of certain values and meanings will be
permanently lost, along with the possibility of
certain understandings of the human person:
'Sexual disintegration entails personal disinte-
gration, and the loss of desire will entail the
gradual erasure from nature of the human face
which covers it' (ibid., p. 349).
Apart from relationships between the sexes,
Scruton is concerned about the ways in which
modern societies strip out meaning from the
Lebenswelt in other spheres such as music,
architecture, politics and religion. In The
Aesthetics of Music (1997), having quoted with
approval Nicholas Cook's remark that, 'A
musical culture is a tradition of imagining
sound as music' (p. 455), Scruton notes that
such a culture creates for its participants the
possibility of certain types of knowledge and
experience. The experience of harmony, for
example, provides us with the knowledge
which allows us 'to respond to a wider world,
to value the other voice, and to situate both self
937
SCRUTON
and other in a moralized universe' (The
Aesthetics of Music, p. 502). Where experi-
ences of harmony, melody and rhythm are lost
or attenuated in popular music (and Scruton
illustrates this by reference to the music of the
bands Nirvana and REM), then the possibility
of a certain fulfilling human life is also lost:
'Through melody, harmony and rhythm, we
enter a world where others exist besides the self,
a world that is full of feeling but also ordered,
disciplined but free ... The anomie of Nirvana
and REM is the anomie of its listeners' (ibid.).
Scruton's work can be seen as being domi-
nated by three themes: the need for the world
in which we live to be constructed by imagina-
tion; the fragility of that world and the tradi-
tions which sustain it; and the interconnected-
ness of activities in that world, so that a decline,
say, in music cannot be isolated from declines
in other areas of our life. The seriousness with
which these themes are addressed has often
been concealed by the controversy which
Scruton has stirred up with his championing of
deeply unfashionable causes such as fox
hunting and smoking. In part, this controversy
is the unavoidable consequence of his political
conclusions: as a conservative thinker, he will
necessarily be attacked by those who have
reached more radical conclusions. Scruton,
however, clearly relishes his role as a conserv-
ative gadfly and this combativeness, coupled
with the non-academic forums in which he airs
his ideas, has sometimes led to an undervaluing
of the philosophical depth of his arguments.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Art and Imagination (1974).
The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979).
The Meaning of Conservatism
(Harmondsworth, 1980).
The Aesthetic Understanding (Manchester,
1983).
Sexual Desire (1986).
Modern Philosophy (1994).
Animal Rights and Wrongs (1996).
The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford, 1997).
SCRUTON
Other Relevant Works
Fortnight's Anger (Manchester, 1981).
The Politics of Culture and Other Essays
(Manchester, 1981).
A Short History of Modern Philosophy
(1981).
A Dictionary of Political Thought (1982).
Kant (Oxford, 1983).
Untimely Tracts (Basingstoke, 1985).
Thinkers of the New Left (Harlow, 1986).
Spinoza (Oxford, 1986).
A Land Held Hostage (Lebanon and the
West) (1987).
Philosopher on Dover Beach and Other
Essays (1989).
A Dove Descending and Other Stories
(1991).
Francesca: A Novel (1991).
Xanthippic Dialogues: A Philosophical
Fiction (1993).
The Classical Vernacular: Architectural
Principles in an Age of Nihilism
(Manchester, 1994).
An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy
(1996).
An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern
Culture (1998).
On Hunting (1998).
England: An Elegy (2000).
Perictione in Colophon (South Bend, Indiana,
2000).
Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in
Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (Oxford,
2004).
Further Reading
Morrissey, Christopher S., Roger Scruton:
Internet Bibliography,
http://www.morec.com/scruton.htm,
accessed November 2004.
'Scruton, Professor Roger Vernon', in
Debrett's People of Today (2004).
'Scruton, Professor Roger Vernon', in Who's
Who (2004).
Scruton, Roger, Home Page,
http://www.rogerscruton.com, accessed
November 2004.
938
Wroe, Nicholas, Thinking for England', The
Guardian, 28 October 2000.
Stephen Watt
SCRUTTON, Mary Beatrice, see Midgley
SELBY-BIGGE, Lewis Amherst (1860-1951)
Amherst Selby-Bigge was born on 3 April 1860
and died in Lewes on 24 May 1951. The
second son of Charles Selby-Bigge of Linden,
Northumberland, he was educated at
Winchester and Christ Church, Oxford, grad-
uating BA with a first class in literae human-
lores in 1883 (MA 1886). He was fellow and
lecturer in philosophy at University College,
Oxford from 1883 (hon. fellow 1930). He had
entered the Inner Temple in 1884 and was
called to the bar in 1891. From 1893 he was a
Charity Commissioner before entering the
Board of Education in 1902, where he was
involved in constituting the foundation
managers for voluntary schools and in settling
teachers' salaries. He was also principal advisor
to H.A.L. Fisher on the drafting of his
Education Act. He was promoted principal
assistant secretary in 1908 and permanent sec-
retary in 1911. He retired in 1925 to his farm
near Lewes, also sitting on a number of Public
Commissions. He was appointed CB in 1905,
advanced KCB in 1913, and was created a
baronet in 1919.
Selby-Bigge is now best known for his edi-
torial activities. He produced editions of David
Hume's Enquiries (1894) and of the Treatise of
Human Nature (1888) which have remained
standard until very recently. As important was

his collection of British Moralists (Oxford,
1897), which printed extracts from many of the
hitherto neglected writers of the eighteenth
century. This has an important Introduction
and, like the Hume editions, a valuable index.
A later collection edited by D.D. RAPHAEL
(1969) covers a wider chronological range and
a different selection of writers; hence the
original compilation remains of importance as
the most accessible text of many writers of the
period.
John Stephens
de SELINCOURT, Oliver (1898-1974)
Oliver de Selincourt was born in Oxford on 8
August 1898 and died in Aynho,
Northamptonshire on 19 August 1974. He
was the eldest of four children in a family of
French origin. His father was Ernest de
Selincourt, Professor of English at Birmingham
University and a Wordsworth specialist, and his
mother was Ethel Shawcross. The extended
family was literary and scholarly to an excep-
tional degree. For example, Oliver's aunt Agnes
de Selincourt was Principal of Westfield
College, University of London; his cousin
Aubrey de Selincourt was an author and trans-
lator of the Penguin Herodotus (1954); while
his sister Mary edited and translated the
original Everyman Leibniz (1934) and married
C.R. MORRIS (Lord Morris of Grassmere),
philosopher and later Vice-Chancellor of Leeds
University.
Oliver de Selincourt was not outshone in this
company. From 1912 to 1916 he was a scholar
at Winchester College, where he won the
English Verse Prize. He then obtained a schol-
arship to Trinity College, Oxford, but for his
generation a sterner demand took precedence.
In 1917 he was gazetted a second lieutenant in
the Royal Field Artillery, and saw action on the
939
de SELINCOURT
Somme, as a result of which he was left with
damaged hearing. He entered Trinity College,
where his tutor was H.A. PRICHARD, in 1919,
and in 1921 obtained a first class in literae
humaniores. Following graduation he spent a
year at the Sorbonne as lecteur d'Anglais, then
a year as an extramural tutor for Oxford
University, before becoming Assistant lecturer
in moral philosophy at Aberdeen (1923-6). In
1926 he became lecturer in philosophy,
Queen's University, Belfast, and then Professor
of Philosophy at Cardiff from 1944 to his
retirement in 1963. In 1944 he married Ethel
Noble of Belfast. De Selincourt was active in
assisting refugees from Europe before World
War II, and was a trustee of Dove Cottage, the
Wordsworth home in the Lake District.
De Selincourt's philosophical output was
both limited and eccentric. Apart from his one
book, he published one article and thirty-seven
reviews, all concerned with philosophical issues
in politics, Marxism or the social sciences. In
these areas de Selincourt was obviously well
informed and his writing are clear and, when
critical, go straight to the heart of the matter.
The book, Art and Morality (1935), was
very different in content and form. Although it
had little influence, it was well received by the
reviewers for its pioneering originality and its
competence: in the words of W.G. de Burgh in
Mind, it was distinguished by 'a rigour of
argument, a precision of statement and a pen-
etrative insight' (de Burgh, p. 95). But it was
also criticized for the abstract nature of its argu-
ments and the difficulty and obscurity of its
style: every step forward in the argument was
concealed in 'cautious qualifications' and a
'maze of reservations' (ibid., p. 96).
What neither author nor critics realized was
that de Selincourt stood on the threshold
between the old and the new in Oxford phi-
losophy. Although the general framework of
the book was still idealist, its method was
analytic. This method was to be expected from
an author who revered his tutor Prichard, who
in turn was a follower of COOK WILSON. With
the emergence of this new philosophy the
de SELINCOURT
cogency of the arguments was as important as,
if not more important than, the conclusions.
Indeed, the conclusions of Art and Morality
are hardly startling: art has its own aesthetic
values and is also subject to moral evaluation.
But the journey to that outcome is well worth
the price of the ticket. Given his obvious abili-
ties, however, it is a mystery why de Selincourt
published so little.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Some Aspects of the Materialist Conception
of History', Journal of Philosophical
Studies, vol. 2 (1927), pp. 190-204.
Art and Morality (1935).
further Reading
de Burgh, W.G., 'Critical Notice: Art and
Morality, by Oliver de Selincourt', Mind,
vol. 45 (1936), pp. 95-101.
Andrew Belsey
SELL, Alan Philip Frederick (1935-)
Alan P.P. Sell was born in Farncombe, Surrey
on 15 November 1935. He was educated at
Pewley School in Guildford before embarking
on ministerial training at the Lancashire
Independent College (later Northern
Congregational College), Manchester. He
received BA, BD and MA degrees from the
University of Manchester, and was ordained to
the Christian ministry in 1959. He was
awarded a PhD in 1967 from the University of
Nottingham for work on the relationship
between philosophy and the Christian religion.
Sell held two pastorates and one lectureship in
England, before his appointment in 1983 as
Theological Secretary of the World Alliance of
Reformed Churches in Geneva. He was
appointed to the Chair of Christian Thought at
the University of Calgary in Canada (1988-92),
940
later moving to the Aberystwyth and Lampeter
School of Theology of the University of Wales
as Professor of Christian Doctrine and
Philosophy of Religion at the United
Theological College, Aberystwyth
(1992-2001). A prolific and disciplined scholar,
he has lectured around the world, and received
many honours, including honorary doctorates
from four institutions, in Hungary, Romania,
the USA and Canada. In 1998 he was awarded
the Doctor of Divinity degree from the
University of Manchester. His skill in facilitat-
ing ecumenical dialogue, through careful elu-
cidation of language, doctrine and meaning,
has been sought and engaged by leaders from
across the ecclesiological spectrum.
Sell is known as a philosopher, theologian,
ecumenist and historian, particularly of, but
not exclusive to, the English nonconformist
tradition. Pursuing an essentially pre-apolo-
getic task, Sell seeks to engage the tools of phi-
losophy to clarify the methods and claims of
both philosophy and theology, and to explore
the philosophical nature of religious belief, and
unbelief. His work reveals how intellectual
currents at various points in history have influ-
enced the development and coherence of reli-
gious claims. Through examination of philoso-
phers and their respondents in their historical
contexts, he yields a freshly accurate under-
standing of their thought and reception. Sell
demonstrates how historically informed appre-
ciation of past philosophical controversies and
theological differences not only identifies poten-
tial inadequacies in our contemporary under-
standings of religious knowledge, but also
offers suggestions for ways forward through
problems posed by contemporary philosophy
and culture.
Equally at home in the disciplines of philos-
ophy and theology, Sell has significantly
demonstrated the religious response to such
well-known figures as Locke and Mill, as well
as the philosophical response to many forgot-
ten divines, whose thought he enjoys resur-
recting. He has shown that, despite according
a greater place to revelation than many assume,

both English rationalism and British idealism
offer insufficient epistemological bases for reli-
gious belief. He has similarly explained how
Mill's alternative approach to religion
bequeaths relevant legacies, and inadequacies.
Moreover, he offers constructive suggestions
for ensuring that revelation, reason, experience
and faith cohere as elements of religious knowl-
edge, and inform an appropriate corresponding
worldview. Providing a reasoned eclecticism,
Sell offers a philosophical method that
embraces the intellectual reasonableness of reli-
gious belief, while acknowledging its essentially
confessional nature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defending and Declaring the Faith: Some
Scottish Examples 1860-1920 (Exeter and
Colorado Springs, 1987).
The Philosophy of Religion 1875-1980
(London and New York, 1988; 2nd edn,
Bristol, 1996).
Dissenting Thought and the Life of the
Churches (San Francisco, 1990).
Commemorations: Studies in Christian
Thought and History (Calgary and
Cardiff, 1993; repr. Eugene, Oregon,
1998).
Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief
(Cardiff and New York, 1995).
John Locke and the Eighteenth Century
Divines (Cardiff, 1997).
Mill and Religion: Contemporary Responses
to the Three Essays (Bristol, 1997).
Confessing and Commending the Faith:
Historic Witness and Apologetic Method
(Cardiff, 2002).
Philosophy, Dissent and Nonconformity
1689-1920 (Cambridge, 2004).
Mill on God: The Pervasiveness and
Elusiveness of Mill's Religious Thought
(Aldershot, 2004).
Anna M. Robbins
941
SEN
SEN, Amartya Kumar (1931-)
Amartya Sen was born in Santiniketan, India
on 3 November 1931, the son and grandson of
distinguished academics. He was educated at
the Presidency College, Calcutta and Trinity
College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a
PhD in economics in 1959. Sen has taught at
the Universities of Calcutta, Delhi, Cambridge,
Oxford and Harvard, and at the London
School of Economics. He has also held visiting
positions at MIT, Stanford, Berkeley and
Cornell, and has served on the editorial boards
of a number of leading journals in economics
and in philosophy, including Economics and
Philosophy', Ethics and Philosophy and Public
Affairs. Among other distinctions, Sen was
Drummond Professor of Political Economy at
Oxford from 1980 to 1988, Master of Trinity
College, Cambridge from January 1998 and
winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in
1998. He has been three times married and
has four children from his first two marriages.
Although he is an economist by training,
Sen's philosophical interests are of long
standing, and he used his prize fellowship at
Trinity College, Cambridge in the 1950s to
devote himself to a study of logic and episte-
mology as well as moral and political philoso-
phy. His professional interests as an economist
have included important studies of poverty and
famines, but were initially in the direction of
social choice theory. This is an attempt to
develop a mathematically formal answer to a
question that Sen has said has preoccupied him
since his teenage years: is reasonable social
choice at all possible given the differences
between one person's preferences (including
interests and judgements) and those of another,
especially given the diversity of preferences
among people? Or, to put the question another
way, is there a way of aggregating individual
preferences that permits a decision on which
social arrangement or policy would be socially
optimal? In attempting to answer these ques-
tions, Sen's work has increasingly tended in
the direction of moral philosophy.
SEN
The framework for most late twentieth-
century social choice theory was provided by
the highly formal work of Kenneth J. Arrow,
although it also traces its origins to the pio-
neering work of the eighteenth-century French
mathematician and philosopher Condorcet.
Sen's work has produced a number of techni-
cally very important results within this tradi-
tion. One of these is the so-called Sen Paradox,
also known as the Impossibility of a Paretian
Liberal. Loosely speaking, it alleges a conflict
between the principles of efficiency and liber-
alism. Expressed in the technical language of
social choice theory, Sen's Paradox poses a
critical dilemma for anyone who wishes simul-
taneously to espouse principles of efficiency
and individual liberty. It states that there always
will be some possible situation when one of
these principles will have to be sacrificed in
favour of the other.
Another major theme of Sen's work has been
concerned with the implications of Arrow's
'impossibility theorem'. This famously offers
formal proof that a social choice function,
which transforms each individual's set of pref-
erence orders into a global societal preference
order, is unable to satisfy all of a list of stipu-
lated desirable ('fair') conditions at once,
including the condition of 'non-dictatorship'.
Arrow's impossibility theorem states that if the
decision-making body has at least two members
and at least three options to decide among,
then it is impossible to design a social choice
function that simultaneously satisfies all of the
stipulated conditions. It thus appears to cast
doubt on the very possibility that a non-dicta-
torial social choice mechanism may yield con-
sistent social decisions.
Taking Arrow's work as his starting-point,
Sen has attempted to overcome its pessimistic
conclusions. While making use of Arrow's
formal framework, Sen argues that the concept
of 'preference' is itself problematic, and a series
of important papers explore this point. Sen
argues that there are substantive differences in
the range of possible interpretations of the
concept of preference (which include mental
942
satisfaction, desires, choices and values). In
standard economics it is assumed that the dif-
ferences between these concepts are irrelevant
since they all yield the same ranking of prefer-
ences. However, Sen argues that these different
concepts focus on quite distinct aspects of the
individual. In a 1973 paper he argued that
eschewing these distinctions amounted to
seeing people as 'rational fools', as undiscrim-
inating and gross thinkers who choose one all-
purpose preference ordering to regulate their
lives. A theory of human behaviour - even on
economic matters - demands more structure
and more distinction than is possible by treating
the different concepts of preference as equiva-
lent.
Recognizing the diversity of individual pref-
erence adds to the richness of social choice
theory by permitting the theory to invoke dif-
ferent features of the individual, depending on
context. Thus, for example, in judging a
person's interests, his or her actual choices may
provide an inadequate informational base.
Much depends on the reasons on which actual
choices are based. On the other hand, to the
extent that we are concerned with a person's
freedom to act, choices that are actually made
by that person would be the best starting-point,
no matter what motivates, these choices. Sen
thus argues that there is a substantial difference
in the informational content of the different
interpretations of preference.
Sen has used his analysis of preference to
develop a powerful and original critique of util-
itarianism. This challenges the equation of pref-
erences with utilities, arguing that the concept
of preference should involve a broader infor-
mational base than simply an individual's
mental states. Utilitarianism sees value only in
terms of individual utility,, which is defined in
terms of some mental characteristic, such as
pleasure, happiness or desire. Sen argues that
this provides a limited account of individual
well-being and pays no attention to the freedom
to pursue well-being or indeed any other objec-
tive. In short, there is a need to go beyond util-
itarianism, but this does not require a rejec-

tion of a preference-based approach to social
choice. Nor do social choice formulations need
to be preference-independent. Instead, the infor-
mational content of preferences needs to be
extended to take into account the principles of
liberty, equity and justice (Utilitarianism and
Beyond).
In place of utilitarianism, Sen proposes a
capabilities-oriented perspective which differs
from utilitarianism with respect to the content
of what he terms 'evaluative space'. In standard
utilitarian analysis the evaluative space consists
only of individual utilities (defined in terms of
pleasure, happiness or desire fulfilment). By
contrast, in Sen's 'capabilities' approach, the
evaluative space is identified with functionings
and capabilities to function. Some function-
ings are very elementary, such as being ade-
quately nourished or in good health, whereas
others are more complex, such as achieving
self-respect or being socially integrated. The
capability of a person refers to the various alter-
native combinations of functionings, any com-
bination of which a person can choose to have.
Capabilities depend both on individual physical
and mental characteristics, and also on social
opportunities and influences. In some of his
later writings, Sen has acknowledged the con-
ceptual connections between his 'capabilities
approach' and the Aristotelian analysis of
'political distribution' ('Cability and Well-
Being'). However, in contrast with Aristotle,
Sen argues that the capabilities approach does
not necessarily point to a single list of func-
tionings that do in fact constitute the human
good. Human preferences are more diverse
than a single list could recognize.
The capabilities approach differs from utili-
tarianism because it makes room for a variety
of human acts and states as important in them-
selves, and not just because they yield utility. It
emphasizes that human well-being is not simply
a matter of achievements - which can be
measured by income, wealth or utilities - but
also a matter of the freedom that a person has
to lead one kind of life or another. It thus
makes room for valuing various freedoms. Sen
943
SEN
(Rationality and Freedom) distinguishes
between two different and irreducibly diverse
aspects of freedom, which he calls the 'oppor-
tunity aspect' and the 'process aspect'. These
conceptions have a great deal in common with
the concepts of positive and negative liberty,
respectively. The process aspect of freedom
concentrates on the freedom involved in the
actual choice itself - whether the person was
free to choose or whether other persons
intruded or obstructed his or her choice. By
contrast, the opportunity aspect of freedom
concentrates attention on the actual ability of
a person to achieve those things which he or she
values. However, whereas many political
philosophers have argued for one or other of
these conceptions, Sen claims that both oppor-
tunity and process freedom can be simultane-
ously valued. We may have good reasons to
value both aspects of freedom, and the relative
importance that is attached to them may vary
with the nature of the choice and its context.
A person's capability to achieve functionings
that he or she has reason to value provides a
general approach to the evaluation of social
arrangements, and this in turn yields a particu-
lar approach to equality and inequality (On
Economic Inequeality, Inequality Reexamined).
A utilitarian approach, which considers only an
individual's utilities, may substantially under-
state the extent of a person's deprivation. Sen is
particularly concerned with the situation in
which, when confronted by entrenched inequal-
ities such as those of gender, caste or class, a
person accepts or comes to terms with his or her
lot in life. Such a person, even though thor-
oughly deprived and confined to a very reduced
life, might not appear to be so badly off in terms
of utilitarian measures of welfare. Despite the
fact that he or she may lack the opportunity to
be adequately nourished, decently clothed, min-
imally educated or properly sheltered, an indi-
vidual's poverty of expectation or of desire
may lead to these conditions not registering
significantly in a utilitarian metric. By contrast,
Sen argues that the capabilities approach
provides a straightforward way of evaluating
SEN
social arrangements that entrench these types of
inequality because they deprive people of the
freedom to achieve elementary functionings.
Poverty is in turn the deprivation of some
minimum fulfilment of elementary capabilities.
Sen's capability approach also leads to
important criticisms of John Rawls's concept of
'justice as fairness', although by Sen's own
admission he owes a substantial intellectual
debt to Rawls's theory. In contrast with Rawls,
who makes interpersonal comparisons in terms
of bundles of primary goods, Sen argues that
the ranking of Rawlsian primary goods bundles
must be ultimately related to the individuals'
evaluation of these bundles in terms of their
usefulness in promoting the diverse objectives
of different persons. Thus the assessment of
distribution cannot be preference-independent.
Moreover, two persons holding the same
bundle of primary goods can have very differ-
ent freedoms to pursue their respective concepts
of the good. To judge equality in the space of
primary goods amounts to giving priority to the
means of freedom over any assessment of the
extents of freedom. Again, the practical impor-
tance of this divergence can be very great in
dealing with inequalities related to gender,
location, caste and class.
The capabilities approach also lends itself to
a powerful defence of democracy. As with
freedom, democracy's claim to be valuable does
not rest on just one particular merit. The case
for democracy rests on a plurality of virtues,
including, first, the intrinsic importance of polit-
ical participation and freedom in human life;
second, the instrumental importance of politi-
cal incentives in keeping governments respon-
sible and accountable; and third, the construc-
tive role of democracy in the formation of
values and in the understanding of needs, rights
and duties.
A particular strength of Sen's moral philoso-
phy has been the way it has both informed, and
has been shaped by, his empirical economic
studies on poverty and famines. Moreover, the
theory of capabilities and functionings has
provided theoretical support to attempts to
944
assess human welfare not simply by measures of
economic output (such as gross domestic
product), but by more broadly based measures
of human development that take into account
other factors such as access to education and
health care. Thus Sen has played a major role in
developing the 'Human Development Index'
used by international agencies such as the United
Nations Development Programme and the
World Bank to assess economic development.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Collective Choice and Social Welfare (San
Francisco, 1970).
'The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal',
Journal of Political Economy', vol. 72
(1970), pp. 152-7.
On Economic Inequality (Oxford, 1973).
'Equality of What?', in S. McMurrin (ed.),
Tanner Lectures on Human Values^ vol. 1
(Cambridge, 1980).
Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford,
1982).
(Ed. with Bernard Williams), Utilitarianism
and Beyond (Cambridge, 1982).
'Well-Being, Agency and Freedom: The
Dewey Lectures 1984', Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 82 (1985), pp. 169-221.
On Ethics and Economics (Oxford, 1987).
Inequality Reexamined (Oxford, 1992).
'Capability and Well-Being', in M.
Nussbaum and A. Sen (eds), The Quality
of Life (Oxford, 1993).
Development as Freedom (Oxford, 1999).
Rationality and freedom (Cambridge, Mass.,
2002).
further Reading
Alkine, Sabina, Valuing freedoms: Sen's
Capability Approach and Poverty
Reduction (Oxford, 2002).
Basu, K. et al., Choice, Welfare, and
Development: A festschrift in Honour of
Amartya K. Sen (Oxford, 1995).
Michael W. Taylor

SETH, Andrew, see Pringle-Pattison
SETH, James (1860-1924)
James Seth was born in Edinburgh on 6 May
1860 and died there on 24 July 1924. Educated
first at George Watson's Academy in
Edinburgh, he went to Edinburgh University in
1876, where, specializing in philosophy, his
teachers were Alexander Campbell Eraser and
Henry Calderwood. He graduated with first
class honours in 1881, and a year later was
awarded the Ferguson Scholarship open to
graduates of the four Scottish universities.
Having originally entered university with the
intention of becoming a minister, after gradu-
ating he enrolled as a student of divinity at the
Theological College of the Free Church of
Scotland, where he stayed for four years until
1885. During this time he spent two summer
semesters at German universities (visiting
Leipzig, Jena and Berlin), and held for two
years (1883-5) the post of assistant to
Campbell Fraser. In 1886 he accepted an invi-
tation to succeed Jacob Gould Schurman as
Professor of Metaphysics and Ethics at
Dalhousie College, Halifax, Nova Scotia. In
1892 he moved from there to Brown University
as Professor of Natural Theology, and then in
1896 he was appointed to the Sage
Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Cornell
University. However, when, on the death of
Calderwood, the Chair of Moral Philosophy in
Edinburgh fell vacant, he took advantage of the
opportunity to return to Scotland, being elected
to the post in May 1898 and taking up his
duties in October of that year. The connection
with Cornell was not completely severed, in
that he remained until 1923 co-editor of the
Philosophical Review, which is published there.
He held the Edinburgh chair for twenty-six
years. During most of this time (from 1891 to
945
SETH
1919) his elder brother by four years, Andrew
Seth PRINGLE-PATTISON, also an important
idealist philosopher, held the Chair of Logic
and Metaphysics. Seth died suddenly at the rel-
atively early age of sixty-four, having been diag-
nosed with heart trouble and in consequence
about to retire with the expectation of finding
the time and leisure to write, which until then
had always eluded him.
Like the two Caird brothers who held sway
in Glasgow, the Seth brothers were both ideal-
ists, but where the elder was interested in meta-
physics, the younger's focus lay almost exclu-
sively in ethics. His basic position was that of
ethical theism, and as such more Kantian than
Hegelian. It shows also the influence of S.S.
Laurie.
His interests and orientations were evident
from his very first work, a short pamphlet
entitled Freedom as Ethical Postulate (1891).
He argues there against such philosophers as
Henry Sidgwick and Leslie Stephen that the
problem of free will is not some obsolete antiq-
uity but a serious metaphysical issue which no
philosophy can afford to ignore. Their natu-
ralism, he argues, undermines freedom and
therefore morality. However, he is equally
opposed to the attempt by Hegel, or indeed
any other monistic, to rescue the idea, finding
their position destructive of individuality. He
asserts that there can be no genuine solution to
the puzzle of free will which does not accord
full reality to the finite self. The notions stand
or fall together. While he is dismissive also of
Kant's solution that we may be free in some
nouminal realm, he does accept the Kantian
position that freedom is a practically unavoid-
able postulate. Indeed, he argues we have every
right to accept as true what our moral sense so
insistently tells us - that we are free. But as to
the nature of freedom, beyond asserting that it
is, within parameters set by circumstance and
character, a matter of genuine contingency (he
argues against the compatibilism of such figures
as Shadworth Hodgson), he just takes it as
basic, something incapable of further analysis.
His next book, A Study of Ethical Principles,
SETH
written while he was at Brown University and
published in 1894, was essentially an intro-
ductory textbook in moral philosophy rather
than a systematic treatise. It was however very
successful, running to a seventeenth edition in
1926, and gaining him an international repu-
tation. He begins with an attempt to define the
Moral Idea, our chief end, which he concludes
is a matter of character; something to be or
become, not something to be got or to be done.
Attempting to fix this idea more precisely, he
criticizes two extreme positions, hedonism, or
the ethics of sensibility, and rigorism, or the
ethics of reason. Both he finds too one-sided.
He argues the need for a mediating theory
which he call 'Eudaimonism', or the ethics of
personality, which sees man as both rational
and sensitive, organically united. This he
connects with the idealistic attitudes of Plato
and Aristotle, but the influences of Kant, of
Butler and - with its emphasis on self-realiza-
tion - of Green are all very apparent also. With
its precept 'Be a person', this position empha-
sizes self-control, regard to life as a whole,
death of the lower self and the triumph of the
true or rational self.
The second part of the book, entitled The
Moral Ideal', considers both individual life and
social life in the light of the position arrived at.
Like Green, Seth expounded the supreme value
of the social life as the groundwork of the indi-
vidual moral life, strongly emphasizing the
nature of the state as an ethical institution, and
the resulting duties of citizenship as incumbent
on the individual. However, with regard to the
relation between state and person, he never
loses sight of the fact that the former exists for
the sake of the person, not vice versa.
The third and final section of the book deals
with the 'Metaphysical Implications of
Morality', and in an essentially Kantian fashion
urges the necessity for ethics of Freedom, God
and Immortality. Freedom, he argues, can only
be secured by recognizing the irreducible reality
of the transcendental self behind finite experi-
ence. Likewise it is not reason but ethics - 'not
the intellectual burden of fmitude but the moral
946
burden of evil' (A Study of Ethical Principles,
1905, p. 446) - that points us towards the
higher personal reality that is God, something
which in turn secures the ideal character of the
universe: the assurance that the universe is not
foreign or indifferent to the ethical spirit of
man. In a similar way, it is the facts, not of
metaphysics, but of ethics, more precisely the
infinite or open-ended nature of the task of
self-realization, which form the basis of his case
for personal immortality.
In 1912 Seth published a history of philoso-
phy, English Philosophers and Schools of
Philosophy, examining all the major figures of
English philosophy, and a considerable number
of the more minor ones, from the seventeenth
century up to the time of its publication.
Published as part of the 'Channels of English
Literature' series, though not taking so wide a
view of 'philosophy' as to include such figures
as Carlyle and Arnold, its range is broad
enough to consider the contributions of
Coleridge and J.H. Newman (under the general
chapter heading of The Idealistic Answer to
Hume'). At the time it was the most compre-
hensive sketch of English philosophical thought
ever attempted, and it is notable for its style, its
scholarly detail and its general even-handed-
ness. It could perhaps be objected that as an
idealist history its treatment of the tradition of
British empiricism is somewhat weak and one-
sided. Yet it is precisely as such a history that
its chief value now lies, for it was one of the
earliest attempts by a member of the idealist
school to set down the history of that
movement. It is thus comparable to W.R.
SORLEY'S A History of English Philosophy
(1920) or J.H. MUIRHEAD'S The Platonic
Tradition (1931).
Burdened as he was throughout his life with
teaching, it is to be regretted that Seth did not
live to write any final account of his position.
It is in large part because of this fact that,
although he was renowned and respected in his
day, his influence did not outlive his own time,
and he is now largely forgotten in the shadow
of his more famous brother.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Freedom as Ethical Postulate (Edinburgh,
1891; 8th edn, Edinburgh, 1905).
A Study of Ethical Principles (Edinburgh,
1894).
English Philosophers and Schools of
Philosophy (1912).
Essays in Ethics and Religion (Edinburgh,
1926).
W. J. Mander
SHARPE, Robert Augustus (1935-)
R.A. Sharpe was born in Penzance on 19 August
1935. After education at Bristol University (MA
in philosophy) and the University of London
(PhD), in 1962 he became a research fellow at
Reading University. In 1964 he moved from
Reading to St David's University College,
Lampeter (now University of Wales, Lampeter) as
assistant lecturer. He is currently Professor of
Philosophy at Lampeter.
Sharpe's research interests are focused on aes-
thetics (especially the aesthetics of music) and the
philosophy of mind. In Contemporary Aesthetics
(1983) he argues, amongst other points, that
critical judgement of an artwork is dependent on
a reciprocal relationship between the individual
critic and the consensus of connoisseurs embody-
ing a tradition. In his Music and Humanism
(2000) Sharpe argues for the connection of music
'with the life humans lead' (p. 179). He rests this
connection mainly on two points: that music can
be described using expressive predicates (such as
vivacious or calm); and that it can be followed
(e.g., through remembering patterns). The parent-
age of both points Sharp attributes to analogies
between music and language which 'are central to
the way in which our culture has viewed music'
(ibid., p. 182). He goes on to argue that, with the
rise of atonalism, such a basis for the intelligibil-
ity of music is now lacking.
947
SHARPE
In Sharpe's Making the Human Mind (1990)
he presents an anti-realist view in which minds
are 'artefacts brought about by the develop-
ment of language' (p. 3). 'What I shall argue is
that a model of interpretation taken from the
arts can, with suitable modifications, accoun
for the varieties of such areas of human enquiry
as psychology, history, sociology and the arts.
Inevitably a by-product of this is a conception
of what man is' (ibid., p. 5). The centrality of
this type of interpretation in Sharpe's thought
serves to link his aesthetics and philosophy of
mind, as well as providing a justification for his
claim in the Preface to Contemporary
Aesthetics that 'nothing equals the value and
importance of the arts'.
The Moral Case Against Religious Belief
(1997) argues against belief in God on the basis
that such a belief is immoral. Sharpe puts
forward the case that central religious attitudes
such as faith, worship and trust are contrary to
virtue. He also argues that the traditional teach-
ings of Christianity on sexual matters go
against a reasonable understanding of what
human nature is like. He concludes by attack-
ing the promise of immortality on the ground
that eternal life would be tedious for beings
like us.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Contemporary Aesthetics (Brighton, 1983).
Making the Human Mind (1990).
The Moral Case Against Religious Belief
(1997).
Music and Humanism (Oxford, 2000).
The Philosophy of Music (2004).
Other Relevant Works
'Type, Token, Interpretation and
Performance', Mind, vol. 88 (July 1979)
pp. 437-40.
'The Very Idea of a Folk Psychology',
Inquiry, vol. 30 (December 1987), pp.
381-93.
'Culture and its Discontents', British Journal
of Aesthetics, vol. 28 (Autumn 1988), pp.
305-16.
SHARPE
'Authenticity Again', British Journal of
Aesthetics (April 1991), pp. 163-6.
'Moral Tales', Philosophy, vol. 67, no. 26.
(April 1992), pp. 155-68.
'Music, Platonism and Performance: Some
Ontological Strains', British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 35, no. 1 (January 1995),
pp. 38-48.
'One Cheer for Simulation Theory', Inquiry,
vol. 40, no. 1 (1997), pp. 115-31.
'Philosophical Pluralism', Inquiry, vol. 42,
no. 1 (March 1999), pp. 129-42.
'Sounding the Depths', British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 40, no. 1 (January 2000),
pp. 64-72.
'The Empiricist Theory of Artistic Value',
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
vol. 58, no. 4 (Fall 2000), pp. 321-32.
'Could Beethoven Have "Discovered" the
Archduke Trio?', British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 41, no. 3 (July 2001), pp.
325-7.
'The Tale and the Teller', British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 42, no. 4 (October 2002),
pp. 415-18.
Stephen Watt
SHERRINGTON, Charles Scott
(1857-1952)
Charles Scott Sherrington was born in Islington
on 27 November 1857 and died in Eastbourne
on 4 March 1952. He was educated at St
Thomas's Hospital, London and Gonville and
Caius College, Cambridge - from the latter he
obtained his MB (1885), MD (1892) and ScD
(1904). In 1895 he became Holt Professor of
Physiology at Liverpool, and subsequently
Waynflete Chair of Physiology at Oxford
(1913-35). He received many honours from
the Royal Society (FRS, 1893; Croonian
Lecture, 1897; Royal Medal, 1905; President,
948
1920-25; and Copley Medal, 1927) as wellas
a number of civilian honours (GBE, 1922; OM,
1924). In 1932 he was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Physiology.
Soon after he retired from Oxford, Sherrington
gave the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, a series
which were subsequently published as Man on
his Nature. It is in this work that the reader expe-
riences Sherrington's philosophy of nature and
mind (although he had expressed much of this in
earlier works, for example in his 1934
Introduction to The Grand Design). For
Sherrington, nature itself was amoral, such that
it was only after the emergence of mind in higher
organisms that morality came into being, and
indeed until the arrival of humans, mind had
done little but add to the competitive evolution-
ary process. As he stated, 'Man is Nature's begin-
ning to be self-conscious' (Man on his Nature,
p. 387), and as such we can judge nature and alter
its impact on us. Sherrington advocated looking
to (and praising) nature for its beauty but not for
any moral message. Any moral progress for
humanity would come from within, not from
any outside source (be it divine or natural).
Sherrington's philosophy of mind and body
was a strict form of Cartesian dualism - there
existed a body which was constructed of matter,
which functioned like a machine and which could
be studied using observation, and a mind which
modified and directed the behaviour of the body.
To understand the relationship between these
two entities would, in his view, require philo-
sophical analysis. As Cohen points out, for
Sherrington
the mind however is immaterial, incorpo-
real, and not energy; it is not in space and not
subject to mechanical laws, its career is
private; it can only be known introspectively
by the organism itself but its workings in
others can be inferred from behavior. It is
responsible for consciousness, for thoughts,
perceptions, and feelings, for remembering
and imagining, for willing and for directing
purposive and intelligent actions.
(Cohen of Birkenhead, p. 58)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Introduction, in F. Mason (ed.), The Grand
Design: Order and Progress in Nature
(1934), pp. xi-xiii.
Man on his Nature (1940; 1951).
Further Reading
Bowler, P.J., Reconciling Science and
Religion (2001).
Cohen of Birkenhead, Lord, Sherrington:
Physiologist, Philosopher and Poet (1958).
Granit, R., Charles Scott Sherrington: An
Appraisal (1967).
Liddell, E.G.T., 'Charles Scott Sherrington
(1857-1952)', Obituaries of Fellows of the
Royal Society of London, vol. 8 (1952),
pp. 241-70.
Sherrington, C.E.R., 'Charles Scott
Sherrington (1857-1952)', Notes and
Records of the Royal Society of London,
vol. 30 (1975), pp. 45-63.
John M. Lynch
SIBLEY, Frank Noel (1923-96)
Frank Sibley was born in London on 28
February 1923 and died on 18 February 1996.
After education at University College, Oxford
he began his teaching career in the USA. He
was assistant professor at Yale University
(1949-53), assistant professor at the University
of Iowa (1953-5), visiting lecturer in philoso-
phy, University of Michigan (1955-6) and
assistant professor and associate professor,
Cornell University (1956-64). In 1964 he
returned to England on being appointed to the
first Chair of Philosophy at the University of
Lancaster, where he remained for the rest of his
career. He was made emeritus professor in
1985.
Sibley's main work was in the field of aes-
thetics, where his reputation was and has
949
SIBLEY
remained immense. Influenced by the work of
Gilbert RYLE and J.L. AUSTIN, he was a major
figure in the revival of English-language ana-
lytical aesthetics during the late 1950s and
1960s, and active in the establishment of the
British Society for Aesthetics. His reputation
was achieved despite the relatively small
number of his publications, in part a conse-
quence of chronic ill health during his time at
Lancaster, in part due to his habit of incessant
rethinking and rewriting. In common with the
Oxford school of ordinary language philosophy
from which he emerged, the main interest in his
work lies perhaps less in any overall strategy or
direction, but rather in the careful, piecemeal
attention which he devoted to a number of
topics in aesthetics, sometimes returning to
them over and over again in the course of his
career. As Sharpe says at the end of his review
of the posthumously published collection of
Sibley's essays, having read his work, 'it is hard
to resist the feeling that philosophy has lost
something in subtlety and refinement over
recent years' (Sharpe, p. 316).
Sibley's interest in aesthetics developed from
an original concern with the wider problems of
perception. In an early paper, 'Seeking,
Scrutinizing and Seeing' (1955), he takes issue
with Ryle in his analysis in The Concept of
Mind (1949) of perception verbs as primarily to
be understood as achievement verbs: according
to Ryle, 'see' is primarily to be understood as
a successful achievement of a task. Sibley, on
the other hand, argues that perception verbs
such as 'see' have 'many other functions besides
indicating achievements' ('Seeking, Scrutinizing
and Seeing', p. 47). Most important among
these various uses is that which Sibley styles the
'occurrence use', where the verb signifies the
exercise of an ability over a period of time.
Thus, the occurrence use, 'I can see now' is
argued to be more fundamental to our under-
standing of perception than the achievement
use, 'I see the blackboard.' It follows from this
that Ryle's claim that seeing is not an activity
- and a fortiori not a mental activity - if it is t.
be retained, needs to be supported by argu-
SIBLEY
ments which deal with the occurrence use of the
verb. Although Sibley's interest in this paper is
not yet focused on issues in aesthetics, a redi-
rection of attention away from regarding per-
ception as primarily a matter of achievement
would allow consideration of the sort of con-
templative perception normally considered to
be part of aesthetic experience.
A paper which bridges the gap between his
interest in perception and his interest in aes-
thetics is 'Aesthetics and the Looks of Things'
(1959). Here Sibley is primarily concerned to
examine the claim that an aesthetic approach to
things is always concerned with appearances.
After a characteristically careful examination of
the way in which 'looks' and 'appearances'
may be understood, he argues that aesthetic
vision (but not aesthetic interest) always
involves a concern with appearances. He then
turns to consider whether we can be aestheti-
cally interested in any appearance. Noting that
there are some qualities in which we can take
a (favourable or unfavourable) aesthetic interest
for themselves, others only with a suitable
explanation, and others still where it is perhaps
impossible to take such an interest, he specu-
lates that the qualities which we can admire aes-
thetically 'are vitally involved in human expe-
rience' ('Aesthetics and the Looks of Things',
p. 913). Thus, it may be impossible to admire the
quality of being square or being elliptical aes-
thetically, because 'if we come across such qual-
ities in nature they are of no especial concern to
us for themselves'. On the other hand, 'we
cannot survive without warmth, peace, energy;
we cannot avoid anger, violence, fear; and we
concern ourselves deeply over purity, clarity,
and simplicity' (ibid., pp. 913-14).
A number of the issues touched on in
'Aesthetics and the Looks of Things' are devel-
oped in his most famous papers, 'Aesthetic
Concepts' (1959) and 'Aesthetic and Non-
Aesthetic' (1965). In these papers, Sibley puts
aside questions as to the merit of artworks
(what he calls 'verdicts'). He instead focuses on
contrast between aesthetic concepts (such as
graceful or balanced) and non-aesthetic
950
concepts (such as square or red). He notes that
many writers have argued that aesthetic judge-
ments are not mechanical, but have failed to
explain such a claim in any detail. This Sibley
attempts to remedy by noting that those aes-
thetic judgements which employ an aesthetic
concept are not dependent on non-aesthetic
qualities in any rule-governed way. Thus, if we
say that a painting is 'nobly austere because of
the lack of detail and the restricted palette', we
are not claiming that any general rule links the
non-aesthetic concept of lack of detail with the
aesthetic concept of being nobly austere. (Not
all paintings lacking detail are nobly austere.)
This leaves open precisely how the relation-
ship between non-aesthetic and aesthetic is to
be characterized. Sibley suggests that aesthetic
qualities may (1) result from the totality of
non-aesthetic qualities; (2) result from a notable
specific dependence on some particularly
important non-aesthetic qualities. He goes on
to make use of these relationships in discussing
art criticism, arguing that the critic's task of
explanation characteristically takes two forms.
Firstly, it consists in explaining why we notice
the aesthetic qualities we do. Thus, we may
see that a particular work has great dramatic
intensity: the critic's task here might be ful-
filled by explaining that this intensity results
from a balance in the arrangement of figures in
the picture. Secondly, it consists in getting
others to see aesthetic qualities in the artwork
that they have not previously noticed. Both
tasks take account of the different relationships
between non-aesthetic and aesthetic qualities: a
critic may point to the way in which all the
various non-aesthetic qualities work together in
a picture to produce the aesthetic quality of
grace (1) above; alternatively, she may point to
a particular group of non-aesthetic qualities as
being especially responsible for (2) above.
Sibley leaves us in these two papers with the
claim that aesthetic qualities emerge from non-
aesthetic qualities but that this emergence is
not rule governed. This naturally leads on to the
question as to whether the sort of explanations
offered by a critic can be correct or incorrect or,

to put it another (perhaps ultimately less
helpful) way, whether judgements about the
aesthetic qualities of artworks are objective or
subjective. One reason for thinking that such
judgements must be subjective is that reason
giving in cases of objective judgement has a uni-
versality that results from the application of
rules. Thus, I might claim that Bluebeard is a bad
man because he kills his wives, and I can rest the
objectivity of this judgement on the rule that
anyone who kills his wives is a bad man. But, as
we have seen, in Sibley's view there is no corre-
sponding rule that links non-aesthetic qualities
with aesthetic qualities. (Indeed, 'having a patch
of grey in the left corner' may in one painting be
responsible for its beauty, in another for its
dullness.) So how is the objectivity of aesthetic
judgements to be defended?
This sort of question is taken up in two
papers, 'Colours' (1967-8) and 'Objectivity
and Aesthetics' (1968). There Sibley argues
that the attribution of aesthetic qualities to a
work is objective in the way that attribution of
colours to an object is objective. Neither rests
on the sort of rule that occurred in the
Bluebeard case mentioned above - what (non-
trivial) rule justifies our seeing a red post box as
red? In the last resort, attribution of colours to
objects rests on an agreement in judgements,
and it is on an analogous agreement that the
objectivity of aesthetic qualities rests. In his
later paper 'General Criteria and Reasons in
Aesthetics' (1983) Sibley turns to the related
question of reasoning in aesthetics. He distin-
guishes here between merit features (e.g., grace,
balance) and neutral features (e.g., having a
grey patch in the left corner). Whilst the latter
do not constitute general reasons for saying
that a work has merit, the former do, in that
they prima facie can only count towards a
judgement of merit. For example, if a painting
has grace, that can only be a reason for judging
it to be a good painting, not for judging it to be
a poor one. Whilst this does provide some
element of generality to the account (and thus
an obvious basis for the rationality of criti-
cism), Sibley is careful to note that the presence
951
SIBLEY
of such features counts only as a prima facie
reason for a work's merit, and that this merit
can be overridden in certain circumstances.
Few of Sibley's conclusions in this area can
be held to be indisputable. For example, it has
been suggested that features such as elegance
are not reasons for attributing merit to an
object, anymore than features such as ugliness
are reasons for withholding it (Sharpe, p. 313).
It has been argued that concepts other than
aesthetic concepts share their property of not
being entailed by the properties from which
they emerge (Meager). It has also been argued
that some aesthetic concepts are so entailed
and also that the central distinction between
aesthetic and non-aesthetic cannot be stated
without circularity (Cohen, 1973; and see also
his contribution to Brady and Levinson).
However, Sibley's careful analysis of central
features of this area of debate continues to
provide an important starting-point for philo-
sophical discussion. In particular, his refocus-
ing of philosophical interest on the perceptual
nature of aesthetic judgements - that the judge
ment 'This drawing is graceful' is primarily
meant to alter what one sees rather than what
one believes - has remained influential.
The posthumous appearance in Approaches
to Aesthetics (2001) of five previously unpub-
lished papers by Sibley have provided further
evidence of the fertility of his thought. From
1976 until his death, Sibley was absorbed by
the problem of predicative and attributive
judgements. On the analysis that Sibley accepts,
a predicative judgement such as This is a blue
book' can be analysed as a conjunction of 'This
is a book' and 'This is blue.' On the other hand,
an attributive judgement such as This is a small
elephant' cannot be so analysed. In 'Adjectives,
Predicative and Attributive' he suggests that
the correct use of attributive adjectives rests on
standards which are specific to the class to
which they are being applied. Thus, in the
above example, 'small' cannot be applied cor-
rectly without an awareness of the standards of
size for elephants. Such a requirement does not
apply to colour terms: we do not need, for
SIBLEY
example, to have an awareness of the stan-
dards of colour of skies in order to be able to
state correctly that The sky is blue.' The impli-
cations of such an analysis for aesthetics
become clear when it is noted that terms such
as 'beautiful' are sometimes used attributively
and sometimes predicatively: as Sibley notes in
'Aesthetic Judgements: Pebbles, Faces and
Fields of Litter', to know that a horse is beau-
tiful does require a knowledge of the standards
of beauty for horses; to know that a pebble is
beautiful does not require a knowledge of the
standards of beauty for pebbles. If Sibley's
analysis is accepted, it follows that we do not
always need to know what something is in
order to declare it beautiful. This would tend to
support a traditional strand in aesthetics which
suggests that aesthetic experience is in some
way detached from a practical interest in or
understanding of the object experienced.
A further previously unpublished paper in the
Approaches to Aesthetics collection, 'Why the
Mona Lisa May Not Be a Painting', deals with
the ontology of painting. It is often assumed
that artworks such as novels can be analysed in
terms of a distinction between types and tokens:
the play Othello is a type, and the specific per-
formances of that play tokens. On the other
hand, this analysis is not normally applied to
paintings: the Mona Lisa is not normally
regarded as a type of which there may be many
tokens. Sibley, perhaps counter-intuitively, here
argues that we might regard reproductions of
the Mona Lisa as tokens. The general sugges-
tion that all artworks, including painting, can
be analysed in terms of the type-token distinc-
tion is not new: it has, for example, previously
been made by STRAWSON (1974). But whilst
Strawson emphasizes that current methods do
not yet adequately reproduce the original,
Sibley argues that, given that our understand-
ing and appreciation of a painting is already
achieved mainly through photographs and film,
there is currently no good reason for denying
that reproductions of a painting are tokens of
a type. That we usually do not suggests to him
either that there is an inconsistency in our
952
concept of a painting, or that there are two
competing concepts of a painting, one in which
the painting is taken to be the physical object
(and thus in which reproductions are not
tokens) and one in which the type-token dis-
tinction does apply.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Approaches to Aesthetics: Collected Papers in
Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson,
Betty Redfern and Jeremy Roxbee Cox
(Oxford, 2001).
Other Relevant Works
'Seeking, Scrutinizing and Seeing', Mind, vol.
64 (1955), pp. 455-78.
'Philosophy and Analysis' [book review], vol.
65, no. 2 (April 1956), pp.. 260-64.
'Aesthetic Concepts', Philosophical Review,
vol. 68 (1959), pp. 421-50.
'Aesthetics and the Looks of Things', Journal
of Philosophy, vol. 56 (1959), pp. 905-15.
'The Psychology of Perception' [book
review], Philosophical Review, vol. 68, no.
2 (April 1959), pp. 263-5.
'Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of
Criticism' [book review], Philosophical
Review, vol. 70, no. 2 (April 1961), pp.
275-9.
'Aesthetic Concepts: A Rejoinder',
Philosophical Review, vol. 72, no. 1
(January 1963), pp. 79-83.
'Perception and the Physical World' [book
review], Philosophical Review, vol. 73, no.
3 (July 1964), pp. 404-408.
'Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic', Philosophical
Review, vol. 74 (1965), pp. 135-59.
'Colours', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 68 (1967-8), pp. 145-66.
'Objectivity and Aesthetics', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 42
(1968), pp. 31-54.
'Ryle and Thinking', in O. Wood and G.
Pitcher (eds), Ryle: A Collection of Critical
Essays (New York, 1970), pp. 75-104.
(Ed.), Perception: A Philosophical
Symposium (1971).

'Particularity, Art and Evaluation',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Societyr,
suppl. vol. 48 (1974), pp. 1-21.
The Aesthetics of Architecture' [book
review], Mind, vol. 91, no. 361 (Januar.
1982), pp. 143-7.
'General Criteria and Reasons in Aesthetics',
in J. Fisher (ed.), Essays on Aesthetics:
Perspectives on the Work of Monroe C.
Beardsley (Philadelphia, 1983).
'Originality and Value', British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 25 (1985), pp. 169-84.
'Making Music Our Own', in Michael
Krausz (ed.), The Interpretation of Music
(Oxford, 1993).
Further Reading
Anon., The Times, 13 March 1996.
Brady, Emily and Jerrold Levinson (eds),
Aesthetic Concepts: Essays after Sibley
(Oxford, 2001).
Cohen, Ted, 'Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic',
Theoria, vol. 39 (1973), pp. 113-52.
Lamarque, Peter, 'Frank Noel Sibley', in
Stuart Brown, Diane Collinson and Robert
Wilkinson (eds), Biographical Dictionary
of Twentieth-Century Philosophers (1996),
pp. 723-4.
Lyas, Colin, 'The Evaluation of Art' and
'Criticism and Interpretation', in Oswald
Hanfling, Philosophical Aesthetics: An
Introduction, (Oxford, 1992), pp.
349-403.
, 'Frank Noel Sibley', in David
Cooper, A Companion to Aesthetics
(Oxford, 1992), pp. 397-9.
, 'Sibley, Frank', in E. Craig (ed.),
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(2002), http://www.rep.routledge.com/
article/M053, accessed November 2004.
Meager, Ruby, 'Aesthetic Concepts', British
Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 10 (October
1970), pp. 303-22.
Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind (1949).
Sharpe, R.A., 'Sibley and his Legacy',
Philosophical Books, vol. 44, no. 4 (2003),
pp. 310-16.
953
SIDGWICK
Strawson, P.F., Freedom and Resentment and
Other Essays (1974).
Stephen Watt
SIDGWICK, Alfred (1850-1943)
Alfred Sidgwick was born in Skipton,
Yorkshire and died on 22 December 1943. He
was the eldest son of Robert Hodson
Sidgwick, a cotton manufacturer, and his wife,
Mary Jane Ward, and he was a first cousin of
both Arthur, the eminent classics don of
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Henry
Sidgwick, Knightbridge Professor of Moral
Philosophy at Cambridge. Alfred was
educated at Rugby and Lincoln College,
Oxford, where he failed to distinguish himself,
being awarded a fourth class degree from the
School of Jurisprudence in 1873. This near
failure does not square with his subsequent
writing career. After leaving the university he
developed an abiding interest in philosophy,
especially logic, which he taught himself. His
first publication, 'The Negative Character of
Logic', appeared in Mind in 1878. In it he
argued that logic should be taught to begin-
ners as a method for revealing fallacies:
The function of Logic is to sit still and weigh
evidence already produced, not to run
abroad and find it: to distinguish, amongst
arguments already urged, the good from the
bad, not itself to aim at reaching a conclu-
sion; to discover not the whole truth of any
question raised, but only such truth as is
proved by the evidence before the court; not
necessarily to emerge from 'unknown' into
'known,' but to make sure at least of not
emerging into certain particular forms of
'mistaken'.
('The Negative Character of Logic', p. 351)
SIDGWICK
Logic, then, is a very practical subject, and all
six of his books are concerned to put that lesson
across. In 1881 he was appointed Bishop
Berkeley Fellow at Owens College, Manchester,
by Professor Robert Adamson. In the next two
years he wrote his first book, Fallacies: A View
of Logic from the Practical Side, for the
International Science Series. After his fellowship
expired, he held no academic appointments.
Sidgwick was married in 1883 to Cecily Ullman
of Frankfurt-am-Main and they settled in
Surbiton. Later they moved to St Buryan, near
Penzance. Mrs Sidgwick published over forty
novels, both under the alias 'Mrs. Andrew
Dean' and 'Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick'. She died in
1934.
Fallacies is written within the formal logic
tradition with the added feature that Sidgwick
is much more interested in expounding the
practical side than was usual in the logic books
of the time. In his later books he gradually
developed an antipathy to formal logic,
although he never rejected it as completely as
some of his contemporaries did. But he is
strongly critical of it. The formal logician's
pursuit of certainty and simplicity were, he
thought, delusive. The 'perfect axiomatic cer-
tainties of logic are empty truisms of a practi-
cally misleading kind', and simplified logic 'is
applicable only to the flattest and least dis-
putable cases of reasoning' (The Application of
Logic, p. 311). In other words, formal logic
cannot be used to detect fallacies in common
sense reasoning. As his distrust of formal logic
grew, he became more and more committed to
'the fundamental principle' of a pragmatist
theory of truth.
This principle, in its broadest expression, is
that every statement (whether of rule or of
fact) depends for its meaning on the use it is
intended to be put to. Thus a rule means
nothing except as applied, and a statement of
fact means nothing except so far as it is
viewed as a minor premiss.
(The Application of Logic,
pp. 299-300)
954
His last book, Elementary Logic (1912), is
divided into two parts, the first an exposition
of those parts of 'the old system' of logic still
worth study, and the second, the changes ('the
risks of reasoning') that he believed must be
made to bring that system up to date. After its
publication, although he lived for another three
decades, he ceased to write on logic. Despite the
fact that his books are very readable and
contain much useful information and advice,
they seem never to have caught on, nor, accord-
ing to Henry STURT, were they ever used for
teaching logic.
Sidgwick's concentration on the negative
character of logic led him to a conception of
argument as a battle between belief and doubt
where any number of things can go wrong. In
analysing arguments the most we can ever hope
to attain is practical certainty, and that only
rarely. Ambiguity of words and phrases is a
common source of bad reasoning, and it can
only be removed by defining what the word or
words are to mean in the given context.
Sidgwick argued that even in syllogisms it is
possible for the middle term to be ambiguous
in a particular case and not be apparent because
the same form of words appears in both
premises. In such cases an ostensibly valid syl-
logism is really fallacious. Only a careful
analysis of the use of the middle term in the
context in which the argument is being made
reveals the fallacy. Discoveries of this sort led
him to insist that logic, if it is to be useful, has
to develop ways of assessing arguments in
everyday language. His insistence on the impor-
tance of detailed linguistic analysis in assessing
arguments places his work firmly in the main-
stream of British philosophy. The work of
Henry Sidgwick and his pupils, Bertrand
RUSSELL and G.E. MOORE, being done at the
same time, was to establish conceptual analysis
as a dominant concern of twentieth-century
philosophers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'The Negative Character of Logic', Mind, vol.
3 (1878), pp. 350-57.

Fallacies: A View of Logic from the Practical
Side (1883).
Distinction and the Criticism of Beliefs
(1892).
'Notes on Reform in Logic', Mind, vol. 6 ns
(1893), pp. 145-59.
The Process of Argument: A Contribution to
Logic (1S93).
The Use of Words in Reasoning (1901).
The Application of Logic (1910).
Elementary Logic (Cambridge, 1914).
Other Relevant Works
'Mr. Alfred Sidgwick: An Original Logician',
The Times, 24 December 1943.
Sturt, H., 'Alfred Sidgwick, 1850-1943',
Mind, vol. 53 (1944), pp. 379-80.
John G. Slater
SINCLAIR, May (or Mary Amelia St Clair:
1863-1946)
Mary Amelia St Clair (she did not use the name
'May' until her thirties) was born in Higher
Bebington on the Wirral Penninsula on 24
August 1863 and died in Buckinghamshire on
14 November 1946. She was the youngest
daughter of a shipowner. When in 1872 her
father's business failed, the family relocated to
Ilford in Essex. She was educated mostly at
home, but in 1881 she was sent for a year to
Cheltenham Ladies College, where many years
before her mother had been a pupil. There the
Headmistress, Dorothea Beale, encouraged her,
as one of the older pupils, in the reading of phi-
losophy, and especially the idealism of Plato,
Kant, Fichte, Green and Caird, in which she
found a position to satisfy her philosophical
and religious doubts. Her interest in philosophy
continued, and during the subsequent fifteen
years she published several philosophical
articles in the Cheltenham Ladies College
955
SINCLAIR
magazine. She went on to write two books in
defence of idealism. She never married but sup-
ported herself by writing - mainly fiction, but
also poetry, reviews and translations. She was
a supporter of women's suffrage. Her novels
were popular (even more so in America than
Britain) but have been largely forgotten since
her death.
The first of her two philosophical books, A
Defence of Idealism (1917), which she later
described as a 'light-hearted essay' but is
nonetheless both well-written and argued,
could hardly have appeared at a time less recep-
tive to its doctrines. As its author noted, 'There
is a certain embarrassment in coming forward
with an Apology for Idealistic Monism at the
present moment. You can not be sure whether
you are putting in an appearance too late or
much too early' (Defence of Idealism, p. vii).
The book is an attempt on behalf of idealism to
deal with the contemporary challenges of
vitalism and pragmatism, and is marked
throughout by a strong interest in psycho-
analysis. Though it generated little response, the
book was well received, and Sinclair afterwards
became a member of the Aristotelian Society.
Her second book, The New Idealism, which
appeared five years later in 1922, is a stronger
work which attempts to formulate an idealism
that could withstand the 'new realism' of
RUSSELL, WHITEHEAD and ALEXANDER, a
position for which she had immense respect
and which had, she thought, successfully
brought out many weaknesses of the older
idealism. In particular it taught the need to
take space and time seriously and not to dismiss
them as mere antinomies. Central to the recon-
struction she proposes is a distinction she draws
between primary and secondary consciousness;
between, on the one hand, the objects, events,
relations and conditions which are immedi-
ately present in consciousness, and, on the
other, further observation, reflection, judge-
ment, inference or belief upon them. The realist
is right, she argues, to attempt to draw a line
between knower and known, but this must fall
not between consciousness and its objects but
SINCLAIR
within consciousness itself, between its primary
and secondary forms. Her work was well
thought of (Bertrand Russell and J.H.
MUIRHEAD were two admirers) but, appearing
in a climate hostile to monistic idealism, her
views never became widely known, provoked
little response and were soon forgotten.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Defence of Idealism, Some Questions and
Conclusions (1917).
The New Idealism (1922).
Other Relevant Works
'Primary and Secondary Consciousness',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
23 (1922-3), pp. 111-20.
Further Reading
Laird, J., Review of The New Idealism,
Mind, vol. 32 (1923), pp. 116-17.
Raitt, Suzanne, May Sinclair: A Modern
Victorian (Oxford, 2000).
Russell, Bertrand, 'Idealism on the
Defensive', The Nation, vol. 21, 8
September 1917, p. 588, 590; repr. in
Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell
(1935-), vol. 8, pp. 106-10.
, Review of A Defense of Idealism,
The English Review, 25 October 1917, pp.
381-4.
-, 'Philosophic Idealism at Bay',
National and Athenaeum, vol. 31,5
August 1922, pp. 119-25; repr. in
Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell
(1935-), vol. 9.
W. J. Mander
SINCLAIR, William Angus (1905-54)
William Angus Sinclair was born in Edinburgh
on 27 December 1905 and died visiting an
956
Officers' Training Corps winter camp in the
Grampians on 21 December 1954. He attende.
George Watson's school. At Edinburgh
University his teachers included Norman KEMP
SMITH and John ANDERSON. He graduated MA
with first class honours in philosophy in 1929
and pursued postgraduate studies at Magdalen
College, Oxford, and at Harvard. Appointed
lecturer in logic and metaphysics at Edinburgh
in 1933, he was promoted reader in 1952. On
wartime military service in the Royal Artillery,
he broadcast impressive analyses of Nazi pro-
paganda. He was awarded the OBE.
He was awarded his 1952 DLitt at
Edinburgh for The Conditions of Knowing
(1951), a masterpiece of lively compression
and comprehensiveness. An Introduction to
Philosophy (1944), based on radio broadcast
scripts adapted from early drafts of the later
book, is a valuable supplementary. Sinclair
attacks the persuasiveness of sheerly formal
arguments. Formal logic proves nothing. A relic
one needs to know about for its historical
former importance, it is useful too on occasion
to organize and clarify arguments. His
Traditional Formal Logic (1937) was devised
to save students' time by presenting all he had
come to believe necessary in the subject. The
deck needed clearing of misconceptions as to
the well-foundedness of numerous arguments,
and formulations, currently too widely per
suasive, due to the persistence of an
Epistemological Attitude (Sinclair's term) which
needed to be supplanted - just as previous
Epistemological Attitudes had rightly been
overthrown. Philosophical arguments belong
within the disciplined pursuit of truth, founded
on their persuasiveness in the light of criteria
founded ultimately on experience. There are
no axioms; the test of truth is consistency with
all appearances and with experience (including)
products of past experience,
An Epistemological Attitude is a practice of
'selecting and grouping' (a key phrase), dis
criminating within as much of reality as bio
logical factors have allowed the senses to access.
Composed as a cumulative sequence of

chapters, each an attempt to meet its own tests
of truth, The Conditions of Knowing seeks to
demonstrate the inadequacy of the prevailing
Epistemological Attitude - exposing its reliance
on a range of formal axioms, and their
unfoundedness. Where W.H. WALSH'S review
of the book noted superficially apparent resem-
blances to respectively 'behaviourism, prag-
matism and idealism', Sinclair had worked
through the problematics of several alternative
positions. His topic is the foundation of actual
knowing and of any method rational or scien-
tific, in contrast with the false purported foun-
dations of inadequate Epistemological
Attitudes. The conditions of knowing are oper-
ations of selecting and grouping, distinguishing
within the one reality foundations alike of the
sciences, of ethics, of epistemology and of aes-
thetics, the last of these the topic of a star-
tlingly cryptic Appendix to his book. Himself
a species of realist, to any theory inconsistent
with its own foundations Sinclair gives the
name 'the Epistemologist's fallacy'.
The important American linguist-anthropol-
ogist Kenneth L. Pike cites Sinclair's influence
on his 'Tagmemics' theory and his contextual-
izing conception of argument and rhetoric.
From the later 1930s Sinclair was a discussant
in Edinburgh's new Department of Animal
Genetics under F.A.E. Crewe (and later C.H.
WADDINGTON), concerned with philosophical
issues raised by its work. Thereafter he deliv-
ered an annual philosophical lecture in the
Faculty of Science. His popular text on joining
the Labour Party contrasts alternative voting
criteria, advocating critical consideration of
any party's respective policies, as against
habitual allegiance to wider inherited tradi-
tions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Traditional Formal Logic (1937; several
reprs).
An Introduction to Philosophy (1944; repr.
1945,1947).
The Conditions of Knowing (1951).
957
SMART
Other Relevant Works
The Voice of the Nazi [eight talks broadcast
between December 1939 and May 1940]
(1940).
Society and the Individual: Notes on Joining
the Labour Party [posthumously] (1955).
Robert R. Calder
SMART, John Jamieson Carswell (1920-)
JJ.C. Smart was born in Cambridge on 16
September 1920. He was an undergraduate at
the University of Glasgow (1938^0) studying
mathematics and natural philosophy, served in
the army from 1940 to 1945, and then returned
to Glasgow (1945-6), receiving an MA in logic
and moral philosophy and a war honours in
maths and natural philosophy. He took the BPhil
at Oxford (1946-8), remaining as a junior
research fellow at Corpus Christi from 1948 to
1950. In 1950 he was appointed to the Chair of
Philosophy at the University of Adelaide, where
he was Hughes Professor of Philosophy until
1972. From 1972 to 1976 he was reader at La
Trobe University, then in 1976 he moved to the
Australian National University (ANU), where
he was Professor of Philosophy at the Research
School of Social Sciences until his retirement in
1985. He has honorary DLitt degrees from the
Universities of St Andrews, La Trobe and
Glasgow, and held visiting professorships at
Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and
Alabama. For his contribution to philosophy he
was made Companion in the General Division of
the Order of Australia in 1990. In 1999 ANU
inaugurated an annual lecture in his honour,
The Jack Smart Lecture'. Jack Smart is emeritus
professor at ANU, honorary research fellow at
Monash University, and a fellow of the
Australian Academy of Humanities.
JJ.C. Smart is one of the great philosophers
of the twentieth century. Some of his works
SMART
now look likely to remain permanently within
the philosophical canon, the best known of
which are 'Sensations and Brain Processes'
(1959), Philosophy and Scientific Realism
(1963) and Utilitarianism: For and Against
(1973). Almost all contemporary philosophers
know some or all of these in detail, and they are
widely read within other disciplines. In addition
to these headline works, Smart published exten-
sively throughout a long career, often influ-
encing the direction of philosophical thought.
Smart's work presents a coherent worldview
in tune with his era, and within which all the
pieces slot naturally into place. Nothing seems
eccentric, nothing anomalous. At the basis of all
his positions is a scientific realism according to
which only science (especially physics) can tell
us the true nature of things. This commitment
drives his work positively, by providing a vision
of people as just another part of the natural
order described by science ('simply very com-
plicated physico-chemical mechanisms',
Philosophy and Scientific Realism, p. 65), as
well as negatively, by making him want to
undermine and expose anthropocentrism in all
its forms. His vision of a vital role for philoso-
phy in clarifying our understanding of the
world by coordinating and adjudicating
between common sense and science has become
standard in analytic philosophy in the second
half of the twentieth century, when concern
with science started to displace prior preoccu-
pations with logic and language. By doggedly
and consistently adhering to this agenda in a
'straight-talking', 'no-nonsense' fashion, dis-
playing respect for science and distaste for what
he considers mysticism, obfuscation and false
profundity in philosophy, J.J.C. Smart fits the
stereotype of an analytic philosopher better
than most, even to the extent of admitting
(albeit playfully) to a certain philistinism (Pettit
et al., p. 174) - aesthetics being one of the few
philosophical subjects absent from his corpus.
By the time 'Sensations and Brain Processes'
came out in 1959, Smart had been publishing
regularly for ten years. However, it was this
paper which made his name and for which he
958
is still best known. Its impact was such that
physicalism became almost immediately the
central topic of debate in philosophy of mind.
Not only that, but it won through to become
the orthodoxy it is today. Very few philosophy
papers have had such a major effect.
Smart argued that the identification of sen-
sations with brain processes could be treated as
a scientific hypothesis, akin to the identification
of water with H2O, and that consequently the
identification could be empirical and contin-
gent, thus overcoming the standard objections
of the time which were premised on any such
identification being a priori arid necessary. This
thesis was not Smart's idea, but U.T. PLACE'S,
whom Smart had appointed at Adelaide in 1951.
Smart and Place both fell under the influence of
Gilbert RYLE at Oxford, and adhered to Ryle's
behaviourist account of mental states. In dis-
cussions with Smart and others at Adelaide,
however, Place came to reject Ryle's account as
it applied to sensations (though not preposi-
tional attitudes) and to argue for the identity
theory instead. When Place returned to England
in 1954 and published 'Is Consciousness a Brain
Process?', the first statement of the identity
theory, Smart still opposed it. But he continued
discussing it, and by the end of the 1950s (when
he had also read the second statement of the
identity theory, Herbert Feigl's 'The "Mental"
and the "Physical"') he had changed his mind.
Smart made every effort to credit Place in his
paper, originally referring to the theory as
'Place's thesis' in a footnote, then moving the ref-
erence to the opening paragraph of the main
text in subsequent reprints. However, Smart's
name was soon indelibly linked with the theory,
and he became its main spokesman.
'Sensations and Brain Processes' is a model
analytic paper, divided into opening remarks,
presentation of thesis, seven objections and
replies, and closing remarks, all written in a
style both clear and precise, but also very direct
and affably informal. The main ideas had
already been presented in Place's paper, it is
true, but Smart introduces a crucial change of
emphasis, for right from the start it is clear

that his fundamental interest is in vindicating
physicalism (Place seemed more interested in
vindicating the current reality of sensations
against the claims of behaviourism).
Behaviourism is attractive, Smart explains,
because it fits the worldview of physicalism, but
it will not 'quite do the trick' ('Sensations and
Brain Processes', p. 144) since in reporting sen-
sations it seems undeniable, contra Ryle, that
we are making a genuine report. So an alter-
native account of sensations is required, one
which like behaviourism is compatible with
physicalism, but which unlike behaviourism
allows introspective reports to be reports of a
current reality. The identity theory provides
this alternative.
Smart's preference for physicalism over 'old-
fashioned dualism' (ibid., p. 141) is explained
by an appeal to Occam's razor: if a human
being can be fully described as 'a vast arrange-
ment of physical particles' (p. 143), then there
can be no need to posit consciousness as some-
thing 'over and above' these particles. And
Smart is sure consciousness can indeed be
explained by science: 'That everything should
be explicable in terms of physics ... except the
occurrence of sensations seems to me to be
frankly unbelievable' (ibid., p. 142). Sensations
are not 'nomological danglers' (Feigl's expres-
sion), that is non-physical entities related to
the physical world by irreducible and inexplic-
able psycho-physical laws, for such laws 'have
a queer "smell" to them', and Smart is 'just
unable to believe in' them (ibid., p. 143). If
new laws arise in science, they will simply relate
'whatever ultimate particles are then in vogue'
(ibid., p. 143) without reference to an extrane-
ous domain of the mental. The choice between
dualism and physicalism is compared to the
choice between the creationist claim that the
earth was created complete with a bogus fossil
record, and the orthodox geological story (ibid.,
pp. 155-6). Occam's razor decides in favour of
the latter in both cases.
This instinctive coupling of physicalism with
science and rationality, and of dualism with
the occult and irrational is characteristic of
959
SMART
Smart's work. It amounted to an adoption of
Ryle's manner of stigmatizing dualism ('the
ghost in the machine') enlisted in support of the
physicalism Smart had taken out of its linguis-
tic context in Carnap and aligned with scientific
realism. This new conception of physicalism,
and Smart's unabashed way of arguing for it,
made for a new and highly influential combi-
nation which has reverberated in dismissals of
dualism ever since. The following example, in
which Smart points out the tension between
dualism and evolution, is typical: 'what sort of
chemical process could lead to the springing
into existence of something nonphysical? No
enzyme can catalyze the production of a
spook!' ('Materialism', p. 660).
Smart's proposal was that sensations are
strictly identical to brain processes, and to
explain how we might discover an identity, he
draws on Frege's sense/reference distinction:
mental and physical terms might have different
senses but be found empirically to share a
referent. This idea was the focus of the most
important of the objections Smart considered
(attributed to Max BLACK), objection 3. This is
premised on the plausible claim that if 'pain =
c-fibres firing' states a non-trivial empirical
hypothesis, then the terms 'pain' and 'c-fibres
firing' must be associated with distinct identi-
fying properties by which independent refer-
ence could be made to the same thing. It then
seems, however, that the identifying properties
associated with the mental term ('pain') would
themselves be mental, letting property dualism
in through the back door. This objection was
pressed in a well known response by J.T.
Stevenson, who pointed out that by Leibniz's
law, if the Morning Star is the Evening Star,
then the Evening Star must have all the prop-
erties of the Morning Star, including the iden-
tifying properties for applying the term
'Morning Star'. The identity theory, then, must
entail that brain processes have all the identi-
fying properties for applying sensation terms, in
which case the properties which were 'nomo-
logical danglers' before the identification would
remain so afterwards.
SMART
Smart's 'topic-neutral' analysis provides his
response. It aims to give the sense of sensation
terms without mentioning anything intrinsically
mental, which it does using the circumstances in
which sensations typically occur. Thus
When a person says, 'I see a yellowish-orange
after-image,' he is saying something like this:
'There is something going on which is like
what is going on when I have my eyes open,
am awake, and there is an orange illumi-
nated in good light in front of me, that is,
when I really see an orange.'
('Sensations and Brain Processes', p. 149)
This extrinsic, 'quasi-logical' analysis ('quasi'
because 'something going on' implies a process)
explains how 'the ancient Greek peasant's
reports about his sensations can be neutral
between dualistic metaphysics or my material-
istic metaphysics' (ibid., p. 150). D.M.
Armstrong (A Materialist Theory of the Mind)
later extended and modified this approach to
provide an explicitly causal analysis of all
mental states, not just sensations, as a premise
to identify the occupants of these causal roles
with brain states. This 'central state material-
ism', as Armstrong called it, was the culmina-
tion of the 'Australian materialism' Smart had
set in motion, and Smart approved the devel-
opment.
Topic-neutral analysis denies that sensations
are picked out by phenomenal properties
(qualia). Rather we pick out a neutral 'some-
thing going on' in virtue of the circumstances in
which it occurs - 'raw feels are colorless ... for
the very same reason that something is color-
less' (ibid.). The idea of experiences possessing
phenomenal properties is a confusion: 'Trees
and wallpaper can be green, but not the expe-
rience of seeing or imagining a tree or wallpa-
per' (ibid., p. 151). This renders Smart's theory
of mind dependent upon a theory of the sec-
ondary qualities. This he provides in terms of
the discriminatory responses of normal percip-
ients (pp. 148-9), an account further elabo-
rated in his 1961 'Colours'.
960
In 'Colours' Smart argued that belief in
qualia receives tacit support from the discred-
ited empiricist view that words derive their
meaning from associated images, and that once
the Wittgensteinian idea of meaning as use is
taken on board, there is no obstacle to under-
standing the application of colour terms as
based solely on the abilities of normal subjects
to make certain discriminations among objects
in the world. This allows the objective criteria
for the redness of an object to be the same for
blind as for sighted people, which Smart illus-
trates with his example of 'a race of congeni-
tally blind people who have as slaves a race of
normal percipients' ('Colours', p. 140). By
learning colour words on the basis of discrim-
inations their slaves can make among differ-
ently dyed but otherwise identical pieces of
wool, the blind rulers 'can understand colour
words every bit as well as sighted people can'
(ibid., p. 141). This behaviouristic account of
secondary qualities reflects Smart's view that
'colour is an anthropocentric concept' which a
scientific metaphysics should ultimately
'eschew' (ibid., p. 142). He was, however, later
to abandon this view in response to inverted
spectra objections ('On Some Criticisms of a
Physicalist Theory of Colours' in Essays
Metaphysical and Moral), and began to defend
an objectivist account according to which
'colours are the highly disjunctive and idiosyn-
cratic physical properties which are the cate-
gorical bases of the powers to cause the dis-
criminatory reactions' ('"Looks Red" and
Dangerous Talk', p. 546). The suspicion of
anthropocentrism remained, the behaviourism
did not.
Many objections to the identity theory
followed over the years, but it was Hilary
Putnam's 'multiple realization' argument that
proved most influential. Putnam argued
('Psychological Predicates') that the identity
theory bound attributions of mentality too
closely to human physiology: mental states
could be 'realized' by multiple states of humans
or non-humans. This objection brought in its
wake Putnam's alternative theory of mind,

functionalism, for which mental states are
multiply realizable functional states.
Reflecting on this development in later years,
Smart downplayed the differences between
functionalism and the identity theory ('The
Identity Theory of Mind', 2000). Topic-neutral
analysis was 'at bottom functionalist' and the
functionalist's refusal to identify mental and
physical types an 'over-reaction'. Though two
particular pains might be realized differently,
Smart would expect some similarity between
the realizers. At some level of abstraction the
states could be described as belonging to the
same physical type, and at 'the limit of con-
creteness the types would shrink to single
membered types, but there would still be no
ontological difference between identity theory
and functionalism' (ibid., p. 9). This view
shows the influence of David Lewis, once
Smart's student, who argued that functionalism
should be construed as a premise in the
argument for the identity theory
('Psychophysical and Theoretical
Identifications'), thereby helping to quell the
impression that the identity theory had been
superseded by functionalism. In recent years,
there has if anything been increasing sympathy
for the identity theory, due to the problems
alternative, non-reductive physicalist theories
have had with the charge of epiphenomenalism
(Kim, Mind in a Physical World), though
perhaps the more significant trend is towards
increasing ambivalence about the physical vs
functional issue, as seen in Brian Loar's influ-
ential paper 'Phenomenal States', which makes
deliberately neutral reference to 'physical-func-
tional' states. Whatever its future fortunes may
be, the identity theory remains relevant and
live at the start of the twenty-first century.
Philosophy and Scientific Realism brought
Smart's most important views together. Smart
explains in the Preface that he had moved away
from a Wittgensteinian conception of the task
of philosophy as 'unravelling conceptual
muddles' towards a 'more metaphysical' con-
ception in 'more intimate relation to the
sciences', according to which philosophy
961
SMART
should aim at 'the tentative adumbration of a
world view' (Philosophy and Scientific Realism^
p. vii). Clarifying concepts and exposing con-
cealed nonsense is an important role for phi-
losophy, but in addition 'it is the business of the
philosopher to decide between various synoptic
hypotheses on grounds of plausibility' (ibid., p.
8). This is important because there can be com-
peting hypotheses which are perfectly mean-
ingful but cannot be decided between on the
basis of empirical evidence. RUSSELL'S hypoth-
esis that the world began ten minutes ago (ibid.,
p. 10), for example, is perfectly meaningful
and cannot be empirically refuted, and yet can
still be rejected because its reliance upon arbi-
trary and inexplicable brute facts is implausible.
A philosopher who defends such a theory
cannot be proved wrong, for inconsistencies in
his theory can be patched up with additional
clauses. We can, however, 'try to persuade him
that his way of talking is becoming more and
more baroque and is ill-fitting to our scientific
knowledge' (ibid., p. 13). A vital tool for
Smart's 'plausible arguments' is Occam's razor
(ibid., p. 11), which supports his physicalism.
Later accused of inconsistency on the grounds
that Occam's razor is not itself physical, Smart's
bold response was that Occam's razor is a set-
theoretic abstract entity, and hence on his
understanding of physicalism as incorporating
all 'entities which need to be postulated in
physics', it is indeed physical ('Is Occam's
Razor a Physical Thing?', p. 382).
Smart's defence of scientific realism follows
on from his meta-philosophy. Phenomenalism,
and instrumentalism about the theoretical
entities posited in science, stem from the same
deep-seated anthropocentrism which desires to
'tame the vast astronomical spaces' (Philosophy
and Scientific Realism, p. 25), and which must
be shown to lack plausibility. Instrumentalist
are obliged to 'believe in a cosmic coincidence'
to explain the behaviour of galvanometers and
cloud chambers, 'but if there really are elec-
trons, etc., this is just what we should expect'
(ibid., p. 39). Not only are the entities posited
by physicists fully real, but Smart also argues
SMART
that 'science gives us a "truer picture" of the
world' (ibid., p. 47), since ordinary ways of
thinking about the world can be misleading, as
is the case with secondary qualities and also
time.
The chapter on time presents a particularly
lucid exposition of the tenseless theory of time.
In Smart's first published paper, he argued that
thinking of pastness, presentness and futurity as
properties of events was a grammatical trick
tempting us misleadingly to 'substantialise
events' and 'spatialise time' (The River of
Time', p. 493). In Philosophy and Scientific
Realism this basic perspective had not changed,
but it had been supplemented by the idea of
four-dimensionality taken from physics:
'instead of talking of things or processes
changing or not changing we can now talk of
one time slice of a four-dimensional entity being
different or not different from some other time
slice' (p. 133). The ordinary idea of time
'passing' cannot be reconciled with the scientific
conception of a space-time manifold, since it
contains a 'hidden anthropocentrism' creating
an 'illusion which prevents us seeing the world
as it really is' (ibid., p. 132). This is because
tenses refer to human thoughts and utterances,
'now' meaning 'is simultaneous with this utter-
ance' (ibid., p. 134). By translating tensed
expressions into tenseless ones we 'banish from
the universe much unnecessary mystery' (ibid.,
p. 135), draining the sense from puzzlement
over the transitory presentness of events, the
changing of events from future to present, or
the idea that time must flow at some particular
rate. There is nothing mysterious about the
asymmetry of time either, which is not part of
'the nature of time itself (ibid., p. 148), but a
consequence of certain statistical facts which
science can elucidate in terms of direction of
increase of entropy.
Ethical value takes its place within Smart's
physicalism through the existence of pleasur-
able and painful experiences. In Utilitarianism:
For and Against, with Bernard WILLIAMS
arguing against, Smart defended an updated
version of Henry Sidgwick's act utilitarianism,
962
for which whether an action is right depends on
whether the consequences of the action are
such as to promote the general happiness, and
whether an action is rational depends on
whether the action is likely to succeed in pro-
moting happiness. This is supported by a non-
cognitivist meta-ethics according to which
ethical principles are expressions of attitudes,
and so cannot be proven, though we may nev-
ertheless be persuaded to adopt them. Smart
considers utilitarianism so 'simple and natural
a doctrine' (Utilitarianism, p,. 31) that his argu-
mentative strategy is largely taken up with
opposition to the 'rule worship' of deontolog-
ical theories, his main argument being that 'the
dictates of any deontological ethics will always,
on some occasions, lead to the existence of
misery that could, on utilitarian principles, have
been prevented' (ibid., p. 62). Act utilitarianism,
by contrast, has a 'built-in flexibility' (ibid.,
p. 64) which allows for ethical decisions to
track changing circumstances, and for standard
rules of conduct to be broken where positive
consequences are foreseeable. Much resistance
to utilitarianism is removed by distinguishing
between 'the utility of an action and the utility
of praise or blame of it' (ibid., p. 53), so that a
trivial act of negligence with terrible unforeseen
consequences may be 'in fact very wrong'
(p. 54) but 'hardly blameworthy at all' (pp.
54-5). We must also remember that as a nor-
mative theory, the 'fact that it has consequences
which conflict with some of our particular
moral judgements need not be decisive against
it' (ibid., p. 56). Against the objection that util-
itarianism would condone injustices against
minorities for the greater good, Smart reluc-
tantly bites the bullet, pointing out that 'the
anti-utilitarian conclusion is a very unpalat-
able one too, namely that in some circum-
stances one must choose the greater misery,
perhaps the very much greater misery' (ibid.,
p. 72).
Atheism and Theism, with JJ. Haldane
defending theism, was an interesting attempt to
repeat the successful formula of the
Smart/Williams collaboration. Smart provides

a comprehensive case against all the traditional
reasons for believing in God. Against what he
calls 'the new teleology' (Atheism and Theism,
p. 13) found in scientists such as Stephen
Hawking who claim that physics uncovers the
workings of the 'mind of God', Smart employs
Occam's razor, on the grounds that any 'com-
plexity in the laws and initial conditions would
be duplicated in the mind of the designer'
(p. 26). Such physicists make the mistake of
projecting 'theistic emotions of admiration,
awe and wonder' (ibid., p. 15) onto the
universe. Smart concludes that theism is 'emo-
tionally attractive' but unlikely to be true unless
'understood in such a way that it would differ
little from what we at present regard as
atheism' (ibid., p. 78).
In the few snippets of autobiography scat-
tered among J.J.C. Smart's later writings, what
can be most instantly gleaned is his modesty.
He always tries to downplay his own contri-
bution and credit lesser known figures. Of
course, it is true that Smart's best-known views
were not his own personal innovations: the
identity theory, the tenseless theory of time and
utilitarianism were all extant views which he
took up, developed and defended. His innova-
tion, however, was to bring all of these views
together into a system which stands today as a
particularly explicit, consistent and plausible
example of the science-led metaphysics which
captivates contemporary philosophy and forms
a backdrop to so many of its debates.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
'Sensations and Brain Processes',
Philosophical Review, vol. 68 (1959), pp.
141-56.
'Colours', Philosophy, vol. 36 (1961), pp.
128-42.
'Materialism', Journal of Philosophy, vol. 60
(1963), pp. 651-62.
Philosophy and Scientific Realism (New
York, 1963).
Between Science and Philosophy: An
Introduction to the Philosophy of Science
(New York 1968).
963
SMART
Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge,
1973).
Ethics, Persuasion and Truth (1984).
Essays Metaphysical and Moral: Selected
Philosophical Papers (Oxford, 1987).
Our Place in the Universe (Oxford, 1989).
Atheism and Theism (Oxford, 1996).
Other Relevant Works
'The River of Time', Mind, vol. 58 (1949)
pp. 483-94.
'Is Occam's Razor a Physical Thing?',
Philosophy, vol. 53 (1978), pp. 382-5.
P. Pettit, R. Sylvan and J. Norman (eds),
Metaphysics and Morality: Essays in
Honour of J.J.C. Smart (Oxford 1987).
'"Looks Red" and Dangerous Talk',
Philosophy, vol. 70 (1995), pp. 545-54.
'The Identity Theory of Mind', in E.N. Zalta
(ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Stanford, 2000),
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2000/
entries/mind-identity/, accessed November
2004.
Further Reading
Armstrong, D.M., A Materialist Theory of
the Mind (1968).
Feigl, H., The "Mental" and the "Physical"',
in H. Feigl, M. Scriven and G. Maxwell
(eds), Concepts, Theories and the
Mind-Body Problem, Minnesota Studies in
the Philosophy of Science, vol. 2
(Minneapolis, 1958); repr. in H. Feigl, The
'Mental' and the 'Physical': The Essay and
a Postscript (Minneapolis, 1967).
Hawking, S., A Brief History of Time (1988).
Kim, J., Mind in a Physical World
(Cambridge, Mass., 1998).
Lewis, D., 'Psychophysical and Theoretical
Identifications', in Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 50 (1972), pp. 249-58.
Loar, B., 'Phenomenal States', in N. Block,
O. Flanagan and G. Giizeldere (eds), The
Nature of Consciousness (Cambridge,
Mass., 1996).
Place, U.T., 'Is Consciousness a Brain
SMART
Process?', British Journal of Psychology,
vol. 47 (1956), pp. 44-50.
Putnam, H., 'Psychological Predicates', in
W.H. Capitan and D.D. Merrill (eds), Art,
Mind, and Religion (Pittsburgh, 1967).
Ryle, G., The Concept of Mind (1949).
Sidgwick, H., Methods of Ethics (1907).
Stevenson, J.T., '"Sensations and Brain
Processes": A Reply to J.J.C. Smart',
Philosophical Review, vol. 69 (1960), pp.
505-10.
James Tartaglia
SMART, Roderick Ninian (1927-2001)
Roderick Ninian Smart was born in Cambridge
on 6 May 1927 and died in his seventy-fourth
year in Lancaster on 29 January 2001. He was
born to Scottish parents, William M. Smart,
Regius Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow
University and Isabel Carswell, a public poet,
and was educated at King's College Choir
School, Cambridge and Glasgow Academy,
although he was brought up mainly in
Scotland. In May 1945 he joined the British
Army and served in the Intelligence Corps. He
spent eighteen months in language training in
Chinese in the Services Language Unit at the
School of Oriental and African Studies, after
which he served in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where
he became, as he put it, somewhat orientalized
in his interests. Upon his return to England he
continued his education at Queen's College,
Oxford (1948-51) in classical languages,
ancient history and philosophy, and was
awarded a first class degree in literae human-
iores, and subsequently, a BPhil in philosophy
under the guidance of John AUSTIN (1951-4).
He served as lecturer in philosophy at the
University of Wales from 1952 to 1956, and as
visiting lecturer at Yale University for the
1955-6 academic year, during which time he
964
also studied Pali under the tutelage of Professor
Paul Tedesco. Smart was then appointed
lecturer in the history and philosophy of
religion at the University of London (1956-61),
while also spending some time as visiting
lecturer in philosophy at Banaras Hindu
University. In 1961 he was appointed H.G.
Wood Professor of Theology at the University
of Birmingham (serving a term as visiting pro-
fessor at the University of Wisconsin during
this period). In 1967 Smart was appointed the
founding professor of the new Department of
Religious Studies at the University of Lancaster
- the first department in the United Kingdom
for the study of religious phenomena free from
an overarching theological or religious agenda
- which became a major centre for the
academic study of religion. During his time at
Lancaster, Smart also served as visiting pro-
fessor at St Martin's College, Lancaster
(1980-89). From 1976 until 1982, when he
retired from the University of Lancaster, Smart
held a joint appointment as Professor for the
Study of Religion with the University of
California at Santa Barbara (also serving as
visiting professor at various universities, includ-
ing the University of Capetown, Queensland
University, Harvard University and the
University of Hong Kong). He became the first
J.F. Rowny Professor in the Comparative Study
of Religion at Santa Barbara (1986), and in
1995 he was named faculty research lecturer,
the highest recognition a faculty member at
Santa Barbara can receive. He retired from
Santa Barbara in 1998 but remained involved
in the life of the department virtually until his
death. In 1999 he was elected to an honorary
fellowship at the Queen's College, Oxford.
Upon his retirement both from the University
of Lancaster and the University of California,
Smart was made emeritus professor.
Smart's contributions to the academic and
philosophic study of religion as a professional
philosopher are considerable, but his overall
influence on the field is not limited to his pub-
lished work. He was an outstanding teacher
who attracted students from around the world.

His teaching involved not only the transmission
of information and the training of people in the-
oretical analysis of religious data; he was also
sensitive to the types of academic and teaching
careers his students were likely to take up and
helped in getting them placed. As one of his col-
leagues noted, it is likely 'that no other scholar
in the academic study of religion has more
students teaching in educational institutions
throughout the world' (Lamb and Cohn-
Sherbok, p. 223). Smart was something of a
pioneer in his attempt to create a study of
religion free from what he called the Christian
Establishmentarian mind-set, a proposal he
published in 'Religion as a Discipline' (1962)
five years before taking up his position in reli-
gious studies at the University of Lancaster.
He was also something of an ambassador on
behalf of religious studies as an indispensable
element of a liberal university education both
because, as he put it, we still live without an
explanation for the strange and exotic things
people do 'under the influence of religion' and
because, in the current process of construction
of a global civilization, knowledge of religion
can soften hostilities created by ignorance, and
lead to tolerance and mutual acceptance of dif-
ferences among the nations of the world. He
expended considerable energy in assisting in
the establishment and support of various
departments and centres for the study of
religion around the world in his activities as
visiting professor or scholar in residence, as
consultant to various universities considering
establishing programmes of religious studies, as
principal speaker at association conference
meetings, and in the numerous special (named)
lectures he was invited to present over the span
of his career. His active participation in such
scholarly organizations as the British
Association for the Study of Religion, the
International Association for the History of
Religions and the American Academy of
Religion, among many others, was directed
towards the same goal. Smart also contributed
to understanding the teaching of religion at the
primary and secondary levels of education by
965
SMART
serving for many years on the Shap Working
Part on World Religions in Education (as co-
chair and then as President), as well as improv-
ing the understanding of religion in society at
large through activities such as serving as con-
sultant to the BBC television series The Long
Search (1974), and the writing of popular
books on comparative religion available not
only as introductory textbooks but also to the
broader public.
Smart was a prolific writer, publishing thirty-
two books and more than 250 essays, articles
and reviews on a broad range of topics in phi-
losophy, religion and theology, and on how
these matters related to personal, social and
political concerns in the academy and society at
large. In the context of the academy, he made
significant contributions to three areas of study
related to religion: to the philosophy of religion,
both in its traditional mode and to the later
emergent comparative philosophy of religion;
to the methodology of the academic study of
religion; and to philosophical and natural
theology.
As a professional philosopher of religion,
Smart made several major contributions to the
redevelopment of the study of religion that
took place in the post World War II university
context. Traditional philosophy of religion in
his estimation was largely a parochial enterprise
focused, generally, either on 'an attack on' or
'defence of theism of a Western sort; it was too
much an exercise in apologetics, resting upon
the unquestioned assumption that religious dis-
course was essentially cognitive and argumen-
tative in nature. Although acknowledging that
the philosopher is a logician whose task is to
explore the logic of propositional claims,
including those made by religious devotees, he
rejected the notion that it was therefore also the
task of the philosopher to attempt to establish
or overthrow particular religious beliefs. As
one might expect, Smart was much influenced
by the notion of philosophy as linguistic
analysis dominant in the Oxford of his day. He
had no doubt of its potential value for the
student of religion, although he did not believe
SMART
that it had yet achieved very much, because, as
he saw it, it had been too insensitive to the
subtleties of religious discourse. That insensi-
tivity, Smart argued startlingly in an early paper
delivered to the eighth international Congress
of the International Association for the History
of Religions (1955), can only be overcome by
recognizing that the philosophy of religion must
be a factual enquiry. He insisted in that paper
- 'The Comparative Logical Analysis of
Religious Doctrines', published in 1959 - that
historical comparisons of religious concepts
would assist in giving logical distinctions
content and so provide substance for philo-
sophical reflection, and, consequently, would to
some extent make of the philosophical task a
specialized factual enquiry within the compar-
ative religion enterprise.
A fuller, more persuasive elaboration of this
new approach to the philosophical study of
religion is to be found in Smart's first book,
Reasons and Faiths: An Investigation of
Religious Discourse, Christian and Non-
Christian (1958). Smart spells out here a more
comprehensive understanding of how the
philosopher can gain enlightenment from the
historical and comparative study of religion. He
shows, for example, how a proper under-
standing of religious concepts can only be
gained by seeing how they function in their
religious setting, whether that be in ritual
practice, mystical contemplation or moral
deliberation. A proper understanding of the
structure of doctrinal systems, and of the nature
and interaction of the various strands of reli-
gious discourse that make up those schemes, he
argues, is also essential to a proper analysis of
the religious concepts used. With this kind of
systematic and comprehensive contextual
knowledge, according to Smart, philosophers
will know how religious truths are taken to be
confirmed and this will throw light on what
sort of truth religious truths are supposed to be.
Smart's recognition here that all religions
express themselves in ritual and moral action or
in mystical contemplation as well as in doctri-
nal schemes, and that doctrinal schemes are
966
complex structures made up of different 'logical
strands' (experiential, mystical, incarnational,
moral, ascetic and meditative, etc.), even
though their epistemological characters are
distinct, made it possible for philosophers to
provide more sophisticated analyses of reli-
gious notions and concepts and, consequently,
to make a more valuable contribution to a
general understanding of religion. Smart's own
contributions in this vein can be found in his
Doctrine and Argument in Indian Philosophy
(1964) and in numerous articles, a number of
which are republished in Concept and
Empathy: Essays in the Study of Religion
(1986) and Reflections in the Mirror of
Religion (1997). His work here clearly antici-
pated the emergence of the new subdiscipline of
comparative philosophy of religion that
emerged among members of the American
Academy of Religion decades later.
In Philosophers and Religious Truth (1964)
Smart gave particular attention to traditional
Western themes in the philosophy of religion in
an effort to combat the anti-intellectualism of
the existentialism that had a profound influence
on theologians at the time. However, in The
Philosophy of Religion (1970) he returned to
the new approach to the field he first elaborated
in the 1950s. Once again he set out to explore
religious concepts using the methods of lin-
guistic analysis in an effort to determine their
distinctive features and to see how they stood
in relation to more mundane, non-religious
concepts. As in his earlier work, he included
non-Christian traditions in his sweep and
insisted that the concepts be viewed not only in
their linguistic contexts but also their non-lin-
guistic contexts. For Smart, 'some kind of sym-
pathetic initiation is needed before people can
grasp the meaning of religious concepts'
(Philosophy of Religion, p. vii). From the early
1970s Smart also insisted that the scope of the
work of the philosopher of religion be extended
beyond the boundaries even of the realm of
the historian and comparative student of
religion. In 'The Philosophy of Worldviews:
The Philosophy of Religion Transformed'

(1981) he encouraged philosophers of religion
to include in their purview analysis of the struc-
ture and history of actual worldview systems
such as Marxism, Maoism and Freudianism.
He elaborated his views on this extension of the
work of the philosopher of religion in
Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of
Human Beliefs (1983) and his last major work,
World Philosophies (1999).
Philosophically, Smart is perhaps most
widely known for his attention to method-
ological issues in the academic study of reli-
gions, issues he first took up in systematic
fashion in his inaugural lecture at the University
of Lancaster early in 1968 - The Principles
and Meaning of the Study of Religion - and
returned to repeatedly over the years. Even
before taking up his position in Lancaster,
Smart had expressed serious reservations about
how theology had become institutionalized in
the secular universities in the UK. He saw this
as a form of religious establishmentarianism
and considered it a 'kind of conceptual alba-
tross around the neck of religious studies', and
as incompatible with what he called pluralistic
freedom. In the inaugural lecture he argued
that the secular academic study of religion
ought essentially to be descriptive and theoret-
ical rather than evaluative. As a university dis-
cipline it ought to be plural in the sense of
being ready to deal with many traditions
(without intrinsic priority given to any) and
non-finite in that the concept of religion is
without clear boundaries and may well shade
over into worldviews; it ought also to be aspec-
tual in that, like politics, it focuses attention on
a particular kind of behaviour; and, finally, it
must be polymethodic, using many disciplines
and methods to make sense of religions and
religion.
Smart did not argue in that lecture that reflec-
tive (theological, religious) concerns should not
be part of the academic study of religion, but he
worried that such concerns could become
dominant and justify the image many scholars
had of it as a tertiary Sunday School enterprise
rather than as a bona fide scientific undertak-
967
SMART
ing. Smart attempted therefore to focus philo-
sophical attention on 'the logic of studying
religion for its own sake' (rather than with ref-
erence to its educational aspect and its role in
programmes of educational institutions), which
he elaborated in considerable detail in his The
Science of Religion and the Sociology of
Knowledge: Some Methodological Questions
(1973) and The Phenomenon of Religion
(1973). Essential to that 'logic' is the contrast
between 'doing theology' and 'studying
religion', and this involves recognizing that
enterprises such as theology, inter-religious
dialogue and the like are part of the phenome-
non to be understood rather than methods for
gaining an understanding of it. Smart sought
the justification for the scientific study of
religion not on the grounds that religion held
potential benefit for persons or societies, but
rather on intellectual grounds alone. Not to do
so, according to Smart, would only justify the
image many academics held of the discipline as
'a pious dogmatism, girding its loins with the
cloth of obscure scholarship' (Science of
Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge, p.
14). For Smart, therefore, the primary aim of
the scientific study of religion is to understand
it, and that requires both description and expla-
nation.
In Smart's estimation, several disciplines are
necessary to achieve an adequate descriptive
understanding of any particular religious phe-
nomenon or tradition: the history of religions,
philosophical and comparative analysis, and
the phenomenology of religion. The history of
religions is essentially a positivistic undertaking
and involves philological and historical analysis
of religious texts and the development of
doctrine, ritual and practice in an attempt to
provide a neutral picture of a religious tradition.
Smart refers to this as 'old style' empiricist
analysis of religion that restricts itself to the
external features of religions and therefore lacks
depth in the account of religion. Philosophical
attention to the central concepts of a religious
tradition in the peculiarity of its particular reli-
gious setting and compared to cognate concepts
SMART
in other religious traditions reveals more of the
'inner logic' of religion and so provides a
descriptive understanding that goes beyond the
'flat neutralism' of the crude empiricism of the
historical positivists. And greater depth still is
achieved by undertaking a phenomenological
analysis of the tradition; an examination that
refuses to treat the subject-matter simply as a
human phenomenon while simultaneously,
however, remaining free from metaphysical
commitment with respect to the existence of
transcendent religious realities. What Smart
calls 'bracketed realism' makes this possible, for
such a form of realism rests on the distinction
between the reality and existence of transcen-
dent agents or objects that allows one to accept
the social reality of the transcendent agent or
object while leaving unasked the question of
whether or not it actually exists; that is, the
existence of the transcendent reality is neither
affirmed nor denied.
Whereas the descriptive task of the student of
religion displays or presents the content or sub-
stance of a tradition, the explanatory and the-
oretical task is directed towards clearing away
puzzles about it, accounts for it being what it
is and how it came to be what it is, and draws
heavily upon the diverse social sciences (anthro-
pology, sociology, psychology, and so on) in
doing so. Explanations can be either intra or
extra-religious and may be of a narrative, struc-
tural or causal type. Internal explanations
attempt to show the connection an item or
items in one dimension of religion may have to
an item or items in another dimension of that
tradition, and external explanations seek out
the connections that religions, or elements of
them, have to other aspects of culture and/or
the material world. But Smart also pointed out
that explanations can be classified as natural or
supernatural, and he recognized that theology
may invoke supernatural agents and events to
account for some historical or doctrinal devel-
opment in the church that could stand in
conflict with a purely naturalistic explanation
of the same. Smart resolves the tension implied
by that possibility by invoking the notion of
968
'phenomenological explanation', which allows
the student of religion to take seriously the
reality (but not the existence) of the transcen-
dent focus of the devotee without becoming
embroiled in some form of endorsement of the
religious perspective of the devotee. Smart
acknowledged that invoking the notion of phe-
nomenological explanation short circuits the
adoption of purely naturalistic external expla-
nations of religion by showing that such a
strategy would result in a reductionism of reli-
gious claims that cannot be justified by empir-
ical evidence, although he does not on that
account rule out all possibility of such a reduc-
tionistic account of religious phenomena.
Despite his attempt to provide the structure
for a truly scientific study of religion that seeks
not only an objective descriptive account of
religion but also an explanation for it, Smart
insists that the student of religion is justified in
drawing a distinction between the 'scientific
study of religion' and 'religious studies'. The
former, he claims, is part of the latter but the
latter can include aims beyond that espoused by
the scientist qua scientist. In principle, for Smart,
there is a divide between a reflective/evaluative
(i.e. religio-theological) study on the one hand,
and a descriptive and explanatory (i.e. scientific)
one on the other. Nevertheless he also main-
tains that this does not preclude attention to
other, broader, matters. Thus for Smart,
somehow (although this is left unexplained) the
complexity of the search for explanation leaves
room for a 'symbiosis' between intra and extra-
religious explanations that in his judgement
provides some justification for considering the
possible 'break down of the simplified opposi-
tion between learning about religion and feeling
the living power of religion' (Science of Religion
and the Sociology of Knowledge, p. 160).
In breaking down that simplified opposition,
and simultaneously elaborating a framework
for achieving a descriptive and theoretical
understanding of religion that could work col-
laboratively with the social sciences, Smart
created a very influential methodology for the
academic study of religion, attractive not only

to social scientists who, for the most part, could
ignore 'reflective' concerns, but also to more
traditional religio-theological and humanistic
scholars persuaded by the argument showing
that a scientific study of religion 'does not
reduce religion away'. Although widely
adopted as an appropriate framework for the
academic study of religion - with Smart likely
second only to Mircea Eliade in terms of influ-
ence on the field of religious studies worldwide
- significant criticism has also been raised with
respect to inconsistencies and tensions related
to a scientific study of religion that all but pre-
cludes the possibility of it ever being able to
provide a fully naturalistic account of religion.
Theological and religious concerns, then,
were not foreign to Smart, nor were those reli-
gious issues inconsistent either with his com-
parative analytic philosophy of religion or with
the methodological framework he sought to
create for the study of religion in the academic
setting of the modern research university. In his
insistence that the scientific study of religion is
but one aspect of a fully rounded 'religious
studies', he left room not only for a 'reflective'
study of religion but for a blending of theology
and religion, as he put it in a late essay, 'Some
Thoughts on the Science of Religion' (1996).
For him, being a saint - being religious - was
much more important than simply studying
religion, a point he made not only in his inau-
gural lecture at the University of Lancaster but
also in his Science of Religion and the Sociology
of Knowledge, supported by his sympathetic
appraisal of Eliade's 'creative hermeneutics' in
The Phenomenon of Religion. This concern to
be engaged not only in the academic study of
religion but in religion itself in effect made of
Smart not only an academic and scholar but
also a religious intellectual.
Smart's philosophico-theological concerns
are clearly set out in two early papers:
'Revelation, Reason, and Religion' (1961) and
'Theology, Philosophy and Natural Sciences'
(1962), his inaugural lecture as H.G. Wood
Professor of Theology at the University of
Birmingham. Although cognizant that natural
969
SMART
theology held little interest in the philosophical
circles of that day, he believed it was of the first
importance to revive it - although not in its tra-
ditional form - if there were to be any hope of
mounting a defence of religion without the irra-
tionality of appealing to revelation alone. The
essence of his 'new natural theology' rests on
the notion of 'religious reasons' for belief.
Smart, that is, argued that belief based not
merely on intellectual argument or simply on an
appeal to revelation, but rather on the deliver-
ances of religious experience that has been
crucial in the history of religion, could itself be
taken to constitute a kind of 'general revela-
tion'. Smart recognizes the less than rigorous
logic of such a 'general revelation' and therefore
acknowledges the new natural theology to be
somewhat 'soft'. He elaborated this view in
greater detail in his The Yogi and the Devotee:
The Interplay Between the Upanishads and
Catholic Theology (1968) as the basis for a
defence of religion against a form of Western
secularism which he saw as intent on making all
religion obsolete. And in showing the weakness
of the secular assumption that a necessary and
general conflict exists between science and
religion, Smart provided a foundation for the
development of what he later came to call a
'compatibility system' that could integrate the
two into a larger, broader understanding of
the world.
These theological and reflective religious
concerns re-emerged in Smart's later work as
well. Smart did not, for example, limit himself
in his Gifford Lectures - Beyond Ideology:
Religion and the future of Western Civilization
(1981) - to reviewing and analysing the relation
of religion to broad cultural and political
concerns, but rather strove 'to weave together'
a worldview that could provide aid to a
troubled society in, as he put it, a planetary
context that forces 'differing cultures and polit-
ical systems ... [into] continuing and intimate
interplay'. In Worldviews he reiterates that the
study of religion must leave room for this kind
of activity; that it must not restrict itself to the
mere study of comparative worldviews but
SMART
rather encourage scholars to form and clarify
the bases of their own worldviews. And,
together with his former student Steven
Konstantin, Smart set out to present his own
Christian worldview in their Christian
Systematic Theology in a World Context
(1991) - a vision that 'is easy to share but
impossible to prove' but nevertheless one that,
in his opinion, 'is possible for reflective people
to hold with inner certitude'.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reasons and Faiths: An Investigation of
Religious Discourse, Christian and Non-
Christian (1958).
Theology, Philosophy of Religion and the
Natural Sciences: An Inaugural Lecture
delivered in the University of Birmingham
on 16th March, 1962 (Birmingham, 1962).
Doctrine and Argument in Indian Philosophy
(1964).
The Principles and Meaning of the Study of
Religion: An Inaugural lecture Delivered in
the University of Lancaster on 14th
February, 1968 (Lancaster, 1968).
The Yogi and the Devotee: The Interplay
Between the Upanishads and Catholic
Theology (1968).
The Philosophy of Religion (New York,
1970).
The Phenomenon of Religion (1973).
The Science of Religion and the Sociology of
Knowledge: Some Methodological
Questions (Princeton, 1973).
Beyond Ideology: Religion and the Future of
Western Civilization (San Francisco,
1981).
Other Relevant Works
Philosophers and Religious Truth (1964).
The Concept of Worship (1972).
Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of
Human Beliefs (New York, 1983).
Concept and Empathy: Essays in the Study of
Religion, ed. Donald Wiebe (1986).
The Dimensions of Religion: An Analysis of
the World's Beliefs (1996).
970
Reflections in the Mirror of'Religion, ed.
John Burris( 1997).
Further Reading
Lamb, Christopher and Dan Cohn-Sherbok
(eds), The Future of Religion: Postmodern
Perspectives, Essays in Honour ofNinian
Smart (Middlesex, 1999).
Masefield, Peter and Donald Wiebe (eds),
Aspects of Religion: Essays in Honour of
Ninian Smart (New York, 1994).
Orye, Lieve, Verborgen Hypotheses in
Menswetenschap: Een Analyse van Drie
Visies op Religiestudies (Brussels, 2001).
Donald Wiebe
SMILEY, Timothy (1930-)
Timothy Smiley was born in London on 13
November 1930. He was educated at
Ampleforth College (1943-8) and won a schol-
arship in mathematics to Clare College,
Cambridge. Too young to go up to Cambridge,
he spent the year 1948-9 at Fribourg
University, where he took his only philosophy
exam - a Latin oral on the Five Ways - and
where his interest in logic w as conceived under
the formidable I.M. Bocheriski OP. Back in
Cambridge, the mathematical climate was
chilly towards logic; it was not until his final
year that he returned to the subject as the sole
attendee at S.W.P. Steen's dry and thorough
lectures. He graduated with distinction and
went on to complete a PhD ('Natural Systems
of Logic') in 1956 under Steen's nominal super-
vision. These were busy years: he qualified as a
pilot officer, served in the Air Ministry and
was called to the bar (Gray's Inn). After a
research fellowship (1955-7) at Clare College,
he was appointed to an assistant lectureship in
the Faculty of Philosophy (then 'Moral
Sciences') at Cambridge, and a fellowship at

Clare, where he has remained since. In lectures
arising from his doctoral work, he was the first
to announce completeness proofs for systems of
propositional modal logic that were explicitly
interpreted in terms of possible worlds. From
1969 to 1971 he held the Radcliffe Fellowship,
and in 1980 he became Knightbridge Professor
at Cambridge, a post he held until his retire-
ment in 1998.
His influence on generations of students and
colleagues has not worked by the stamp of
strong doctrine but through his pithy criticism
and unpretentious example, and his knack of
opening up new or neglected fields of inquiry.
His lectures were models, combining the ped-
agogical skill and impish style also displayed in
his articles. Always a believer in the civic duties
of academia and enjoying any prospect of
immediate practical results, he held senior
administrative positions in his college, and was
a member of numerous university working
parties and committees, first in the wake of the
student troubles of the 1960s, and lately scru-
tinizing Cambridge's administration. In 1982-3
he was President of the Aristotelian Society,
and he was elected a fellow of the British
Academy in 1984.
Smiley says that he feels
odd man out in a collection of philosophers,
since my work is on logic and often mathe-
matical. I suppose I do what I do from a
mixture of curiosity and mischief - a reluc-
tance to let sleeping dogs lie and a desire for
clear-cut, unexpected results. Rehabilitating
Aristotle's logic is satisfying on both counts,
(quoted in Pyke)
In a lifelong engagement with Aristotle,
Smiley's bete noire is Jan Lukasiewicz, whose
leading thesis was that Aristotelian and 'tradi-
tional' syllogisms are completely different
animals. A traditional syllogism is an argument,
whereas Aristotle is held to identify a syllogism
with a conditional whose antecedent is the con-
junction of the premises of the traditional
argument and whose consequent is the con-
971
SMILEY
clusion. Smiley argues that Lukasiewicz's con-
ditional interpretation makes a nonsense of
Aristotle's concern with the fine structure of
deductions, and that it falsely imports the
machinery of propositional logic into his
system.
Lukasiewicz's second error is a classic case of
'the schematic fallacy', Smiley's label for the
widespread but misbegotten idea that logic does
not deal with genuine languages, but with
language schemata obtained through substitu-
tion of schematic letters (variables) for concrete
terms. Smiley argues that schemata should be
used, not mentioned. Their proper role is met-
alinguistic, as a vehicle for talking about forms
of arguments. The arguments themselves are not
schematic but concrete ones framed in a con-
tentful object language. Naturally, Aristotle used
the conditional idiom along with schematic
letters to state logical laws ('if b is predicable of
every m, and m of every a, then b is predicable
of every <?'). Blinded by their identification of
schemata with the objects of logic, Lukasiewicz
and his followers confuse these generalizations
about syllogisms with the syllogisms themselves,
which thus become conditionals.
Smiley's more mathematical contributions to
our understanding of Aristotle's logic are
designed to counter the distancing and dismissive
attitude embodied in Lukasiewicz's claim that
the syllogistic 'exists apart from other deductive
systems, having its own axiomatic and its own
problems' (Lukasiewicz, p. 130). Smiley shows
that ancient and modern logic are conceptually
and methodologically continuous, and lauds
Aristotle as the creator of mathematical logic. He
champions a logic of many-sorted quantifica-
tion, where generalization is over different sorts
of thing (men, cats, points, lines), as the proper
vehicle for comparing Aristotelian and modern
logic, as well as for formalizing a raft of mathe-
matical theories, and for representing the use of
general terms in tandem with quantifiers ('every
man', 'some cat').
In 'What is a Syllogism?' (1973) he was the
first to formulate a notion of 'relevant' impli-
cation for the syllogistic that produces
SMILEY
Aristotle's chain condition as a consequence -
the requirement that the premises must form a
chain of predications linking the terms of the
conclusion. He then proved the soundness and
completeness of a deductive system which
closely approximates Aristotle's own. Most
strikingly, in the textually sensitive and pio-
neering 'Aristotle's Completeness Proof (1994)
he argues that, far from having no idea of com-
pleteness, Aristotle actually attempted a com-
pleteness proof by showing that every valid
deduction, couched in syllogistic language and
with any number of premises, is reducible to a
series of two-premise syllogisms which proceed
by his favoured rules of inference. Smiley goes
most of the way to filling the gaps of the com-
pressed and defective proof.
Thinly disguised as the successor to Lewis
Carroll's tortoise, he proposes to reclassify
formal logic - ancient and modern - as a branch
of theoretical applied mathematics ('A Tale of
Two Tortoises', 1995). It is theoretical because
'only a crank would advocate a formalized
language for a living science' (The Schematic
Fallacy', p. 10). It is mathematical, because its
limits are set by mathematical content: too much
and it becomes something else - a theory of sets
or probability or whatever; too little and a logic
doesn't get going. Finally, it is applied because it
is only sometimes reliable. Existential import is
an example of this ingrained tendency towards
impurity, starting with Aristotle's inference from
'every man' to 'some man', through to the clas-
sical predicate calculus and its assumption that
the domain is necessarily non-empty. As befits
applied mathematics, logical purity is continually
sacrificed in favour of technical simplicity.
Around the time Smiley began his career, the
predicate calculus displaced the syllogistic as the
dominant modern system. He has not sought to
overturn modern logic through the most radical
departures. For example, he has vigorously
attacked deviant systems of logic that try to
include true contradictions. Again, to take a
related case, his early research on entailment is
pessimistic about the chances of constraining
logical consequence to dodge the paradoxes of
972
strict implication. Smiley's more modest brief is
to put the predicate calculus in its place. As the
current paradigm, it is the working logic of most
philosophers, who have tended to elevate their
habits to necessities. He aims to break the grip
of what he calls Belloc's principle - 'always keep
ahold of Nurse for fear of finding something
worse' - and so he has taken apart the appara-
tus of rationalisation surrounding the predicate
calculus: bogus methodology, self-serving
appeals to hidden logical reality, false history.
A prime illustration of Smiley's debunking
strategy is his work on empty terms. The clas-
sical predicate calculus omits them and conse-
quently cannot represent definite descriptions,
or treat functions (partial as well as total)
directly. Instead it relies on RUSSELL'S reductive
method which replaces function signs with
descriptions and then eliminates descriptions. In
the taut and witty tour de force The Theory of
Descriptions' (1981) Smiley proposes a logical
theory which takes names and descriptions,
empty ones included, as genuine terms, and
accommodates functions, partial ones included,
in a natural way, while preserving bivalence.
The technical details were already settled in
'Sense without Denotation' (1960), but pre-
sented alongside an alternative three-valued
interpretation. The later, more philosophical
paper takes on Russell and Frege, who had
both excluded empty terms from their formal
systems on bad principle. Smiley emphasizes
that 'the real test of a "theory of descriptions"
comes with its handling of functions' (The
Theory of Descriptions', 2004, p. 133).
Russell's theory fails miserably, since it makes
'the expression and manipulation of mathe-
matical information humanly impossible' (ibid.,
p. 135). As for Frege, he was too quick to
convict empty terms of breeding fallacy and
error. His system also fails the function test,
since it cannot accurately capture the theory of
partial recursive functions.
Much of the received history which shores up
Russell's theory is fabricated, and the culprit is
often Russell himself. Smiley's detective work
on Meinong is a gem, and restores some of the

reputation of this mythical villain. Russell had
convicted him of logical error, but only by
completely misinterpreting his concern with
the definite article. Whereas Russell was pre-
occupied with definite descriptions, Meinong's
'the' was generic, as in 'the whale is a mammal'.
Smiley also attacks the two last (and often first)
resorts of much philosophical logic - parsi-
mony and intuition. The taste for the simplest
formal system may well explain the persisting
refusal to accommodate empty terms, but
'Occam's razor is a dangerous weapon ... a
standing encouragement to puritanism, impa-
tience and shortsightedness' ('Rejection', p. 3).
And how many logicians put their supposedly
pre-theoretic intuitions about truth-values and
entailments to the public vote? Surveys of the
uncorrupted typically produce 'evidence for
nothing except the unreliability of appealing to
intuition' (The Theory of Descriptions', 2004,
p. 147).
In work with Alex Oliver he explores strate-
gies for a logic of plurals. Like empty terms,
plural terms ('Discovery Rocks', 'the real
numbers') do not fit the mould of the predicate
calculus. A popular manoeuvre reduces a plural
term to a singular one standing for a complex
object, a set or group or sum. Oliver and Smiley
show that no such account can succeed. The
logical category of terms must be broadened to
include genuinely plural terms that are capable
of standing for more than one thing.
In 'Multigrade Predicates' (2004) Oliver and
Smiley tackle the logic of lists, as in 'WHTTEHEAD
and Russell wrote Principia'. On one plausible
account, a list is a mere string of separate items
that are the several arguments of the relevant
predicate. Since lists vary in their length, this
requires predicates to take variably many argu-
ments, i.e. they are 'multigrade'. On a rival
account, a list is a compound plural term
formed from its items. This account too needs
a multigrade apparatus, since the term-forming
'and' must be a multigrade functor. Oliver and
Smiley assess the two analyses, concluding that
both are acceptable but that they differ in scope.
Multigrade predicates (and functors) are of
973
SMILEY
course excluded from the predicate calculus,
and they have even been deemed impossible in
principle. Yet they are there in English.
Frege regarded logic as a degenerate theory
concerning a special kind of general truth. This
regressive approach, with its emphasis on prop-
erties of sentences (logical truth and theorem-
hood), dominated until well beyond the mid
twentieth century. Against this tide, Smiley puts
the relation of logical consequence (and its syn-
tactic correlate, deducibility) centre stage,
always urging that a logic is a vehicle of infer-
ence that underlies theories rather than being a
theory itself.
Much of his mathematical work examines
the structural properties of consequence rela-
tions. One novel relation permits premises and
conclusions to be rejected, actually or hypo-
thetically, in addition to being asserted or
assumed. Fregean orthodoxy notwithstanding,
rejection is a distinct activity from assertion,
even though rejecting ? may often be equivalent
to asserting not P. In fact, Smiley argues, rejec-
tion is needed to explain the meaning of not. He
revives the neglected problem, set by Carnap in
1943, of finding axiomatizations capable of
excluding unintended interpretations of logical
calculi ('the problem of sentential categoric-
ity'). The semantics of a calculus determines its
'sentential output': the classification of every
assignment of truth-values to sentences (all of
them at once) as being possible or impossible.
The trouble is that logical consequence, as stan-
dardly defined, does not fix sentential output:
consequence is the same relation in the classi-
cal prepositional calculus as in the variant
which agrees in output except for counting as
possible the assignment in which every sentence
is true. Since P and not P are both true in this
deviant assignment, it fails to respect the
meaning of not. Hence merely requiring that a
deductive system be sound and complete
relative to a standard consequence relation
cannot exclude unintended interpretations. All
changes when consequence is extended to cover
rejection, since it then fixes the entire sentential
output and with it the meaning of not.
SMILEY
In Multiple-Conclusion Logic (1978), written
with David Shoesmith, Smiley had given an
alternative solution to the categoricity problem.
Ordinary arguments are 'lop-sided': they can
have only one conclusion, but any number of
premises. Within multiple-conclusion logic
arguments can also have any number of con-
clusions, the truth lying somewhere among
them if all the premises are true, i.e. some
premises imply some conclusions if it is impos-
sible for all the premises to be true and all the
conclusions false. So defined, consequence is
capable of saying everything at the level of sen-
tences about any semantics. It follows that a
categorical axiomatization of, for example, the
prepositional calculus can be obtained using
multiple-conclusion rules.
Shoesmith and Smiley's book is the first sys-
tematic treatment of multiple-conclusion logic.
It bristles with technical subtlety and historical
scholarship, yet partly because of its forbid-
ding generality, elegance and originality, it still
remains undiscovered treasure for many
philosophers. Multiple-conclusion consequence
and rules of inference were introduced by
Carnap, but it was left to William KNEALE to try
to amend proof techniques to take account of
multiple-conclusion rules. Kneale's 'develop-
ments' branch upwards, as in diagrams of
ordinary arguments, but also downwards to
deal with multiple conclusions. Developments
are too restricted, however, since even some
tautologies escape proof by their means.
Shoesmith and Smiley apply graph theory to
provide an adequate generalization of proof
which allows, as crucially Kneale did not, for
closed circuits in which forked branches may
rejoin. The mathematical difficulty comes in
analysing how steps may be arranged correctly
within arguments, thus filtering out fallacious
circuits. Their extended investigation of many-
valued logic is a good example of how the
symmetry of multiple-conclusion logic yields
unconditional results which would have needed
qualification in the asymmetrical setting of
single-conclusion logic. They also illustrate how
multiple-conclusion rules of inference provide
974
an elegant and direct alternative to the complex
and indirect rules involving assumptions and
their discharge which are typical of natural
deduction systems.
Smiley's most subversive move is to raise the
question that we learn to suppress: why must
deductive arguments be logically valid? After
all, most deductions are required to have only
de facto true premises, not necessarily true ones.
So why demand that a deduction be truth-pre-
serving relative to all logical possibilities when
everyday arguments concentrate on real possi-
bilities? Lawyers, scientists and tourists rightly
ignore some notional possibilities by taking
contingent data (legal statutes, Newtonian
geometry, timetables) for granted as the 'basis'
for their deductive arguments.
Early on Smiley had explored the logic of
'relative necessity', i.e. necessity relative to an
arbitrary body of propositions such as a moral
code, or some mathematical postulates. His
later idea in 'A Tale of Two Tortoises' is that
if logic is to have a practical value, if it is to deal
with everyday argument, all logical notions
need to be relativized in the spirit of Bolzano.
We need to speak of consequence, validity,
necessity, etc. relative to some or other argu-
mentative basis. A formal logician may well
reply that everyday arguments are incomplete
or enthymematic: that they really contain, or
should contain, elements of the basis as
premises, thus bringing them up to the favoured
standard of logical validity. Smiley reverses the
direction of explanation. An everyday
argument, left as it stands, may meet the pre-
vailing standard of relative validity. Logical
validity is just a special case of relative validity,
since formal logic itself always takes some basis
for granted (witness existential import). But
while relative validity is ripe for formal treat-
ment, a quite different inquiry is needed to
settle which bases can be taken for granted for
what purposes and in what circumstances.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Entailment and Deducibility', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 59 (1958-9),

pp. 233-54.
'Sense without Denotation', Analysis, vol. 2.
(1960), pp. 125-35.
'Syllogism and Quantification', Journal of
Symbolic Logic, vol. 27 (1962), pp. 58-72
'Relative Necessity', Journal of Symbolic
Logic, vol. 28 (1963), pp. 113-34.
(with David Shoesmith), 'Deducibility and
Many-Valuedness', Journal of Symbolic
Logic, vol. 36 (1971), pp. 610-22
'What is a Syllogism?', Journal of
Philosophical Logic, vol. 2 (1973), pp
136-54.
(with David Shoesmith), Multiple-Conclusion
Logic (Cambridge, 1978).
'The Theory of Descriptions', Proceedings of
the British Academy, vol. 67 (1981), pp
321-37; a much exp. version appears i.
T.R. Baldwin and T.J. Smiley (eds), Studies
in the Philosophy of Logic and Knowledge
(Oxford, 2004), pp. 131-61.
'The Schematic Fallacy', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 83 (1982-3), p.
1-17.
'Can Contradictions be True?', Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 67
(1993), pp. 17-33.
'Aristotle's Completeness Proof, Ancient
Philosophy, vol. 14 (1994), pp. 25-38.
'A Tale of Two Tortoises', Mind, vol. 10.
(1995), pp. 725-36.
'Rejection', Analysis, vol. 56 (1996), pp. 1-9
'Consequence, Conceptions of, in Edward
Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, vol. 2 (1998), pp. 599-603.
(with Alex Oliver), 'Strategies for a Logic of
Plurals', Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 51
(2001), pp. 289-306.
(with Alex Oliver), 'Multigrade Predicates',
Mind, vol. 113 (2004), pp. 609-81.
Further Reading
Carnap, Rudolf, Normalization of Logic
(Cambridge, Mass., 1943).
Copeland, B. Jack, The Genesis of Possible
World Semantics', Journal of Philosophical
Logic, vol. 31 (2002), pp. 99-137.
975
SMITH
Kneale, William, 'The Province of Logic', in
H.D. Lewis (ed.), Contemporary British
Philosophy, 3rd ser. (Aberdeen, 1956), pp.
235-61.
Lukasiewicz, Jan, Aristotle's Syllogistic, 2nd
enl. edn (Oxford, 1957).
Pyke, Steve, Philosophers (Manchester,
1993).
Alex Oliver
SMITH, Alic Halford (1883-1958)
Alic Smith was born in India and died in
Oxford on 13 July 1958. He was educated at
Dulwich College and New College, Oxford,
where he achieved a first in both Classical
Moderations (1904) and in Greats (1906). He
was employed in the Scottish Office from 1906
until 1919, and his services were recognized in
1920 by the award of a CBE. By this stage,
however, he had been persuaded to return to
New College and was fellow and tutor in phi-
losophy there until 1944. He was elected
Warden in 1944 and served as Vice-Chancellor
of the University (1954-7). He took a keen
interest in the built environment of Oxford,
which was recognized by his election, in 1955,
as honorary freeman of the city. His term of
office as Warden of New College had not quite
expired when he died at the age of seventy-
five.
Smith was a man of independent mind who,
it was stated in the memorial address for him,
'as a young man, refused to join the rigorous
sect of COOK WILSON'S disciples' and 'in later
years found little to attract or excite him in the
exhilarating discriminations of the new
analysts' (Selected Essays, p. xviii). Nonetheless,
he had a particular affinity with his tutor and
later colleague H.W.B. JOSEPH, not only in the
style of his philosophy but also in some of his
personal attitudes. For instance, both held deep
SMITH
Wordsworthian views, which Smith expressed
as 'the conviction, though not the comprehen-
sion, that the flux of life contains or conceals a
divine purpose and changeless peace' (ibid.,
p. 106). This conviction without 'comprehen
sion' seems to have motivated his philosophi-
cal activity in some measure. Like Joseph he
pursued philosophy by focusing on a philoso-
pher with whom he sympathized and whose
views he liberally developed in response to crit-
icism. In Smith's case the focus was on Kant's
critical philosophy.
Smith wrote two philosophical books in
which he sought to arrive at his own conclu-
sions through a careful study of Kant's episte-
mology: A Treatise on Knowledge (1943) and
Kantian Studies (1947). The 'studies' of the
second book were, as Smith acknowledged in
its Preface, 'prolegomena' to the 'speculations'
of the first. Smith found much to agree with in
Kant's aesthetic but thought Kant failed to
explain how separate minds came to know a
common world. In his 'Speculations on
Knowledge', the final part of his Treatise, Smith
seeks to develop a Kantian view that could
accommodate this difficulty. He argues that
there is a non-individual or universal con
sciousness which contains everything temporal
and spatial. This conclusion was one that har-
monized with his Wordsworthian convictions.
Smith had himself already discussed with
Blackwell the publication of his essays and
addresses before he died and the selection later
published, which contains nothing strictly
philosophical, was very largely his own.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Treatise on Knowledge (Oxford, 1943).
Kantian Studies (Oxford, 1947).
Other Relevant Work
'Horace William Brindley Joseph,
1867-1943', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 31 (1945), pp. 375-98.
Selected Essays and Addresses, ed. Sir
C.W.M. Cox (Oxford, 1963).
976
Further Reading
Harrod, Roy, 'Alic Halford Smith', The
Oxford Magazine, vol. 77 (1958), pp.
74-8.
New College, Oxford and its Buildings
(Oxford, 1952).
Stuart Brown
SMITH, Colin (1914-90)
Colin Smith was born on 4 October 1914 in
Bolton and died in Surrey on 27 November
1990. After receiving his BA and MA from
Manchester University, he taught at University
College London and became reader there. He
joined the French Department at Reading in
1967 as professor, and was Head of
Department from 1968 to 1975, and received
the Chevalier de 1'ordre de meerite. He retired
in 1980. Smith was at the vanguard of the
reception of continental philosophy in this
country. He is known chiefly for his translation
of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of
Perception (1962) and Barthes's Elements of
Semiology (1967), and will be remembered for
taking French philosophy seriously in an
academic climate that was at that time far from
receptive. He did this through co-founding the
British Society of Phenomenology, of which he
was President, through his essays, translations
and his book Contemporary French Philosophy
(1964).
When Merleau-Ponty died in 1961 the co-
founders of the British Society for
Phenomenology, Colin Smith and Wolfe MAYS,
suggested that a British philosophy society have
a symposium in his honour. It never happened,
and one reason is that British philosophy was
simply not ready for phenomenology, and cer-
tainly not ready for Merleau-Ponty's seemingly
idiosyncratic version of it. Yet by translating
Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception

in 1962, Colin Smith paved the way for the
massive Anglo-American interest in the 1980s
and onwards in French philosophy in general
and Merleau-Ponty in particular. The signifi-
cance of translating this particular text at this
time cannot be underestimated. Merleau-Ponty
is one of the most oft-quoted and oft-refer-
enced French philosophers, and this is partly a
result of his advancement of an embodied phi-
losophy, the friendliness of this to recent
feminist philosophy and critical theory, and
partly due to the fluid and poetic writing style
that the philosopher employed. While not
perfect, Smith's translation into English
captures the poetic style, helping to engage the
imagination as well as the intellect, as the
author would have wanted. At times Merleau-
Ponty's careful prose is somewhat obscured,
for example in the consistent translation of
schema corporel as 'body image', but for the
most part the fascinating interconnection of
Gestalt psychology, philosophies of the
organism and the return to sense experience
come through in a rich, readable and satisfying
way.
While this translation helped to seed the
reception of French philosophy into proper
philosophical study in this country,
Contemporary French Philosophy continued
the process, being a study of French philosophy
and literature in which a mixture of fashionable
and important writers such as Camus, Sartre,
Bachelard, Bergson and Saint-Exupery amongst
others were presented in a loose, unified
argument rather than as a simple chronological
introduction to their thought. While this was
unusual in trying to introduce a raft of thinkers,
in some cases into a potentially hostile academic
climate, it allowed more detailed analysis and
the establishment of a philosophical context
to these figures, while escaping the usual reduc-
tive nature of secondary texts. In this way it was
an attempt to treat these as serious philoso-
phers in the context of continental philosophy,
rather than treating them as literary figures.
'What I here try to show, from the writings of
the French themselves, is the mutual comple-
977
SMITH
mentarity of existence and essence in feeling,
knowing and acting', he writes, '...a process
effected by perpetually throwing up meanings
which are never anything but provisional'
(Contemporary French Philosophy, p. 19). In
the predominant philosophical climate of
Anglo-American linguistic and logical philoso-
phy, this was a bold step.
Continuing with the translation of major
French philosophers, a few years later with
Anne Lavers he translated Roland Barthes's
Elements of Semiology, a slim volume written
by Barthes as an introductory text for his
students. In this way, it applied Saussure's con-
jecture in his Course in General Linguistics
(1916) about a 'semiology' from language as
such to other 'systems of signification', and
incorporated elements from the structuralism of
Claude Levi-Strauss. It is this larger sign system
which has been applied so extensively in the
humanities and social sciences, applicable to
journalism, psychoanalysis, anthropology,
cultural studies and media studies and so on.
Smith's translation of this text helped an
English-speaking audience to fuse the philo-
sophical backbone of semiology to newly
emerging academic sub-disciplines based
around communications, information and
media. The four main elements of semiology
that Barthes presents in this text do transcend
the context of structuralism from which it orig-
inally emerged, and are taught in undergradu-
ate courses in the humanities and social sciences
to this day.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Contemporary French Philosophy: A Study
in Norms and Values (1964).
Other Relevant Works
(Trans.), Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception (1962).
(Trans, with Anne Lavers), Elements of
Semiology (1967).
Mark W. O. Paterson
SMITH
SMITH, John Alexander (1863-1939)
John Alexander Smith was born in Dingwall in
the north of Scotland on 21 April 1863 and
died in Oxford on 19 December 1939. He was
educated at the University of Edinburgh and at
Balliol College, Oxford. His first appointment
was as a lecturer in Greek at Edinburgh
(1886-91) but he returned to Balliol as a tutor
in philosophy (1891-1909). From 1910 till
1935 he was Waynflete Professor of Moral
and Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford.
Smith was originally a classical scholar and
initially, as he himself admitted, his concep-
tion of philosophy was coloured by a 'prefer-
ence for scholarship and erudition' and by his
acceptance of 'the Oxford tradition that directs
its undergraduate students and their instructors
to concentrate upon the texts of the two great
Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, as a
propaedeutic to philosophy' ('Philosophy as
the Development ... of Self-Consciousness',
p. 228). He had, by 1900, become the foremost
Aristotelian scholar in Oxford and he was
senior editor of the Oxford edition of Aristotle's
works.
Although his philosophical tendencies had
been idealist, he rejected Hegelianism and, in
the early 1900s, toyed with the realism of COOK
WILSON. But he found it increasingly difficult to
defend the view that what is known is entirely
independent of its being known by any knower.
Thus, when he was offered the Waynflete Chair
in 1909, he still had, as he admitted, no phi-
losophy of his own. This situation was soon
remedied, however, when he visited Naples
and, quite by chance, had the opportunity to
read some of Benedetto Croce's philosophical
writings. From the time of his inaugural lecture
in 1910 Smith became a follower of Italian
idealism, defending, with his own amendments,
ideas he had first read in Croce and in his ally,
Giovanni Gentile. The most fundamental thesis
he sought to defend was that 'the whole and
sole Reality ... is not stationary or immobile,
but essentially in change or process'
('Philosophy as the Development ... of Self-
978
Consciousness', p. 235). In consequence,
though he professed to have learned from other
absolute idealists such as Bradley and
Bosanquet, he rejected their view that the
Absolute itself, while containing all histories,
does not itself have a history.
Smith was an outstanding teacher and influ-
enced several younger philosophers, including
COLLINGWOOD, C.S. LEWIS, H.J. PATON and
G.R.G. MURE. His Crocean aesthetics were to
find an enduring expression in Collingwood's
Principles of Art (1938). But in other respects
his influence was less than his abilities
promised. One reason for this was his reluc-
tance to publish books in which his thought
was developed at length - his Gifford Lectures
on ' The Heritage of Idealism', for instance,
were never published. Another perhaps more
telling reason was, as H.J. Paton reported in a
review of the period (1956), that by the late
1930s the philosophical climate in Oxford had
greatly altered. By the time Smith died those
philosophers in Oxford who were at all sym-
pathetic to idealism - or, for that matter, any
other species of metaphysics - were very much
in the minority.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Knowing and Acting: An Inaugural Lecture
Delivered Before the University of Oxford
(Oxford, 1910).
'The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society', vol.
20 (1919-20), pp. 63-78.
The Nature of Art: An Open Letter to the
Professor of Poetry in the University of
Oxford (Oxford, 1924).
'Philosophy as the Development of the
Notion and Reality of Self-Consciousness',
in J.H. Muirhead (ed.), Contemporary
British Philosophy, 3rd ser. (1924), pp.
225-44.
Other Relevant Works
'On Feeling', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 14 (1913-14), pp. 49-75.
'Progress in Philosophy', in F.S. Marvin (ed.),

Progress and History (1916).
The Issue between Monism and Pluralism',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Societyr, vol.
25 (1924-5), pp. 41-60.
Further Reading
Paton, H.J., 'Fifty Years of Philosophy', in
H.D. Lewis (ed.), Contemporary British
Philosophy, 3rd ser. (1956), pp. 337-54.
Patrick, James, The Magdalen Metaphysicals:
Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford
1901-1945 (Atlanta, Georgia, 1985),
chap. 3.
Stuart Brown
SMUTS, Jan Christiaan (1870-1950)
Jan Christian Smuts was born on his parents'
farm Bovenplatz, near Malmesbury, Gape
Colony on 24 May 1870 and died in Irene,
near Pretoria on 11 September 1950. The
second child of Jacobus Abraham Smuts, a
well-to-do Boer farmer, and his wife Catherine
de Vries, he was Educated at Victoria College
Stellenbosch and graduated in science and lit-
erature in 1891. He travelled to England,
gaining a first class honours degree in law at
Christ's College, Cambridge in 1894. On
returning to Cape Town he was admitted to the
bar, but found work as a journalist for the
Cape Times. Reporting parliamentary debates
fired an interest in politics. At first sympathetic
to the ideas of Cecil Rhodes, after the Jamieson
raid of January 1896 he espoused the Boer
cause, becoming Transvaal state attorney in
1898 under President Kruger. In 1900, after the
British occupied Pretoria, he commanded the
Boer field forces raiding into the Cape Colony,
but in the peace negotiations he urged com-
promise.
In 1907 Smuts was elected to the Transvaal
Assembly and served as Colonial Secretary and
979
SMUTS
Minister of Education under Kruger's successor
Louis Botha. In 1910 he played a leading role
in the formation of the South African Union,
and in 1912 he helped form the South African
Defence Force, whose first major action was to
suppress a rebellion on the Witwatersrand in
January 1914.
During World War I he commanded
Imperial forces fighting the Germans in East
Africa in 1916, and on returning to London in
1917 was appointed privy councillor and given
a seat on the War Cabinet with special respon-
sibility for the air forces and the defence of
London. At a parliamentary dinner he made a
speech advocating a British Commonwealth of
Nations, and a year later published The League
of Nations: A Practical Suggestion, in which he
advocated the mandate system.
Smuts returned to South Africa after the
signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and
served two terms as Prime Minister (1919-24
and 1939-48), and was Minister of Justice
from 1933 to 1939. During World War II
Smuts worked closely with Winston Churchill
and attained the rank of field marshall. He was
the only person who was a signatory to the
peace treaties ending both world wars.
While out of office he travelled widely, lec-
turing and indulging his hobby of collecting
and classifying grasses. In 1926 he published
Holism and Evolution, his philosophy of life. In
this work he expounded the idea that he had
been pondering since his student days, his phi-
losophy of the whole, which governed his polit-
ical actions. His concept of the biological evo-
lutionary process was that all living things were
based on separate units, which he called
'wholes' and which had a natural tendency to
coalesce into larger wholes. The atom was a
whole, but contained an extra force that drove
it to join with other atoms to form larger
wholes. Each whole was perfect in itself but the
extra force in each tended towards further coa-
lescence. The ultimate coalescence was into the
human personality, which he felt was the apex
of perfection. In politics this natural progression
led to the amalgamation of smaller states into
SMUTS
larger ones, as the South African Union was
formed from its four constituents, the Cape
Colony, Transvaal, the Orange Free State and
Natal. Holism inspired his efforts to help estab-
lish the British Commonwealth, the League of
Nations and eventually the United Nations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The League of Nations: A Programme for the
Peace Conference (1918).
Holism and Evolution (1926).
Further Reading
Armstrong, H.C., Grey Steel: ].C. Smuts, a
Study in Arrogance (1937).
Alan Cohen
SORABJI, Richard Ruston Kharsedji (1934-)
Richard Sorabji was born in Oxford on 8
November 1934. After an early education at the
Dragon School (1943-8) and Charterhouse
(1948-53), as well as a period of National
Service in the Navy when he learned Russian, he
was admitted to Pembroke College, Oxford,
where he read Greats (1955-9) (see Stallworthy
for recollections of this period). He remained at
Oxford to do a BPhil, where his principal
teachers were G.E.L. OWEN and John ACKRILL
(1959-62).
His first academic appointment was at Cornell
University (1962), where he became associate
professor in 1968 and served for a time as an
editor of the Philosophical Review. He joined
King's College London in 1970 and was
appointed Professor of Ancient Philosophy in
1981. He was President of the Aristotelian
Society (1985-6) and founding Director of the
King's College Centre for Philosophical Studies
(1989-91), one of whose aims is to promote
philosophy to a wider public. He was appointed
Director of the Institute of Classical Studies
980
(1991-6), where for many years he has been an
influential presence in the Institute's seminar in
ancient philosophy, and British Academy
Research Professor at Oxford (1996-9).
He retired from King's College in 2000, but
has held positions since then as Professor of
Rhetoric at Gresham College, London
(2000-2003); adjunct professor at the University
of Texas at Austin (2000-); distinguished visiting
scholar, New York University (2000-2003); and
visiting professor, City University of New York
(2004-). He was elected fellow of the British
Academy (1989), appointed a foreign honorary
member of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences (1997) and included on the Queen's
honours list for his distinguished contributions
to ancient philosophy (CBE, 1999). He has deliv-
ered lectures in many notable series in North
America, Europe and India.
Sorabji's major contributions have been to
the history of ancient Western philosophy, Greek
and Roman. His work draws attention to its
rich resources for illuminating issues of contin-
uing philosophical interest as various as time,
determinism, explanation, function, perception,
the emotions, the relation of mind to body, and
the treatment of animals, to name a few. An
early paper, 'Aristotle and Oxford Philosophy'
(1969), argues that the vogue for the
Nicomachean Ethics at Oxford was due in part
to the relative absence from it of characteristic
features of Aristotle's philosophy such as the
incorporation of scientific information in defin-
itions to facilitate scientific generalization or an
indifference to the distinction between logical
and non-logical necessity. Sorabji reviews these
features with the aim of making us better under-
stand Aristotle's perspective and sympathize with
his views. In this way, he makes a public decla-
ration of independence from the style of philos-
ophizing characteristic of Oxford when he
attended it, and the consequential parochialism
that limited its interest in historical texts.
Much the same aim informs many of his
publications. In 'Body and Soul in Aristotle'
he defends Aristotle's approach to the soul's
relation to the body because, while it has

numerous points of contact with modern
theories, it is neither reducible to them nor
bedevilled by difficulties to which they are vul-
nerable (see Articles on Aristotle, vol. 4). He
defends Aristotle's treatment of cause, linking
it to explanation rather than necessity, becaus.
it holds out greater promise than most con-
temporary accounts (Necessity, Cause and
Blame, 1980). He draws attention to the inge-
nuity of Philoponus's arguments concerning
infinity (Time, Creation and the Continuum,
1983) and argues that Stoic analysis of the
emotions 'achieved a precision seldom matched
in the modern philosophical literature'
(Aristotle and After, p. 197). On the other side
of the coin, he identifies bad arguments in the
ancient tradition, such as Aristotelian and Stoic
attempts to distinguish humans from animals,
that unduly influenced later thinking through
their effect on Christianity (Animal Minds and
Human Morals, 1993).
Of the classical Greek philosophers, Sorabji
is especially drawn to Aristotle, his philosophy
of mind and physics in particular. In a lecture
at Gresham College, where he lists Aristotle's
Physics as one of a handful of ancient philo-
sophical works whose reading and study has
been personally seminal, he confesses that he is
temperamentally drawn to Aristotle's philoso-
phy because of his liking 'to get everything
sewn up' ('The Half Dozen Most Seminal
Philosophy Books'). Many of his articles, his
early ones especially, centre on his work, and
many, such as 'Aristotle on Demarcating the
Five Senses', are recognized as indispensable
reading on their subject (see Articles on
Aristotle, vol. 4). Indeed, his writing generally
is characterized by urbanity, breadth of learning
and scope, fair-mindedness towards alterna-
tive ways of assessing the evidence, and lucidity
of exposition. He brings far more to bear on a
subject, much of it fascinating, than one would
normally anticipate. An early illustration is the
account of Greek mnemonics and its philo-
sophical bearing in his first book, Aristotle on
Memory (1972). He challenges existing ortho-
doxies such as the notion that situating
981
SORABJI
Aristotle in the debate on determinism is to be
guilty of projecting backwards a concern about
which Greek philosophy was at that stage
innocent.
Sorabji's first major book, Necessity, Cause
and Blame, is also the first of a trilogy that
canvases themes central to Aristotle's Physics.
The other two are Time, Creation and the
Continuum and Matter, Space and Motion
(1988). Without minimizing the philosophical
originality of Aristotle or other early philoso-
phers, Sorabji pays special regard not only to
the Stoics and Epicureans, but also, unusually,
to the later debates between Neoplatonists and
Christians down to the closing of the philo-
sophical schools, with glimpses beyond to their
impact on the Arabic and medieval Western
traditions, down to the present. For Sorabji, the
history of ancient philosophy encompasses
more than a millennium and ought to be
viewed as a continuous, albeit in its later stages
largely neglected, story. His energetic, sustained
and compelling championing of this cause is
perhaps his most notable contribution. For
him, philosophy has far more to be learned
from the systematic examination of its history
than has often been supposed.
Large stretches of this history had previously
been the preserve of specialists with linguistic
training in Greek and Latin, since many of the
writings from its later period had not been
translated into any modern languages and were
often viewed by specialists themselves as pos-
sessing little philosophical appeal. To alter this
situation, Sorabji has been at pains to demon-
strate the interest, legitimacy and, indeed, the
originality, whether of interpretation or ideas,
that exist within the commentary tradition of
doing philosophy (Aristotle Transformed, esp.
pp. 24-7). The commentators did nothing less
than transform Aristotle in their effort to har-
monize his thought with Plato's in answering
the challenge of Christian critics who argued
the inconsistency of pagan philosophy.
Philoponus, who was one of those critics, was
himself schooled in that tradition and his
Against Proclus on the Eternity of the World
SORABJI
appears on Sorabji's list of personally seminal
works. Sorabji has edited a collection of schol-
arly articles devoted to him (Philoponus and the
Rejection of Aristotelian Science, 1997) and
features his philosophy in his writings, notably
his revolutionizing of dynamics through his
impetus theory of projectile motion, and his
related 'proof of God's creation of the universe
from his opponents' premises, given their con-
ception of infinity as extendable finitude.
To address the unavailability of much of this
writing to modern readers, Sorabji has orga-
nized and directed a major international project
centred at King's College and the Institute of
Classical Studies to publish English transla-
tions of the ancient commentators on Aristotle,
a formidable undertaking that is projected to
include some seventy volumes. It will make it
possible properly to understand the bridge by
which earlier philosophy was transformed and
transmitted to medieval Islam and the Latin-
speaking West. Sorabji's edited collections,
Aristotle Transformed and Aristotle and After,
introduce and supplement this project by
drawing together and stimulating scholarship
on the commentators, some of it translated
into English from German and French.
The setting out of the history of ancient phi-
losophy as an ongoing debate and the advan-
tages of doing so are strikingly illustrated in
Animal Minds and Human Morals, a book
which signals a return of focus to the philoso-
phy of mind. Sorabji sketches a debate that,
while it had earlier progenitors, effectively
began with Aristotle's demarcation of animals
from humans by reference to their supposed
lack of reason. The subsequent debate not only
influenced the philosophy of mind through the
consequential analysis it necessitated of per-
ception and its relation to reason, but also had
implications for the treatment of animals. On
one influential view, animals, lacking reason,
fell outside the scope of justice with the conse-
quence that it was not possible to do them an
injustice. On the other side is another of
Sorabji's seminal texts, the Neoplatonist and
anti-Christian Porphyry's On Abstinence from
982
Killing Animals, which reviews and answers
these arguments and also argues from the
ability of animals to experience pain and terror.
The focus on the philosophy of mind is sus-
tained in what is, at the time of writing,
Sorabji's most recently published book,
Emotion and Peace of Mind, in which Stoic
theories of the emotions play a central role.
The book draws heavily on three more of
Sorabji's seminal works, Seneca's Moral Essays,
Epictetus's Discourses and Augustine's
Confessions. The appearance of this last refers
to the Christian transformation of Stoic ideas
intended to show agitation could be avoided to
a view about the avoidability of sin. Among
other things, Sorabji attempts to show the
relation there can be between, on the one hand,
the analytic examination of the emotions by the
Stoics and, on the other, a practical basis for a
way of life through a 'seamless ... connection
between practice and theory' (Aristotle and
After, p. 209). In particular, he undertakes a
limited defence of the Stoic notion of cognitive
therapy as one legitimate therapeutic method
among many. Sorabji has debated these claims
with Bernard WILLIAMS, who expresses doubts
and reservations not only about the connection
between theory and practice, but also about the
Stoic theory, its rationalism and the conception
of how life should be lived that it supports
('Stoic Philosophy and the Emotions', Aristotle
and After, pp. 211-13). However one judges
that debate, it illustrates the success Sorabji
and his colleagues have had in placing ancient
philosophy in its historical fullness at the heart
of philosophical debate.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle on Memory (1972).
Necessity, Cause and Blame: Perspectives on
Aristotle's Theory (1980).
Time, Creation and the Continuum: Theories
in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
(1983).
Matter, Space and Motion; Theories in
Antiquity and their Sequel (1988).
Animal Minds and Human Morals: The

Origins of the Western Debate (1993)
Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic
Agitation to Christian Temptation
(Oxford, 2000).
The Self: Insights from Different Times and
Places (2005).
Other Relevant Works
'Aristotle and Oxford Philosophy', American
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 6 (1969), pp
127-35.
(Ed. with J. Barnes and M. Schofield),
Articles on Aristotle, 4 vols (1975-9).
(Ed.), Aristotle Transformed: The Ancient
Commentators and their Influence (1990).
(Ed.), Philoponus and the Refection of
Aristotelian Science (1997).
(Ed.), Aristotle and After, BICS Supplement
no. 68 (1997).
The Half Dozen Most Seminal Philosophy
Books', http://www.gresham.ac.uk/
botright/br_rs_040603 .asp, accessed
November 2004.
(Ed.), The Philosophy of the Commentators
200-600 AD: A Sourcebook in Three
Volumes (2003-2004).
Other Relevant Works,
'Afterword', in Cornelia Sorabji, India
Calling, ed. Chandani Lokuge (Oxford,
2001), pp. 213-16.
Further Reading
Salles, Ricardo (ed.), Metaphysics, Soul, and
Ethics: Themes from the Work of Richard
Sorabji (Oxford, 2004). Contains a bibli-
ography of Sorabji's published work as
well as an intellectual autobiography.
Stallworthy, Jon, Singing School (1998).
J. Dybikowski
983
SORLEY
SORLEY, William Ritchie (1855-1935)
William Ritchie Sorley was born in Selkirk on
4 November 1855 and died in Cambridge on
28 July 1935. The son of a minister in the Free
Church, he was educated at the University of
Edinburgh, where among his fellow students
were Andrew Seth (PRINGLE-PATTISON) and
James SETH, Richard Burdon HALDANE and
Robert Adamson, all destined to become both
eminent philosophers and lifelong friends. After
taking his degree in philosophy and mathe-
matics he was awarded the Shaw Fellowship
and acted as assistant to Professor Fraser, while
at the same time studying theology at New
College Edinburgh with a view to entering the
ministry. He visited Tubingen and Berlin in
two successive summers. However, rather than
entering the ministry, he left Edinburgh for
another period of student life at Trinity College,
Cambridge where he was taught by Henry
Sidgwick, among others. In 1883, one year
after graduating with a first in moral sciences,
he was elected to a fellowship at the college.
After several years lecturing in Cambridge and
elsewhere, in 1886 he took up a post at
University College London as deputy to Croom
Robertson, before he was elected, in 1888, to
succeed Andrew Seth as Professor of Logic and
Philosophy at University College Cardiff. In
1889 he married. He had twin sons, the elder
of whom was killed in the war, and a daughter.
In 1894 he was appointed Professor of Moral
Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, and
in 1900 he succeeded Henry Sidgwick in the
Knightbridge Professorship of Moral
Philosophy at Cambridge, becoming a fellow of
King's College. This post he held until his retire-
ment in 1933.
Sorley was among the small group of
pioneers who published articles in the seminal
1883 volume Essays in Philosophical Criticism
(edited by Andrew Seth and Richard Burdon
Haldane). His own contribution 'The Historical
Method', discusses the merits and limitations of
attempting to explain phenomena historically
or in terms of their origins. The method has on
SORELY
the one hand great power to unify and explain
elements that seem otherwise arbitrary or dis-
connected, but its applicability is limited, and
the very nature of our concepts and categories,
and their function as ideals yet to be realized are
things which it cannot explain. Drawing a dis-
tinction between the realistic and the idealistic
use of the method, between explanations
tracing the history of external circumstances or
conditions and ones focusing on thoughts or
ideas, he argues that human progress has been
due to the presence and power of higher ideals
than are derivable from experience itself.
His Trinity College fellowship dissertation,
which also served as his Shaw Lectures, revised
and enlarged, was published in 1885 as The
Ethics of Naturalism. Stressing throughout the
objectivity of value, the book examines various
forms of naturalistic ethics, and in particular the
ethical significance of the theory of evolution.
He objects that naturalism, however great the
achievements of natural science, is unable to
provide us with any end or purpose for
conduct. He praises the theory of evolution for
establishing an organic connection between the
individual and the race, but objects that
whatever we may learn from it about the evo-
lution of conduct, it is no more able than any
naturalism to explain its end. He acknowledges
in this early work some debt to Green, although
by 1904, when he published Recent Tendencies
in Ethics, he was more critical of this type of
absolute idealism, holding that it provided no
definite basis for ethics or for a clear distinction
between good and evil.
His philosophy received its fullest exposition
in lectures given first at Manchester College,
Oxford in 1913-14, expanded as Gifford
Lectures which he delivered at Aberdeen in
1914-15 and finally published under the title
Moral Values and the Idea of God (1918). His
views were in many respects comparable to, or
continuous with, those of A. Seth Pringle-
Pattison. The work addresses itself to the issue
of whether what should be is any kind of guide
to what is, that is to the question of whether
from an examination of the principles of ethics
984
it is possible to learn anything about meta-
physics, about the nature of ultimate reality.
The overall conclusion of the book - a recog-
nition that values are fundamental to our con-
ception of reality obliges us in the end to adopt
an idealistic, even a theistic, view of the world
Reviewing and finding inadequate to our
moral experience systems such as the Cartesian,
the Hegelian and the Spencerian which derive
their ethics from physical or metaphysical
theories, he argues that ethics should be an
independent science, with concepts of its own.
Given that this would be reasonable only if
ethical judgements possessed objective truth
and universality, he argues at length against
moral subjectivism, a position he associates
especially with naturalism. Although it is only
in persons and not in mere things that values
are realized, they remain objective in the sense
that they are not constituted by feeling or
desire, but belong to the fabric of reality itself.
Although, as an idealist, Sorley allows some
sense in which values are relative to mind, the
same holds for all facts, he thinks, and there are
no grounds for denying objectivity to morality
that would not equally be grounds for denying
the objectivity of knowledge in general.
Reality, then, must include value, and con-
sequently any satisfactory view of ultimate
reality must show what its place is in the overall
scheme. Once its existence is recognized, a way
of fitting it together with the rest of reality
must be found. But this is not easy. It is hard to
see how we might bring together the moral
and the natural order when at first sight they
seem so different and incongruous.
Sorley considers the various metaphysical
options. Discussing monism and pluralism, his
sympathy is with pluralism. The monists'
emphasis on unity is their undoing for it leaves
them unable even to explain the incongruity
between the natural and the moral order, let
alone reconcile them. It tends in one or other of
two directions, either out-arid-out naturalism,
or some kind of a mystic union into which the
world, individual people, and the very values
we have outlined all disappear without trace.

Says Sorley:
The one purpose which, so far as I can see,
justifies the field of havoc through which the
world passes to better things, is the creation
of those values which only free minds can
realise. And if free minds, when perfected, are
to pass away, even for absorption in God,
then that value is lost.
(Moral Values, p. 515)
In assessing the case for idealism he distin-
guished between two different kinds of
idealism, the Platonic and the Berkeleyan: the
former tends to interpret reality as an order of
objective or absolute thought, tends to empha-
size the unity of reality and tends to monism,
and the latter holds the essence of reality to lie
in the nature of personality or consciousness
and tends to stress plurality (ibid., p. 477). His
own idealism was of this latter type.
There are two things which need to be
explained, if we are to bring together the moral
and the natural orders. If values are objective,
why do we make such slow and imperfect
progress towards them, and why is it that the
universe in general seems so indifferent to
them? To account for these two points we need
to make room for the notions of purpose and
freedom. The world must be interpreted as pur-
posive, and agents as acting out of freedom. But
this means in effect that our pluralism must be
supplemented with theism; with the notion that
there exists in the universe a pervasive and con-
trolling power which works towards good, the
same way as we do in our own limited sphere.
God Sorley understands in almost entirely
ethical terms, both as the origin and essence of
values themselves, and as the final cause or
purpose of the world. Emphasizing the impor-
tance of time as the means by which value is
attained, and endorsing Malebranche's saying,
'If I held truth captive in my hand, I should
open my hand and let it fly, in order that I
might again pursue and capture it' (Moral
Values, p. 513), he concludes that if we are to
be satisfied, our ultimate fate needs to be under-
985
SPALDING
stood not as something static, however good
might be the state in which we rest, but as an
unending progress and growth.
Sorley's last book, A History of English
Philosophy, published in 1920 and based upon
a series of chapters contributed to The
Cambridge History of English Literature, dis-
played his considerable talents as a historian of
philosophy. Even-handed and accessible, it
served for many years as a standard history.
However, it is primarily as a moral philosopher
in the personal idealist tradition that Sorley's
place in the history of philosophy rests. Neither
in his day nor since has Sorley ever been read
as much as he perhaps deserves, falling under
the shadow of his near contemporary A. Seth
Pringle-Pattison, who developed a similar but
better known position.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Ethics of Naturalism (Edinburgh, 1885).
Recent Tendencies in Ethics (Edinburgh,
1904).
The Moral Life and Moral Worth
(Cambridge, 1911).
Moral Values and the Idea of God
(Cambridge, 1918).
A History of English Philosophy (Cambridge,
1920).
W. J. Mander
SPALDING, Kenneth Jay (1879-1962)
K.J. Spalding was born in Eastbourne on 17
March 1879 and died in Surrey on 20 January
1962. His father was H.B. Spalding. He
married Amy Katherine Baynes and they had
two children, a son and a daughter. Amy died
in 1932, and he did not remarry. Spalding was
educated at the College de St Servan in France
and Eastbourne College, and later earned an
MA degree at Balliol College, Oxford. As a
SPALDING
result of his early French studies, he was
enabled to take up the post of lecturer in French
at Culham College during the years 1903 to
1905. Subsequently, he was employed as
lecturer in logic and philosophy at King's
College London (1905-12). Spalding then
became Professor of Classical Literature and
Philosophy at Queen's College London, a
position he assumed in 1909 and in which he
continued until 1928. From 1928 onwards, he
was a fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford.
While Spalding is probably best known for
his book The Philosophy of Shakespeare
(1953), he was also the author of several other
works on religion, ethics, Chinese thought and
additional subjects. His articles appeared in
various journals, including Mind. It is clear
that overall, Spalding's philosophical outlook
had a religious cast to it. In Talks on
Philosophy (1931), for example, he takes it as
his task to explain and remedy the problem
that stands in the way of philosophy being a
'"way of life."' Wisdom was [once] connected
through it with goodness, and knowledge with
virtue. This can hardly be said of philosophy at
the present day' (p. 1), as it wavers in its alle-
giances between science and religion. Spalding's
diagnosis is that the mind cannot find complete
satisfaction either in knowledge of nature or the
world of spirit. Therefore, neither of these can
yield 'that self-complete being of which reason
is the "want"' (ibid., p. 94). It turns out that
there is and can be only one 'self-complete
being', and that is God. Rational inquiry
reaches its point of satisfaction here, for in
God, both 'Ideal' and 'Object' perfectly
coincide. And, in a manner reminiscent of
Spinoza (whom Spalding quotes at length in the
'Preface' to this work), the finite existence of
mortal beings such as ourselves is a facet of
God's mind (Talks on Philosophy, p. 151).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Pilgrim's Way (1910).
Desire and Reason: Being an Account of the
Origin and Development of Intellectual
Principles (1922).
986
Talks on Philosophy (Oxford, 1931).
Three Chinese Thinkers [International Series
of Chinese Studies] (Nanking, 1947).
The Philosophy of Shakespeare (Oxford,
1953).
Essays on the Evolution of Religion, and an
Essay on Law and Morality (Oxford,
1954).
Reflections at the End of Life (Cardiff,
1960).
Michael Allen Fox
SPARSHOTT, Francis Edward (1926-)
Francis Edward Sparshott was born in Chatham
on 19 May 1926 and was educated at Corpus
Christi College, Oxford. He joined the University
of Toronto in 1950 as a lecturer in philosophy
and in 1955 he became a member of Victoria
College, University of Toronto. Sparshott was
appointed Professor of Philosophy in 1964,
University Professor in 1982, and professor
emeritus at the University of Toronto and
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Victoria
College, University of Toronto in 1991. He held
visiting appointments at universities in Illinois
(1966), Montreal (1971), Victoria, British
Columbia (1981), Christchurch, New Zealand
(1987) and York University, Toronto (1989-91).
Sparshott was appointed fellow of the Royal
Society of Canada (1977) and awarded Doctor
of Laws by the University of Toronto (2000). He
served as President of philosophical associations
in Canada and the USA. Although a philosopher
by profession, writing poetry is his mission. He
was President of the Canadian League of Poets
(1977-9). (Ten philosophy books are surpassed
by eleven - soon to be twelve - poetry books.)
Sparshott's witty footnotes throughout his phi-
losophy books are legendary. He has been
widely in demand as a speaker, in spite of his
unscripted asides, often scathing in their indif-

ference to the recipient, who might be seated in
the audience.
Sparshott established his reputation with An
Enquiry Into Goodness (1958) which he referred
to as an 'aid to understanding, not a means to
salvation' (p. 295). His subsequent publications
were mainly on aesthetics and the classical
philosophers.
The Structure of Aesthetics (1963) lays out the
fundamental areas of inquiry in aesthetics: the
concept of a work of art, the meanings of artistic
language, the legitimacy of artistic criticism and
the capacity of art to express ideas about the
human condition. Sparshott was not determin-
ing what those ideas are. For his own thoughts
on the human condition one must seek out his
poetry. In spite of his keen analytic skills,
Sparshott warned against finding single purposes
or meanings for artworks. The Concept of
Criticism (1967) argues for the interrelatedness
of theories and urged the applications of several
techniques of critical analysis. Looking For
Philosophy (1972), explores the analytic
approach to philosophical questions. His playful,
witty review of Bertrand RUSSELL, G.E. MOORE,
Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN, Gilbert RYLE and J.L.
AUSTIN left some colleagues wondering about
his seriousness as a scholar. Doubts were quelled
absolutely with The Theory of the Arts (1982).
This book promotes the theory that aesthetic
concepts and theories have a specific historical
development, that through their use they are
transformed over time. Art is primarily an intel-
lectual activity; it is only objectified when
regarded as a performance. Sparshott cleared
the muddy waters of modernist interpretive aes-
thetics, distinguishing between the classical def-
inition of fine art - a designed performance or
creation - and the alternate theories of art as
pure creativity or expressed intuition. Off the
Ground (1988) is one of two landmark books
on dance. The above establishes the categories
and components of dance as an activity. A
Measured Pace (1995) traces the evolution of the
activity of dance to a performance, exploring
the concepts that begin to influence our recog-
nition of a work of art before us.
987
SPARSHOTT
Aristotle: Taking Life Seriously (1995) inter-
prets the Nicomachean Ethics as a single, specu-
lative, but deductive argument about making
choices. This interpretation differs from the
standard approaches which often regard the
classic work as a series of independent observa-
tions on friendship and living well. The Future of
Aesthetics (1998) defends the proposition that
even if the concepts of aesthetics evolve, the
activity of doing aesthetics is sustained by a rec-
ognized durable structure. His publications in
philosophy include more than fifty book chapters
and journal articles.
The aesthetic concepts that he dutifully, almost
painfully, pins down on the philosophic page
takeflightin his poetry - metaphorical artworks
packed with the intellectual treasures of a disci-
plined but far-seeing mind.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An Enquiry into Goodness (Toronto and
Chicago, 1958).
The Structure of Aesthetics (Toronto and
London, 1963).
The Concept of Criticism (Oxford, 1967).
Looking for Philosophy (Montreal, 1972).
The Theory of the Arts (Princeton, 1982).
Off the Ground: First Steps to a Philosophical
Consideration of the Dance (Princeton,
1988).
Aristotle: Taking Life Seriously, A Study of the
Argument of the Nicomachean Ethics
(Toronto, 1995,1996).
A Measured Pace: Towards a Philosophical
Understanding of the Arts of Dance
(Toronto, 1995).
The Future of Aesthetics (Toronto, 1998).
Other Relevant Works
The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Special
Issue in honour of Francis Sparshott, vol. 31,
no. 2 (Summer 1997).
The City Dwellers and Other Verses (Toronto,
2000).
Elizabeth Trott
SPRIGGE
SPRIGGE, Timothy Lauro Squire (1932-)
Timothy L.S. Sprigge was born in London on
14 January 1932. He went up to Gonville and
Caius College at the University of Cambridge,
where he gained his BA in English in 1955. He
then transferred to philosophy for the MA and
PhD degrees, finishing in 1961, first supervised
by R.T.H. Redpath and then by AJ. AYER
under an arrangement in which he took his
PhD at Cambridge in absentia working under
Ayer at University College London. Upon com-
pletion of the PhD, he received a position as a
researcher on Jeremy Bentham's manuscripts
and as temporary lecturer at University College.
In 1963 he was appointed lecturer in philoso-
phy at the University of Sussex and remained
there until 1979, when he was appointed to the
Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at the
University of Edinburgh. In 1989 he retired to
become emeritus professor and endowment
fellow. He was President of the Aristotelian
Society in 1991 and he was elected a fellow of
the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1993. As a
proponent of animal rights, he served as
Chairman of Advocates for Animals in the
1980s and 1990s.
While making important contributions to
philosophical topics as diverse as conscious-
ness, time, personal identity, punishment, cen-
sorship and animal rights, Sprigge is also con-
sidered the doyen of British idealists at the end
of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-
first centuries. His command of the history of
philosophy and particularly the classic
American philosophers gave him a basis for
the construction of his own system of philo-
sophical idealism - a system of metaphysics
and ethics based on panpsychism, absolute
idealism, determinationism and utilitarianism.
This system shows strong influences from
William James, George Santayana, Josiah
Royce, Jeremy Bentham, F.H. BRADLEY, Alfred
North WHITEHEAD, Arthur Schopenhauer and
Baruch Spinoza.
Against the current of the dominant analyt-
ical philosophy of the twentieth century,
988
Sprigge produced a philosophy in the grand
style of metaphysicians of the past. The very
title of his magnum opus, The Vindication of
Absolute Idealism (1983) was a challenge to
those philosophers who believed that absolute
idealism was abandoned with the critiques of
Bertrand RUSSELL, G.E. MOORE and Sprigge's
own teacher AJ. Ayer. But in opposition to
the orthodox philosophy that he found to be
arid and intensely scholastic, Sprigge shows
that his unique form of idealism is a powerful
means of addressing and attempting to solve
contemporary problems.
The starting-point of this system is the reality
of consciousness investigated from within. This
he called the 'eidetic' approach, otherwise
known as the phenomenological or the intro-
spective investigation of consciousness that he
launched in his inaugural lecture at Edinburgh,
The Importance of Subjectivity' (1982).
Sprigge argued that we grasp the most concrete
reality in our own knowledge of ourselves as
centres of consciousness and via empathy the
reality of consciousness in other human beings
and animals. Reality, for him, is composed of
innumerable, mutually interacting momentary
centres of experience related to form-enduring
centres of experience or consciousness such as
we find in ourselves. The momentary centres
are pulses of experience that come together
with other momentary centres in its stream to
form the continuity of the enduring centres
across time. These cumulate in one final Whole
- the Absolute, which occurs as one grand
epochal moment of the universe.
According to Sprigge's panpsychism, the
whole universe is to be regarded as a living
organism that is conscious or sentient. The
greater part of what we call 'inanimate nature'
is constituted of low-grade centres of experience
that merely feel the pulse of Being as parts of a
greater totality. As we move up the animal
kingdom, various degrees of high-grade centres
of experience arise, including the self-reflective
consciousness of human experience. What we
ordinarily understand as the physical world is
really mutually interacting centres of experi-

ence that form the basis of the phenomenal
appearances or abstract structures grasped in
the sciences.
Since the Absolute occurs as one unified
moment of consciousness, time is unreal. For
Sprigge, all of the momentary centres form
'space-time worms' that exist eternally within
the Absolute. This means that our ordinary
distinctions between past, present and future
are illusory. Past and future are only relative to
the moment experienced as present. In them-
selves all moments are intrinsically present.
This ontological thesis about time is what
Sprigge calls 'determinationism', in contrast to
the epistemological view commonly known as
'determinism'. The latter is largely a matter of
predicting future events from the laws of
nature, whereas the former advances the notion
that the past and the future are as real as the
present.
Sprigge powerfully argued that our current
emphasis on a physicalist or materialist world-
view has done serious damage to our moral
sense. Instead of treating objects in our phe-
nomenal world as mere matter to be used to
our ends, the panpsychist view requires that we
treat the whole of nature as intrinsically
valuable. The understanding of consciousness
manifest throughout the universe involves a
moral sensitivity beyond the imperatives of tra-
ditional anthropomorphic ethics. We have
obligations not only to our fellow human
beings but to animals and the environment as
well. Sprigge embraced the utilitarian view
insofar as he recognized the value of pain and
pleasure in moral calculations, but he rejected
the cost/benefit analysis by which certain intrin-
sically bad actions turn out to be morally per-
missible because they promote the interest of
the greater number.
Unlike many who have regarded philosophy
merely as an academic exercise or puzzle-
solving activity, Sprigge constructed a philoso-
phy that is theoretical, practical and personal.
His metaphysics and ethics present principles
by which one lives the moral and rational life.
Sprigge lived by these principles and sought to
989
SPRIGGE
change public policy on the practice of vivisec-
tion and other harmful and cruel treatment of
animals. Like Spinoza, he found religion in the
monistic view of the universe, but religion
stripped of myth, superstition and intolerance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Facts, Words and Beliefs(1970).
Santayana: An Examination of his
Philosophy (1974).
The Vindication of Absolute Idealism
(Edinburgh, 1983).
Theories of Existence (Harmondsworth,
1984).
The Rational Foundation of Ethics (1988).
James and Bradley: American Truth and
British Reality (Chicago, 1993).
Other Relevant Works
'The Privacy of Experience', Mind, vol. 78
(1969), pp. 512-21.
'Final Causes', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 45 (1971),
pp. 149-70.
'Ideal Immortality', The Southern Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 10 (1972), pp. 219-35.
'Spinoza's Identity Theory', Inquiry, vol. 20
(1977), pp. 419-45.
'Metaphysics, Physicalism and Animal
Rights', Inquiry, vol. 22 (1979), pp.
101-43.
'The Importance of Subjectivity: An
Inaugural Lecture', Inquiry, vol. 25 (1982),
pp. 143-63.
'Intrinsic Connectedness', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 88 (1987-8), pp.
129-45.
'Consciousness', Synthese, vol. 98 (1994), pp.
73-93.
'Is Spinozism a Religion?', Studia Spinozana,
vol. 11 (1995), pp. 137-62.
'Idealism, Humanism and the Environment',
in Paul Coates and Daniel D. Hutto (eds),
Current Issues in Idealism (Bristol, 1996),
pp. 267-302.
'Pantheism', The Monist, vol. 80 (1997), pp.
191-217.
SPRIGGE
'Has Speculative Metaphysics a Future5, The
Monist, vol. 81 (1998), pp. 513-33.
Further Reading
McHenry, Leemon B., Timothy L. S.
Sprigge', in Philip B. Dematteis, Peter S.
Fosl and Leemon B. McHenry (eds),
British Philosophers, 1800-2000 (Detroit,
2002), pp. 266-74.
Naik, A.D., 'Sprigge's Argument for Absolute
Idealism', Darshana International, vol. 31,
(1992), pp. 36-44.
Robinson, Howard, 'How to Give Analytical
Rigour to "Soupy Metaphysics"', Inquiry,
vol. 40/41 (1997), pp. 95-114.
Leemon McHenry
STAGE, Walter Terence (1886-1967)
Walter Terence Stace was born in London on
17 November 1886 and died in Laguna Beach,
California on 2 August 1967. He was educated
at Bath College (1895-1901) and Fettes
College, Edinburgh (1902-1904), and received
his BA in 1908 and his DLitt in 1929, both
from Trinity College Dublin. From 1910 to
1932 he served with the British Civil Service in
Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), in various positions
including private secretary to the Governor,
district judge with the Land Settlement Office,
and, from 1931 to 1932 as Mayor of Columbo.
Upon retirement from the Civil Service he
moved to Princeton University, where he was
employed from 1932 to 1955, first as lecturer
until 1935 and then as Stuart Professor of
Philosophy. He received awards and honours
from the Bollingen Foundation, the American
Council of Learned Societies and Phi Beta
Kappa, and served as President of the American
Philosophical Association in 1949. He retired
from the university in 1955 and received the
title of professor emeritus. Stace travelled
990
widely throughout his life, visiting France, Italy,
Egypt, Malaya, China, Hong Kong, Japan and
Canada, in addition to his long sojourn in
Ceylon. He was married twice (to Adelaide
Vaughan Cooke of London in 1910, and to
Blanche Bianca Beven of Negombo, Ceylon in
1925) and was the father of three children
(Beryl Mary Cynthia by his first marriage, and
Noel John, died 1960, and Jennifer Jean, later
Dawson, by his second). He lived the last years
of his life in California.
W.T. Stace was a prolific philosopher,
authoring fourteen books and a number of key
articles in American and British journals. He
described his political beliefs as 'liberal'.
Although he originally planned to take orders
in the Church of England, Stace became, in his
own words, 'too sceptical'. It was while
working with the British Civil Service in Ceylon
that he began writing about philosophy, pro-
ducing books on the history of Greek philoso-
phy (1920), Hegel (1924), aesthetics (1929)
and epistemology (1932).
In Ceylon, also, he developed an interest in
Hinduism, Buddhism and other world reli-
gions, an interest that became the basis much
later of his published work on philosophy of
mysticism. Altogether he devoted about thirty
years to the examination of mystical phenomena,
starting out as a sceptic who gradually came to
believe that a commitment to empiricism
demanded the serious consideration of mystical
experience, and finally becoming convinced of
the value and importance of mysticism.
There is a strong theoretical continuity in
Stace's work, from the early anti-realist episte-
mology of The Theory of Knowledge and
Existence (1932), through his development of a
'phenomenalist metaphysics' in The Nature of
the World: An Essay in Phenomenalist
Metaphysics (1940), his ongoing defence of
empiricism in articles such as 'Positivism' (1944)
and 'Some Misinterpretations of Empiricism'
(1958), his early explorations of religion and
mystical consciousness in "Naturalism and
Religion' (1949-50), 'Oriental Conceptions of
Detachment and Enlightenment' (1952-3) and

'Mysticism and Human Reason' (1955), to the
final mature expression of his philosophy of
religion and philosophy of mysticism in
Mysticism and Philosophy (1960) and The
Teachings of the Mystics, an edited collection
selected and introduced by Stace (1960).
In important ways Stace's work was closely
connected to the mainstream of Anglo-
American philosophy in the early to mid twen-
tieth century. In his metaphysics and episte-
mology he was not to any great degree an inno-
vator, and his phenomenalism was derivative
from the work of more original minds. The
concept of the given is the link connecting
Stace's thought with that of such philosophers
as A.J. AYER, C.D. BROAD, C.I. Lewis, G.E.
MOORE, H.H. PRICE, L. Susan STEBBING and
especially Bertrand RUSSELL. Yet he was at times
reluctant to acknowledge his obvious indebt-
edness to them, mainly because of what he
regarded as their failure to follow their assump-
tions to their farthest implications. Indeed,
because of his well-developed awareness of the
gaps and weaknesses in the phenomenalism of
his predecessors, he anticipated and responded
to many potential criticisms of his own theory.
His scholarly works are distinguished by his
ongoing rejection both of naive realism and of
relativism, and his meticulous examination of
the full significance of an epistemology and
metaphysics predicated upon a phenomenalist
given. Employing principles of reason, he
sought to show how genuine knowledge could
be assembled on the basis of this empirical
foundation. According to Stace's general
theory, experience is a multitude of individual
givens confronting each solitary mind. From its
initial position of solipsism, the mind infers the
existence of other minds, then constructs the
'fiction' that its presentations may exist unper-
ceived and are qualities of external physical
objects.
Stace came to believe that he could accu-
rately understand many aspects of human exis-
tence by means of his distinction between the
percept or empirical presentation on the one
hand, and its interpretation or concept on the
991
STAGE
other. Always his work was motivated by a
search for commonalities within human expe-
rience and by the use of careful inductive and
deductive reasoning on the basis of that expe-
rience. He applied this general method to a
variety of different philosophical fields, pub-
lishing work in aesthetics, ethics, political phi-
losophy and social commentary. Indeed, in The
Concept of Morals(1937) Stace acknowledged
that there was a 'common theme' within his
work, though not one that he had intended
from the start of his philosophical career,
namely the reasoned rejection of relativism
without taking refuge in some form of abso-
lutism. His aim was always to distinguish the
merely subjective from that which is objective
and 'real'. For example, with respect to under-
standing what he called 'the essence of beauty',
he proposed that 'beauty is the fusion of an
intellectual content, consisting of empirical non-
perceptual concepts, with a perceptual field, in
such a manner that the intellectual content and
the perceptual field are indistinguishable from
one another; and in such manner as to consti-
tute the revelation of an aspect of reality' (The
Meaning of Beauty, p. 43). In The Concept of
Morals he argued that morality is not an end in
itself but a means to happiness, that it is uni-
versal, and that ethical judgements can only be
justified by reference to human beings' actual
desires, wants and sanctions. Rejecting ethical
relativism, he defined 'the moral law' as 'Act
always so as to increase human happiness as
much as possible. And at the same time act on
the principle that all persons, including yourself,
are intrinsically of equal value' (The Concept of
Morals, p. 182). In The Destiny of Western
Man (1942) he used this fundamental moral
law to defend democratic political principles
against totalitarianism.
Stace resolutely rejected logical positivism,
not because of its insistence that meaning must
be understood in terms of some possible expe-
rience, but rather because in his view it too
narrowly construed experience, limiting it to
human sense-experience. With his broader con-
strual of experience, and motivated by his fas-
STAGE
cination with mysticism, he opened up space in
his philosophical system for mystical experi-
ence. Indeed, Stace's most important and
indeed pioneering philosophical contributions
were in the philosophy of mysticism, including
the often-cited Mysticism and Philosophy but
also Time and Eternity (1952), The Mystical
Form of Western Spirituality' (1968) and a
book-length poetic meditation on mysticism
(The Gate of Silence, 1952).
Stace offered a phenomenological analysis
of mystical experience, defined the main
problems raised by mystical experience, and
offered answers to those problems that were
consistent with his philosophical worldview.
It could be said that Stace was responsible for
setting the initial terms of the debate in Anglo-
American philosophy of religion and episte-
mology about the philosophical value of mys-
ticism and mystical experience. Although these
terms were eventually vigorously rejected (see,
for example, Katz), Stace's main contribution
to the philosophy of mysticism was his insis-
tence that mystical consciousness is not neces-
sarily an isolated, inexplicable state, but a form
of experience, and that it can therefore be
understood within the framework of a more
general theory of experience. Stace's claims
about the nature and epistemic value of
mystical experience were at least partly the
product of his working out of problems that
had concerned him for decades. They both
found their justification in, and illustrated, his
carefully constructed 'phenomenalist meta-
physics' and epistemology.
Stace believed that although interpretations
of mysticism may vary from one culture to
another, depending chiefly upon the cognitive
content of the prevailing religion, mystical expe-
rience itself, at least in its 'core', is everywhere
the same and has the same characteristics. He
distinguished between two forms of mystical
experience, 'introvertive' and 'extrovertive', the
latter of which he regarded as an incomplete
form of the former, because he thought the
latter involved ordinary sense-experience
whereas the former did not. He also distin-
992
guished between the core mystical experience
itself and the various interpretations placed
upon it by different mystics, and argued that
what he regarded as the unanimity of the
reports of the mystics is evidence for its objec-
tivity. Stace regarded the core mystical experi-
ence as a private, pure, unitive, paradoxical,
ineffable and undifferentiated given, which is
identical with its object, the 'Universal Self,
and which is subjected to various interpreta-
tions by different mystics, interpretations that
may be strongly influenced by the mystics'
culture and religious beliefs. He concluded that
mystical experience is 'transsubjective': it
involved contact with a 'transcendental
absolute Being', a being that: was, he thought,
the 'object' not only of Western theistic reli-
gions but also of Hinduism and Buddhism.
Stace wrote with a very clear and plain style,
highly accessible to readers. In so doing he was
faithful to his belief, stated in Man Against
Darkness (1967, which was aimed at a general
audience), that philosophy is deeply rooted in
human life and that all writing should aim, as
far as possible, to be 'popular', that is to be
comprehensible to general readers. Not a
sceptic, he believed in philosophical progress
and thought that the sincere, careful thinker
could produce genuinely valuable resolutions
not only of technical problems in epistemology,
metaphysics and philosophy of religion, but
also of moral issues and the social and political
challenges facing the first half of the twentieth
century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Critical History of Greek Philosophy
(1920).
The Philosophy of Hegel; A Systematic
Exposition (1924).
The Meaning of Beauty; A Theory of
Aesthetics (1929).
The Theory of Knowledge and Existence
(Oxford, 1932).
The Concept of Morals (1937).
The Nature of the World: An Essay in
Phenomenalist Metaphysics (Princeton,

1940).
The Destiny of Western Man (New York,
1942).
What Are Our Values? [Montgomery
Lectures on Contemporary Civilization]
(1950).
The Gate of Silence (Boston, 1952).
Time and Eternity: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Religion (Princeton, 1952).
Religion and the Modern Mind (1953).
Mysticism and Philosophy (Philadelphia,
1960; London, 1961).
(Ed.), The Teachings of the Mystics (New
York, 1960).
Man Against Darkness and Other Essays
(Pittsburgh, 1967).
Other Relevant Works
The Present Dilemma in Philosophy', The
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 31 (1934), pp.
365-72.
'Sir Arthur Eddington and the Physical
World', Philosophy, vol. 9 (1934), pp.
39-50.
'Metaphysics and Meaning', Mind, vol. 44
(1935), pp. 417-38.
'The Philosophical Issues Involved in the
War', Philosophy, vol. 16 (1941), pp.
242-56.
'The Refutation of Realism', Mind, vol. 43
(1943), pp. 145-55.
(with Ralph M. Blake and Arthur E.
Murphy), 'Can Speculative Philosophy be
Defended?', Philosophical Review, vol. 52
(1943), pp. 116-43.
'Interestingness', Philosophy, vol. 19 (1944),
pp. 233-41.
'Positivism', Mind, vol. 53 (1944), pp.
215-37.
'Russell's Neutral Monism', in P.A. Schilpp
(ed.), The Philosophy ofBertrand Russell
(Evanston, 1944), pp. 353-84.
The Problem of Unreasoned Beliefs', pt 1,
Mind, vol. 54 (1945), pp. 27-49.
The Problem of Unreasoned Beliefs', pt 2,
Mind, vol. 54 (1945), pp. 122-47.
'Are All Empirical Statements Merely
993
STAGE
Hypotheses?', The Journal of Philosophy,
vol. 44 (1947), pp. 29-38.
'Metaphysics and Existence', Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, vol. 9
(1948-9), pp. 458-61.
The Parmenidean Dogma', Philosophy, vol.
24 (1949), pp. 195-204.
'Naturalism and Religion', Proceedings and
Addresses of the American Philosophical
Association, vol. 23 (1949-50), pp. 22-46.
'Oriental Conceptions of Detachment and
Enlightenment', Philosophy East and West,
vol. 2 (1952-3), pp. 20-30.
'Mysticism and Human Reason' [Riecker
Memorial Lecture 1] (Tucson, 1955).
'Some Misinterpretations of Empiricism',
Mind, vol. 67 (1958), pp. 465-84.
The Mystical Form of Western Spirituality',
Philosophy East and West, vol. 9-10
(1959-60), pp. 43-4.
The Mystical Form of Western Spirituality',
in Charles A. Moore (ed.), Philosophy and
Culture East and West (Honolulu, 1968),
pp. 302-15.
Further Reading
Brown, Patterson, 'Stace's Refutation of
Realism', Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, vol. 31
(1970-71), pp. 426-8.
Katz, Steven T., Mysticism and Philosophical
Analysis (New York, 1978).
Masson, J. Moussaieff and T.C. Masson,
The Study of Mysticism: A Criticism of
W. T. Stace', Journal of Indian Philosophy,
vol. 4 (1976), pp. 109-25.
Meehan, Francis X., 'Professor Stace and the
Principle of Causality', The New
Scholasticism, vol. 24 (1950), pp.
398-416.
Overall, Christine, 'Mysticism,
Phenomenalism, and W. T. Stace',
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society, vol. 18 (1982), pp. 177-90.
Price, H.H., 'Mr. W. T. Stace on the
Construction of the External World',
Mind, vol. 42 (1933), pp. 273-98.
STAGE
Rohatyn, Dennis A., The Refutation of
Stace', Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (1973),
pp. 32-8.
'Stace, Walter Terence', The Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, vol. 8 (1967), pp. 2-3.
Stedman, Ralph and H.B. Acton, 'Mr. Stace's
"Refutation of Realism"', Mind, vol. 43
(1934), pp. 349-53.
Wainwright, William J., 'Stace and
Mysticism', The Journal of Religion, vol.
50 (1970), pp. 139-54.
Christine Overall
STAPLEDON, William Olaf (1886-1950)
Olaf Stapledon was born in Wallasey on 10
May 1886 and died at his home in Caldy on the
Wirral on 6 September 1950. In 1919 he
married his cousin, Agnes Zena Miller, with
whom he had a son and a daughter. He was
educated at Abbotsholme School and Balliol
College, Oxford, where he read modern history.
After serving with the Friends Ambulance Unit
during World War I, Stapledon obtained a PhD
in philosophical psychology from the University
of Liverpool in 1920. He subsequently taught
for the Workers' Educational Association and as
an extension lecturer for Liverpool University,
running courses on literature, psychology and
industrial history as well as on philosophy. In
the 1930s Stapledon's non-fiction writings
established him among the group of left-leaning
popular intellectuals that included such thinkers
as J.B.S. HALDANE and C.E.M. JOAD.
Nonetheless, his lasting fame rests on his 'philo-
sophical romances' (science fiction). His first
book of fiction, Last and First Men (1930),
received encomiums from such diverse writers
as H.G. WELLS and Jorge Luis Borges, while
his masterpiece, Star Maker (1937), has been
proclaimed as the greatest work of science
fiction ever written.
994
The metaphysics of Alfred North WHTTEHEAD
exerted a profound influence on Stapledon's
philosophical ideas. In Philosophy and Living, a
two-volume popular introduction to philosophy
published by Penguin in 1939, Stapledon
described Whitehead's thought as 'the most bril-
liant, most comprehensive, most significant ...
metaphysical system of our time'. He was
attracted by Whitehead's attempt to develop a
metaphysics that would be compatible with the
results of modern science. Humanity needed
answers to the perennial questions about fate,
death and human purpose, but within the context
of a system of belief that was consistent with sci-
entific thought. Nonetheless, Stapledon came to
believe that a metaphysical belief system could
not ultimately rest on a rational foundation: thus
he came to refer to it as 'myth'.
Stapledon did not doubt the reality of the
material world investigated by science and thus
he rejected metaphysical idealism. But he also
repudiated materialism, including in its Marxist
dialectical form. Stapledon challenged the con-
ventional dualism of mind and matter, and
believed the material world was suffused with
'spirit': in Star Maker even the stars and planets
embody consciousness, emotions and spiritual-
ity. Spirit is an active force, prompting the
universe to undergo a process of evolutionary
creativity which affects God himself, who learns
from his creations. Stapledon's God is a remote,
impersonal creator, but one whose creative
powers and abilities grow with the creation of
a succession of universes. Nothing of value is
lost: it is prehended by succeeding creations and
is incorporated in them. The ultimate goal for
created beings, Stapledon suggested, is to
achieve the lucidity that comes from appreciat-
ing the beauty and harmony of the creator's
efforts. Good and evil, the darkness and light,
complement each other by enhancing the beauty
of the whole. This is human life seen sub specie
aeternitatis.
The concept of 'spirit' also suffused Stapledon's
social philosophy, and led him to a rejection of
both Marxism and liberal individualism.
Although he had sympathy for many of

Marxism's social and economic aims, the charge
- made by Leslie Fielder among others - that he
was a fellow traveller is unfounded. Stapledon
believed the individual could only be realized
through the community, and the aim of the com-
munity should be the fullest flowering of the indi-
vidual. This concept of 'personality-in-commu-
nity', a form of unity in diversity, points to an
organic society and may reflect the influence of
John Ruskin, of whom Stapledon's mother was
a great admirer. Several of his non-fiction works
examined this theme, including A Modern
Theory of Ethics (1929), Waking World (1934),
Beyond the 'Isms' (1942) and Saints and
Revolutionaries (1939).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Modern Theory of Ethics: A Study of the
Relations of Ethics and Psychology (1929).
Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and
Far Future (1930).
Waking World (1934).
Star Maker (1937).
Philosophy and Living, 2 vols
(Harmonds worth, 1939).
Saints and Revolutionaries [I Believe, no. 10]
(1939).
Beyond the 'Isms' [Searchlight Books, no. 16]
(1942).
Other Relevant Works
'Mr. Bertrand Russell's Ethical Beliefs',
International Journal of Ethics, vol. 37
(July 1927), pp. 390-402.
The Location of Physical Objects', Journal of
Philosophical Studies, vol. 4 (January
1929), pp. 64-75.
'Morality, Scepticism and Theism',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
44 (1943-4), pp. 15-42.
'Interplanetary Man?', Journal of the British
Interplanetary Society, vol. 7 (November
1948), pp. 212-33.
'The Meaning of "Spirit"', in Peter Albery
and Sylvia Read (eds), Here and Now:
Miscellany No. 5 (1950), pp. 72-82.
995
STEBBING
Further Reading
Clark, Stephen R.L., 'Olaf Stapledon
(1886-1950)', Interdisciplinary Science
Reviews, vol. 18 (Spring 1993), pp.
112-19.
Crossley, Robert, Olaf Stapledon: Speaking
for the Future (Syracuse and Liverpool,
1994).
Fiedler, Leslie A., Olaf Stapledon: A Man
Divided (New York, 1983).
Michael W. Taylor
ST CLAIR, Mary Amelia, see Sinclair
STEBBING, Lizzie Susan (1885-1943)
Lizzie Susan Stebbing was born in Wimbledon
on 2 December 1885 and died in London on 11
September 1943. She was the youngest of six
children. Her father, the barrister Alfred Charles
Stebbing, died when she was two and her
mother, Elizabeth, daughter of William Elstob,
died when she was sixteen. Of delicate health,
she was educated privately until she went to
Girton College, Cambridge, where she read
history (recommended as less strenuous than
classics, which is what she had wanted to read).
She took Pt I of the Tripos in 1906, Pt II in
1907, and then stayed on to take Pt I of the
Moral Sciences Tripos in 1908. According to
John WISDOM (1943), it was reading BRADLEY'S
Appearance and Reality that converted her to
philosophy, and she was tutored by W.E.
JOHNSON. From 1911 until 1924 she taught and
was subsequently Director in Moral Sciences
Studies at Girton and Newnham Colleges (and
research fellow at Girton during 1923^).
STEBBING
In 1912 she gained an MA with distinction
from the University of London with a thesis
entitled 'Pragmatism and French Voluntarism',
and from 1913 to 1915 she lectured in phi-
losophy at King's College London. She was
also visiting lecturer in philosophy at Westfield
College London from 1914 to 1920, and at
Homerton Training College from 1914 to
1921. In 1915, with her sister and two friends,
she took over the running of the Kingsley
Lodge school for girls in Hampstead, where
she taught history for a while and was
Principal until her death. From 1915 she also
taught philosophy as a part-time lecturer at
Bedford College London. She became a full-
time lecturer there in 1920, reader in 1927
and professor in 1933. She was elected a fellow
of the Royal Historical Society in 1916, and
was awarded a DLit from the University of
London in 1931. She was visiting professor at
Columbia University, New York, in 1931-2,
President of the Aristotelian Society in 1933-4,
and President of the Mind Association in
1934-5. She never married.
Stebbing's central philosophical interests lay
in logic and logical analysis. But developing
out of this, she also wrote on the foundations
of science and more popular works on the
importance of clear thinking and definite ideals
in private and public life. From her first
academic post she was highly active in the
Aristotelian Society, regularly attending its
meetings and contributing papers - seventeen in
all over the course of her career. With Austin
DUNCAN-JONES, C.A. MACE and Gilbert RYLE,
she was one of the founders of the journal
Analysis, which first appeared in 1933 and
soon established itself as one of the main
journals of analytic philosophy. She also con-
tributed regularly to Mind, writing critical
notices and engaging in discussions, most
notably with H.W.B. JOSEPH. From the 1920s
until her death in 1943 she was at the forefront
of British analytic philosophy, and her books
remained influential well into the 1950s.
Her first main work was A Modern
Introduction to Logic, a substantial textbook
996
(of some 500 pages) on logic and methodology,
and the book that established her reputation as
a major exponent of modern logic (in its
broadest sense) and a central figure in the devel-
opment of analytic philosophy in Britain. First
published in 1930, it was revised and supple-
mented for the second edition of 1933. A third
edition came out in the year before she died,
and four subsequent editions after her death,
the seventh in 1950. The book was still being
reprinted in the 1960s, and it remains a classic
statement of analytic philosophy as it consoli-
dated itself in the 1930s. Indeed, it is the first
textbook to have appeared anywhere that
sought to introduce modern logic in the
broader context of philosophical concerns with
the nature of logic and methodology generally.
The book falls into three parts. The first part
deals with logic, covering both traditional
(Aristotelian) and modern (Russellian) logic,
the second deals with scientific method, and the
third with definition and the nature and his-
torical development of logic. The combination
of traditional and modern logic in the book
deserves comment. Stebbing notes in her
Preface that all the textbooks on logic being
used at that time still expounded traditional
logic. A textbook on the new - 'symbolic' or
'mathematical' - logic was thus needed, but a
book that focused solely on the new logic would
be of no use to students preparing for university
examinations that still involved questions on
traditional logic. So to escape the vicious circle,
both had to be covered. However, to her credit,
Stebbing realized in any case that there was
much greater continuity between traditional and
modern logic than the early proponents of the
new logic such as Russell had recognized. The
conception of logic as essentially formal Stebbing
found in Aristotle's thought, and Aristotle's
theory of the syllogism remained the best place
to start. What was to be rejected was just the
'elaborate trivialities' of later developments of
syllogistic theory (A Modern Introduction to
Logic, 1933, p. xii).
Stebbing's key idea is formulated in the
Preface to the second edition: 'Advance in logic

has come about through recognizing that the
whole of Aristotelian logic falls within a more
general symbolic logic' (ibid., p. vii). This governs
her approach in the book. After initial chapters
on 'reflective thinking' in ordinary life, language,
and the distinction between naming and describ-
ing, her exposition of syllogistic theory is
embedded in an account of propositions and
their relations. Only then does she introduce the
symbolism of Principia mathematica and
Russell's theory of descriptions. She ends part 1
with an account of inference and implication.
Part 2 is largely independent of part 1. It contains
nine chapters on the nature of scientific method,
induction and causality. Part 3 returns to logic,
or more specifically, deals with topics in the
history and philosophy of logic. There are three
chapters on definition, abstraction and the char-
acteristics of logical thinking, respectively, and
the book ends with a brief sketch of the histori-
cal development of logic.
Four appendices are added in the second
edition, on 'Meaning, Reference, and
Description', 'Logical Constructions',
'Postulational Systems and Principia mathe-
matica' and Thing and Cause'. Of these, the
second and third are the most significant. From
1931 to 1933 John Wisdom's series of papers
on logical constructions was published in Mind,
and the project of showing how tables and
chairs, as well as persons, colleges and nations,
were 'logical constructions' was all the rage.
Stebbing was one of those concerned to defend
the project. The early 1930s also saw the emer-
gence of logical positivism, which brought out
differences between the conception of logic and
logicism embodied in Principia mathematica
and the new forms of thinking introduced by
Hilbert and Carnap. Drawing on the distinction
between mathematics and meta-mathematics,
for example, Stebbing was able to articulate
more clearly her objections to Russell and
WHITEHEAD'S project. Appendices B and C are
testament to the rapid developments that were
taking place in the early 1930s, one of the most
significant phases in the development of
analytic philosophy.
997
STEBBING
Just before she died, in 1943, Stebbing pub-
lished a much shorter textbook, A Modern
Elementary Logic, just over 200 pages,
intended specifically for first-year students. She
talks in the Preface of the progress that teachers
and examiners have made in 'carting away
some dead wood', allowing students 'to
consider the wider implications of logic as a
formal discipline instead of a depository of
antiquities' (Modern Elementary Logic, p. v).
She notes, however, that 'there is no simple,
introductory textbook on formal logic, written
from a modern point of view, that is both unen-
cumbered with much dead traditional doctrine
and yet meeting the needs of students prepar-
ing for an examination' (ibid.). The book is
modelled on the first part of her earlier book,
and still discusses syllogistic theory, but again
in the broader context of an account of propo-
sitions and their relations, classes and classifi-
cation, variables, prepositional functions and
implication. The book was widely used in the
decade after her death, being revised by C.W.K.
MUNDLE for the fifth edition of 1952. But by
the middle of the 1950s, there were a number
of logic textbooks on the market, and
Stebbing's book faded from the scene. (Quine's
Methods of Logic appeared in 1950, for
example, and STRAWSON'S Introduction to
Logical Theory in 1952.)
Stebbing's two logic textbooks are impor-
tant milestones in the development of analytic
philosophy, and in particular in the consolida-
tion and broadening of what became known as
the Cambridge School of Analysis. In the
Preface to the first edition of A Modern
Introduction to Logic, Stebbing singles out the
influence of Whitehead, Russell, MOORE and
BROAD on her book. The influence of
Whitehead and Russell - of Principia mathe-
matica and the theory of descriptions - is quite
clear in part 1, and Broad's work is cited in her
accounts of causality and induction. Moore's
influence is more subtle and pervasive. At the
end of her Preface to the second edition, she
writes that 'My chief debt is to Professor Moore
to whom I owe more than I can say'. She
STEBBING
acknowledges the detailed criticisms he had
made of chapter 9 of the first edition, which
were instrumental in her revision of the chapter
for the second edition. It is entitled 'General
Propositions, Descriptions, and Existence' and
the influence of Moore is explicit throughout
the second and third sections, on the analysis of
descriptions and on Russell's theory of incom-
plete symbols. In an essay written towards the
end of her life, entitled 'Moore's Influence'
(1942), she talks of his 'steady pursuit of
methodical questioning' as his characteristic
merit (p. 520). More specifically, it was his
method of analysis, understood as effecting
clarification rather than justification, that she
identified as the source of his influence.
Stebbing did not make Moore's acquain-
tance until 1917, at the meeting of the
Aristotelian Society at which she gave a paper
on 'Relations and Coherence'. As she writes in
'Moore's Influence', she had left Cambridge
just before Moore returned to it as a lecturer,
and so was never taught by him as a student. But
Moore was present at that meeting, and tore
into the paper in the discussion, prompting her
to describe the paper later as 'perhaps one of the
most muddled papers that have ever been pre-
sented to that assembly'. She goes on: 'I am
inclined to think that this meeting of the
Aristotelian Society was somewhat peculiar in
the annals of the Society, for the reader of a
paper was, before the end of the discussion, con-
vinced that her main contentions were entirely
wrong.' Her conversion, she writes, was mainly
due to 'the vehement and vigorous clarity of
Moore and his patience in pursuing the question
to its end', though she also mentions the 'politely
ironical criticisms' of Russell, who was present
at the meeting too ('Moore's Influence', p. 530.)
This meeting was clearly a turning point in her
intellectual development. Her early work had
been on Bergson. From 1917 she was a con-
verted analytic philosopher in the Moorean
mould. Moore sent her detailed criticisms of a
paper she wrote the following year, and they
exchanged letters on a number of occasions,
Moore seeking to clarify what Stebbing meant
998
when she touched on topics about which Moore
had written. But it would be wrong to charac-
terize Stebbing as just a disciple of Moore. She
soon developed a strong voice of her own. As her
logic textbooks show, she was able to do what
Moore was unable to do - write systematic
expositions of fundamental ideas and arguments;
and it was just this that was needed to widen the
appeal of Cambridge philosophy. In this respect
her style is much closer to Russell's. Although
Moorean affectations creep in, her writing is
generally lucid and straightforward, without the
tortuous clarifications of minor details that
makes Moore's work so difficult to read at times.
But she was more than just a lucid exponent of
Cambridge philosophy. She also probed at its
methodological foundations to an extent
unmatched at the time. This comes out most
clearly in her writings on analysis in the early
1930s.
In 'The Method of Analysis in Metaphysics',
which she read to the Aristotelian Society in
December 1932, Stebbing attempts to articulate
just what assumptions underlie the method of
analysis practised by Moore and other
Cambridge philosophers. She identifies three
main assumptions, one logical and two meta-
physical:
(1) If p is to be analysed, then p must be under-
stood. It follows that there is at least one
expression which unambiguously expresses
P-
(2) If p is to be analysed, then it is not always
the case that p is known to be false, and it is
sometimes the case that p is known to be true.
(3) Directional analysis is possible.
('The Method of Analysis in Metaphysics',
p. 85)
The first two assumptions are derived from
Moore. The starting-point is that we know or
understand certain things; the aim is to clarify
what it is we know or understand - to give the
correct analysis. Neither assumption is unprob-
lematic, but Stebbing endorses them both. She
is less sanguine about the third assumption.

What she means by 'directional analysis' is
analysis that ultimately yields basic facts -
simple or atomic facts upon which all the facts
which are the supposed references of true
propositions are based. This is the key assump-
tion of logical atomism, as articulated in
WITTGENSTEIN'S Tractatus and in the writings of
Russell around 1920. But although this is an
assumption of the method of analysis that
Stebbing favours, she admits that she can find
no good reason to accept it. The paper ends on
this inconclusive note.
Stebbing returns to the issue in the lecture on
'Logical Positivism and Analysis' which she
gave to the British Academy in March 1933.
Although she does not provide the missing jus-
tification of directional analysis, she does offer
further discussion of various types of analysis.
Her main concern is to clarify the difference
between the directional analysis of the
Cambridge School and the different form of
analysis that she saw as characteristic of the
work of Carnap and the logical positivists -
which she calls 'postulational' analysis. By this
she means 'the kind of analysis used in the con-
struction of a deductive system' ('Logical
Positivism and Analysis', p. 80), the aim being
to elucidate the structure of a given domain of
thought or experience by constructing or 'pos-
tulating' a system that models it. However,
insofar as light can only be thrown on the form
and not the content of the relevant domain,
Stebbing argues, it should be rejected as inad-
equate. (For details of Stebbing's arguments in
these two papers, see Beaney.)
Although Stebbing is concerned in this paper
to defend directional analysis from postula-
tional analysis, what is significant about this
paper is her engagement with logical positivism.
Stebbing played a major role, in fact, in intro-
ducing logical positivism to Britain. In 1934 she
invited Carnap to give a series of three lectures
at Bedford College, which were subsequently
published as Philosophy and Logical Syntax.
(AYER attended all three lectures, the occasion
being the first time he met Carnap, having
missed him during his first visit to Vienna in
999
STEBBING
1932-3.) She wrote a critical notice of four of
Carnap's books, including this one, for Mind in
1935. In the summer of 1935 she met POPPER
at the International Congress of Scientific
Philosophy in Paris, and invited him to come to
Britain too. (Ayer was present at this congress
as well, and reports: 'One of my most pleasant
memories of this congress is that of watching
Otto Neurath being gallant to Miss Stebbing,
speaking to her in English and saying, "I have
always been for the womans." It was the only
occasion on which I saw her at a loss', 1977,
p. 164.) Although she was critical of logical
positivism, then, she was by no means dismis-
sive of it, and did more than anyone else at the
time to encourage dialogue between what we
now recognize as the two main branches of
analytic philosophy in the 1930s.
Like the logical positivists, but in this respect
unlike Moore, Stebbing had a deep interest in
the philosophy of science as well in questions of
logic and epistemology. Her knowledge of
science, and physics in particular, was that of
the well-read amateur, but she turned this to
her advantage in her book, Philosophy and the
Physicists, which was published in 1937. She
here takes EDDINGTON and JEANS to task for the
philosophical pretensions of their scientific
works, and especially of their popular books on
science. The science at issue may now be
outdated, but the tendency of scientists to draw
unjustified philosophical conclusions from their
work has hardly weakened over the years, so
that the underlying moral of Stebbing's book
remains as valid as it was then.
Throughout her career, Stebbing was active
in adult education, and in 1936 she gave a talk
entitled 'Thinking' to the annual autumn con-
ference of the British Institute of Adult
Education. She was subsequently asked by the
BBC to give a series of twelve talks based on the
topic. The talks were not themselves given, but
a book, Thinking to Some Purpose, appeared
in 1939, a book on what would now be
described as critical thinking. Stebbing writes in
the Preface:
STEBBING
I am convinced of the urgent need for a
democratic people to think clearly without
the distortions due to unconscious bias and
unrecognized ignorance. Our failures in
thinking are in part due to faults which we
could to some extent overcome were we to
see clearly how these faults arise. It is the
aim of this book to make a small effort in this
direction.
(Thinking to Some Purpose, p. ix)
The first chapter is provocatively entitled 'Are
the English illogical?5, and although she
answers in the affirmative, she finds no other
nation (and in particular, not the French) faring
any better. Writing as she was in 1938, her
pessimism was no doubt warranted. A signifi-
cant feature of the book are the examples of
poor thinking she takes from speeches by politi-
cians and other public figures, although it might
be objected that choosing politicians is hardly
likely to falsify a claim that the people of a
given nation are illogical.
Ideals and Illusions (1941) is a book that is
similarly aimed at a general audience, again
motivated by the sense that many intellectuals
had, on the outbreak of World War II, that
there had been a massive collective failure in
national life (cf. p. vii). The book was not as
well received as her logic books, although,
according to Laird (p. 20), this did not make
her regret having written it. What is interest-
ing about it is its application of Moorean phi-
losophy, with its emphasis on clarity and the
careful specification of the questions to be
answered. She writes (Ideals and Illusions, p.
x): 'My advice to myself as well as to others
is: Be definite. To formulate one's ideals is
not to set out a string of maxims; it is to
answer questions of the form: What is worth
having in such and such specifiable circum-
stances? In a remark that has since found its
way into anthologies of quotations, she writes
that 'to have ideals is not the same as to have
impracticable ideals, however often it may be
the case that our ideals are impracticable'
(ibid., p. 5).
1000
Stebbing was a committed but demanding
teacher, and a high-minded but generous
person. Wisdom reports:
Her lectures were full of life. In discussion
with her one could not expect to sit about in
warm air - a stiffish breeze was usually
blowing. But those who were given her
vigorous teaching must, I think, have felt very
great kindness and patience behind the sharp
raps they were expected to stand up to in their
training.
(Wisdom, 1943)
Margaret Macdonald also comments:
Perhaps her greatest gift was for teaching phi-
losophy. Clear in exposition, fair and acute in
criticism, she could analyse without destroy-
ing and illuminate without dogmatizing. Her
passion for the subject was communicated to
her listeners. She provoked discussion and
stimulated her hearers to independent thought.
(Macdonald, 1959)
Her no-nonsense character is perhaps best
summed up by Ayer in his autobiography, in
describing her on the occasion of the Carnap
Lectures:
The lectures were sponsored by Susan
Stebbing, whom I had grown to like very
much. By then in her early fifties, she was still
a handsome woman, though careless of her
appearance. When she decided that she needed
a new hat, she always bought the first one
that fitted. She lived with two women friends,
who were earning less money than she, but she
pooled her salary with theirs, believing that
friends should have as much as possible in
common ... Philosophically she was very
much a disciple of Moore and shared his impa-
tience with sloppy or pretentious thinking. She
was quite often brusque but she was never
mean. She was one of those persons who make
you proud if they think well of you.
(Ayer, pp. 157-8)

Stebbing's works may be less frequently read
today than are the works of her more famous
contemporaries, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein,
Carnap, Ryle and Ayer, but she played a central
role in the establishment of analytic philosophy
in the 1930s. Despite the illnesses from which
she suffered throughout her life, and which
ultimately led to her early death, she had the
strength of character and lucidity of mind to
have had a significant influence, in her admin-
istrative activities, teaching and writings, on
the generation of analytic philosophers that
followed her.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Modern Introduction to Logic (1930; 2nd
rev. and enl. edn, 1933).
The Method of Analysis in Metaphysics',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society', vol.
32 (1931-2), pp. 65-94.
'Logical Positivism and Analysis',
Proceedings of the British Academy
(1933), pp. 53-87.
Logic in Practice (1934}.
Philosophy and the Physicists (1937).
Thinking to some Purpose (1939).
Ideals and Illusions (1941).
Contribution to Science and Ethics (1942).
A Modern Elementary Logic (1943).
Other Relevant Works
The Notion of Truth in Bergson's Theory of
Knowledge', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 13 (1912-13), pp.
224-56.
'Pragmatism and French Voluntarism. With
Special Reference to the Notion of Truth in
the Development of French Philosophy
from Maine de Biran to Bergson', Girton
College Studies, no. 6 (Cambridge, 1914).
'Relations and Coherence', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 17 (1916-17),
pp. 459-80.
The Philosophical Importance of the Verb
"To Be"', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 18 (1917-18), pp. 582-9.
'Is the Existence of the Platonic EIAOZ
1001
STEBBING
Presupposed in the Analysis of Reality?',
'Symposium', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 20 (1919-20), pp.
281-7.
'A Note on the Philosophy of Hardy's
"Dynasts'", Shama'a (1923).
'Mind and Nature in Prof. Whitehead's
Philosophy', Mind, vol. 33 (1924), pp.
289-303.
'Universals and Prof. Whitehead's Theory of
Objects', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 25 (1924-5), pp. 305-30.
The Nature of Sensible Appearance',
'Symposium', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 6 (1926).
'Is the "Fallacy of Simple Location" a
Fallacy?', 'Symposium', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 7 (1927),
pp. 207-23.
'Materialism in the Light of Modern
Scientific Thought', 'Symposium',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 8 (1928), pp. 113-29.
'Realism and Modern Physics', 'Symposium',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 9 (1929), pp. 146-61.
'Concerning Substance', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 30 (1929-30), pp.
285-308.
'Substances, Events and Facts', Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 29 (1932), pp. 309-22.
The A Prior?, Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 12 (1933),
pp. 178-97.
'Mr. Joseph's Defence of Free Thinking in
Logistics', Mind, vol. 42 (1933), pp.
338-51.
'Constructions' [presidential address],
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
34 (1933-4), pp. 1-30.
'Concerning Solipsism: Reply to R. B.
Braithwaite', Analysis, vol. 1 (1934, pp.
26-7.
'Directional Analysis and Basic Facts',
Analysis, vol. 2 (1934), pp. 33-6.
'Communication and Verification',
'Symposium', Proceedings of the
STEERING
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 13 (1934),
pp. 159-73.
'A Second Reply to Mr. Joseph', Mind, vol. 43
(1934), pp. 156-69.
Critical notice of Carnap, Logische Syntax der
Sprache, Die Aufgabe der Wissenschafts-
logik, Philosophy and Logical Syntax, The
Unity of Science, Mind, vol. 44 (1935), pp.
499-511.
'Sounds, Shapes and Words' [inaugural
address], Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 14 (1935), pp. 1-21.
Critical notice of A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth
and Logic, Mind, vol. 45 (1936), pp.
355-64.
'Some Ambiguities in Discussion Concerning
Time', in R. Klibansky and H.J. Paton (eds),
Philosophy and History, Essays Presented
to Ernst Cassirer (Oxford, 1936).
Thinking', in C. Day-Lewis and L. Susan
Stebbing, Imagination and Thinking, British
Institute of Adult Education, Life and
Leisure Pamphlets, no. 4 (1936).
'Nebulous Philosophy', American Scholar, vol.
6(1937).
'Ethics and Materialism', Ethics, vol. 50
(1939).
'Some Puzzles about Analysis', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 39 (1938-9),
pp. 69-84.
'Relations between Science and Ethics',
Nature, vol. 148(1941).
Critical notice of R.G. Collingwood, An Essay
on Metaphysics, Mind, vol. 50 (1941), pp.
184-90.
'Moore's Influence', in P.A. Schilpp (ed.), The
Philosophy of G. E. Moore (Evanston,
1942), pp. 515-32.
'The New Physics and Metaphysical
Imperatives', 'Symposium', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 43 (1942-3),
pp. 167-84.
'Men and Moral Principles' [13th L.T.
Hobhouse Memorial Lecture] (1943).
Philosophical Studies: Essays in Memory ofL.
Susan Stebbing (1948).
1002
Further Reading
Ayer, A.J., Part of my Life (Oxford, 1977).
Beaney, Michael, 'Susan Stebbing on
Cambridge and Vienna Analysis', in
Friedrich Stadler (ed.), The Vienna Circle
and Logical Positivism, Vienna Circle
Institute Yearbook 10 (Dordrecht, 2003),
pp. 339-50.
Laird, J., 'Reflections Occasioned by Ideals
and Illusions', in Philosophical Studies
(1948), pp. 20-30.
Macdonald, Margaret, 'Stebbing, (Lizzie)
Susan 1885-1943', in Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography (Oxford, 1995);
entry first published 1959.
Willow, M.G., 'L. Susan Stebbing
(1885-1943)', in Mary Ellen Waithe (ed.),
A History of Women Philosophers, vol. 4,
Contemporary Women Philosophers,
1900-Today (Dordrecht, 1994), pp.
125-55.
Wisdom,]., 'L. Susan Stebbing, 1885-1943:
An Appreciation', Mind, vol. 52 (1943);
repr. in Philosophical Studies (1948), pp.
1-4.
Michael Beaney
STEWART, Herbert Leslie (1882-1953)
Herbert Leslie Stewart was born in Cairncastle,
County Antrim on 31 March 1882 and died in
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada on 19 September
1953. A son and grandson of the Manse, he
studied at the Royal Academy, Belfast. He was
enrolled in 1900 in the Royal University of
Ireland (BA, 1904; MA, 1905; DPhil, 1907),
but from 1901 he held scholarships at Oxford,
where he received an MA in 1905 and was
elected John Locke Scholar. Although he later
studied for the Presbyterian ministry at
Edinburgh, in 1909 he accepted a lectureship in
moral philosophy and history of philosophy

in the Queen's University of Belfast. In 1913 he
was appointed George Munro Professor and
Head of the Department of Philosophy at
Dalhousie University in Halifax. He continued
as professor after his retirement in 1947, and
was made professor emeritus in 1951. He was
a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Stewart began as a critical modernist. His
first book, Questions of the Day in Philosophy
and Psychology (1912), contains among other
things a substantial critique of pragmatism's
theory of truth, and some empirical research on
genius that he conducted himself. This diversity
is unified by Stewart's contention that the new
empirical methods in psychology have usefully
replaced traditional philosophy of mind in
which a priori theorizing is mistaken for
description. His second book, a thorough
account of Nietzsche's moral theory, aims to
show that despite his objections to anti-
Semitism and the German state, Nietzsche con-
tributed materially to the mood of self-aggran-
dizement and anti-morality which characterized
Germany's foreign policy during World War I.
It is already clear that Stewart's audience was
to be less the professional philosopher than the
wider, thinking public.
In 1921 Stewart founded the Dalhousie
Review to be a forum for 'free discussion of
contemporary problems'. Poets and prime
ministers were among the contributors, but he
set the tone himself with frequent articles on
contemporary issues. Even after retiring as
editor (in 1947) he continued to contribute; a
1951 critique of the a priori exaggerations of
both individualism and socialism is typical.
The j o u r n a l provided a great boost to
Dalhousie's reputation, as did Stewart's
growing career as editorialist. His weekly talks
on current affairs became a fixture on the
national CBC Radio network after 1933. One
national figure said, 'he was ... the greatest
news commentator, bar none, on the radio'
(Empire Club, 1942, p. 15). Samples of this
work are found in From a Library Window
(1940), which also contains longer political
essays, and several philosophy papers from
1003
STEWART
the 1930s (e.g., on Descartes, Locke and
Bentham). More than ever, when he returns to
philosophy the tone is popular.
Stewart was also renowned as a teacher. A
former student would write that Stewart's course
on Philosophical Ideas in Literature 'was an edu-
cational experience that had few equals in the
country' (Goudge, p. 542). Later in his career,
however, his heart was clearly in his writing and
public lecturing. His two books of church history
(1929 and 1932) are of lasting philosophical
interest. Their central question is whether 'mod-
ernism' can persevere in the face of a revival of
'fundamentalism', or literalism in the matters of
creeds and scriptures. He would later adapt these
terms for his assessment of Winston Churchill,
whom he called 'a modernist, not a fundamen-
talist, in his imperialism', but one who eventually
found it necessary to 'fight the extravagant mod-
ernists much more than the stubborn funda-
mentalists' in order to preserve the essence of
what he would modernize (Winged Words, p. 2).
The same may be said of Stewart's own career.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Questions of the Day in Philosophy and
Psychology (1912).
Nietzsche and the Ideals of Modern Germany
(1915).
Anatole France, the Parisian (New York,
1927; repr. Freeport, New York, 1972).
A Century of Anglo-Catholicism (London and
Toronto, 1929).
Modernism, Past and Present (1932).
From a Library Window (Toronto, 1940).
The Irish in Nova Scotia (Kentville, Nova
Scotia, 1949).
Winged Words: Sir Winston Churchill as
Writer and Speaker (Toronto, 1953).
Other Relevant Works
Numerous articles, editorials, addresses and
broadcasts. See especially: The Empire Club
of Canada Speeches for 1936,1941,1942,
1944 and 1948. Available from http://
www.empireclubfoundation.com/search.asp
, accessed 14 August 2004.
STEWART
Further Reading
Armour, Leslie and Elizabeth Trott, The
Faces of Reason; An Essay on Philosophy
and Culture in English-Canada,
1850-1950 (Waterloo, Ontario, 1981).
Goudge, T.A., 'A Century of Philosophy in
English-Speaking Canada', Dalhousie
Review, vol. 47, no, 4 (1968), pp. 537^9.
Waite, Peter, The Lives of Dalhousie
University, vols 1 and 2 (Montreal and
Kingston, 1994,1998).
S. A. M. Burns
STOCKS, John Leofric (1882-1937)
John Leofric Stocks was born in Market
Harborough on 26 October 1882 and died in
Swansea on 13 June 1937. He was the sixth son
and one of twelve children of John Edward
Stocks, vicar of Market Harborough and later,
successively, archdeacon of Leicester and
Canon of Peterborough Cathedral. He was
educated at Rugby and at Corpus Christi,
Oxford, where he was a student of David Ross
and received a double first in classics. In 1906
he was appointed fellow and tutor at St John's
College, where he remained until 1924, except
for the years 1914 to 1918, when he served in
the army in World War I. In 1916 he received
the DSO for gallantry in battle in France, when
he was wounded and subsequently sent back to
England to train new officers. Whilst at Oxford
he promoted the cause of women's eligibility to
take degrees at the University. In 1924 he
became Professor of Philosophy at Manchester
University, succeeding Samuel ALEXANDER.
Whilst at Manchester, he was actively involved
in public service and adult education, including
the Workers' Educational Association, and as
soon as postwar conditions allowed, he went to
Germany to see at firsthand its economic and
social problems. He stood as the Labour can-
1004
didate for Oxford University in the 1934
general election, but was unsuccessful. In 1937
he was appointed Vice-Chancellor of Liverpool
University. He had held this post for only a few
months when, whilst on a trip connected with
adult education, he died suddenly of heart
problems caused by his war wounds.
Stocks's philosophical output was not large,
but it was influential. His literary and philo-
sophical interests centred on Epicureanism, and
on Plato and Aristotle. He contributed a
chapter on Epicureanism to New Chapters in
Greek Literature (ed. Powell and Barber,
1921), and wrote an article entitled 'Epicurean
Induction', reprinted in a collection of his
articles published under the title The Limits of
Purpose (1932). At the time of his death, he
was engaged in compiling a list of words used
by the Epicureans, together with examples of
their uses, for the forthcoming Liddell and Scott
dictionary of ancient Greek. He translated
Aristotle's De caelo for volume 2 of the Oxford
translation of The Works of Aristotle, which
David Ross 'always thought:... to be one of the
best parts of the Oxford translation of Aristotle'
(Note to Reason and Intuition, p. xix). Stocks
had two qualifications which rendered him
admirably suited to his work as a translator: a
deep understanding of the subtleties of ancient
Greek, and an elegant use of English. In The
Limits of Purpose he questioned the then-
accepted interpretation that Plato's Divided
Line expressed the gradual progress of the soul
to the knowledge of the Forms, a critique which
was later developed by others. In the same col-
lection, he also contributed to the scholarly
debate on the development and dating of
Aristotle's thought and works, and in his pub-
lication Aristotelianism (1993) he traced their
influence throughout their dispersal and wan-
derings.
Stocks was hostile to any attempt to impose
the reductionism of the natural sciences, and
thus of materialism, on the study of
humankind. The province of science is not that
of the 'final statement of the truth', which is the
concern of philosophy. Of Aristotle's four

causes, science since the time of Hobbes and
Descartes has allowed only one: the efficient
cause, 'which made possible or necessary a sub-
sequent event'. The efficient cause is thus the
initiator of movement or change, which in turn
consists of the rearrangement of parts in the
thing changed (what Aristotle regarded as the
material cause). Thus Stocks says that science,
legitimately for the sphere of its operation,
makes two assumptions: that the present deter-
mines the future, and that the parts of a thing
determine the whole, or in other words that the
whole is merely an aggregate of the parts of
which it is composed. Science leaves out two
crucial considerations which are, respectively,
the formal and the final causes. The Form or
essence of an entity is the determinant of all its
aspects, and thus the whole is the cause of its
parts. The final cause is the goal towards which
the entity develops, and thus the future deter-
mines the present. According to Aristotle,
formal and final causes, the concern of meta-
physics, take priority over, and are used in a full
explanation which encompasses, efficient and
material ones.
Our knowledge that there are principles of
organization or structure in entities, which con-
stitute formal causes, is primarily gained from
our experience of ourselves as beings who can
think and act, and can reflect on their thoughts
and actions. The concept of purpose, which
Stocks defines as 'the concentration of effort on
bringing about a certain result ... which [is]
called the end' (The Limits of Purpose, p. 18), is
by itself insufficient to account for the morality
of an action: it is not the case, morally speaking,
that any purpose will do. The best way of
bringing about a certain result (Stocks uses the
example of providing food for yourself and your
family) is the most economical one in terms of
effort, but the most economical is not necessar-
ily the best way in moral terms. The means of
attainment of an end must be morally praise-
worthy in order to make the end itself moral, and
the best judge of whether or not an action and
its result are moral is its agent who is committed
to living the most moral life he can.
1005
STOCKS
Stocks maintains that any activity can be
transformed into art by injecting its purpose
with the enjoyment or satisfaction of the agent.
He gives the example of riding a bicycle, which
may be undertaken for one or more purposes,
such as to get to a place more quickly than on
foot, or to provide exercise. If the rider enjoys
or takes satisfaction from it, the activity of
riding his bicycle is transformed into art. The
feelings or self-expression appropriate to art
do not conflict with his purpose in riding the
bicycle, but might enhance it. As Stocks ele-
gantly puts it, 'all practice of art is simultane-
ously the practice of something which is not art;
and ... there is no practice or occupation which
will not accept in some degree an infusion of
art. Art, in short, is an embroidery upon the
fabric of human purpose' (ibid., p. 20).
For Stocks, religious beliefs are to be under-
stood in the traditional way, as assertions about
the whole world order. He then divides asser-
tions into two types, partial and total. Partial
assertions are statements about some aspects of
the subject, but not all, whereas total asser-
tions are about the whole of the subject. He
contrasts the partial assertion that a man is six
feet tall, which can be proved to be true or
false, with the total assertion that Milton's
Paradise Lost is a beautiful poem. This state-
ment encompasses the whole of the work, and
cannot be proved to be true, even though
reasons can be given by its assertor as to why
he believes it to be true. Thus all traditional
arguments for the existence of God are inade-
quate, but science, which is the province of
partial statements, does not encompass the
whole of reality. Religious belief, which for
Stocks embraces the view that the whole world
order is the expression of an all-embracing and
personal Love and Wisdom, involves total com-
mitment, and has an ethical aspect to it, in that
the religious believer will attempt to realise this
all-embracing Love in his own life, through his
own actions.
Stocks regarded philosophy as an 'open' and
practical discipline, in that the matters and
experiences which it critically examines, and on
STOCKS
which action is demanded, are to be found
outside philosophy and are taken from
everyday life. Like Aristotle, he had a keen
interest in ethics, as outlined above, and in
politics. His absorption in the latter can be seen
in his engagement in practical contemporary
concerns, and also in some of his publications.
In an early book, The Voice of the People
(1918), he examines what the interrelationship
should be between government and the critical
and legitimate demands of public opinion. He
states that no member of any government
should be so unduly restricted as to consider
himself as a mere delegate for the transmission
of the views of his constituents, but instead
should retain the flexibility of acting how he
thinks fit in any new situation that has arisen
since he was elected. However, the government
member should take public opinion into con-
sideration in his decisions and actions.
Stocks was admired both during his lifetime
and after his death for having produced a body
of meticulous scholarship and original work,
which has proved to be of lasting interest and
influence. He was also praised, by David Ross
and many others among his colleagues, for
being 'one of the best men of his generation'
(Reason and Intuition, p. xxii).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Argument of Plato in Protagoras
351b-356c', Classical Quarterly (1913),
pp. 3-15.
Patriotism and the Superstate (1918).
The Voice of the People (1918).
Aristotle's Definition of the Human Good
(1919).
(Trans.), Aristotle, De caelo, in The Works of
Aristotle, vol. 2 (1922).
The Limits of Purpose (1932).
The Composition of Aristotle's Logical
Works', Classical Quarterly (1933), pp.
22-36.
The Nature and Grounds of Religious Belief
(1934).
Time, Cause and Eternity (1935).
Reason and Intuition, and Other Essays
1006
(1939).
Morality and Purpose (1969).
Aristotelianism (1993).
Kathryn L. Plant
STOUT, Alan Ker (1900-83)
Alan Ker Stout was born in Oxford on 9 May
1900 and died in Hobart, Tasmania on 20 July
1983. He was the only child of G.F. STOUT, the
celebrated psychologist and philosopher, and
grew up in St Andrews, Scotland, where at that
time his father held a chair. Alan Stout was
educated at Fettes College, Edinburgh and Oriel
College, Oxford, where he read Greats,
presided over the Jowett Society and gradu-
ated in 1924, winning the Bishop Fraser
Research Scholarship for further study.
In the same year, 1924, he was appointed
assistant lecturer in philosophy at the University
of North Wales, Bangor. In 1934 he became
lecturer in moral philosophy' at the University of
Edinburgh, and in 1939 Professor of Moral and
Political Philosophy at the University of Sydney,
Australia. Australia remained his home for the
rest of his life; he lived first in Sydney, and then,
after his retirement in 1965, in Tasmania.
In philosophy Alan Stout: retained much that
he inherited from his father, especially in epis-
temology and metaphysics, so it was eventually
on ethics that he concentrated. His early pub-
lished work was in Descartes interpretation,
where he proved a sophisticated pioneer of the
movement away from excessive emphasis on
the third Meditation and, in particular, on the
Cogito as a foundation for Descartes's philos-
ophy. In an extended review of A. Boyce
GIBSON'S The Philosophy of Descartes, pub-
lished in 1933, he showed himself master of the
whole range of Cartesian studies.
In the 1930s he worked at the perennial issue
of reconciling freedom and responsibility with

causation in human behaviour, and made this
the theme of his presidential address to the
Australasian Association of Psychology and
Philosophy in 1940. Following his arrival in
Australia, he published also on the relation-
ship between duty and motivation. Later in his
career he edited and saw through the press
God and Nature, the second volume of his
father's Gifford Lectures, originally delivered in
1922.
However, Stout's principal contributions as
a philosopher lay in other directions. Apart
from his excellent and enthusiastic teaching,
he was from 1950 until 1967 the editor of the
Australasian Journal of Philosophy. During
this period of rapid expansion in academic phi-
losophy, the Journal attained its respected inter-
national standing. Stout's status among his
peers was evident in his invitation to become a
foundation fellow of the Australian Academy
of the Humanities in 1969.
His chief importance in Australia lay in his
role as a 'public intellectual'; he participated by
way of public lectures, letters and media
appearances in many of the controversies of the
day, always a liberal, rational and tolerant
voice. He was Foundation President of the New
South Wales Council for Civil Liberties
(1963-5), a councillor of the Australian
Consumers' Association (1963-79), regular
broadcaster on the ABC's 'Any Questions?',
drama critic, prison reformer and champion
of Professor S.S. Orr, whose controversial dis-
missal from the University of Tasmania was an
Australian cause celehre for a decade from
1956.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Basis of Knowledge in Descartes F,
Mind, vol. 38 (1929), pp. 330-42.
'The Basis of Knowledge in Descartes IF,
Mind, vol. 38 (1929), pp. 458-72.
'Descartes' Proof of the Existence of Matter',
Mind, vol. 41 (1932), pp. 191-207.
'Freewill and Responsibility', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 37 (1936-7),
pp. 213-30.
1007
STOUT
'Motive and the Rightness of an Act',
Australasian Journal of Psychology and
Philosophy, vol. 18 (1940), pp. 18-37.
'Freewill', Australasian Journal of Psychology
and Philosophy, vol. 18 (1940), pp.
212-31.
'Duty and Inclination', Australasian Journal
of Psychology and Philosophy, vol. 20
(1942), pp. 184-202.
The Morals of Advertising', Australian
Highway (March 1967), pp. 8-12.
Other Relevant Works
(Ed.), G. F. Stout, God and Nature
(Cambridge, 1952).
Keith Campbell
STOUT, George Frederick (1860-1944)
George Frederick Stout was born in South
Shields, Durham on 6 January 1860 and died
in Sydney on 18 August 1944. The son of
George Stout, a shipbroker, and his wife Eliza,
the daughter of Richard Frankland, a white-
smith from Whitby, Stout was educated in
South Shields at the school of Charles Addison,
a brilliant classicist who encouraged Stout to go
to Cambridge. In 1879 Stout was admitted to
St John's College, Cambridge, where in 1881 he
obtained first class honours in the Classical
Tripos with special distinction in ancient phi-
losophy and became a scholar. An exceptional
student, he further obtained first class honours
in 1883 in the Moral Sciences Tripos with
special distinction in metaphysics. In 1884 he
was elected a fellow of the college, receiving his
MA in philosophy from Cambridge in 1885.
Among his Cambridge teachers were James
WARD and Henry Sidgwick, both of whom he
highly respected. It was Ward, however, who
shaped the issues that Stout chose to pursue.
Focusing upon philosophical psychology,
STOUT
though never becoming Ward's mere disciple,
Stout early in his career published several
articles in Mind and the Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society on such topics as Herbart's
psychology, the scope and method of psychol-
ogy, and the nature of psychological states.
That philosophy and psychology found a
meeting ground in his work was clearly shown
in his early analyses, moreover, of conscious-
ness, cognition, conation, presentation, belief,
and the relation between thought and language.
An apt choice to succeed George Groom
Robertson as editor of Mind: A Quarterly
Review of Psychology and Philosophy, Stout
held that post from 1892, when he initiated a
new series, to 1920. Under Stout's editorship,
Mind flourished, with F.H. BRADLEY, Bernard
BOSANQUET, F.C.S. SCHILLER, William James,
Bertrand RUSSELL and G.E. MOORE among its
contributors. Though appointed university
lecturer in the moral sciences in Cambridge in
1894, Stout left Cambridge, where Russell and
Moore had numbered among his students, in
1896 to accept appointment as the Anderson
Lecturer in Comparative Psychology at the
University of Aberdeen. In 1899 he became the
first to hold the Wilde Readership in Mental
Philosophy at Oxford, and married Ellen Ker,
daughter of a Free Church minister. Invited to
become a fellow of the British Academy in
1903, he also assumed the Chair of Logic and
Metaphysics at the University of St Andrews
that year, a post from which he retired in 1936
to move to Edinburgh to live with his son Alan
Ker STOUT. During his years at St Andrews
Stout had A.E. TAYLOR among his colleagues
and C.D. BROAD among his assistants. In 1925
he appointed C.A. MACE, later his collaborator,
to teach psychology; together they were instru-
mental in the development of a laboratory of
experimental psychology. In 1919 and 1921
Stout delivered the Gifford Lectures at the
University of Edinburgh. In 1927 he was
elected to an honorary fellowship at St John's
College. The recipient of honorary doctorates
from the universities of Aberdeen, Durham and
St Andrews, Stout also served as President of
1008
the Aristotelian Society from 1899 to 1904 and
from 1938 to 1939. When his son Alan was
appointed to the Chair of Moral and Political
Philosophy at the University of Sydney in 1939,
he moved to Sydney, where he lived with his
son and daughter-in-law until his death in
1944. His wife preceded him in death in 1935.
Stout's early articles not only signalled his
interest in developing a psychology generated
by conceptual analysis, introspection and obser-
vation, but suggested as well themes that would
dominate his work across the years. In 1896 he
published Analytic Psychology, which, among
other things, challenged psychological atomism
and advanced his theory of thought reference.
This theory, which he developed through his
analysis of the concept of noetic synthesis,
maintains that thought implies a real object
that is thought about, and that sense-experi-
ence, to which he referred variously across the
years as 'sensations', 'presentations' and 'sense-
data' requires thought reference. In this early
work, Stout expressed his debt not only to
Ward, but also Herbart and his disciple
Steinthal as well as to Alexander Bain, James
Sully, William James and F.H. Bradley. That he
was influenced by Brentano is also evidenced.
For Stout, analytic psychology has two func-
tions: (1) to offer a general analysis of con-
sciousness, an analysis that seeks to discover,
define, and describe the ultimate, irreducible
constituents of consciousness; and (2) to inves-
tigate what laws and conditions govern changes
that take place in consciousness. Its appropri-
ate methodology, in addition to being analyti-
cal, is largely introspective. Including several of
his early articles, the Analytic shows Stout not
only furthering his theory of thought reference,
but furnishing as well analyses of such mental
processes as relative suggestion, conation,
apperception, comparison, belief, apprehen-
sion, feeling, cognition and attention. Well
received as a significant and original contribu-
tion, the Analytic went through three editions
and was widely cited by psychologists and
philosophers alike. Having distinguished
analytic psychology from genetic psychology in

this initial work, Stout took a genetic approach
in his Manual of Psychology (1899), wherein he
focused upon the discernment and explanation
of the stages of development of the individual
mind. This work became the classic textbook
on psychology in British universities, proceed-
ing through five editions, the second in 1901,
the third in 1913, the fourth in 1929 and the
fifth, in collaboration with C.A. Mace, in 1938.
A central tenet of the Manual is Stout's insis-
tence that both sense-data of experience and
categories of ultimate principles of unity such
as space, time and causality must be considered
as mutually primary, the latter categories being
dispositions to order experience. Repudiating
any ontological dualism of material things and
minds, Stout advanced the view that the
physical and the mental represent a duality of
qualities held together in a single entity. Thus
emerged his theory of the 'embodied self.
After writing numerous psychological defin-
itions, some with James Mark Baldwin, for the
first and second volumes of Baldwin's
Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology
(1901), Stout published The Groundwork of
Psychology (1903). The key departure of this
work from his earlier works is found in his
division of mental states. Having earlier
accepted the traditional tripartite division of
cognition, conation and feeling, in the
Groundwork he divides them simply into cog-
nition and interest. After the Groundwork,
Stout focused simply upon writing articles, his
topics being psychological, epistemological and
metaphysical. During the years of his editorship
of Mind he published them mainly in
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, though
some were scattered then and later among
Mind, the Monist, the British Journal of
Psychology and the Proceedings of the British
Academy. In 1930 he published Studies in
Philosophy and Psychology, a collection of
what he considered to be his best articles from
1887 to 1927. This collection highlights Stout's
further development of such topics as conation,
knowledge, error, thought reference and imme-
diacy. It also shows him to be a superb expos-
1009
STOUT
itor and perceptive critic of doctrines of
Bradley, Russell, ALEXANDER and Ward.
Perhaps the best-known paper in Studies,
however, is his 1921 lecture to the British
Academy, namely 'The Nature of Universals
and Propositions', wherein he defends the view
that there are abstract particulars besides sets,
what D.C. Williams calls tropes, a view that
continues to have some currency today.
In 1931 Stout published Mind and Matter, a
work based upon his Gifford Lectures. Though
these primarily metaphysical and epistemolog-
ical lectures were in the idealist tradition, Stout
nonetheless changed his views somewhat, and
hence this work is not a mere restatement of his
lectures. Still no advocate of materialism, he
puts forth an account of the world that is inclu-
sive of presentations or sensa and physical
objects, a world that holds this duality within
unity. He argues, moreover, that an adequate
account of the physical world demands a cona-
tional theory of mind and a theory of the self
as embodied. In his insistence upon an
embodied self and his rejection of the self as
pure ego, Stout parts company with Ward and
shows instead an affinity with the views of
Bradley, James and continental phenomenolo-
gists, both methodologically and doctrinally. In
urging that striving is the key feature of the
universe as a whole, he promised to further
develop this thesis in another book. That book,
also rooted in the Gifford Lectures, was pub-
lished posthumously by Stout's son Alan in
1952 under the title God and Nature. In this
work Stout argues that the unity of the universe
depends for its existence upon a Universal
Mind, and, in so doing, offers a defence of the
argument from design. But when this work
was published, philosophy had taken such a
different direction that it received very little
attention. Indeed, Mind and Matter appears
not to have had much impact either.
In sketching Stout's legacy in broad strokes,
mention must be made of his role, together
with that of Bradley and Ward, in sounding the
death knell for psychological associationism.
His work in philosophical psychology,
STOUT
moreover, not only offered a conceptual frame-
work for the early development of empirical
psychology, but in its conceptual analyses of
mental processes and their contents provided as
well a bridge in the evolution of philosophy of
mind from the nineteenth century to the mid
twentieth century. Then, too, as editor oiMind,
he played an invaluable role in ensuring that
idealism, pragmatism and realism were each
well represented and, as importantly, that rep-
resentatives of these schools engaged one
another in the pages of Mind. Furthermore, if
the Bradley-Stout correspondence is any indi-
cation, Stout significantly contributed to raising
the bar for philosophic discussion through his
telling questions, astute suggestions and gentle
prodding for clarity of expression. But the full
measure of Stout's impact - as psychologist,
philosopher and editor - remains to be taken.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Analytic Psychology, 2 vols (London and
New York, 1896).
A Manual of Psychology (London and New
York, 1899).
Groundwork of Psychology (London and
New York, 1903).
Studies in Philosophy and Psychology
(London and New York, 1930).
Mind and Matter (London and New York,
1931).
God and Nature, ed. A.K. Stout, with a
Memoir by J.A. Passmore (Cambridge,
1952). Includes a bibliography.
Further Reading
Mace, C.A., 'George Frederick Stout',
Australasian Journal of Psychology and
Philosophy, vol. 22 (1944). Includes
bibliography.
Angell, James R., Review of Analytic
Psychology, Philosophical Review, vol. 6,
no. 5 (September 1897), pp. 532-9.
Baldwin, J. Mark, Review of Analytic
Psychology, International Journal of
Ethics, vol. 7, no. 4 (July 1897), pp.
522-4.
1010
Bosanquet, Helen, Critical Notice of
Groundwork of Psychology, Mind, vol.
13, no. 51 (July 1904), pp. 422-4.
Broad, C.D., Critical Notice of Studies in
Philosophy and Psychology, Mind, vol. 40,
no. 158 (April 1931), pp. 230-34.
, Critical Notice of Mind and Matter,
Mind, vol. 41, no. 163 (July 1932), pp.
351-70.
-, 'Professor G. F. Stout (1860-1944)',
Mind, vol. 54, no. 215 (July 1945), pp.
285-8.
-, The Local Historical Background of
Contemporary Cambridge Philosophy', in
C.A. Mace (ed.), British Philosophy in the
Mid-Century (1957), pp. 13-61.
Das, R., 'Our Knowledge of Physical Objects:
A Consideration of Professor G. F. Stout's
View in Mind and Matter'', The Monist,
vol. 42 (April 1932), pp. 294-302.
Drake, Durant, Review of Mind and Matter,
The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 29, no. 11
(26 May 1932), pp. 296-301.
Hamlyn, D.W., 'Bradley, Ward and Stout', in
B.B. Wolman (ed.), Historical Roots of
Contemporary Psychology (New York,
1966), pp. 298-320.
Hay-Roe, Keith Angus, 'G. F. Stout's
Ontology', dissertation, University of
Texas at Austin (1998).
Hoernle, R.F.A., 'Professor Stout's Theory of
Possibilities, Truth and Error', Mind, vol.
40, no. 159 (July 1931), pp. 273-84.
Jones, J.R., 'Are the Qualities of Particular
Things Universial or Particular',
Philosophical Review, vol. 58, no. 2
(March 1949), pp. 152-70.
Keene, Carol A. (ed.), Collected Works ofF.
H. Bradley, vol. 4, Selected
Correspondence, 1872-1904, and vol. 5,
Selected Correspondence, 1905-1924
(Bristol, 1999); see also English Letters:
The Philosophers (Charlottesville, Virginia,
2004) for an exp. edn of these volumes.
Loveday, T., Critical Notice of A Manual of
Psychology, Mind, vol. 23, no. 92
(October 1914), pp. 570-87.

Mabbot, J.D., Critical Notice of God and
Nature, Mind, vol. 62, no. 148 (October
1953), pp. 523-35.
Mace, C.A., 'George Frederick Stout,
1860-1944', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 31 (1945), pp. 307-16.
, 'The Permanent Contributions to
Psychology of George Frederick Stout',
British Journal of Educational Psychology,
vol. 24, pt 2 (June 1954), pp. 64-75.
-, 'George Frederick Stout', in Paul
Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (New York, 1967), vol. 8, pp.
22^4.
Marvin, Walter T., Review of The
Groundwork of Psychology, The Journal
of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific
Methods, vol. 1, no. 9, 28 April 1904, pp.
241-2.
Morris, Charles W., Review of Mind and
Matter, Philosophical Review, vol. 41, no.
4 (July 1932), pp. 410-13.
Passmore, J.A., A Hundred Years of
Philosophy (1957), pp. 192-202.
Pittinger, David J., 'George Frederick Stout',
in Alan E. Kazden (ed.), Encyclopedia of
Psychology (Oxford, 2000), vol. 7, pp.
477-8.
Royce, Josiah, Critical Notice of Analytic-
Psychology, Mind, vol. 6, no. 23 (July
1897), pp. 379-99.
, Review of A Manual of Psychology,
International Journal of Ethics, vol. 10,
no. 2 (January 1900), pp. 258-61.
Ryland, F., Critical Notice of A Manual of
Psychology, Mind, vol. 10, no. 40
(October 1901), pp. 545-7.
Taylor, A.E., 'Mind and Body in Recent
Psychology', Mind, vol. 13, no. 52
(October 1904), pp. 476-508.
Urban, Wilbur M., Review of A Manual of
Psychology, Philosophical Review, vol. 9,
no. 3 (May 1900), pp. 345-7.
Wright, J.N., 'Obituary: G. F. Stout',
Nature, vol. 154, 14 October 1944, p.
481.
, 'G. F. Stout', Philosophical
1011
STRAWSON
Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 14 (January 1954),
pp. 75-81.
Wright, William Kelley, Review of God and
Nature, Philosophical Review, vol. 62, no.
1 (January 1953), pp. 127-9.
Carol A. Keene
STRAWSON, Peter Frederick (1919-)
Peter Frederick Strawson was born in London
on 23 November 1919. He was educated at
Christ's College, Finchley and at St John's
College, Oxford. There he read PPE, receiving
a BA in 1940. He interrupted his academic
career to serve, from 1940 to 1946, in the
Royal Artillery, and then the Royal Electrical
and Mechanical Engineers, attaining the rank
of captain. In 1946 Strawson took up a position
as assistant lecturer in philosophy at the
University College of North Wales, which he
left in 1947 to become a lecturer at University
College, Oxford. Strawson became a fellow of
University College the following year, and
remained in this position until 1966, when he
was promoted to reader. He remained at
University College until 1968, when, upon suc-
ceeding Gilbert RYLE as Waynflete Professor of
Metaphysical Philosophy, Strawson moved
from University College to Magdalen College,
the traditional home of the Waynflete Chair.
Strawson retired in 1987.
During his career Strawson has received
numerous visiting appointments, including
visiting professorships at both Duke University
(1955-6) and Princeton University (1960-61,
1972). He is the recipient of various honours,
among them election as a fellow of the British
Academy in 1960, as a foreign honorary
member of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in 1971, and as an honorary fellow of
St John's College, Oxford in 1973. Strawson
was knighted in the Queen's Jubilee year, 1977.
STRAWSON
Strawson's contributions to philosophy are
remarkable for their breadth, penetration and
originality. He has contributed fundamentally
to logic, the philosophy of logic, the philosophy
of language, the philosophy of mind, episte-
mology, metaphysics, moral philosophy and
Kant scholarship, and has sparked lively and
ongoing debates in the secondary literature in
each of these domains. That Strawson is a
philosopher of the highest order is indicated not
only by his debates with such singular philoso-
phers as RUSSELL, on the theory of descriptions,
and Quine, on issues of philosophical logic and
the nature of meaning, but also by the out-
standing philosophers who have acknowledged
their debt to Strawson in their own philosoph-
ical work, among them Gareth EVANS and John
MCDOWELL.
The enormous scope of Strawson's work,
coupled with the fact that Strawson devoted
much of his energy to developing and modify-
ing his positions and relatively little to critical
exegesis of his own contributions, makes it dif-
ficult to distil a set of doctrines that might be
characterized as a Strawsonian system.
Nevertheless, a few themes emerge as recurring
preoccupations. Perhaps chief among these is
Strawson's view of one of the central projects
of philosophy as explicating the 'massive
central core of human thinking which has no
history - or none recorded in histories of
thought; [the] categories and concepts which, in
their most fundamental character, change not
at all' (Individuals, p. 10). Strawson called this
project 'descriptive metaphysics', contrasting
it with 'revisionary' metaphysical projects that
attempt to produce better conceptual schemes,
but the same motivation characterizes his work
in domains of philosophy other than meta-
physics as well.
In this discussion we will focus on four of
Strawson's central contributions. We begin
with a presentation of Strawson's critique, in
'On Referring' (1950; reprinted in Logico-
Linguistic Papers, 1971), of Russell's analysis
of definite descriptions. Following this we
consider Strawson's arguments, in Individuals
1012
(1959), concerning the centrality of material
bodies for identification, the role of space in our
conceptual scheme, and the nature of persons.
Third, we discuss Strawson's attempts to deal
with sceptical challenges in their development
from Strawson's response to inductive scepti-
cism in Introduction to Logical Theory (1952),
through the Kantian transcendentalism of The
Bounds of Sense (1966), to the Wittgensteinian
quietism of Scepticism and Naturalism: Some
Varieties (1985). Finally, we consider
Strawson's influential account of freedom and
determinism, in 'Freedom and Resentment'
(1962; reprinted in Freedom and Resentment
and Other Essays, 1974).
Although it is one of his earliest works, 'On
Referring' remains perhaps the single most
famous of Strawson's writings. Its core is a
critique of Russell's theory of definite descrip-
tions, but the article's richness has led to its influ-
ence outside the philosophy of language proper,
particularly in logic and linguistics. In the course
of his discussion, Strawson argues for a number
of theses concerning the use of linguistic utter-
ances, introduces a variety of distinctions
between types of linguistic entities and their use,
suggests that there is a fundamental distinction
between logical subject ancl logical predicate,
and insists that the study of ordinary language is
distinct from the study of formal systems, and is
of central importance to philosophy.
Russell argued that, if we are not to suppose
that we refer to objects in a realm of non-existent
entities, we must analyse sentences containing
definite descriptions - for example, The present
King of France is bald' - as involving the con-
junction of three claims. Thus, the example given
should be analysed as: (1) there is a present King
of France, (2) there is at most one present King
of France, and (3) everything that is the present
King of France is bald. Thus, according to
Russell, an utterance of the sentence 'The present
King of France is bald,' given that there is no
present King of France, is false.
Strawson presents two central lines of
critique of Russell's account. First, Strawson
objects that Russell's notion simply of sentences

and their meanings is too imprecise; when one
examines the various uses of linguistic utter-
ances, Strawson maintains, one realizes that
more subtle distinctions are required. Roughly,
Strawson's suggestion amounts to an argument
for the distinction between the sentence itself,
the use of that sentence (i.e. as an assertion),
and the utterance of the sentence, a distinction
that is of importance in current work on
demonstratives and indexicals. Second,
Strawson claims that Russell confuses the
meaning of the sentence with the conditions
required for meaningful utterance of the
sentence. Strawson suggested that someone
saying 'The present King of France is bald' is
not thereby asserting that there is a present
King of France. Rather, he is implying that
there is a present King of France through the
use of 'the present King of France'. For this
reason, Strawson argues, the assertion The
present King of France is bald,' given that there
is no present King of France, would not be
regarded as false, but, in some sense, unsuc-
cessful. In such sentences, if the grammatical
subject of the sentence (The present King of
France') fails to refer, then there is no question
as to the truth or falsity of the sentence. Instead,
the sentence involves a 'truth-value' gap.
One of the central themes of Strawson's
work that is merely suggested in 'On Referring'
involves the distinctive roles of logical subjects
and logical predicates. There, the difference
may be seen in the ways in which Strawson sees
their contributions to the determination of the
conditions governing appropriate utterance of
the sentences of which they are components.
Thus, if one says 'So and so is bald,' one has
done so correctly if, and only if, the person
belongs to the set of bald things. That is, the
conditions governing the satisfaction of... is
bald' are bound up in the conditions governing
the assertion of 'So and so is bald.' This is not
the case with The present King of France',
however. Rather, that there is one and only
one present King of France - i.e. that The
present King of France' is in fact a directly ref-
erential term - is implied, but not asserted, by
1013
STRAWSON
the person uttering the sentence The present
King of France is bald.'
In Individuals Strawson makes central the
distinction between subject and predicate that
remained merely implicit in 'On Referring'. In
the later work, the central contrast is both the
logical one of subject/predicate and the meta-
physical one of particular/universal. Indeed,
the work may be characterized as exploring
the metaphysical foundations of the logical dis-
tinction between reference and predication. In
this context, however, we must limit ourselves
to a discussion of one of the core projects in
Individuals, Strawson's attempt to demonstrate
that certain types of particulars, material bodies
and persons, have a fundamental role in our
conceptual scheme.
Concerning material bodies, Strawson argues
for three main points. First, he suggests that we
identify items to which others refer either by
locating them among those items that we cur-
rently perceive or by employing uniquely iden-
tifying descriptions that those items satisfy.
Second, he argues that in order for us to make
sense of the idea of locating objects spatio-tem-
porally, we must presuppose that there is a
framework of reidentifiable objects - i.e. objects
that, when encountered on one occasion, we
can identify as the same objects encountered on
a previous occasion. This presupposition is
incompatible with, and thus proof against,
scepticism concerning reidentification. Third,
Strawson maintains that, although our ability
to identify bodies does not depend on an ability
to identify any other sort of particular, the
ability to identify bodies is fundamental for the
ability to identify those other sorts, such as
private experiences (e.g., the toothache in my
lower right molar), unobservables and partic-
ular events.
In his discussion of our ability to identify
bodies, Strawson ceded a central role to space
in our conceptual scheme. In order to investi-
gate the notion of space at work in that scheme,
Strawson introduces a series of thought-exper-
iments that test the limits of that notion. The
experiments involve subjects inhabiting a world
STRAWSON
only of sound; that is these subjects lack all
visual, tactile, olfactory and taste experiences.
Strawson then asks whether such subjects could
reidentify objects, and whether they could dis-
tinguish themselves from other objects. If we
consider a world of such subjects containing
only sounds varying in timbre, pitch and
loudness, Strawson argues, then such subjects
could not reidentify objects. This is because, if
a subject were to hear a tone of the same pitch,
timbre and loudness at two different times,
nothing underwrites the notion that the tones
in question are numerically identical tones, as
opposed to merely qualitatively identical.
However, Strawson suggests, if we were to sup-
plement the thought-experiment as described
with the experience of a master sound, varying
in pitch and loudness, but of constant timbre,
then subjects in the world could 'locate' par-
ticular sounds by means of their position along
the master sound, represented by changes in the
pitch and loudness of the master sound accom-
panying the particular sounds in question.
Despite the construction of an analogy to
space through the use of the master sound, and
thus an affirmative answer to the question as to
whether reidentification would be possible in
the world of Strawson's thought-experiment,
Strawson suggests that the answer to the
question concerning whether subjects in such a
world could distinguish themselves from other
objects is very likely to be negative. Even if, as
Strawson demonstrates, one would be able to
introduce elements into the world of the
thought-experiment corresponding to our
notions of action and cause, Strawson sees no
way to conceive of the subjects in that world as
being able to develop a concept of themselves
as subjects, and thus to distinguish themselves
from other objects in the sound world.
Given the conclusion of Strawson's discus-
sion of the sound world, a natural question
remains that of how one does draw a distinc-
tion between oneself and other entities.
Strawson's central contention is that our ability
to do so rests on our conceiving of ourselves as
single entities to which both physical properties
1014
and psychological properties are attributable.
That is, according to Strawson, we are subjects
of whom both M-predicates, predicates applic-
able to all material bodies, and P-predicates,
predicates applicable only to persons, are pred-
icable. This account can be correct only if both
the 'no-ownership view', which holds that
states of consciousness ought to be attributed
literally to nothing, and the Cartesian view,
which holds that states of consciousness ought
not to be attributed to the same thing to which
one attributes physical properties, are false.
Against the no-ownership view, Strawson
notes that this view must account for our expe-
riences of seeming to ascribe conscious states to
ourselves. Strawson suggests that the only
account available to the no-ownership view is
that experiential states are causally dependent
on bodies. The problem with this position for
the no-ownership view is that it is only my
experiences that are causally dependent on my
body, and not all experiences. Thus, according
to Strawson, any attempt to explain the causal
dependence of my experiences on the states of
a particular body, without reference to myself
as a way of identifying the experiences and the
body linked in the explanation, is doomed to
failure.
Against the Cartesian view, Strawson
advances two lines of argument. One is that the
notion of a non-spatially located particular,
such as the Cartesian ego, is unintelligible. This
is because, given the fact: that we have no
recourse to distinguishing them spatially, there
would seem to be no way to conceive of two
egos existing at the same time. The other
argument rests upon Strawson's contention
that, one can't have a concept of one's own
experiences unless one possesses a concept of
oneself as the subject of those experiences.
However, one can't possess the concept of
oneself without thinking of oneself as one
among many potential persons other than
oneself. This, further, requires that one be able
to identify other persons, that is other subjects
of experiences. However, it would seem that
the only way for one to identify other subjects

of experiences is by identifying their bodies.
Therefore, one must identify subjects of expe-
riences by identifying their bodies. Now,
according to Strawson, it is not at this point
open to us merely to suppose that others'
bodies stand in some relation to their experi-
ences in a way that would allow us to maintain
the Cartesian view. For this would require us to
be able to conceive of the relation of others'
experiences to their bodies in the same way
that the Cartesian wishes to conceive of the
relations of one's own experiences to one's own
body. The problem for the Cartesian, accord-
ing to Strawson, is that the Cartesian has not
yet demonstrated how it is that one conceives
of one's own experiences as one's own experi-
ences. Since this was the original phenomenon
to be explained, Strawson points out, we have
thereby demonstrated that the Cartesian view
is untenable.
The discussion of 'On Referring' and of
Individuals centred upon two elements of a
triad that Strawson considers central to his
philosophical work. Thus, in The Bounds of
Sense) he writes:
The theory of being, the theory of knowl-
edge, and the theory of statement are not
truly separable; and [the duality of intuitions
and concepts] necessarily appears in all three,
under different forms. In the first, we cannot
avoid the distinction between particular items
and general kinds or characteristics they
exemplify; in the second, we must acknowl-
edge the necessity of our both possessing
general concepts and becoming aware in
experience of things, not themselves
concepts, which fall under them; in the third,
we must recognize the need for such linguis-
tic or other devices as will enable us both to
classify or describe in general terms and to
indicate to what particular cases our classi-
fications or descriptions are being applied.
(The Bounds of Sense, p. 47)
We now turn to the third element of that triad,
the theory of knowledge. In our discussion
1015
STRAWSON
here, we will focus exclusively on the develop-
ment of Strawson's responses to the sceptic.
Strawson considers specifically the challenge
of inductive scepticism in his discussion of
induction in Introduction to Logical Theory.
There he understands the sceptical challenge as
involving the claim that no justification of
induction can be provided. Rather than face the
sceptical challenge head-on, Strawson suggests
that, in the sceptical challenge, the word 'justi-
fication' can have no meaning. Strawson
supports this claim by considering possible
interpretations of the notion of justification
employed by the sceptic. One such interpreta-
tion would involve understanding justification
to involve only deductive justification. Such an
interpretation, however, would make the
sceptic's challenge obviously wrong-headed in
that it would simply reject the possibility of a
distinctive, inductive, form of reasoning from
the outset. A second interpretation would
involve understanding 'justified' as 'reason-
able'; thus, the claim that no justification of
induction can be provided is simply the claim
that one cannot demonstrate justification to
be reasonable. According to Strawson, this
cannot be what the sceptic means, because our
very understanding of 'being reasonable'
involves following induction as a paradigm
case of reasonability. A further interpretation of
the sceptic's notion of justification would take
a justification of induction to involve a proof
that induction is guaranteed to yield true con-
clusions. Such a proof, however, is impossible,
and further seems to rely upon a conflation of
justification with deductive justification. Thus,
according to Strawson, all of the possible inter-
pretations of the inductive sceptical challenge
that have been canvassed fail to yield a mean-
ingful challenge.
In Individuals Strawson suggests that, if one
is to possess concepts of a particular sort, one
must take a non-sceptical attitude towards the
core cases to which those concepts may be
applied. Thus, as we saw above, Strawson
suggests that, if we are to have a concept of rei-
dentification, we must presuppose that there is
STRAWSON
a framework of reidentifiable objects, and that
this presupposition is incompatible with scep-
ticism concerning reidentification. Similarly,
Strawson argues that having mental concepts
involves being able to apply those concepts to
others. Since this latter ability requires that the
criteria for correct application of those concepts
be logically adequate, the having of mental
concepts is, on Strawson's account, incompat-
ible with scepticism concerning other minds.
Strawson's central anti-sceptical argument
in The Bounds of Sense concerns the issue
raised in the passage from that work quoted
above, where Strawson notes that it is part of
the nature of experience that, in experience,
we are aware of things. That is, Strawson
answers the sceptic by answering the question
of why experience must sometimes be objective.
In doing so, he begins with the assumption that
we are concerned with the experiences of a
self-conscious subject, one capable of self-
attributing experiences. As we saw previously,
in our discussion of the thought-experiment in
Individuals, Strawson thinks that self-conscious
subjects, those possessing a concept of them-
selves as subjects, must distinguish themselves
from other objects. Thus, it would seem that
one argument available to Strawson would be
that any self-conscious subject must recognize
himself to be part of a world of objects.
This argument, however, is not the argument
that Strawson advances in The Bounds of Sense.
Rather than focusing on the self-consciousness of
the subject, Strawson concentrates on the expe-
riences the subject ascribes to himself. In order
for such ascriptions to have content as ascrip-
tions of experiences, Strawson continues, the
self-ascribing subject must have some contrast
class against which experiences may be
measured. However, since the application of
any concept must be underwritten by experi-
ence, the subject can possess such a contrast
class only if his experiences underwrite the appli-
cation of non-experiential concepts. This,
however, is only possible if some experiences
are of, or represent, non-experiential things.
These things, however, just are objects. Thus, if
1016
Strawson's argument is successful, the descrip-
tion of experience presupposes the existence of
objects. Given this, however, and given that the
sceptic's argument presupposes the possibility
of describing experience without presupposing
the existence of objects, the sceptical project is
demonstrated to be incoherent.
More recently, in Scepticism and Naturalism,
Strawson has traced a response to the sceptic
that he locates in the naturalism of Hume and
WITTGENSTEIN. Strawson sees in both thinkers
the realization that our most fundamental
beliefs, say, in the general reliability of induc-
tion or the existence of body, do not rest on
further reasons; nor, however, are they open to
doubt. One recognizes in Strawson's reading of
Hume and Wittgenstein Strawson's own pre-
occupation with explicating and defending the
'massive central core of human thinking which
has no history'. Strawson suggests that Hume's
and Wittgenstein's observation that these core
beliefs are not open to doubt itself provides a
way to answer the sceptic, not by meeting his
challenge, but by ignoring it as idle.
That is, according to Strawson, the point of
his latest response is 'not to offer a rational
justification of the belief in external objects
and other minds or of the practice of induction,
but to represent sceptical arguments and
counter-arguments as equally idle - not sense-
less, but idle - since what we have here are
original, natural, inescapable commitments
which we neither choose nor give up'
(Scepticism and Naturalism, pp. 27-8). The
distinction between this latest answer to the
sceptic and Strawson's earliest answer, in
Introduction to Logical Theory, is that
Strawson no longer takes this answer to rest
upon interpreting the sceptic as nonsensical or
incoherent. This latest response and the
responses of Individuals and The Bounds of
Sense share a certain affinity, however, to the
extent that one understands those earlier
attempts simply as ways to make explicit which
commitments belong to the 'massive central
core of human thinking', and not as attempts
to offer a rational justification for those com-

mitments or as attempts to demonstrate the
senselessness of the sceptic's challenge.
Strawson's most recent answer to the sceptic
bears a remarkable resemblance to Strawson's
discussion of determinism and responsibility
in 'Freedom and Resentment', which, despite
being one of very few essays Strawson wrote in
moral philosophy, has been extremely influen-
tial. In that paper Strawson presents a novel
way to reconcile determinism and responsibil-
ity, without succumbing to incompatibilism or
the over-intellectualizations of traditional com-
patibilists. The failing of traditional compati-
bilism, according to Strawson, is that it explains
our commitment to the practices of praise and
blame, even in the face of determinism, merely
in terms of the utility of those practices. This,
however, is radically to misconstrue why it is
that we in fact are committed to those practices.
In fact, we are committed to those practices
because those commitments arise out of core
reactive attitudes, such as the other-directed
resentment and gratitude and the self-directed
guilt and remorse, which are ineluctable
products of our lives as social beings interact-
ing with others. The fact that we can, in excep-
tional cases, suspend these reactions provides
no comfort for incompatibilism, which
Strawson terms 'pessimism'. This is for two
reasons. First, although the reactions can, in
specific cases, be suspended, we cannot uni-
versally suspend them. Second, the reasons for
which we suspend them - for example, in our
dealings with people who are clearly mentally
disturbed - are not based upon a commitment
to determinism, but are in fact independent of
determinism. Thus, since we cannot abandon
the reactions upon which our practices of praise
and blame are based, and since our commit-
ments to those practices are independent of
our support for, or rejection of, determinism,
Strawson claims that determinism is no threat
to the legitimacy of such commitments.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Introduction to Logical Theory (1952).
Individuals (1959).
1017
STREETER
The Bounds of Sense (1966).
Logico-Linguistic Papers (1971).
Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays
(1974).
Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar
(1974).
Scepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties
(1985).
Analysis and Metaphysics (Oxford, 1992).
Entity and Identity (Oxford, 1997).
Further Reading
Hahn, L.E. (ed.), The Philosophy of P.P.
Strawson (La Salle, Illinois, 1998).
Snowden, P.P. 'P. F. Strawson', in A.P.
Martinich and D. Sosa (eds), A
Companion to Analytic Philosophy
(2001), pp. 334-49.
Van Straaten, Z. (ed.), Philosophical Subjects
(Oxford, 1980).
Joseph H. Shieber
STREETER, Burnett Hillman (1874-1937)
B.H. Streeter was born in Croydon and was
killed in an air accident in 1937. He was
educated at Queen's College, Oxford and was
a fellow there from 1905 to 1933, and became
Provost in 1933. Streeter was an enthusiastic
member of the Modern Churchmen's Union
and his thought was typical of classic mod-
ernism.
Streeter's main contribution was in New
Testament studies. His work on the 'Synoptic
Problem', first published as a chapter in W.
Sanday's collection Oxford Studies in the
Synoptic Problem of 1911 and then consoli-
dated in his magnum opus on The Four
Gospels of 1924, remains the classic solution to
the relationship between the first three gospels.
Streeter argued for the priority of Mark and for
the view that Matthew and Luke used Mark as
STREETER
well as a now lost collection of Jesus's sayings
(Q) and their own individual sources.
Streeter was also important for his work on
the resurrection of Jesus published in his edited
work Foundations in 1912. Streeter placed all
his emphasis on the appearances of Jesus rather
than on the empty tomb tradition. He believed
that the appearances were visions 'directly
caused by the Lord himself veritably alive and
in communion with them'. The resurrection of
Jesus for Streeter, and his fellow modernists,
consisted in the belief that Jesus was able
to convince the disciples of His victory over
death by some adequate manifestation;
possibly by showing Himself to them in some
form such as might be covered by St. Paul's
phrase 'a spiritual body' or possibly through
some psychological channel similar to that
which explains the mysterious means of com-
munication between persons commonly
known as telepathy.
Streeter's understanding of the resurrection was
accepted as permissible in the report of the
Doctrine Commission of the Church of
England which was published a year after his
death.
Streeter's final contribution was his Bampton
Lectures on The Buddha and the Christ of
1932, which particularly focused on Mahayana
and Pure-Land Buddhism. Streeter argued that
Mahayana stands to primitive Buddhism in
a relation not unlike that of the Gospel
according to St. John to that according to St.
Matthew. That is to say, the interest has
shifted from the teaching of the Founder to
reflection on the meaning for religion of his
life and person.
Streeter shows how in Mahayana Buddhism in
general, and in Pure-Land Buddhism in partic-
ular, Buddhism ceased to be interested in the
personality of its founder and came instead to
focus on a metaphysical belief in the identity of
his Buddhahood with the Absolute. This
1018
expressed itself in forms of worship in the great
Buddhist Temples which have a remarkable
resemblance to the Choir Office and the Mass
in the Cathedrals of Europe, including similar-
ity of altar, vestments, chanting, ascending
incense and even the manual acts of the priests.
Streeter also showed the similarity between the
prayers and hymns of devotion to Amida
Buddha and similar hymns addressed to Christ
within Christianity. Streeter believed that the
understanding of Christ in classic Christianity
had 'travelled a long way from the New
Testament' just as the devotee of Amida 'has
travelled a long way from primitive Buddhism'.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Ed.), Foundations (1912).
The Four Gospels (1924).
The Buddha and the Christ (1932).
Other Relevant Works
Oxford Studies in the Synoptic Problem, ed.
W. Sanday(1911).
Doctrine in the Church of England (1938;
repr., 1962).
Further Reading
Badham, Paul, The Contemporary Challenge
of Modernist Theology (Cardiff, 1998).
Paul Badham
STURT, Henry Cecil (1863-1946)
Henry Cecil Sturt was born in Mortlake, Surrey
on 14 June 1863 and died in Oxford on 13
December 1946. He was educated at Queen's
College, Oxford and worked for the British
Museum until 1898, when he returned to
Oxford and became one of the founders of the
Oxford Philosophical Society, of which he was
Secretary until 1908. From 1900 to 1914 he
organized a course for Civil Service candidates

at Oxford. During and for a few years after
World War I he was a lecturer and sometime
substitute Professor of Moral Philosophy at
the universities of St Andrews and Aberdeen
and at the University College of North Wales
at Bangor. From 1925 to 1931 he was back at
Oxford as tutor in philosophy to non-colle-
giate students. He also held various positions at
the Mind Association.
Sturt's 'Introduction' to the anthology
Personal Idealism: Philosophical Essays by
Eight Members of the University of Oxford,
which he edited in 1902, was a kind of mani-
festo of the group that dominated the
Philosophical Society. Like the older tradition
of personal idealism at Oxford represented by
J.R. Illingworth, it challenged both absolute
idealism and naturalism, and defended the epis-
temological, ontological and ethical primacy
of the finite person, but in a very different spirit
that was less typical of the broader nineteenth-
century movement of personal idealism. One of
the most important contributions, F.C.S.
SCHILLER'S 'Axioms as Postulates', was, signi-
ficatively, the founding document of British
pragmatism, and the 'humanism' which Schiller
and Sturt advocated represented a distinctly
neoteric position combining pragmatism,
empiricism and vitalism. Schiller and Sturt thus
contributed to the common identification of
modern personalism with such pragmatic
humanism. However, Sturt was perhaps the
only British philosopher who consistently used
the term 'personal idealism' as a designation of
his own position. The term had been intro-
duced a few years earlier by the American
philosopher G.H. Howison, who protested
against Sturt's appropriation of it. But the con-
tributions to Personal Idealism were disparate,
and also included one from the anti-pragmatist
personal idealist H. RASHDALL, and an influen-
tial essay on 'Error' by G.F. STOUT. Sturt
himself contributed an essay on 'Art and
Personality'.
Sturt went on to a more ambitious criticism
of absolute idealism in his most important con-
tribution to philosophy, Idola theatri: A
1019
STURT
Criticism of Oxford Thought and Thinkers
from the Standpoint of Personal Idealism
(1906). The idols were 'intellectualism', 'abso-
lutism' and 'subjectivism', and Sturt scrutinized
their manifestations in German idealism, T.H.
Green, F.H. BRADLEY and B. BOSANQUET.
Sturt's radical modernist departure from the
older tradition of personal idealism came out
more clearly in The Idea of a Free Church
(1909) and Socialism and Character (1922),
where in a highly idiosyncratic fashion he advo-
cated a new religion and a new society, per-
ceived to be irreconcilable with his defence of
individual personality. Sturt was an extreme
state socialist with fascist leanings.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Introduction' and 'Art and Personality', in
H.C. Sturt (ed.), Personal Idealism:
Philosophical Essays by Eight Members of
the University of Oxford (1902), pp.
v-viii, 288-335.
Idola theatri: A Criticism of Oxford Thought
and Thinkers from the Standpoint of
Personal Idealism (1906).
The Idea of a Free Church (1909).
The Principles of Understanding: An
Introduction to Logic from the Standpoint
of Personal Idealism (Cambridge, 1915).
Socialism and Character (1922).
Human Value: An Ethical Essay (Cambridge,
1923).
Moral Experience: An Outline of Ethics for
Class Teaching (1928).
Jan Olof Bengtsson
STURT, Mary (1896-1994?)
Mary Sturt was born on 8 September 1896; her
date of death is unknown, though a handwrit-
ten note in the register of Somerville College,
Oxford suggests that she died in 1994. Her
STURT
father, Henry STURT, was a lecturer at St
Andrews, where Sturt studied Greek and Latin.
In 1916 she began a degree at Somerville, and
was awarded a second class degree in literae
humaniores in 1920. She then spent six years as
a lecturer in education at Nevilles' Cross
College, Durham and Furzedown Training
College, London; during this period, she earned
a first class Cambridge Education Diploma.
From 1929 to 1930 she was an inspector of
schools in Ceylon. She became a lecturer in
education at Birmingham University, where
she was awarded a PhD in 1932; her thesis
consisted of two books and five articles pub-
lished between 1921 and 1931. In addition to
her works on psychology and education, she
wrote four novels, several books of plays and
retellings of classic literature for children, and
a well-received biography of Francis Bacon.
Between 1950 and 1963 she was Vice-Principal
of St Mary's College, Bangor.
Sturt's work on education has a highly prac-
tical orientation, and is intended to maximize
the abilities and efficiency of educators as well
as students. In her textbook Modern
Psychology and Education (1926) Sturt empha-
sizes the necessity for teachers to empathize
with the children they instruct, and the impor-
tance of acknowledging the physical and
mental needs of the teachers themselves. Matter
and Method in Education (1928) focuses on the
development and structure of elementary edu-
cation, while in The Education of the People
(1967) Sturt examines her topic from a histor-
ical perspective, demonstrating both the con-
ceptual implications of universal education and
the real effects it had on students of the nine-
teenth century.
Sturt is best known for The Psychology of
Time (1925). This work was published as a
volume of the International Library of
Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method,
a series which offered investigations of new
theories in psychology and related fields. Sturt
notes that although the idea of time is crucial
to the fields of metaphysics, mathematics and
physics, psychological approaches of the
1020
previous thirty years had been too theoretical to
be of use to the sciences. Drawing on classical
and historical theories of time, Sturt explores
her topic through logical arguments, practical
analyses of how individuals experience time,
and anthropological studies of the ways in
which societies conceptualize time within their
world views. As in her educational writings,
theoretical beliefs are balanced with pragmatic
approaches. Rejecting the possibility that time
has an objective reality, Sturt ultimately con-
cludes that time is a subjective concept, one
which 'is constructed by each individual under
the influence of the society in which he lives'
(The Psychology ofTime, p. 141).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Psychology of Time (1925; repr. 1999).
(with E.G. Oakden), Modern Psychology and
Education: A Text-Book of Psychology for
Students in Training Colleges and Adult
Evening Classes (1926; repr. 1937).
(with Ellen C. Oakden), Matter and Method
in Education (1928).
The Education of the People: A History of
Primary Education in England and Wales
in the Nineteenth Century (1967).
Other Relevant Works
(with Ellen C. Oakden), Great Venturers
(1928).
(with Ellen C. Oakden), Growing Up: How
One Did it in Different Times and Places
(1930).
Francis Bacon: A Biography (1932).
Be Gentle to the Young (1936).
One of His Majesty's Subjects: A Family
Chronicle (1936).
(with Margaret Blanche Hobling), Practical
Ethics: A Sketch of the Moral Structure of
Society (1949).
Further Reading
The Lady's Who's Who 1938-39 (1939).
Somerville College Register (1971).
Tracey S. Rosenberg

SWINBURNE, Richard Granville (1934-)
Richard Granville Swinburne was born in
Smethwick, Staffordshire on 26 December
1934. Swinburne studied philosophy at Oxford
(MA, BPhil), then proceeded to a lectureship in
philosophy at Hull in 1963. During this early
period, he devoted himself to logic and philos-
ophy of science, culminating in his first book,
Space and Time (1968). In this early work on
the logical and metaphysical analysis of space
and time, Swinburne was still a verificationist
in his philosophy of language. This view was
soon to change, however. His study of the phi-
losophy of science led him to reject even modest
versions of the verification criterion for mean-
ingful sentences. Also at this stage of his career
he published The Concept of Miracle (1971),
an early hint of later interest in philosophy of
religion. Three other works demonstrate
Swinburne's continued interest in the philoso-
phy of science: An Introduction to
Confirmation Theory (1973) and two edited
books, The Justification of Induction (1974)
and Space, Time and Causality (1983). In his
work on confirmation theory, Swinburne intro-
duced his conception and use of the probabil-
ity calculus, his understanding of the role of
probability in scientific rationality, and his
general Bayesian approach to epistemology. In
a later work, Epistemic Justification (2001)
similar views are developed more broadly.
Swinburne held a traditional conception of
knowledge as justified true belief. In charting a
path among the various debates in epistemol-
ogy, Swinburne argued that the best form of
epistemic justification should be both syn-
chronic and diachronic, internalist and exter-
nalist, allowing for a range of types of epistemic
justification. Knowledge is a valuable goal, and
therefore all types of epistemic justification are
also valuable and desirable when available to
the knower.
Swinburne accepted the Chair of Philosophy
at the University of Keele in 1972, and began
to write a famous trilogy in philosophy of
religion, the outline of which he gave as Wilde
1021
SWINBURNE
Lectures at Oxford (1975-8). He used the
philosophical insight and logical rigour devel-
oped over ten years of study in the philosophy
of science to great effect in this new specialism.
The Coherence of Theism (1977) begins with
philosophy of language, clarifying and cor-
recting the largely verificationist and falsifica-
tionist debate about religious language charac-
teristic of British philosophy of religion for the
previous twenty years. Rejecting both of these
simple criteria for meaning, Swinburne laid out
his own sophisticated criteria for coherence
and meaning in religious language. It would be
too much to claim that Swinburne solved the
problem of religious language, but he did make
significant and lasting progress. The same can
also be said about the other two sections of this
book, which deal with the coherence of the
divine attributes, and the various types of neces-
sity with respect to the divine nature. While he
rejected the ontological argument, which would
entail that God's existence is logically necessary,
he accepted the necessity of God's existence in
other senses of the term. He concluded that
belief in a God who is 'eternally an omnipresent
spirit, free, creator of the universe, omnipo-
tent, omniscient, perfectly good, and a source
of moral obligation' (Coherence of Theism, p.
97) is coherent, but gave some revisionist inter-
pretations of these attributes in order to make
them so.
Having clarified the concept of God,
Swinburne next applied the logic of probabil-
ity to arguments for The Existence of God
(1979). His argument for the existence of God
was based upon modern scientific findings, and
a rigorous application of probability theory.
Several important points are made in this work
concerning philosophy in general, such as the
discussion of various types of explanation,
including personal explanation. Swinburne put
the cosmological, teleological, and moral argu-
ments on a solid philosophical ground once
again, after years of relative neglect. He also
developed arguments from divine providence
and human consciousness. He considered the
problem of evil, and its tendency to lower the
SWINBURNE
probability of theism; but on the whole of the
evidence, he concluded that theism is more
probable than not. His general approach to
natural theology, viz. that the arguments are
inductive and cumulative, has become com-
monplace. The final volume of the trilogy, Faith
and Reason (1981), considers the nature and
rationality of religious belief, including the
nature of faith and the value of reason in
religion.
This trilogy of books established Swinburne
as a major figure in British philosophy of
religion. He was invited to give the Gifford
Lectures (1982-4), elected a fellow of the
British Academy and appointed to the Nolloth
Chair of the Philosophy of the Christian
Religion at Oxford (1985-2002) soon after
their publication. In developing his argument
from consciousness, Swinburne concluded that
mental events cannot be reduced without
remainder to brain events, i.e. he rejected mate-
rialism in the philosophy of mind. He devoted
his Gifford Lectures to greatly expanding this
argument, later published as The Evolution of
the Soul (1986). In this work he rejected empir-
ical standards of personal identity as insuffi-
cient, and claimed that therefore the mind or
soul must be some kind of substance (a view he
calls 'soft dualism'). Turning from generic
theism to a particular religion, i.e. from natural
to philosophical theology, Swinburne began a
sustained and serious philosophical investiga-
tion of specifically Christian beliefs. This even-
tually resulted in a four-part series in philo-
sophical theology, and a sustained apologetic
for the bodily resurrection of Jesus. He
examined key concepts in moral philosophy
and applied them to the doctrines of sin,
redemption and personal eschatology in
Responsibility and Atonement (1989). A
volume on Revelation: From Metaphor to
Analogy (1992) revisits his earlier work on reli-
gious language, and extends the discussion to
cover Creeds, scripture and the Church as an
interpretive community. Swinburne held that
some language for God is literal, while other
sentences are metaphors or analogies. He
1022
provided clarity in distinguishing the logic of
religious language. In The Christian God
(1994) he revisited the topic of coherence, this
time with a special focus on Christianity. After
a substantial first part dealing with general
metaphysical issues such as time, substance and
necessity, he moves on to discuss philosophical
issues in the nature of God, the doctrine of
Trinity, and the incarnation. For the most part,
with notable exceptions concerning eternity
and omniscience, Swinburne's God is that of
classic Christian monotheism.
Swinburne was criticized by a number of
philosophers and theologians for his rational
approach to theodicy, i.e. his defence of theism
in the face of human suffering and evil. In
Providence and the Problem of Evil (1998)
Swinburne develops a greater-good theodicy,
this time drawing upon the more complex
goods available to Christian faith, such as
eternal life. In this work he responds to some of
his critics, but maintains his generally ratio-
nalist approach. Many of Swinburne's critics in
philosophy of religion still maintain that this
work is an ineffective response to the problem
of evil. Swinburne's critics have complained
that such a rationalist approach to theodicy
does not do justice to the breadth and depth of
the problem of evil.
After completing this tetralogy in philo-
sophical theology, he authored a work in
Christian apologetics: The Resurrection of God
Incarnate (2003). Having demonstrated the
logical coherence of classical two-nature
Christology in The Christian God, he next
provided an empirical argument that Jesus was
in fact the divine-human saviour of the world.
Swinburne's sustained and rigorous contri-
bution to philosophy of religion is one of the
most significant in any century of British phi-
losophy. Even apart from this main thrust of his
work, he would deserve careful reading for his
contributions to philosophy of science, episte-
mology and philosophy of mind. Nevertheless,
Swinburne's philosophy of religion remains
controversial. Along with his theodicy, dis-
cussed above, several philosophers have been

critical of his use of probability theory in
arguing for the existence of God. Swinburne's
view is that God provides an ultimate expla-
nation for the universe, which is 'simple'. Critics
such as J.L. MACKIE complained that God is in
fact a complex concept, and not at all a simple
explanation of the universe. Others reject the
notion of comparative logical probability with
respect to large-scale explanations of the
universe as a whole. Swinburne defended his
conception and use of simplicity as an ultimate
a priori epistemic principle in his Aquinas
Lectures, published as Simplicity as Evidence of
Truth (1997). He also discussed his concep-
tion of logical probability, including intrinsic
probability for hypotheses, more largely in
Epistemic Justification (2001). One should also
note that Swinburne's dualism in the philoso-
phy of mind has been roundly criticized by
many analytic philosophers. The main area of
complaint is that his 'soft dualism' makes the
mind too much like a separate substance from
the brain - a theory many philosophers of mind
believe goes beyond the evidence of modern
neurological research. Swinburne replied to
some of his critics in a revised version of his
Gifford Lectures, The Evolution of the Soul
(1997).
Swinburne was arguably the foremost
natural theologian of his time, and his contri-
bution to Christian philosophical theology has
few equals. His significant oeuvre placed him at
the forefront of that renaissance of philosophy
of religion enjoyed by the twentieth century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Space and Time (1968; 2nd edn, 1981).
The Concept of Miracle (1971).
An Introduction to Confirmation Theory
(1973).
(Ed.), The Justification of Induction (Oxford,
1974).
1023
SWINBURNE
The Coherence of Theism (1977; rev. edn,
Oxford, 1993).
The Existence of God (1979; rev. edn,
Oxford, 1991).
Faith and Reason (Oxford, 1981).
(Ed.), Space, Time and Causality (Dordrecht,
1983).
(with S. Shoemaker), Personal Identity
(Oxford, 1984).
The Evolution of the Soul (1986; rev. edn,
Oxford, 1997).
Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford,
1989).
(Ed.), Miracles (New York, 1989).
Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy
(Oxford, 1992).
The Christian God (Oxford, 1994).
Simplicity as Evidence for Truth (Milwaukee,
1997).
Providence and the Problem of Evil (Oxford,
1998).
Epistemic Justification (Oxford, 2001).
The Resurrection of God Incarnate (Oxford,
2003).
Further Reading
Ashdown, Lance, Anonymous Skeptics:
Swinburne, Hick and Alston (Tubingen,
2002).
Mackie, J.L., The Miracle of Theism
(Oxford, 1982).
Messer, Richard, Does God's Existence Need
Proof? (Oxford, 1993).
Padgett, A.G. (ed.), Reason and the Christian
Religion: Essays in Honour of Richard
Swinburne (Oxford, 1994).
Parsons, Keith, God and the Burden of Proof
(Buffalo, New York, 1989).
Religious Studies, vol. 38, no. 3 (2002).
Special issue devoted to Swinburne.
Alan G. Padgett
 T
TAYLOR, Alfred Edward (1869-1945)
Alfred Edward Taylor was born in Oundle,
Northamptonshire on 22 December 1869 and
died in Edinburgh on 31 October 1945. The
eldest son of a Wesleyan minister, he was
educated at Kingswod School, Bath and New
College, Oxford, where he read classics. After
graduation in 1891 he was awarded a Prize
Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, which
he held until 1898. At Merton he came to have
an intimate friendship with the eminent idealist
philosopher F.H. BRADLEY, with whom he met
almost daily. In 1896 he was appointed
Lecturer in Greek and Philosophy at Owens
College, Manchester, where Samuel
ALEXANDER held the Chair. In 1903 he was
made Frothingham Professor of Philosophy at
McGill University, Montreal, returning in
1908, when he succeeded Bernard BOSANQUET
as Professor of Moral Philosophy at St
Andrews. In 1924, after sixteen years at St
Andrews, where he had John Burnet and G.F.
STOUT as colleagues, he succeeded James SETH
as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh.
He retired from this post in 1941, although he
continued to teach and fill the duties of the
chair during the war emergency until a succes-
sor was appointed in 1944.
At the time he came up to Oxford neo-
Hegelianism was at its height and Taylor fell
very much under its influence. He later
described himself as having been 'carried off my
feet by Bradley', and even in later life, as he
became more sensitive to what he considered
1024
the great dangers of absolute idealism, he con-
tinued to regard Bradley's influence as 'the
most potent to which my own thinking has
been subjected and the most beneficial' (The
Freedom of Man', p. 217). This influence was
clearest in his first two works.
The earliest, The Problem of Conduct, which
he published in 1901, was an expanded version
of an essay which had won him the Green
Moral Philosophy Prize in 1899. The book was
notable and did much to make his reputation.
Its relation to the growing idealist school was,
however, a complex one. While it drew heavily
on Bradley, in particular on his scepticism, it
was nonetheless largely opposed to the neo-
Hegelian school of ethics in general, and to
Green in particular. Finding nothing but a gap
between Green's ethics and metaphysics, the
book argues for a general disassociation of
ethics from metaphysics, insisting that the
former needs to be treated empirically. Ethics,
if it is to be any use, must be based not on
general principles of metaphysics, but on the
study of human nature in its concrete empirical
entirety, as it is revealed in the sciences of psy-
chology, sociology and anthropology. 'It is for
empirical psychology to say what qualities are
and what are not of "absolute" worth for
human beings', he insists (The Problem of
Conduct, p. 169). For all that, the position he
ends up defending is not so very different from
that of 'My Station and its Duties'.
His next work, Elements of Metaphysics,
published in 1903, was also very successful
and for many years served as a standard student

textbook on contemporary metaphysics. It was
also far more orthodox, written from an idealist
and monistic point of view, almost indistin-
guishable from that of Bradley. But where the
earlier book drew on the more sceptical
destructive side of Bradley's thought, this one
picks up on the more positive constructive
aspect. Indeed, at times, with its equation of
reality with immediate experience, its assertion
of a supra-relational absolute, its use of the
law of non-contradiction as the supreme crite-
rion for metaphysics and its discussion of
degrees of reality, it serves almost as a com-
mentary on Appearance and Reality. However,
there are differences. Less Bradleian, for
example, is the use made throughout of a tele-
ological conception of the Absolute as that
structure of the world system of which all
purposes, each in its own way, must take
account, which, it is argued, coincides with the
more traditional account of it as substance.
The influence of other figures, such as James
WARD, Royce, Bosanquet and McTAGGART, is
also discernible. The scope of the book is
notably large. After a general discussion of
metaphysics, it has three sections dealing with
ontology, cosmology and rational psychology,
which last takes in also the relevance of meta-
physics to religion and ethics. The final position
advanced is one destructive of the self, its
freedom - in the sense of chance; true freedom
is said instead to lie in teleology - and the
ultimate reality of time. The book is notable
also for its engagement with actual physical
science, especially the theory of evolution.
As Taylor's career developed, however, he
gradually left behind his early Bradleian views,
both with regard to ethics and metaphysics,
arriving eventually at a position of ethical
theism. He himself explained the change partly
as a result of his associations with Samuel
Alexander at Manchester and with G.F. Stout
at St Andrews, and partly as a result of his
own studies of the work of Ernst Mach,
Galileo, Descartes and Leibniz. The change, he
recalls, was largely complete by the time he
returned to Britain in 1908, but the new
1025
TAYLOR
position was not given full exposition until his
1926-8 Gifford Lectures, published in 1930
in two series under the general title The Faith
of a Moralist.
The first series is subtitled The Theological
Implications of Morality' and offers an
extended version of the moral argument for
the existence of God, drawing on, but extend-
ing beyond, Kant. He begins with an attack on
those who deny that morality can have any
factual implications, attacking the rigid dis-
tinction between fact and value, which he finds
no more tenable than that between primary
and secondary qualities, both of which must be
reckoned in the things themselves.
He goes on to argue that our profoundest
ethical convictions are incompatible with the
truth of naturalism or, as he now prefers to
describe it, secularism. The argument is hypo-
thetical but nonetheless, he thinks, irresistible.
It rests on the fact that we have a concern for
each other and for eternity which naturalism,
with its limited perspective, can only see as
futile. The moral life is one of endeavour
towards an eternal good. All secular good is
defective since it cannot be enjoyed as a whole
simultaneously. Ethics reaches out beyond just
my station and its duties. He also argues from
guilt, which he suggest is sui generis and
peculiar to the human, and incapable of any
merely psychological here-and-now explana-
tion. But if the good we seek cannot be
explained in wholly natural terms, and Kant is
right that whatever we ought to be we can be,
then it follows that we are not wholly natural
agents with a wholly natural destiny either. In
this way ethics points to God. Our moral incli-
nations, it can be said, are nothing less than a
manifestation of the divine.
In sum, morality is given its ultimate basis in
religion; the notion of an absolute moral oblig-
ation depending for its validity on the assur-
ances of Christian theism, of a non-natural
eternal good for man. The change from his
early ethical position is almost complete. Where
in his first work he opposed ethics and meta-
physics, he now completely reverses his
TAYLOR
position, arguing that ethics requires a meta-
physical anchor, in theism. And where before it
was a subject to be approached empirically, he
is now more rationalist and teleological in his
method.
Not only his ethics, but his metaphysic too
changed profoundly. For one thing, his concep-
tion of metaphysics itself became more modest.
In contrast to his earlier position, he now held
'there can be no final "metaphysics" and ... the
temptation of all others which a student of the
subject should avoid as he grows older is the
temptation to have a "system" which leaves no
unexplained mystery at the root of things' (The
Freedom of Man', p. 272).
But his specific positions also changed. He
moves away from the immanentism of the ide-
alists to affirm the reality of independent finite
beings separate from a further being which tran-
scends them. The motive is ethical. 'No philos-
ophy of pure "immanence" can take the moral
life seriously' (The Faith of a Moralist, vol. 1,
p. 228), he argues. With individuality comes
freedom. Drawing on scholastic thought, he
argues that morality requires us to recognize
genuine liberum arbitrum, which he holds to be
incompatible with scientific determinism and
thus to require real contingency in the world.
Ethics too provides the basis for a belief in
immortality. For we are, argues Taylor, under an
unconditional obligation to strive to become
complete and free persons, yet this is something
that could be realized only by an eternal being.
If by the moral law we are commanded to live
'as aspirants to eternity, eternity must really be
our destination' (ibid., p. 281). Moreover, since,
unlike for some other idealists, moral struggle
and advance are realities, not just appearances,
he now asserts both the reality of evil, as well as
that of time, as that in which the ethical drama
is played. Quite how this latter sits with the
eternity of God, which he also thinks is some-
thing real, is less clear.
The second series of lectures, entitled 'Natural
Theology and the Positive Religions', is much
taken up with the seemingly historical questions
of how the truths of religion may in fact come to
1026
be known. Taylor's own religious faith changed
as his philosophical views progressed, passing
from Methodism through to Anglo-Catholicism.
And it must be confessed that much of the
content of the second volume reads like apolo-
getics for his new-won position. Revelation
through historical persons is, argues Taylor, no
harder to accept than the fact of genius, of which
it is in truth but another example. Nor need the
revelation simply be one of utterance; it could be
through the life of the individual (as Taylor
believes is the case with Christ). He is equally
able to accept miracles, arguing that, given the
existence of God these are not antecedently
unlikely, and while the world must be rational
and have a pattern, we cannot say in advance
what that pattern is. Authority, institutionalism
and sacramentalism are all defended as well.
In addition to his more philosophical and the-
ological work, Taylor was also a scholar of clas-
sical philosophy of international repute. Like his
St Andrews Colleague, John Burnet, he held to
the theory that most of what Plato attributes to
Socrates in his dialogues (not only the early ones,
but all of them) did indeed come from Socrates.
This view he first set out in his Varia Socratica
(1911) and developed in later works. His main
work on Plato, Plato: The Man and his Work,
published in 1926, contains summaries of the
main contents of each dialogue and a careful
study of their various dates of writing. For
Aristotle, Taylor had less sympathy and appre-
ciation and he was wont to emphasize the extent
to which Aristotle's doctrines were borrowed
from Plato and the Academy. He worked also on
Neoplatonic, medieval and early modern phi-
losophy.
Despite his great constructive work, in the
final analysis Taylor must be judged an eminent
commentator and philosophical man of letters
rather than an original systematic philosopher.
Although he was much respected in his day, his
influence on subsequent philosophers has been
negligible.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Problem of Conduct; a Study in the

Phenomenolgy of Ethics (1901).
Elements of Metaphysics (1903).
Plato: The Man and his Work (1926).
The Faith of a Moralist (1930).
Other Relevant Works
Plato (1908).
Thomas Hobbes (1908).
Varia Socratica (Oxford, 1911).
Aristotle (1912).
The Freedom of Man', in J.H. Muirhead
(ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy:
Personal Statements. 2nd ser. (1925), pp.
269-304.
Platonism and its Influence (1925).
Philosophical Studies (1934).
The Christian Hope of Immortality (1938).
Does God Exist? (1945).
W. J. Mander
TAYLOR, Charles Margrave (1931-)
Charles Taylor was born in Montreal on 5
November 1931. He obtained a first class
honours degree in history from McGill
University in 1952, then with a Rhodes
Scholarship studied at Oxford University
(Balliol College), where he obtained a first class
honours degree in PPE in 1955. From 1955 to
1956 he was a John Locke Scholar at Oxford
and from 1956 to 1961 a fellow of All Souls
College, receiving the Oxford MA in 1960 and
DPhil in 1961. During the 1950s Taylor was
politically active in the British New Left, and
was one of the founding editors of the journal
Universities and Left Review (1957-9). After
completing his doctorate he moved back to
Montreal, where he worked in the Department
of Political Science at McGill University and the
Departement de Philosophic at the Universite
de Montreal. He continued to be active in
politics, standing as a candidate for the New
1027
TAYLOR
Democratic Party in four Canadian federal elec-
tions between 1962 and 1968, without gaining
office. He became Professor of Philosophy at
McGill in 1973, and in 1976 was appointed
Chichele Professor of Social and Political
Theory at Oxford University. In 1979 he
became a fellow of the British Academy, but he
gave up his Oxford chair in 1981. He returned
to McGill as Professor of Political Science and
Philosophy in 1982, where he has continued to
work since then. He remained active in
Canadian public life, for example by giving
submissions to two Royal Commissions and by
sitting temporarily on the Quebec Conseil de la
Langue Franchise, and has received several
public honours, including Companion of the
Order of Canada (1996) and grand officer de
1'Ordre national du Quebec (2000). In 2002 he
joined the faculty of Northwestern University
at Evanston, Illinois on a part-time basis, while
continuing to teach at McGill as emeritus pro-
fessor.
Although Taylor published several philo-
sophical articles while still a research student
(including some of the first discussions of the
work of the French phenomenologist Maurice
Merleau-Ponty to appear in English), his first
major publication was his doctoral thesis, The
Explanation of Behaviour (1964). The book is
an attack on psychological behaviourism - the
main research programme in mechanistic psy-
chology in the first half of the twentieth century
- but it is also critical of the 'linguistic philos-
ophy' predominant in Oxford during the
1950s. In the first part of the book Taylor high-
lighted weaknesses in the reductionist strategies
of behaviourism (many of which it shared with
positivism). He argued that neither the behav-
iourist attempt to reduce the teleological form
of law to the mechanistic form, nor its reduc-
tion of psychological or intentional terms to
those of a non-psychological 'physical thing'
language, was successful. Taylor then claimed
to show, by means of conceptual analysis, that
mechanistic explanations of behaviour that
invoked laws governing movement were
incompatible with characterizations of that
TAYLOR
behaviour as action, since behaviour only falls
under the concept of action if it is done for the
sake of some goal or purpose, and is thereby
distinguished from mere movement. But it was
wrong to think, as linguistic or 'ordinary
language' philosophers were prone to do, that
the incompatibility between mechanism and
the ordinary concept of action ruled out mech-
anism. For the conceptual scheme in which the
concept of action is embedded, Taylor argued,
may turn out to be false. Just as the behav-
iourists were wrong to dismiss teleology on a
priori grounds, mechanism could not be dis-
counted a priori either. The only way of settling
the disagreement between mechanists and tele-
ologists was to turn to the 'phenomena' them-
selves. This is what Taylor did in the second
(larger) part of the book, by way of a detailed
examination of the extant experimental
research. Here Taylor recorded how psycholo-
gists had to break out of the narrow mecha-
nistic paradigm of behaviourism in order to
account for the actual learning behaviour of
animals.
The Explanation of Behaviour, together with
several shorter pieces written by Taylor on
related topics, occupied a significant position in
the debates around the status of action that
preoccupied analytic philosophers in the 1960s
(its affinity with Merleau-Ponty's La Structure
du Comportement, 1942, went unnoticed). But
by then behaviourism was a spent force, and as
Taylor noted, his critique did not apply to its
successor paradigm in mechanistic psychology,
cognitive science. His only extended discussion
of the latter is an article entitled 'The
Significance of Significance: The Case of
Cognitive Psychology' (1983, reprinted in
Human Agency and Language', 1985). Here
Taylor argued that whereas the performances
of a machine were 'significant' relative to some-
thing external to it - the designer of the
program, the user of the machine, or an
observer of its use - things have significance for
human beings non-relatively: it matters to
human beings that there is one way rather than
another, that a certain action be performed,
1028
and so forth. For Taylor, human beings, unlike
machines but like other animals, are essentially
'embodied agents': their experience is refracted
through their desires and purposes, so that
through their experience they 'engage' with the
world. 'Consciousness', understood as a series
of neutral or 'disengaged' representations, is
thus at best a secondary mark of the human.
This is a lesson Taylor learnt early on from his
studies of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Hegel
and WITTGENSTEIN, and Taylor has repeatedly
drawn on their work to correct - or better 'to
overcome' - what he takes to be a distorted
picture of the mind inherited from Descartes
and Locke. The fundamental feature of this
picture is that it divides things up into an 'inner'
realm of conscious awareness - 'the mind' -
and an external world, however that is con-
ceived. Each of these realms, the mental and the
non-mental, is deemed to be intelligible inde-
pendent of the other, and this triggers a range
of problems (for instance, about the substantial
grounding of the two realms and their causal
interaction) that set the agenda for the philos-
ophy of mind. Taylor does not try to solve
these problems but asks how it is that we come
to be 'held captive' by the picture of the mind
that generates them. His answer, which he fills
out in a variety of ways, is that we are under the
thrall of epistemology: our conception of what
it is to be 'minded' is driven and misshaped by
a conception of what it is to know. The philo-
sophical task of 'overcoming epistemology',
which Taylor distinguishes from Rorty's project
of moving beyond 'foundationalism', is
outlined in several essays collected in Taylor's
Philosophical Arguments (1995).
The question of how to overcome the
dualism of mind (or 'spirit') and nature is
central to Taylor's second major work, Hegel
(1975). Originally commissioned by A.J. AYER
as an inexpensive primer on Hegel for Penguin
Press, the costly 600-page book that eventually
appeared set a new standard for Hegel schol-
arship. Although the reading of Hegel's Science
of Logic that makes up the central chapters
has been superseded by other interpretations,

the work is still widely read, especially for its
account of the historical context of Hegel's
thought and of the contemporary relevance of
Hegel's social philosophy (a shorter version of
the book, containing extracts from the opening
and closing sections, was published as Hegel
and Modern Societyr, 1979). The leading idea of
Taylor's interpretation is that Hegel attempted
to reconcile the Enlightenment ideal of rational
autonomy and the romantic ideal of authentic
self-expression. The former was set on radical
self-determination, but risked alienation from
nature. The latter was set on expressive unity
with nature, but risked heteronomy. On
Taylor's reading, Hegel attempted to reconcile
these ideals by construing both finite self-
defining subjectivity and nature as incomplete
moments in the self-actualization of a cosmic
subject, Spirit. By showing, in the form of a
philosophical system, how Spirit completes
itself through and only through the self-expres-
sion of finite rational subjectivity, Hegel could
claim to have reconciled mind and nature.
Taylor expounds this view with clarity and
sympathy, but he is clearly not convinced by it
himself.
Taylor places Hegel in what he calls the
'expressivist' tradition, and this tradition has
provided the inspiration for a series of papers
Taylor has written on language. Two of these,
'Language and Human Nature' and Theories
of Meaning', are collected in Human Agency
and Language, others, including 'The
Importance of Herder' and 'Heidegger,
Language and Ecology' appear in Philosophical
Arguments. Taylor's main concern in these
writings is to draw out a contrast between 'des-
ignative' theories of meaning and 'expressive-
constitutive' theories. According to the former,
it is the ability of a word or sentence to desig-
nate or represent an object or state of affairs
that enables words or sentences to mean some-
thing. Such theories take designation or repre-
sentation to be first in the order of explanation
of meaning, and their paradigm of getting
something right in language is designating or
representing an object accurately. By contrast,
1029
TAYLOR
'expressive-constitutive' theories take the
capacity of language to bring something to
expression as basic. This can be done well, or
'got right', in a variety of ways - such as by
articulating a feeling properly, or by evoking
the right mood, or by establishing an appro-
priate interpersonal relation - and so will often
not be a matter of forming an accurate repre-
sentation. Indeed, bringing something to
expression is not in the first instance a matter
of describing an independent object at all.
Emotions, moods and social relations, for
instance, can be 'constituted' by the articulation
that expresses them, and this makes possible the
creation of new levels of feeling and sociality,
experiences that creatures without language
are incapable of possessing. Thus humans, as
language beings, inhabit linguistically disclosed
'worlds' that are qualitatively distinct from the
environments animals inhabit. On this view, it
is only against the background of some lin-
guistically expressive disclosure of a world that
language takes on a representational or desig-
native function, so that expression rather than
designation is primary. By contrasting the
expressivist and designative approaches to
language in this way, Taylor aims to show up
the superiority of expressivism.
Taylor's approach to language owes a lot to
Heidegger and Gadamer, the two central
figures of twentieth-century philosophical
hermeneutics, and one of Taylor's main
achievements has been to explain, in a familiar
idiom, the nature and import of the hermeneu-
tic or interpretative conception of the human
sciences generally. In his 1971 essay
'Interpretation and the Sciences of Man'
(included in Philosophy and the Human
Sciences, 1985) Taylor argued that the situation
of the social enquirer is analogous to that of the
interpreter of a text in that both begin with
something whose meaning is problematic, and
both aim at reaching a deeper understanding of
the subject-matter. In the case of social science,
the goal is to improve upon the pre-theoretical
self-interpretations that spontaneously arise in
a given social practice. In Taylor's view, there
TAYLOR
is no formalizable procedure for testing such
interpretations, no interpretation-free stand-
point from which to determine their validity,
but that only counts against them if they are
measured by standards that prevail in the
natural sciences, which Taylor thinks is a
mistake. The social sciences are also unlike the
natural sciences, Taylor argues, in not being
Value free'. This is because, as he argued in
'Neutrality and Political Science' (1967), the
theoretical frameworks needed to explain
human behaviour always incorporate some
conception of basic human needs and patterns
of motivation, and so secrete value judgements
about the nature of the good or well-ordered
society. So-called value-neutral social science
typically masks rather than neutralizes moral
and political commitments, and this, Taylor
argues, also encourages ethnocentrism, since it
can make it seem as if the social scientist's
home language is the only possible correct one.
But, for Taylor, ethnocentrism is not avoided
by adopting a relativist stance, according to
which the agent's self-understanding is assumed
to be incorrigible and immune from critical
judgement. On the contrary, Taylor argues,
the capacity for cross-cultural judgement is
indispensable for non-ethnocentric social
science, since this is what enables it to be self-
critical and to learn, from its encounter with
other conceptual schemes, the limits of its own.
Taylor's writings on this topic, which include
'Rationality' (1982), 'Understanding and
Ethnocentricity' (1983) and 'Comparison,
History, Truth' (1990), have been influential
amongst cultural anthropologists.
Taylor's most important work to date,
however, is Sources of the Self: The Making of
the Modern Identity (1989). The first part of
the book lays out a general conception of the
self which ties human identity to a certain
understanding of the good. Elaborating on an
idea first formulated in his article 'What is
Human Agency?' (1977), Taylor argues that
some practical orientation to the world,
mapped as a locus of what he calls 'strong
value', is indispensable for healthy human
1030
agency. By this he means that human beings
have no choice but to lead their lives in accor-
dance with standards that discriminate between
what is worthwhile or worthless, admirable or
contemptible, just or unjust, good or bad, etc.
To have no sense of such distinctions or 'qual-
itative contrasts', Taylor argues, would be to
lack an identity of any sort, a pathological con-
dition which sufferers of an 'identity crisis' get
close to. In the normal case, human beings are
oriented in one form or another to 'the good'.
In being oriented to the good, human beings are
not concerned by what they happen to desire -
desires that feature in what Taylor calls weak
evaluation - but by what is worthy of desire, as
that worth is revealed in the qualitative con-
trasts that feature in strong evaluation.
Furthermore, Taylor maintains that concerning
strong evaluations, there is a truth to the
matter. He rejects the 'anti-realism' and 'quasi-
realism' of much modern moral philosophy,
advocating instead a version of realism accord-
ing to which participation in practices of strong
evaluation is not an option and the evaluations
themselves are considered as responsive to real
moral qualities of the world. Taylor is also
critical of the proceduralist models of practical
reasoning - utilitarianism and Kantianism in
particular - predominant in modern ethics.
Practical reason, in Taylor's view, is more a
matter of interpreting the content of specific
strong values than applying a general principle
of justification such as the maximization of
happiness or the universalizability of a rule.
He is also dissatisfied by modern moral phi-
losophy's lack of reflection on what he calls
'moral sources'. A moral source, as Taylor
defines it, is something that simultaneously
constitutes good things as good and empowers
us to realize the good. Taylor's declared aim in
Sources of the Self is to recover a sense of what
the moral sources of the modern identity are.
There are two interlocking strands to the
historical narrative that makes up the bulk of
Sources of the Self: one traces the emergence of
the distinctive set of values (or 'life goods') that
characterize modern, Western civilization; the

other outlines the transitions in metaphysical
understanding (of the 'constitutive good') that
accompanied the emergent values. Each strand
unfolds in two directions: one leads to the
broad moral outlook Taylor calls
'Enlightenment naturalism', the other passes
through romantic expressivism to post-
romantic and modernist forms of moral/aes-
thetic sensibility. According to Taylor's story,
the moral appeal of Enlightenment naturalism
arose from the dignity it accorded to the self-
defining, 'disengaged' subject (who masters
inherited and merely natural attachments by
rationally scrutinizing and re-moulding them);
from its affirmation of ordinary life (thus
viewing the life of work and the family as spir-
itually significant in its own right); and from its
egalitarian vision of morality as geared towards
the amelioration of the condition of mankind
as a whole. Once this range of values is in view,
Taylor observes, it becomes much harder to
dismiss the 'Enlightenment project' as being
hell-bent on domination and control, as critics
of modernity sometimes do. In Taylor's view,
Enlightenment naturalism is vulnerable not so
much because of the values it espouses as on
account of the ontological visions, or moral
sources, it provides to support them. According
to Taylor, the central values of Enlightenment
naturalism initially arose in conjunction with a
vision that placed the human in relation to
God. As the God relation receded, self-respon-
sible reason emerged as the key moral source.
But there is anxiety, Taylor suggests, over the,
'adequacy' of this source, a situation not helped
by Enlightenment naturalism's reluctance to
engage in this level of reflection. Taylor identi-
fies a similar predicament in the second,
'expressivist' stream of the modern identity.
The values that matter here are wholeness,
expressive self-fulfilment and authenticity.
Taylor notes that these standards of human
flourishing both emerged in reaction to and
are incommensurable with the ideal of rational
disengagement, and that our attraction to them
adds to our anxieties about Enlightenment nat-
uralism. But the moral sources of authentic
1031
TAYLOR
self-expression, accessed by way of the creative
imagination, can also be articulated in more or
less adequate ways. Taylor is convinced that
modern art has succeeded in making moral
sources 'manifest' through various modes of
'epiphany'. He suggests that the esteem in
which art is held in modern civilization reflects
this achievement, though the celebration of
imagination for its own sake also opens up the
danger of an experience-flattening 'slide to sub-
jectivism', as Taylor puts it in The Ethics of
Authenticity (1992).
Sources of the Self deals only indirectly with
politics, but it is as a political theorist that
Taylor is probably best known. In early works,
published while a student at Oxford in the ver-
nacular leftist journals Universities and Left
Review, New Reasoner and (the product of
the amalgamation of these) New Left Review,
Taylor defended a model of socialist humanism
that avoided the weaknesses of welfarism and
the vices of Stalinism. He also sketched a diag-
nosis of modern forms of political alienation
which is developed in his book on Canadian
politics (The Pattern of Politics, 1970) and with
more general application in Hegel. In the latter
book, Taylor explicated the dilemma that arose
in modern societies from their reliance on two
self-negating models of freedom: the 'negative'
freedom of the liberal democratic state whose
sole purpose is to protect individual rights, and
the 'Jacobin' positive freedom embodied in the
unanimous will of a politically homogeneous
citizenry. Taylor criticized the negative con-
ception of freedom and its associated doctrines
of the primacy of individual rights and the neu-
trality of the state in two influential articles
published in 1979: 'Atomism' and 'What's
Wrong with Negative Liberty'. These pieces
provide the basis of his reputation as a 'com-
munitarian' critic of liberalism, though as is
clear from his 1989 essay 'Cross-Purposes: The
Liberal-Communitarian Debate', that is a mis-
leading way of categorizing his position. Taylor
is better described as a 'liberal holist' whose
argument then was with Locke and Nozick. In
particular, Taylor took issue with the way in
TAYLOR
which the individual bearer of the putative
unconditional right to freedom defended by
Locke and Nozick is abstracted from the
society that makes possible the development
of capacities for freedom, capacities the indi-
vidual must draw upon in order to benefit from
the right. It thus made no sense, Taylor argued,
to view social obligations as a secondary or
conditional matter, contingent on what indi-
viduals choose to do with their unconditional
right. Or rather, it could only make sense
against the background of an unquestioned but
highly problematic atomist ontology.
Taylor agrees with thinkers in the civic
humanist tradition for whom a free society is
not so much an aggregate of right-holding indi-
viduals as the collective life form of a free
people. A healthy democracy, Taylor main-
tains, is one in which citizens voluntarily par-
ticipate in public life and identify with the polit-
ical community. It thus requires a sense of
common purpose amongst the citizens that is
more important to them than the allegiances
they have as members of potentially conflicting
groups. In his highly influential article The
Politics of Recognition' (published with
responses in a volume entitled Multiculturalism
and 'The Politics of Recognition', 1992) Taylor
considers the options open to modern, cultur-
ally diverse liberal societies for meeting this
demand. On the one hand, he points out, the
citizens of a liberal society demand recognition
of their 'equal dignity' as human beings, which
is expressed in their equal status under the law
and in their possession of the same basic rights.
In this respect the liberal polity is rightly blind
to differences in cultural allegiance and group
identity. But according to 'procedural liberal-
ism' - the form of liberalism dominant in the
United States - the purpose of the liberal polity
is exhausted by its recognition of those indi-
vidual rights: it refuses to endorse collective
goals and disavows any substantive concep-
tion of the good. The problem with this model,
Taylor argues, is that there may be groups
whose very survival depends on some political
recognition of their legitimate collective goals;
1032
and rather than being neutral with respect to
the good, it expresses one particular conception
of it that some will find alien and oppressive.
The claim for recognition of Quebec as a
'distinct society' within Canada, expressed for
instance in laws aimed at preserving the French
language, provides Taylor with an example of
how a liberal society can both protect funda-
mental individual rights and pursue collective
goals while respecting cultural diversity. But
his more general claim is that alternatives to
procedural liberalism will have to be found if
liberal democracy is to flourish under condi-
tions of pluralism around the world. In works
such as 'Liberal Politics and the Public Sphere'
(1995) and Modern Social Imaginaries (2004)
Taylor has explored the potential that exists
within Western traditions for the development
of such alternatives.
Religion also figures prominently in Taylor's
recent work. A Catholic Modernity? (1999)
contains reflections on Taylor's own Catholic
faith and maps a constellation of distinctively
modern ways of relating to transcendence. He
argues that the denial of transcendence, or of a
good beyond life, characteristic of both secular
'exclusive humanism' and Nietzschean 'anti-
humanism' is driven not so much by episte-
mological considerations, or considerations
about what is rational to believe, as by the
power of moral/spiritual ideals. Moreover, he
suggests that the human desire for something
beyond life may degenerate into a life-negating
fascination with death and violence unless
reoriented by a good beyond life. At a more
descriptive level, in Varieties of Religion Today
(2002) Taylor sketches an account of the
changing meaning of religion in the modern
world, and he is currently engaged in a larger
project on the meaning of secularization.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Explanation of Behaviour (1964).
Hegel (Cambridge, 1975).
Human Agency and Language, Philosophical
Papers 1 (Cambridge, 1985).
Philosophy and the Human Sciences,

Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge, 1985).
Sources of the Self: The Making of the
Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1989).
The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge,
Mass., 1992).
Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, Mass.,
1995).
Varieties of Religion Today (Cambridge,
Mass., 2002).
Modern Social Imaginaries (2004).
Other Relevant Works
The Pattern of Politics (Toronto, 1970).
Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays in Canadian
Federalism and Nationalism (Montreal,
1993).
Multiculturalism and 'The Politics of
Recognition' (Princeton, 1992).
A Catholic Modernity?', ed. James L. Heft
(Oxford, 1999).
further Reading
A comprehensive bibliography of works by
and on Taylor is available at http://
www.kent.ac.uk/politics/research/charlesta
ylorbib/index.html, accessed November
2004.
Abbey, Ruth (ed.), Charles Taylor
(Cambridge, 2004).
Smith, Nicholas H., Charles Taylor:
Meaning, Morals and Modernity
(Cambridge, 2002).
Tully, James (ed.), Philosophy in an Age of
Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles
Taylor in Question (Cambridge, 1994).
Nicholas H. Smith
TAYLOR, Christopher Charles Whiston
(1931-)
Christopher Taylor was born in Edinburgh on
12 July 1931. He went to Edinburgh
1033
TAYLOR
University, where he received his MA in classics
in 1958, then to Balliol College, Oxford, where
he was awarded his BPhil in philosophy in
1960. He held the John Locke Scholarship in
1961. He was appointed fellow of Magdalen
College in the academic year 1962-3, and sub-
sequently became fellow and tutor in philoso-
phy at Corpus Christi College, Oxford until his
retirement in 2003. Concurrently with his fel-
lowship and tutorship, he was appointed reader
in philosophy in 1996, and Professor of
Philosophy in 2002.
Taylor is one of a number of philosophers
who has made a great scholarly contribution in
the twentieth century to the study of the ancient
Greek philosophers. The many works produced
by Taylor, including the influential Oxford
Studies in Ancient Philosophy', of which he is
the editor of several volumes, have added con-
siderably to our understanding, particularly of
the pre-Socratics, as well as Socrates himself
and his influence on his contemporaries and
disciples, including of course Plato. Taylor
points out that we never find the historical
Socrates in the writings of Plato, Xenophon
and others who wrote about Socrates, but that
the Socrates who is presented in the works of
others is never entirely fictional. Plato presents
Socrates as the ideal philosopher because he
believed Socrates to have truly been such, even
if many of the theories for which the Socrates
in the Platonic dialogues is often the mouth-
piece were Plato's own.
Stemming from his early interests, Taylor's
work The Greeks on Pleasure (with J.C.
GOSLING, 1982) is a historical survey of ancient
Greek thought on the subject from the pre-
Socratics to Aristotle. Taylor carefully traces the
various contributions of the ancient Greeks,
from the view that hedonism is preferable to
and in conflict with virtue to the contention that
a life of virtue is more pleasant than one which
lacks it. Central to the work is the develop-
ment of Plato's thought, from his early flirtation
with hedonism to the view that the best life
coincides with the most pleasurable, and finally
to his late reflections that not all pleasures are
TAYLOR
compossible. Aristotle is presented as attempt-
ing to make a case for the conclusion that the
life of pleasure is the life of the intellect. Finally,
Taylor issues a warning against the alignment
of the ancient Greek concern with pleasure to
twentieth-century analytical interest in the same
issue.
Taylor's treatment of Aristotle's work on
politics again embodies meticulous scholarship.
In both his ethics and his political philosophy
Aristotle enquires into how each person is to
achieve his or her individual good. The politi-
cal community is the goal of more primitive
communities such as the family and the house-
hold, and life in the polls is both necessary and
sufficient for the development of moral judge-
ment and thus of individual human virtue. The
good life is the life of practical wisdom, or
phronesis, which requires active participation in
the political community.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(with J.C. Gosling), The Greeks on Pleasure
(1982).
The Ways of Desire', in Joel Marks (ed.),
New Essays in Philosophical Psychology
on the Concept of Wanting (1986).
'Polities', in Jonathan Barnes (ed.),
Cambridge Companion to Aristotle
(1995), pp. 233-58.
From the Beginning to Plato, Routledge
History of Philosophy, vol. 1 (1997).
Socrates: A Very Short Introduction (1998).
(with R. M. Hare and Jonathan Barnes),
Greek Philosophers: Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle (1999).
'Pleasure: Aristotle's Response to Plato',
Robert Heinaman (ed.), Plato and
Aristotle's Ethics (2003), pp. 1-20
(Ed.), Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy,
vols 11-16 (1993-8).
Kathryn L. Plant
1034
TEALE, Alfred Ernest (1900-82)
A.E. Teale was born in Keighley on 1
November 1900 and died there on 25 February
1982. He was educated at the University of
Leeds, where he obtained a first class degree in
philosophy and was a pupil of C.M. Gillespie,
himself a student of Kant arid classical philos-
ophy, and of H.F. HALLETT, whose main area
of interest was moral philosophy. Teale went
on in 1929 to complete a BLitt at Balliol
College, Oxford and was there much influ-
enced and encouraged by Lord LINDSAY of
Birker. From Balliol Teale moved to a lecture-
ship in philosophy at the University of
Manchester and it was from there that he went
in 1949 to a founding Chair in Moral and
Political Philosophy at the newly established
University College of North Staffordshire
where Lindsay was the first Principal. Teale
remained at Keele until his retirement in 1968.
His most significant publication was Kantian
Ethics (1951), in which Teale presented an
account of moral theory which was closely
related to certain parts of Kant's ethical writings
but with substantial departures from standard
readings. These departures have in general not
found wide acceptance in the philosophical
world. Teale's view of Kant's moral theory is
that its clearest form is to be found in his early
writings and that it is essentially Pauline and
Protestant. Critics of Teale point out that since
much of Kant's moral theory is incompatible
with that reading it is one which cannot be
accepted. However, it can be said that it does
provide a view of Kant's theory that is some-
times illuminating. According to Teale, Kant's
'great discovery' was an insight into St Paul's
statement 'the good that I would, I do not; the
evil that I would not, that I do'. Kant in the
1760s came to realize that 'a true interpretation
of moral experience would reveal an essential
connexion between morality and religion, and
would establish beyond doubt the priority of
the command "Love God" over the command
"love thy neighbour as thyself" (Kantian
Ethics, p. 15).

The book was fairly widely reviewed in the
philosophical journals but the reception was
generally unsympathetic. There was almost uni-
versal agreement that Teale's argument was at
best obscure and depended on a reading of
Kant's moral philosophy that was at odds with
most of Kant's mature works. However some
readers did see in it a certain promise which led
to the hope that a further work would follow.
However, that never appeared. In fact the only
other strictly philosophical publication by Teale
was his address 'Moral Assurance', given to
the meeting of the Joint Session of the Mind
Association and Aristotelian Society at Keele in
1957. In it Teale offered an account of the
place that conscience occupies in moral phi-
losophy. He also uses the occasion to attack the
answers offered about the nature of moral
theory by such contemporaries as AJ. AYER,
R.M. HARE and Patrick NOWELL-SMITH. Teale
sided with the then young philosopher Iris
MURDOCH in holding that moral vision plays a
central role in moral judgement, though what
Teale took that to be remains somewhat
obscure at the conclusion of the paper.
Teale appears to have published nothing else
of a strictly philosophical kind but he did write
The Origin of the Keele Experiment' which
appeared in the North Staffordshire Journal of
Field Studies in 1961. This gives a persuasive
account of the debates preceding the establish-
ment of Keele in 1950 and the educational phi-
losophy of the first Principal, Lord Lindsay of
Birker.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kantian Ethics (1951).
'Moral Assurance', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 31 (1957),
pp. 1-42.
Other Relevant Works
'The Origin of the Keele Experiment', North
Staffordshire Journal of Field Studies, vol.
1 (1961).
G.A.J. Rogers
1035
TEMPLE
TEMPLE, William (1881-1944)
William Temple was born in Exeter on 15
October 1881 and died at Westgate-on-Sea,
Kent on 26 October 1944. He was educated at
Rugby, where his father, Frederick Temple, who
became Archbishop of Canterbury, had been
Headmaster. At Balliol College, Oxford he was
greatly influenced by the neo-Hegelianism of
Edward Caird. Temple became fellow of
Queen's College, Oxford in 1904, where, despite
his doubts over the miraculous nature of the
Christian faith, he was ordained into the
Anglican ministry in 1909. After a short period
as Headmaster of Repton School he became
Rector of St James's, Piccadilly in 1914, where
he became increasingly involved in the Life and
Liberty campaigns to give greater autonomy to
the Church of England. He was also involved
with the Workers' Educational Association and
Student Christian Movement. In 1919 he
became a canon of Westminster and in 1921
Bishop of Manchester. He was appointed
Chairman of the archbishops' doctrine com-
mission in 1925 which eventually reported in
1938. His abiding interest in social and economic
reform led to the Conference on Politics,
Economics and Citizenship in 1924 and the
Malvern Conference in 1941. He became
Archbishop of York in 1929 and was translated
to Canterbury in 1942. His book Christianity
and Social Order (1942) was deeply influential
in the formation of the welfare state.
Temple's writings embraced many different
areas of theology and philosophy. As early as
1911 he contributed an essay on the church to
the controversial collection Foundations (ed.
B.H. STREETER) and continued to address eccle-
siological issues through his life. Alongside his
engagement in church affairs he developed a
philosophical system which is laid out most
clearly in Mens creatrix (1917), Christus veritas
(1924) and his Gifford Lectures, Nature, Man
and God (1934). These works show the
profound influence of his early philosophical
training and his abiding sense of the underlying
unity of all truth. In Mens creatrix he asserted
TEMPLE
a rational principle behind the universe which
could be grasped not only through the intellect,
but also through the imagination and con-
science. The principle of convergence into truth
was made possible by the Incarnation of Christ.
Temple also held a high doctrine of 'personal-
ity', seeing human will as the union between
mind and feelings: a person was 'a self-con-
scious and self-determining system of experi-
ence in process of achieving unity or, morally
speaking, freedom' (Christus veritas, p. 5). That
unity was to be found as the human being
became integrated with a power beyond itself.
In Nature, Man and God he addressed the
question of the relationship between spirit and
matter, understanding the universe in sacra-
mental terms. However, as the political situa-
tion grew increasingly tense, he became ever
more aware of the misdirection of the human
will towards evil, a theme which became more
prominent in his later social and political
writings. His Readings in St John's Gospel
(1939-40) offers an extended meditation on the
material character of the Christian religion as
the light shines in the darkness.
While Temple's philosophical system is very
much a child of its times, his sense of the under-
lying unity of all truth, as well as the sacra-
mental character of the universe, remains influ-
ential. His abiding legacy, however, lies in the
development of social theology and the con-
struction of the postwar political consensus.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mens creatrix (1917).
Christus veritas (1924).
Nature, Man and God (1934).
Readings in St John's Gospel (1939-40).
Christianity and Social Order (1942).
Other Relevant Works
Iremonger, F.A., William Temple (1948).
Kent,]., William Temple (Cambridge, 1992).
Padgett, J.F., The Christian Philosophy of
William Temple (The Hague, 1974).
Mark D. Chapman
1036
TENNANT, Frederick Robert (1866-1957)
Frederick Robert Tennant was born in Burslem,
Staffordshire on 1 September 1866 and died in
Cambridge on 9 September 1957. He was
educated at Caius College, Cambridge in the
natural sciences, and his training in science
greatly influenced his work in philosophy. The
work of philosopher and psychologist James
WARD also strongly influenced his thought. He
spent several years teaching science at his old
school, and was ordained a parish priest in 1894,
a task at which he worked for two decades.
Afterwards, he became a professional philoso-
pher who focused on philosophy of religion,
becoming a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
from 1913 to 1957. He took a highly intellec-
tualist approach to religion. He was an eviden-
tialist, holding that in order for one properly to
have religious belief, one must be justified in
having it - have adequate reasons for accepting
it. In this respect, he is representative of a long
tradition in philosophy to which contemporary
reformed epistemology is a strong response.
The appeal to reasons cannot go on forever -
somewhere there must be something itself
known without our having to have further
reasons for it - and Tennant found epistemo-
logical rock-bottom in ordinary perceptual and
moral experience, to which, ultimately, justifi-
cation of religious beliefs must appeal.
Nonetheless, it turns out there is an important
distinction to be made regarding perceptual
experience and the experiential basis of science.
Individual sensory experience is concrete - it is
of particulars, qualitative, and at least relatively
uninterpreted. Experience as the basis of science
is abstract, quantitative and highly interpreted.
It is individual sensory experience that is our
rock-bottom source of epistemic justification for
Tennant.
A brief account is in order as to how this
epistemic rock-bottom is construed. Tennant's
most thorough discussion of this topic is found
in the first volume of his Philosophical
Theology (1928). There he tells us that 'the
primary datum of psychology is the fact that

there are selves aware of their own existence
and mentality' (Philosophical Theology, vol.
1, p. 13). The nature of the self is not given in
experience, but the fact that there are selves
aware of themselves and their experiences is
inescapably established by introspection.
Tennant is emphatic in his insistence on this as
an irreducible datum.
Tennant stands in a British tradition in which
it is epistemology, not metaphysics, that is 'first
philosophy' - his intended starting-point is not
with metaphysical principles but with principles
in the theory of knowledge, not with claims
about the existence of concrete or abstract sub-
stances, necessary truths and the like, but with
claims about the nature and content of imme-
diate, non-inferential experience. One sort of
criticism will claim that nonetheless his starting-
point is itself metaphysically committed, and
objectionably so, even in his description of
immediate experience in terms of subjects who
have experiences. His response is that:
It has been taught that subject and object
arise out of undifferentiated 'pure' experi-
ence or feeling. That they have arisen should
suffice for the psychologist, for further back
than actual experience, which is from the
first a duality, we can only go by futile spec-
ulation as to the unknowable. 'Pure experi-
ence' is thus the most complete misnomer
that could be devised for the fiction in
question, as is 'radical empiricism' for the
rationalistic method by which it was
obtained. How such experience, by hypoth-
esis structureless, initiates its own differenti-
ation from within, and how it is to be dis-
tinguished from indeterminate being or from
nothingness, are the first puzzles.
(The Origin and Propagation of Sin, p. 19)
Turning from the subject of experience to the
contents of experience, Tennant analyses them
in terms of feeling (the feelings of pleasure and
displeasure that accompany the experiences of
objects), conation (roughly, desire) and atten-
tion (which is conceived as receptivity of objects
1037
TENNANT
of experience which is not purely passive, as the
nature of what receives determines how the
reception occurs). He refers to the standard
empiricist model, made famous by John Locke,
of sealing-wax receiving an impression from a
signet ring - the idea being that analogously the
mind is 'inpressed on' by physical objects that
exist external to it. Tennant points out that if
the analogy is apt, one must also take account
of the nature of the wax itself, which influ-
ences what sort of impressions can be made.
The net epistemological result is that the exis-
tence of a self and the contents of its experiences
are known noumenally - directly and as they
are. The world is known phenomenally - indi-
rectly, by inference that begins with experien-
tial contents. The claims that there is a soul, an
external world and God are hypotheses
intended to account for the facts of immediate
experience, and are thus known 'interpretively'.
That there is a soul, that there is an external
world, and that there is a God who is an ethical
intelligence responsible for natural order and
beauty, and moral law, are in parity regarding
reasonable belief. Agnosticism toward any one
of them is as reasonable or unreasonable as is
agnosticism regarding any of the others.
A further distinction is central to Tennant's
epistemology. He writes:
At the moment of perceiving a thing we are
unaware of performing synthetic activities; from
the standpoint of our experience at the moment,
the perception is immediate; and the percept has
the unity, simplicity, and instantaneousness of
a flash-photograph. The whole act does not
seem other than unanalysable, and uncondi-
tioned by previous experiences. From the stand-
point of the psychologist, however, whether
another person or oneself, afterwards reflecting
on that experience, the perception is neither
simple nor immediate. These two standpoints,
that of an experience and that of its exposition,
have been named respectively the 'psychic' and
the 'psychological'.
(The Origin and Propagation of Sin, p. 46)
TENNANT
Tennant notes that this distinction, though
well-established, is technical, derived from the
article 'Psychic and Psychological' in Baldwin's
Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychologyr, and
that 'epistemological' would do as well as 'psy-
chological' to name the sort of perspective
intended. It is regarding matters psychological
in this sense that, say, Ward and Tennant, on
the one hand, and the behaviourists, on the
other, differ. It is a fallacy to confuse one for the
other, a phenomenon Tennant takes to be all
too common in psychology and philosophy. It
is the psychic perspective that is epistemologi-
cally rock-bottom - the basic data the adequacy
of the explanation of which is fundamental in
assessing science or philosophy. As Tennant
puts it, when we come to ask what is self-
evident 'the psychic standpoint alone is
relevant, and the psychological standpoint must
be abandoned, else confusion is inevitable'
(Philosophical Theology, vol. 1, p. 409). His
most substantial work, the two-volume
Philosophical Theology, defends the argument
from design - an argument that begins with the
occurrence of order in nature, in its general
structure and its details - and infers to the
activity of a powerful non-human intelligence
as the only adequate explanation of that order.
His development of the argument, not surpris-
ing from one with a strong background in
science, of course came after David Hume's
critique of such arguments in his Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion. It also postdated
Darwin's Origin of the Species, which is widely
taken to have given the coup de grace to the
argument. Tennant, of course, was aware of the
relevance of these works and constructed his
version of the argument in a manner he took to
escape objections from these sources.
Part of this strategy involved adding appeal
to aesthetic considerations - natural beauty -
and the objectivity of morality to the scope of
the argument's premises. He held that while
aesthetic and moral experience involve feelings,
this does not entail or support aesthetic or
moral judgements being subjective or lacking in
truth-value. The other major feature of
1038
Tennant's version of the argument for design,
or ideological argument, is its focus on the
universe as a whole, not simply on particular
objects viewed as relevant, like artefacts. Of
course, Hume also considered this type of
argument from design. Tennant's response to
Hume is characterized by these remarks:
When Hume asked why should we make mind
the one phase in terms of which all others are
to be explained, suggesting that the world-
ground is something whose nature is an insol-
uble enigma, and as to which our only reason-
able resource is total suspense of judgement, he
had set before himself, as data for contempla-
tion, but a fraction of those that are now forth-
coming from the sciences of Nature and man,
of knowledge and valuation. The only idea of
a world-ground that yields an explanation of
these facts in their totality would seem to be that
of an efficient, intelligent, ethical Being.
(Philosophical Theology, vol. 2, p. 120)
This illustrates the increased scope of the
premises of Tennant's argument beyond that of
those that Hume considered. It also introduces
into the argument claims concerning the objec-
tivity of aesthetics and morality. Another
crucial element in his reply to Hume's criticism
of the argument from design is best illustrated
in connection with Tennant's response to
Darwin. Briefly, his response to Darwinian
objections went as follows: 'for the existence of
any forms of life that we may conceive, the
necessary environment, whatever its nature,
must be complex and dependent on a multi-
plicity of coincident conditions, such as are not
reasonably attributable to blind forces or to
pure mechanism' (ibid., p. 87).
This anticipates the contemporary argument
from the asserted infinitesimal chance of life
arising from what we now take to be the
original conditions - the state of affairs after the
Big Bang - to which appeal to an infinite
number of actual universes is one attempted
response. Tennant continues:

Nor, again, can science explain the adapta-
tion of the inorganic environment to life after
the manner in which Darwinism, its suffi-
ciency being assumed, explains the progres-
sive adaptations in organisms without resort
to design. Of a struggle for existence between
rival worlds, out of which ours has survived
as the fittest, we have no knowledge upon.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Origin and Propagation of Sin [Hulsean
Lectures at the University of Cambridge]
(Cambridge, 1902).
The Sources of the Doctrines of the Pall and
Original Sin (Cambridge, 1903).
The Concept of Sin (Cambridge, 1912).
Miracle and its Philosophical Presuppositions
(Cambridge, 1925).
Philosophical Theology', vol. 1 (Cambridge,
1928).
Philosophical Theology', vol. 2 (Cambridge,
1930).
Philosophy of the Sciences (Cambridge,
1932).
The Nature of Belief (1943).
Other Relevant Works
The Aim and Scope of the Philosophy of
Religion: Three Cambridge Lectures
(1940).
Further Reading
Broad, C.D., 'Frederick Robert Tennant: An
Obituary', Proceedings of the British
Academy, vol. 44 (1957), pp. 241-52.
Scudder, D.L., Tennant's Philosophical
Theology (New Haven, Connecticut,
1940).
Keith E. Yandell
1039
THEOBALD
THEOBALD, David William (fl. 1960s-80s)
David Theobald received the BSc and DPhil in
chemistry, as well as a Dip Ed, from Oxford
University. After holding a NATO fellowship
at the University of Strasbourg (1960-61), he
became lecturer in chemistry and philosophy at
the University of Manchester Institute of
Science and Technology for more than twenty
years and was also special lecturer in philoso-
phy at Lancaster University (1965-8).
The online version of Chemical Abstracts
produces twenty-five hits for articles authored or
co-authored by Theobald from 1958 to 1983,
many of them on the chemistry of various types
of terpenes. Also during these years, he pub-
lished articles on his philosophical interests in
science, knowledge and literature.
The topic of models overlaps Theobald's
interests in science, education and philosophy.
Some of his earliest philosophical writings dis-
cussed the nature and role of a scientific model.
An imaginative and explanatory device, the
model provides an analogy to connect the new
and unfamiliar with something that is known.
Theobald has argued that since theoretical
concepts are generally devised to explain obser-
vation and cannot be defined operationally,
they, rather than observables, are ontologically
fundamental entities. A model is therefore nec-
essary, both to determine the domain for a
theory and to provide its physical interpreta-
tion. In addition, a well-chosen model can help
extend a theory by suggesting additional ques-
tions and appropriate avenues of development,
which may not have been obvious without
some of the model's particular features.
Theobald has also applied some of his ideas
specifically to models of molecules, contrasting
them with models of automobiles, for example.
The latter, no matter how accurate, provide
no new information about automobiles, while
the former may suggest what actual molecules
are like and how their true nature may be
further elucidated. 'Only with a model in mind
can we do science, and clearly any model we
use has somehow to reconcile the demands of
THEOBALD
the imagination with the criticisms of the lab-
oratory' ('On Visualizing Chemical Structures',
p. 99).
Theobald's writings on the philosophy of
chemistry have focused on the methods of
explanation in chemistry, especially as they
differ from those of physics. While explanations
in physics often follow the deductive
Hempelian model and aim for quantitative pre-
diction, Theobald has argued that this kind of
explanation is not always suitable for other
sciences. Frequently chemists try to explain
what has already been observed. They want to
understand, for example, why a particular
reaction results in certain products rather than
others. Theobald has termed this 'telling likely
stories'.
Explanations are contextual and must be
relevant to the 'optimum epistemological level'
of a science at any particular time in its devel-
opment. Chemical explanation is often framed
from a molecular point of view. Since molecules
are more 'complicated' and less 'fundamental'
than atoms, explanations in chemistry may
well differ from those in physics. Molecules
comprise atoms, which are not necessarily iden-
tical to the individual atoms that physicists
study.
Theobald's interest in philosophy in literature
has also been the subject of several articles, in
which he examines how philosophical issues
can be explored and exploited within the con-
straints of fiction. Like science, literature is an
intellectual exercise involving language and
symbols as a means of understanding the
world.
Theobald has left a modest body of work in
chemistry and philosophy, but one offering
insights in both fields, sometimes separately
and sometimes conjointly. As the Contributors'
Page for the July 1966 issue of The Personalist
states, D.W. Theobald 'is well known through
his publications'.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Is Chemistry Really Physics?', Journal of the
Royal Institute of Chemistry, vol. 86
1040
(1962), pp. 455-8.
'What are the Factsr,Journal of the Royal
Institute of Chemistry, vol. 88 (1963),
373-6.
'Models and Method', Philosophy, vol. 39
(July 1964), pp. 260-67.
The Concept of Energy (1966).
'Philosophy and Imagination: An Eighteenth
Century Example', Personalist, vol. 47
(July 1966), pp. 315-27.
'The Imagination and What Philosophers
Have to Say', Diogenes, vol. 57 (Spring
1967), pp. 47-63.
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science
(1968).
'Observation and Reality', Mind, vol. 76
(April 1967), pp. 198-207.
'On Visualizing Chemical Structures',
Education in Chemistry, vol. 5 (1968), pp.
99-100.
'Accident and Chance', Philosophy, vol. 45
(April 1970), pp. 106-13.
'Chemistry in Context: Chemistry and
Philosophy', Education in Chemistry, vol.
7 (1970), pp. 18-19,24.
'Philosophy and Fiction: The Novel as
Eloquent Philosophy', British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 14 (Winter 1974), pp.
17-25.
'On the Recurrence of Things Past', Mind,
vol. 85 (January 1976), pp. 107-11.
'Some Considerations on the Philosophy of
Chemistry', Chemical Society Reviews, vol.
5 (1976), pp. 203-13.
'Is Chemistry Just Undeveloped Physics?',
CHEMTECH, vol. 7 (1977), pp. 659-63.
'Errors and Mistakes', Dialogue, vol. 18
(December 1979), pp. 556-65.
'Gaston Bachelard et la philosophic de la
chimie', Archives de philosophie, vol. 45
(1982), pp. 63-83.
Richard E. Rice

THOMAS, David Oswald (1924-)
D.O. Thomas was born in Ruthin, North Wales
on 4 March 1924. After his early education at
Denbigh Grammar School (1935-41), he
became a bank clerk, followed by military service
in the RAF. After demobilization he entered the
University College of Wales at Bangor, where he
studied philosophy (1946-50) and completed
an MA with a thesis on political obligation in the
work of the British idealists supervised by H.D.
LEWIS and D.A. REES (1950-52). He completed
his PhD under H.B. ACTON at Bedford College
in 1956. The subject of his thesis, the political
philosophy of Richard Price, was pivotal to his
later philosophical interests. He was appointed
tutor in philosophy and psychology at Coleg
Harlech (1955) and then lecturer in philosophy
at the University College of Wales at
Aberystwyth (1960), where he became senior
lecturer (1965) and reader (1978). He remained
at Aberystwyth until retirement in 1985.
Thomas's major contribution has been to the
history of philosophy and ideas, particularly the
contribution of religious dissent to the British
Enlightenment. His work centres on the ratio-
nalist philosopher Richard Price, though he has
also written on Price's contemporaries and pre-
decessors including Joseph Priestley, Samuel
Clarke, Joseph Butler, John Locke and Benjamin
Hoadly. He initially pursued these interests when
they fell outside the philosophical mainstream.
While his major publication, The Honest Mind
(1977), deals with Price's varied interests includ-
ing religion, insurance and the national debt, it
focuses on his moral and political philosophy as
well as his political causes and concerns. These
include his campaign for wider religious tolera-
tion, his support for the American position in the
Revolutionary War, the drive for fairer parlia-
mentary representation in Britain and the revo-
lutionary cause in France in its early stages. Like
his edition of The Correspondence of Richard
Price (1983-94), the book is characterized by
meticulous and authoritative scholarship.
A feature of Thomas's work, historical and
otherwise, is the close analysis of concepts such
1041
THOMAS
as liberty, the people, radicalism, sincerity,
candour and obedience to conscience, which
are all strongly rooted in the tradition that
interests him. Where applicable, he scrupu-
lously attends to their historical meaning as
well as the author's intentions in particular
works. His analysis exposes illuminating ambi-
guity, ambivalence, tensions or, in Locke's case,
under-determination capable of supporting
richly varying conservative or radical readings
of a crucial text. In Two Treatises of
Government, Thomas argues, the most com-
pelling interpretative choice turns on the work's
political purpose that would have been under-
mined by more radical claims, even if Locke
personally accepted them. In Price's case,
Thomas teases apart notions he runs together
in his analysis and classification of kinds of
liberty. Sheltered behind these tensions and
ambiguities, Thomas finds optimistic assump-
tions about the impossibility of misusing liberty,
whether by individuals or communities.
In 1977 Thomas was instrumental in
founding The Price-Priestley Newsletter. Its
purpose was to establish a vehicle for making
better known not only the thought of Price and
Priestley, but also the contribution of rational
dissent to the British Enlightenment generally.
After four issues, the newsletter was replaced by
Enlightenment and Dissent, which Thomas
continued to co-edit actively until 1996. The
change of title reflects a widening of the
journal's scope to encompass figures and issues
that fell outside the narrower boundaries sug-
gested by its predecessor's title.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Honest Mind: the Thought and Work of
Richard Price (Oxford, 1977).
(with Bernard Peach), The Correspondence
of Richard Price, 3 vols (Durham, North
Carolina and Cardiff, 1983-94).
Other Relevant Works
'Obedience to Conscience', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 64 (1963-4),
pp. 243-58; repr. in John Donnelly and
THOMAS
Leonard Lyons (eds), Conscience (Staten
Island, New York, 1973), pp. 179-95.
'Subjective Justification', in P.A. French (ed.),
Conscientious Actions: The Revelation of
the Pentagon Papers (Cambridge, Mass.,
1974), pp. 53-72.
'Richard Ashcraft on Locke's Two Treatises',
Enlightenment and Dissent, vol. 14 (1995),
pp. 128-54.
Further Reading
Festschrift for D.O. Thomas, Enlightenment
and Dissent, no. 19 (2000).
J. Dybikowski
THOMAS, John Heywood, see Heywood
Thomas
THOMPSON, D'Arcy Wentworth
(1860-1948)
D'Arcy Thompson was born in Edinburgh on
2 May 1860, the son of the similarly named
classics master at Edinburgh Academy, and
died in St Andrews on 21 June 1948.
Thompson attended Edinburgh Academy -
where he received prizes in classics, Greek
Testament, mathematics and modern languages
- and subsequently studied medicine at
Edinburgh University before switching to
zoology at Trinity College, Cambridge, where
he graduated in 1883, after falling under the
influence of Michael Foster and P.M. Balfour.
The following year he was appointed Professor
of Biology at Dundee, and in 1917 he was
appointed Chair of Natural History at St
Andrews, where he died. During his life, he
1042
received numerous honours: fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh (1885; President,
1934-9), Commander of the Bath (1898), FRS
(1916; Vice-President, 1931-3; Darwin Medal
1946), President of the Classical Association
(1929), knighthood (1937) and the Linnean
Gold Medal (1938).
Throughout his life Thompson published
extensively within the fields of classical studies,
mathematics and natural history. He authored
a number of works on the natural history of
ancient writers, including A Glossary of Greek
Birds (1895), a translation of Aristotle's
Historia animalium (1910) and A Glossary of
Greek Fishes (1945). At a time when British
biology was beginning to use form to trace
lineages, Thompson appealed to Aristotle, Plato
and Pythagoras to deprecate such work and
offer a distinctly ahistorical, anti-Darwinian,
saltationist view of life. This is particularly
evident in On Growth and Form (1917), a
work that Peter MEDAWAR described as 'beyond
comparison the finest work of literature in all
the annals of science that have been recorded in
the English tongue' (p. 241).
In Growth and Form Thompson advocated
a form of structuralism (or formalism) that
viewed the features of organisms as being con-
strained by their growth pattern and shape,
which were in turn constrained by the laws of
physics, and processes such as crystallization,
adsorption and diffusion. In short, physical
forces impose optimal form upon plastic
organic material. In many ways, this was a
development of German Naturphilosophie, in
proposing that there are deep laws of change
that determine some or all of the features of
organisms, with the set of possible transfor-
mations being highly constrained such that par-
ticular transformations may be predictably
linked to specific environmental stimuli.
While Thompson founded no research
school, his ideas have remained somewhat
influential. His views have been recently advo-
cated within theoretical biology by the likes of
Soren Lovtrup, Brian Goodwin, Mae-Wan Ho
and Peter Saunders, often under the banner of

'process structuralism' which proposes a
natural system of classification based on the
dynamics of the processes that generate the
forms. Among organismal biologists,
Thompson is best remembered for his icono-
graphic 'method of transformations' - a
method to consider differences in form in a
holistic manner, seeking single, comprehensive
transformations which result in shape differ-
ence. His unwieldy methodology resisted repli-
cation until the 1980s when analytical break-
throughs by Fred L. Bookstein resulted in a
paradigm shift in the analysis of biological form
under the banner of 'geometric morphomet-
rics'.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
On Growth and Form (1917; 1942).
Further Reading
Bushnell, G.H., 'A List of the Published
Writings of D'Arcy Wentworth
Thompson', in W.E. Le Gros Clark and
P.B. Medawar (eds), Essays on Growth
and Form (1945), pp. 386-400.
Dobell, C., 'D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson',
Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal
Society of London, vol. 6 (1949), pp.
599-617.
Gould, Stephen Jay, The Structure of
Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.,
2002), passim, esp. pp. 1182-208.
Medawar, P.B., 'D'Arcy Thomson and
Growth and Form\ in Pluto's Republic
(1982).
Thompson, Ruth D'Arcy, D'Arcy
Wentworth Thompson: The Scholar
Naturalist (1958).
John M. Lynch
1043
THOMSON
THOMSON, James Frederick (1921-84)
James Frederick Thomson was born in London
on 22 June 1921 and died on 15 February
1984. He was the first son of Frederick James
Saunders Thomson and Netta Marion (Hussey)
of Thame, Oxfordshire. Thomson was
educated at Lord William's School, Thame
(1932-8). He saw military service in the RAF
(1940-46), was awarded the Distinguished
Flying Cross, and in 1946 entered University
College, London (UCL) in philosophy, gradu-
ating BA in 1949.
He won a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship
at Harvard and Princeton (1950-51). Thomson
returned to UCL as an assistant lecturer
(1951-3), becoming lecturer in moral science,
Cambridge University (1953-6). He was fellow
and tutor in philosophy at Christ's College,
Cambridge (1956-63), and was then tutor and
fellow at Corpus Christi, Oxford and lecturer
in philosophy at Lincoln College, Oxford. A
visiting professor at Columbia University
(1961-2), Thomson became Professor of
Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 1963, having married Judith
Jarvis, also a Professor of Philosophy at MIT,
the previous year. After his death, prizes in his
name were established at both MIT and Corpus
Christi.
Thomson published a number of lucid and
incisive papers on such major problems as the
assignment of truth to propositions; the inter-
pretation of the implication sign'...' in logic for
the phrase 'if-then'; the question whether the
notion of existence has the character of a pred-
icate; and, with his wife, whether purely descrip-
tive statements can entail evaluative conclusions,
that is whether 'ought' can be derived from 'is'.
Against the view that the derivation is possible
if another premise is introduced, namely that
'other things are equal', the Thomsons argue
that any plausible and useful interpretation of the
new premise will show it to be evaluative; and
thus not the purely descriptive premise required
by the claim that descriptive premises can entail
evaluative conclusions.
THOMSON
In Truth-Bearers and the Trouble about
Propositions', Thomson considers the question
of what kind of thing can be correctly said to
be true or false. If it is propositions, what sort
of entity are they? The claim that propositions
are what declarative sentences mean leads
people to conclude that propositions are the
meanings of declarative sentences. But if we
know what a sentence means, we do not need
the notion of the proposition which it suppos-
edly expresses, for that notion adds nothing
helpful to us. So propositions are not meanings.
Moreover, we then have the problem of speci-
fying the conditions under which two asser-
tions are the same proposition. We can hardly
answer 'when they have the same meaning'.
By continuing the exploration of these ques-
tions Thomson tried to show that we already
understand what kinds of things are correctly
said to be true or false. We rely on various
features of the 'situation of utterance'.
All of Thomson's publications display his
interest in close and patient logical scrutiny of
familiar philosophical problems, and especially
of standard ways of trying to solve them. His
procedure combines his talent for clarity and
simplicity of expression with an imaginative
determination to expose apparently obvious
truths to rigorous examination.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'How not to Derive "Ought" from "Is"',
Philosophical Review, vol. 73 (October
1964), pp. 512-16.
Truth-Bearers and the Trouble about
Propositions', Journal of Philosophy, vol.
66 (6 November 1969), pp. 737-47.
'In Defense of "..."'Journal of Philosophy,
vol. 87 (February 1990), pp. 57-70.
Other Relevant Works
(with D.F. Pears), 'Is Existence a Predicate?',
Aquinas Papers, vol. 38 (1963).
The Proof of the Law of Infinite Conjunction
...', Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol. 32
(June 1967), pp. 196-7.
1044
Further Reading
Searle, John F., 'How to Derive "Ought"
from "Is"', Philosophical Review, vol. 73
(1964), pp. 43-58.
Robert Brown
THOMSON, John Arthur (1861-1933)
J. Arthur Thomson was born in East Lothian,
Scotland on 8 July 1861 and died in Limpsfield,
Surrey on 12 February 1933. He was educated
at the University of Edinburgh, where he
studied with Patrick Geddes, He went on to do
graduate work at Jena, where he studied inver-
tebrate morphology under the direction of
Ernst Haeckel. He continued his studies briefly
in Berlin before returning to Scotland to take up
the post of lecturer on zoology and biology at
the University of Edinburgh's School of
Medicine. Thomson's researches centred on
Alcyonaria and other soft corals, and his work
was sufficiently regarded to win him the Regius
Professorship of Natural History at the
University of Aberdeen in 1899, a post he held
until 1930. He was famous for his lectures,
which were artistically delivered narratives
about evolution and the balance of life and a far
cry from lectures on systematics or animal mor-
phology, which might have been expected of
him. During this time his attention increasingly
turned to popularizing science and exploring
the relationship between science and religion.
His lucid prose style made him popular with
audiences and publishers alike. He wrote
dozens of popular texts and delivered several
series of lectures in America and Britain, includ-
ing the Bross Lectures at Wake Forest (Illinois,
1907), the Gifford Lectures at St Andrews
(1915), the Terry Lectures at Yale (1924), and
the Morse Lectures at the Union Seminary in
New York City (1924). He also co-authored
several works with his old mentor Geddes,

including Evolution (1911), Sex (1914) and
Life: Outlines of General Biology (1931). He
was knighted in 1930.
Thomson promoted a non-materialistic
version of evolution. He held life to be inher-
ently purposeful, and argued that beauty was
an intrinsic part of nature. While he noted that
the question of the ultimate purpose or design
of nature was beyond the sphere of science, he
drew attention to the apparent facts of progress
in nature, the presence of purposiveness in the
animal kingdom, and the origins of morality in
nature. Thomson held that evolution was pro-
ducing increasing freedom of mind and steadily
higher levels of morality in animals, and so
argued that the facts of science were congruent
with religion in its widest sense. Thomson was
one of several writers promoting an anti-mech-
anistic view of nature who strongly influenced
religious modernists and popular opinion in
the early twentieth century. His views were
opposed by more orthodox Darwinians such as
J.B.S. HALDANE.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(with Patrick Geddes), Evolution of Sex
(1889).
The Bible of Nature (New York, 1908).
(with Patrick Geddes), Evolution (1911).
(with Patrick Geddes), Sex (1914).
The Wonder of Life (1914).
The System of Animate Nature, 2 vols
(1917).
The Biology of Birds (1923).
The Gospel of Evolution (1925).
Science and Religion (New York, 1925).
(with Patrick Geddes), Life: Outlines of
General Biology, 2 vols (1931).
The Outline of Natural History (1932).
The Riddles of Science (1932).
Biology for Everyman, 2 vols (1935).
Further Reading
Bowler, Peter, Reconciling Science and
Religion (2001).
Richard K. England
1045
TOMLIN
TOMLIN, Eric Walter Frederick (1913-88)
E.W.F. Tomlin was born in Croydon on 30
January 1913 and died in London on 16
January 1988. He was educated at Whitgift
School and at Brasenose College, Oxford,
where he was awarded MAs in both PPE and
modern history. His first appointment was as
assistant master at Sloane School, Chelsea, a
post which he held from 1936 to 1938. He
then briefly taught at Marlborough School,
before he became tutor for the Department of
Extra-Mural Studies at Bristol University. In
1940, he joined the Local Defence Volunteers,
and then held various posts in the British
Council, working in Iraq and Turkey until
1945, and London and Paris from 1945 until
1956. From that year until 1971 he was
cultural attache, successively, at the British
embassies in Ankara, Tokyo and Paris. In 1961
he held a visiting professorship at the University
of Southern California; from 1971 until 1972
he was visiting fellow at University College,
Cambridge, where he was awarded an
honorary degree, and from 1972 to 1974 he
held a visiting professorship at Nice University.
He was a member of the Council of the
Philosophical Society from 1986 until his death.
Tomlin's main philosophical interests were in
the philosophy of religion and British idealism.
He was not an original thinker, but he was an
accomplished writer both on philosophical and
on other topics inspired by his wide profes-
sional experience. His importance in philoso-
phy lay in introducing hitherto neglected philo-
sophical works to a general audience, or the
thought of philosophers from one country or
culture to another. Several of his books were
published under the auspices of the British
Council. Thus, for example, he was an early
exponent of the thought of Bertrand RUSSELL
amongst the French-speaking public, and he
also produced a summary of the works of
Simone Weil for English speakers.
Tomlin's publications on the philosophers
about whom he wrote presented their achieve-
ments as holistic, or as a set of interrelated
TOMLIN
issues. In R. G. Collingwood, for example,
Tomlin praises COLLINGWOOD for the idealist
concerns embedded in his philosophical
method. These include the method of question
and answer, the theory of the imagination, the
view that metaphysics is the discipline con-
cerned with presuppositions, and the theory
that the emotions have a prepositional and
thus cognitive content. All of these topics are
found throughout the whole of Collingwood's
works, together with his view that philosophy
should be written in lucid language which pos-
sesses the capacity for great flexibility and
subtlety.
In promoting the works of such philosophers
as R.G. Collingwood, Simone Weil and the
great Eastern thinkers, Tomlin shows his own
philosophical sympathies and aversions. He
was particularly unsympathetic to the contem-
porary trends of Western philosophy and
Western thought in general, which were
towards logical positivism, subjectivism par-
ticularly over the issue of values, and the
assumption that science is the paradigm of
knowledge. In the fifty years since the bulk of
Tomlin's works, philosophy has released itself
from this straitjacket.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Approach to Metaphysics (1947).
The Western Philosophers (1950).
The Eastern Philosophers (1952).
R.G. Collingwood (1953).
Simone Weil (1954).
La vie et I'oeuvre de Bertrand Russell (1963).
Philosophers of East and West (1986).
Other Relevant Works
The World of St. Boniface (1980).
Kathryn L. Plant
1046
TOMS, Eric (1912-2003)
Eric Toms was born in London on 10 January
1912 and died in Manchester on 9 March
2003. His father, a conscientious objector, took
the family after 1914 to rural Essex. Toms
finished his schooling in Brentwood. He
attended St Mary's College, Twickenham,
graduated in mathematics at the University of
London, and after unhappy experience of
school teaching found a place at Ruskin
College, Oxford. He matriculated at St
Catherine's College in 1937. Graduating in
1940, registered as a conscientious objector,
he worked as a medical auxiliary in Hull.
Returning postwar to Oxford he graduated
BPhil in 1948. Appointed assistant lecturer in
logic at Glasgow University in 1949, lecturer
from 1951 to 1977, in retirement he remained
very active philosophically, living in Edinburgh
from 1978 till a final year in a nursing home
near family.
Like other continuing advocates of a neo-
Aristotelian logic, Toms deplored its neglect as
damaging both pedagogy and clear thinking.
The neglect of formal logic by idealists, and
philosophers who spoke in terms of the per-
suasiveness of arguments, had let it decay into
a technique of one-sided exposition of doc-
trines variously called realist, empiricist, mate-
rialist. Yet what if a sound formal logic proved
the truth of idealism?
The Preface of Toms's first book commends
Gilbert RYLE qua teacher. Its text sustains the
tale that their intense strong disagreement was
cited in Ryle's reference commending Toms as
well suited to C.A. CAMPBELL'S Glasgow depart-
ment.
Reference to 'the half-understood authority
of mathematical logic' (Being, Negation and
Logic, p. 97) emphasizes the mathematics
graduate's belief in the abiding value of the
older logic. Bertrand RUSSELL'S Theory of Types
and Theory of Descriptions, Toms insists,
conceal rather than resolve the problems
handled. They are arrangements made for the
convenience of mathematicians. In Toms con-

ventionalism, linguisticism and other proposed
foundations of logic short of reference to real
existence found a tireless critic. Unlike Fred
Sommers, the American critic of mathematical
logic and would-be reformer of logic continu-
ous with the Aristotelian, Toms ever took logic
to be ontology.
Criticizing contemporary British philosophy
and its inherent fissiparous tendencies, Toms
late in his teaching career published arguments
for doctrines he was convinced postwar British
philosophy had never considered, far less
refuted, being ill-founded on arguments against
misunderstandings or distortions. Denials of
what he termed the fact of awareness
commonly confused the Cartesian cogito (a
'minimum cogito') with Descartes's subsequent,
separate, untenable case for the existence of
matter.
The foundations of logic are in real exis-
tence. Language affords no foundations short
of reference to real existence. The integrity of
logic is only compromised by 'the vast tradi-
tional disaster of trying to make and unmake
logic with the aid of empirical hypotheses'.
Toms's 1962 discussions of the principles of
non-contradiction and excluded middle, of
reflexive paradoxes and the reality of negation,
presage later attention (1984,1992) to his case
for idealism contra materialism. His later
Holistic Logic, raising questions of external
versus internal relations, essays a refounding of
formal logic still short of what is outlined in the
book which he knew could appear only posthu-
mously. Opening in tribute to Russell's work,
proceeding through an account of its 'disas-
trous' consequences, the text outlines a
refounding of formal logic not in Russell's
'Logic' or mathematics crucial to post-
Einsteinian physical theory, but in systematic
consistency with the 'Mysticism' of a post-
Einsteinian cosmology and ontology (and a
proof of the existence of God).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Being, Negation and Logic (Oxford, 1962).
The Classical Theory of Meaning; The Use
1047
TOULMIN
Theory of Meaning; Intuition in
Metaphysics, privately published
(Glasgow, 1973).
Relation and Consciousness (Edinburgh,
1984).
Holistic Logic, 2nd edn, with major revision
of 1989 edition, self-published (Edinburgh,
1991).
'Mind and Body', Idealistic Studies, vol. 22
(Worcester, Mass., 1992), pp. 82-90.
Non-Existence & Non-Identity', unpublished
typescript, completed February 2003.
Robert R. Calder
TOULMIN, Stephen Edelston (1922-)
Stephen Toulmin was born in London on 25
March 1922 to Geoffrey Edelson Toulmin and
Doris Holman Toulmin. A physicist and math-
ematician as an undergraduate, Toulmin
received a BA from King's College, Cambridge
in 1942 before taking employment as a junior
scientific officer for the Ministry of Aircraft
Production at the Malvern Radar Research and
Development Station. Towards the end of
World War II he was stationed at the Supreme
Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force
in Germany. He returned to England at the
end of the war, and earned his MA in 1947 and
PhD in philosophy 1948 from Cambridge
University. During his graduate work Toulmin
studied with Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN, who was
exploring the limitations of formal logic and
proposing epistemological problems that were
highly influential on later twentieth-century
philosophy. Toulmin became fascinated with
the nature of rationality. He questioned
whether a priori reason was arbitrary only to
particular paradigms, rather than being an
independently verifiable construct of universal
reason. His thesis, 'Reason in Ethics', strug-
gled with this question by contrasting the way
TOULMIN
in which rational judgement may vary when
applied to moral and scientific issues.
Toulmin became lecturer in philosophy of
science at Oxford after graduating, staying until
1955. Taking a philosophy post at the
University of Leeds, Toulmin then elaborated
upon this issue in his book The Uses of
Argument (1958). This work, which drew a
distinction between formal logic as rational
propositions and substantive arguments based
upon experience, was not popular in England
because it was still dominated by analytical
schools of logic. Much as Wittgenstein himself
- whom many claim as the founder of analytic
philosophy - fell into disfavour in his later
works amongst analytical philosophers,
Toulmin found himself alienated from the
English academy. Many of his former advisers
at Cambridge disowned him through silence,
and he was criticized at Leeds for writing a
work that was against logical analysis. Due to
its highly hostile reception by notable analytic
philosophers, Toulmin was surprised that the
work continued to sell successfully. This was
primarily due to its popularity in America, not
among professional philosophers, but commu-
nication scholars with a particular interest in
the uses of rhetoric. It can be argued that the
success of The Uses of Argument marks the
beginning of Toulmin's classification as an
'American' philosopher. This designation was
fortified by his entry into the United States in
1959 and service as a visiting professor at New
York University, Stanford University and then
Columbia University.
The American attraction to Toulmin's
analysis can partially be accounted for by its
pragmatic orientation, and its ability to apply
structural method to understanding rhetorical
arguments. In a pragmatic sense, Toulmin's
thought was taking the same direction as that
of the later Wittgenstein. Both drew distinc-
tions between formal propositions in logic and
phenomenologically descriptive language as it
related to direct experience. Toulmin's unique-
ness was in his proposal that descriptive
language could be understood structurally, as
1048
practical argumentation. This proposal was to
have profound influence on the understanding
of constructs of law as practical argument as it
evolved from common law, or casuistic
examples of case precedence and, by sugges-
tion, the casuistic basis for ethical reasoning in
general.
By analysing the nature of arguments,
Toulmin's range of inquiry had approached
the analysis of rhetorically structured argu-
ments: the relevance of the application of prac-
tical argument to ethics; the foundations of
ethics as reason proceeding from experience;
and the relationship of science to reason as an
applied praxis. The scope of Toulmin's inquiry
was prescriptive of ethical problems as they
might occur out of scientific culture and the
consequences raised by the application of
formal reason to practical moral thought. The
expansion and recognition of his ground-
breaking use of argument to the substantive
nature of applied reason was first apparent in
his return to England, where from 1960 to
1965 he was Director of the Unit for History of
Ideas of the Nuffield Foundation.
Toulmin returned to the United States in
1965, when he became a Professor of
Philosophy at Brandeis University (1965-9),
then Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State
University (1969-72). From 1972 to 1973 he
was Professor of Humanities at the University
of California at Santa Cruz. During that time he
published Human Understanding: The
Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts. In
1973 he became professor with the Committee
on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
Human Understanding: The Collective Use and
Evolution of Concepts contained the provoca-
tive suggestion that conceptual understanding
was a collective process of assimilating meaning
and subjecting these constructs to rational
critical thought as a consequence of experience
and not, necessarily, a conclusion based upon
strict formal propositions.
This structural approach to applied reason in
scientific procedure earned Toulmin a place
with the National Commission for the

Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical
and Behavioral Research (1975-8), established
by the United States Congress. At that time he
published, with Albert R. Jonsen, The Abuse of
Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning. The
revival of casuistry as the foundation for ethical
understanding was a tradition that had
remained intact in Catholic theological thought.
Toulmin's application directly reflected the
inherent evolution of legal thought out of
common law, in which a collective of 'case
studies' established critical precedence for the
validity of a premise from one case to the next.
Toulmin's use of casuistry was prescient in its
grasp of the use of case studies in applied ethics.
After his stay at the University of Chicago,
Toulmin took a position at Northwestern
University as Avalon Foundation Professor of
the Humanities (1986-92). He published
Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity
in 1990, a work critical of the understanding of
the Enlightenment and modern philosophy
since Descartes. Toulmin held that Cartesian
rationalism had arbitrarily divided epistemol-
ogy into recalcitrant structures, with strict
formal reasoning on one side and subjective
intuition on the other. He asserts the view that
human understanding is composed of concep-
tual understanding related to direct experience
and subject to critical, rational thought and,
thus, is a synthetic proposition rather than a
series of arbitrary principles.
In 1992 Toulmin became Henry Luce
Professor at the Center for Multiethnic and
Transnational Studies at the University of
Southern California, where he remains at
present. Throughout Toulmin's long and dis-
tinguished career he has held visiting profes-
sorships at Bryn Mawr, Dartmouth College
and Southern Methodist University. He also
has been a Phi Beta Kappa National Lecturer,
a visiting scholar at the Hastings Center and a
Guggenheim Fellow. In 1998 he was named
Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment
for the Humanities. The combination of
Toulmin's long career in America, his work
for the United States Congress and his recog-
1049
TOULMIN
nition as Jefferson Lecturer - the premier
honour given by the United States government
for achievement in the humanities - all solidi-
fied his identity as a uniquely American philoso-
pher. At the University of Southern California
(USC) Toulmin became something of a living
legend. As faculty master at USC's North
Residential College, he and his wife Donna
Toulmin lived with students in the dorms,
forming a community based on practical and
lived ethical standards, while affording students
at large the opportunity to come into close
contact with a world-renowned philosopher
and scholar. In demonstration of Toulmin's
versatility and the precocious elements of his
theoretical range, he is currently a member of
the anthropology department at USC, where he
works on multi-ethnic and transnational
studies. His applied ethical constructs have
recently focused on the relationship between
local and global institutions from a non-gov-
ernmental perspective and border, as well as on
the analysis of the interdependency of global
structure beyond the nation-state. In 2001
Toulmin published Return to Reason, where he
once again draws a distinction between reason
and rationality, arguing that reason must
temper the formal rational process in order to
confront the emerging problems of twenty-
first-century civilization. In many ways
Toulmin's title for his latest publication is both
a model for and an example of his earliest
claims about the nature of logic.
In his early publication The Uses of
Argument Toulmin made a distinction between
substantial and analytic arguments. Substantial
arguments appealed to content for validity.
Analytic arguments appealed to form.
Substantial argument is an example of inference
where a conclusion is reached on the basis of
coherence, while analytic argument is based
on a consistency of the conclusion to the
premise. Analytic arguments must therefore
base their premises on a universal truth, while
substantive arguments refer to the context of a
particular situation. If applied to ethical rea-
soning, analytic arguments are more in line
TOULMIN
with Kantian deontological principles, wherein
a singular truth, such as lying is wrong', must
be applied in degrees to all situations. The sub-
stantive argument, in contrast, may look to a
situation and the reason for lying for its moral
content: for example, telling a potential
murderer that one does not know where his
victim is hiding is not wrong. A rational prin-
ciple, such as 2 + 2 = 4, must be invariant and
always true. A reasonable principle, however,
such as lying to a murder-crazed individual,
does not admit to an invariant truth but, rather,
admits the circumstance that has incurred the
lie. Thus a rational principle may have no
bearing on a practical situation.
A great deal of Toulmin's work draws upon
this distinction between theoretical and practi-
cal argument, and demonstrates that theoreti-
cal arguments are often useless in reasoning
about everyday situations. Despite this fact,
Toulmin claims that theoretical and analytic
models have dominated formal and academic
thought since the Enlightenment, partially as a
consequence of the historical insecurity of the
Thirty Years War and the consequent rise of
Cartesian certainty as an antidote to scepti-
cism. This critical analysis of modern philoso-
phy is undertaken in Cosmopolis: The Hidden
Agenda of Modernity. Toulmin suggests that
the division of analytic and substantive rea-
soning is a latecomer in the history of philoso-
phy, and that Aristotle employs theoretical
argument but also employs practical or sub-
stantive arguments, particularly in ethics. This
tradition was lost, he says, in post-Renaissance
Europe and the rise of Cartesian thought, par-
ticularly in the need for certainty in analytic rea-
soning and the exclusively rational constructs
of Cartesian methodology.
Analytic rationality became the criterion for
all rational principles and, as in mathematics
and analytical logic, any rhetorical case-specific
form of reasoning was excluded from rational
thought and ceded either to theology or, in late
modernism and postmodernism, to psychol-
ogy. This caused a dramatic division that led to
the advent of relativistic ethics in the field of
1050
anthropology. According to relativism, ethical
conduct can only be measured by the consen-
sus of values in a given group. The alternative
would be ethical absolutism, where universal
premises are the only means of determining
the moral content of a given situation. Toulmin
demonstrates why ethical absolutism, which
was against pluralism and dogmatic in its asser-
tion, is particularly archaic in that only one
principle is asserted as governing all fields of
knowledge. Just as Aristotle divided philosophy
in subject-matter under different fields of inves-
tigation, Toulmin demonstrates the irrelevance
of mathematical and geometrical logic to
everyday situations. Formal logic is field-
specific to mathematics and geometry but not
necessarily to either existential or practical sit-
uations, because the person doing the logic is
not important to the conclusion reached. The
same cannot be said for either ethical argu-
ments or existential considerations. The same
could be said for quantum mechanics where,
since Heisenberg, the uncertainty principle
made clear that the means of measuring a phe-
nomenon influences the outcome of the mea-
surement. Therefore, an absolute methodology
based on absolute analytic reason is inauthen-
tic. Methods instead are learned, and put into
praxis, or abandoned, by the people doing the
reasoning. Analytic reason was particularly
unsuited for human practical application for
several crucial reasons. Practical concerns are
rarely governed by a singular set of principles,
and the situations we cope with from day to
day are, by nature, complex in substance and
circumstance. A crucial problem with strictly
analytic reason, however, lies in the assumption
of formal analytical proposition that time is
an irrelevant factor to the process of reasoning,
and that formal truths are, therefore, atempo-
ral. Toulmin would hold, however, that time is
the shaper of temporal premises and that,
within time, there is a latent capacity for infinite
circumstances.
In practical and applied reason there can be
no absolute: rather, the conditions of proba-
bility, such as our judgements, may be

probably-correct or probably-incorrect,
depending on the conditions. In this we have a
movement away from Kantian ethics and a
movement towards axiological or value-based
reasoning, in which a conclusion is probably
correct or incorrect in accordance with the
values or claims held by the premises, which,
too, are up for critical examination. The way
we arrive at practical judgements is through
examining values, and then examining case-
specific examples in order to reach a synthetic
proposition. It is here that Toulmin's founda-
tion in physics is made apparent in that the
quantum model of uncertainty and the nature
of time and probability are axioms common to
quantum mechanics.
Toulmin's address will become an appeal to
casuistry, or the examination of concrete cases,
as establishing specific criteria of precedence for
rulings on applied ethics. There is a legal turn
in ethical reasoning that predates the
Enlightenment in the evolution of common
law, and in the establishment of experience as
the foundation for reason. One could argue
that, even in the Enlightenment, John Locke
makes this same turn in his appeal to reason in
the Second Treatise on Government, in which
nature, consulted with reason, leads to sound
judgement as a model for civil order. The foun-
dation for judgement is not Cartesian analytic
rationality, nor that of a geometry that postu-
lates paradigms - such as straight lines, which
are nowhere found in nature - but rather
appeals to a lived engagement with the natural
environment. It is out of such an engagement,
and consequential experience, from which we
draw practical knowledge. It is out of this
assimilated sense of practical knowledge that
claims are made. But such claims, in substantive
argument, warrant justification. Thus, sub-
stantive arguments are structured and open to
critical review. This is most true in ethics, and
it is the application of practical reason, as
applied to ethics, that is the mainstream of
research that unites Toulmin's body of work.
The model for practical argument is developed
from the idea that justification is the primary
1051
TOULMIN
function of practical argumentation. As con-
trasted to the process of inference in analytical
propositions, the role of practical argument is
to justify claims. Justification is a reflective
activity and, therefore, reflects on the nature of
experience rather than inferring an absolute
conclusion. Justification is a process of testing
through critical thought and examination. It is
a collective and ongoing reflection on the nature
of human experience.
An argument is tentatively sound if it survives
the ongoing critical process, including the test
of time, and is justified as a verdict grounded in
the collective of experience. All arguments may
have certain components in common, such as
probability, but the claim to justification may
vary from field to field. To use one premise as
an absolute truth for all fields is the essential
problem with analytical thought. What is true
in a mathematical premise may not be war-
ranted at all in a problem dealing with field
variants, such as dilemmas in ethics. For
Toulmin, this was understood by Aristotle but
lost in the post-Renaissance understanding of
argumentation.
Toulmin wishes to restore and revitalize our
sense of reason to keep pace with our under-
standing of science in the post-Darwinian era.
Argumentation, he claims, is organic, dynamic,
evolving, and auto-critical through reflective
thought. Argumentation involves justifying and
re-examining tentative claims, criticized in the
light of experience. In many ways what is
empirical in argumentation is similar to the
empirical redress by Locke, and others, of the
rationalist claims of Descartes. Experience, and
reflection upon the nature of claims, is the same
as experimentation as the final test of a claim
in empirical method. Thus experiment and
experience are closely related, and experience,
reflected upon, is merely the abstraction of
experiment into concept. Casuistry, or case
study, is the empirical process of empirical
experimentation as proof. Critical analysis is
the reflection upon this process as an attempt
to justify a tentative conclusion drawn, which
can always be altered in light of new evidence.
TOULMIN
As in quantum mechanics, probability is time
dependent and, as in evolutionary theory,
change is inherent in the process of evolution
responding to dynamic conditions.
Toulmin has given us an alternative to the
absolute premises of Cartesian rationalism, and
the concept of moral relativism as its alterna-
tive. For Toulmin, argumentation is an ongoing
process, continually evolving through retro-
spective critical analysis, and is in itself an
exercise in self-awareness. Toulmin has given us
a theory of argument which is 'part and parcel'
of the evolution of consciousness grounded in
the expansive and ever evolving range of
human experience. In order to accomplish this
end effectively, Toulmin structures the nature
of practical arguments. A story, or case,
grounds an argument much as the conditions of
an empirical experiment are the grounding of
the experiment itself. In argumentation, this is
accomplished through 'contextualizing' the
argument within a particular case, which
reveals the variants a principle may take under
certain conditions, or modalities. The basic
elements are claim, grounds and warrant. The
grounds for the warrant justify the claim.
Following this is backing, which cross-
examines the warrant for sufficient cause; the
modal qualifier, whether a claim is possible,
impossible or necessary; and the rebuttal. The
claim would be the equivalent of the conclusion
to an argument or, in metaphorical terms, if we
look at a road map of the United States, it
might first appear as a myriad of colours and
lines, but it is not until we have established
that we are 'going to Cleveland' that the map
takes on form and design. In this sense, the
claim is similar to a thesis. We can then estab-
lish on what grounds the trip is being made,
and what warrants the trip.
A major difference between practical and
formal argument is that in practical argument
the claim is not a given and is open to modifi-
cation and revision. The premise in a formal
argument is given as an axiomatically valid
principle. The claim is contextualized in a prac-
tical argument. Backing, then, may cross-
1052
examine the warrant and, therefore, question
the claim. If the claim is conceded, backing
may also cross-examine why the path chosen to
the claim is the best one, based on probability.
Probability is key in practical argumentation. A
practical argument must consider the modal
qualifier or the degree of probability that a
warrant has in justifying a claim. The modal
qualifier questions the strength of probability
between the warrant and the claim. The next
step is the rebuttal, or the demonstration that
the warrant does not justify the claim. The
rebuttal, in practical argument, is conditional,
or contextualized and case-specific, and does
not necessarily argue the validity of a claim
but, rather, whether the claim is justified for a
particular situation. What may be a valid claim
for one situation is not necessarily good for
another. All this can depend on probability.
Thus, a particular medication may be proven
effective against allergies, except if the patient
is suffering from high blood pressure. This
introduces risk. The medication might not
aggravate the condition of one suffering from
high blood pressure, but the probability factor
that it will arises. Therefore critical judgement,
risk and case-specific examples are all called for
in analysing the argument. As the critical
process evolves over many cases, we begin to
grasp the concept of a problem and arrive at
ever more complex and sophisticated coher-
ences in conceptual analysis. As in evolution, an
essential claim such as DNA is present in all
living organisms and takes on the complexity of
variant and numerous species, each with a
factor in common, but manifest in infinitely
diverse expression. For Toulmin, the process of
ongoing critical discussion forms a 'forum of
competition' that, in various contexts, takes
on its own process of natural selection.
Toulmin edifies our sense of argument on
two fronts: the use of logic in the sciences, as it
is applied in its effect on human reality, and the
need to examine our conceptual understanding
of practical logic. This brings issues such as
medical ethics and ecology into the mainstream
of discourse. By adapting and demonstrating

the structural components of argument,
Toulmin offers an alternative to both analyti-
cal logic and moral relativism, and demon-
strates that the challenge to postmodernism is
the redefining and reformation of reason as a
practical and necessary tool to address the
major issues confronting civilization.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An Examination of the Place of Reason in
Ethics (Cambridge, 1950; 1986).
The Philosophy of Science: An Introduction
(London and New York, 1953).
The Uses of Argument (Cambridge, 1958).
Foresight and Understanding: An Enquiry
into the Aims of Science (Bloomington,
1961).
(with June Goodfield), The Fabric of the
Heavens (London and New York, 1961).
(with June Goodfield), The Architecture of
Matter (New York, 1962; Chicago, 1977).
Night Sky at Rhodes (1963).
(with June Goodfield), The Discovery of
Time (New York, 1965; Chicago, 1977).
Human Understanding, vol. 1, The Collective
Use and Evolution of Concepts (Oxford
and Princeton, 1972).
(with Allan Janik), Wittgenstein's Vienna
(New York, 1973).
Knowing and Acting: An Invitation to
Philosophy (New York, 1976).
The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern
Science and the Theology of Nature
(Berkeley, 1982).
(with Richard Reike and Allan Janik), An
Introduction to Reasoning (New York,
1979; 2nd edn, London and New York,
1984).
(with Albert R. Jonsen), The Abuse of
Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning,
(Berkeley, 1988).
Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of
Modernity (New York, 1990).
Return to Reason (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
Other Relevant Works
'Neuroscience and Human Understanding',
1053
TOULMIN
in G.C. Quarton, T. Melnuchuk and P.O.
Schmitt (eds), The Neurosciences (New
York, 1967), pp. 822-32.
'From Logical Analysis to Conceptual
History', in Peter Achinstein and Stephen
Barker (eds), The Legacy of Logical
Positivism, Studies in the Philosophy of
Science (Baltimore, 1969), pp. 25-52.
(Ed.), Physical Reality: Philosophical Essays
on Twentieth-Century Physics (New York,
1970).
'The Twin Moralities of Science', in Nicholas
Steneck (ed.), Science and Society: Past,
Present, and Future (Ann Arbor, 1975),
pp. 176-95.
'Human Adaptation', in U.J. Jensen and R.
Harre (eds), The Philosophy of Evolution
(New York, 1981), pp. 176-95.
'How Medicine Saved the Life of Ethics', in
Joseph DeMarco and Richard Fox (eds),
New Directions in Ethics: The Challenge
of Applied Ethics (New York, 1986), pp.
265-81.
'The Limits of Allegiance in a Nuclear Age',
in A. Cohen and S. Lee (eds), Nuclear
Weapons and the Future of Humanity
(Totowa, 1986), pp. 359-72.
'From Leviathan to Liliput', in Leroy Rouner
(ed.), Celebrating Peace (South Bend,
1990), pp. 73-86.
Further Reading
Bove, Paul A., 'The Rationality of
Disciplines: The Abstract Understanding of
Stephen Toulmin', in J. Arac (ed.), After
Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge,
Postmodern Challenges (New Brunswick,
1988), pp. 42-70.
Brockriede, Wayne and Douglas Ehninger,
Decision by Debate (New York, 1963).
Hart, Roderick P., 'On Applying Toulmin:
The Analysis of Practical Discourse', in D.
Ochs, G.P. Mohrmann and J. Stewart
(eds), Explorations in Rhetorical Criticism
(University Park, Pennsylvania, 1973), pp.
75-95.
Hasting, Arthus and Russell Windes,
TOULMIN
Argumentation and Advocacy (New York,
1965).
Kerner, George G, The Revolution in Ethical
Theory (Oxford, 1966), chap. 3.
Leary, David E., Thinkers of the Twentieth
Centuryr, ed. Roland Turner, 2nd edn
(Chicago, 1987).
Nilstun, Tore, Moral Reasoning: A Study in
the Moral Philosophy ofS.E. Toulmin
(Lund, 1979).
Seibt, Betty Kay and William E. Tanner, The
Toulmin Method: Exploration and
Controversy. A Festschrift in Honor of
Stephen E. Toulmin (Arlington, 1991).
Laurence L. Murphy
TOYNBEE, Arnold Joseph (1889-1975)
Arnold Joseph Toynbee was born in London
on 14 April 1889 and died in York on 22
October 1975. He was educated at Winchester
College and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he
achieved first class honours in literae humaniores
in 1911. In 1912 he was elected a fellow of
Balliol College, a position he held until his res-
ignation in late 1915, when he took up positions
in the government propaganda department, as
well as the Political Intelligence Department.
From 1919 to 1924 he was Professor of Modern
Greek and Byzantine History, Language and
Literature at King's College London. In 1924 he
accepted an appointment at the British (later
Royal) Institute of International Affairs. In 1926,
in conjunction with his duties at the Institute of
International Affairs, he became Professor of
International History at University College
London. At the outbreak of World War II he
returned to Oxford, where he became Head of
the Foreign Research and Press Service (later
Foreign Office Research Department). In 1947
he was offered, and declined, the position of
Regius Professor of Modern History at
1054
Cambridge. After his retirement from the Royal
Institute of International Affairs in 1956 he
increased his international stature by maintain-
ing a prodigious literary output, and lecturing to
capacity audiences throughout Europe, North
America and the Far East. He received a number
of international honours, the most significant
being the New Zealand Companion of Honour
in 1956, and his instillation as a foreign associ-
ate of the French Academy in 1965. In 1945 he
was offered, but declined, a knighthood.
Arnold J. Toynbee, a nephew of the charis-
matic Victorian social economist Arnold
Toynbee, is most remembered for his numerous
writings on the history of world civilizations. In
his ten-volume magnum opus, A Study of
History (1934-54), he developed a truly inter-
national philosophy of history which argued
that all historical patterns and events are cyclical,
and that one must examine the organic devel-
opment of each civilization as a separate entity
within twenty-one other world civilizations.
Toynbee was the first English-speaking histo-
rian who challenged the then prevailing Western
perception that non-Western cultures con-
tributed little to the development of world civi-
lization.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Intro, and trans.), Greek Civilization and
Character: The Self-Revelation of Ancient
Greek Society (1924).
(Ed. and intro.), Greek Historical Thought
from Homer to the Age of Heraclitus
(1924).
A Study of History, vols 1-3 (1934; vols 5-6,
1939; vols 7-10,1954).
An Historian's Approach to Religion (1956).
Hellenism: The History of a Civilization
(1959).
Hannibal's Legacy: The Hannibalic War's
Effects on Roman Life, 2 vols (1965).
Some Problems of Greek History (1969).
Constantine Porphrogenitus and his World
(1973).
The Greeks and their Heritage (1981).

Other Relevant Works
The World after the Paris Peace Conference
(1925).
The Conduct of British Empire Foreign
Relations since the Peace Settlement
(1928).
(Ed. and trans.), Twelve Men of Action in
Graeco-Roman History (1952).
Further Reading
Dray, W.H., Toynbee's Search for Historical
Laws', History and Theory, vol. 1 (1961),
pp. 32-54.
Mclntire, C.T. and Marvin Perry, Toynbee:
Reappraisals (Toronto, 1989).
McNeill, William H., Arnold]. Toynbee: A
Life (1989).
Montague, Ashley (ed.), Toynbee and
History: Critical Essays and Reviews
(Boston, 1956).
Morton, S. Fiona, A Bibliography of Arnold
J. Toynbee (Oxford, 1980).
Walsh, W.H., Toynbee Reconsidered',
Philosophy, vol. 48 (1963), pp. 71-8.
John W. Clarke, Jr
TRETHOWEN, Dom Illtyd (1907-93)
Dom Illtyd Trethowan received the name
Kenneth at his birth in Salisbury on 12 May
1907; he died at Downside on 30 October
1993. His father was a local solicitor of Cornish
origin and his mother was Dutch. After
preparatory schooling at Sidcup he was
educated at Felsted and in 1925 went up to
Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read
Greats. The Oxford philosopher who made a
lasting impression upon him was the rather
lone eminence, H.A. PRICHARD, who, after a
long period of illness had re-emerged to become
White's Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1928.
Trethowen would therefore have only known
1055
TRETHOWEN
him in his final year at the university, but he
followed in his footsteps in his special interests
in problems about perception and moral oblig-
ation, and shared his reservations about Kant
and Hegel, who had hitherto enjoyed the ascen-
dancy in Oxford philosophy. Prichard's
realism, his conviction that our knowledge is
unique, unanalysable activity, incapable of
being interpreted in terms of anything else, and
yet sure in its grasp of reality so that people can
recognize themselves to be certain in a sense
that guarantees that they know, was to remain
the lifelong bedrock of Trethowan's thought.
He was converted to Christianity after reading
St John's Gospel through in a single sitting,
and following conversations with the Jesuit
Martin D'ARCY, then Master of Campion Hall,
joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1929.
That same year he was struck with
poliomyelitis, which left him permanently
without the use of one arm. Although the dis-
ability meant that even the most ordinary oper-
ations of life were for him arduous and tiring,
it did not diminish his prodigious industry nor
lead him to ask that any concessions be made
for him. After a short time schoolmastering at
the Oratory and at Ampleforth, he joined the
Benedictine community at Downside in 1932,
taking 'Illtyd' as his monastic name. For the
next sixty years he was almost continuously
resident in his monastery where he taught phi-
losophy to the young monks and literature to
the boys in the school.
Philosophically, he felt at first very isolated.
The most brilliant men in the community of his
time - David Knowles, John Chapman,
Christopher Butler and Aelred Sillem - had no
difficulties giving general allegiance to
Thomism, in common with the Catholic main-
stream of that age. But Trethowen soon dis-
covered that he had in many ways a greater
affinity with St Bonaventure than with the
Angelic Doctor and would later recognize a
kindred spirit in Maurice Blondel, whose
system of Christian philosophy emerged as an
alternative to Thomism. Though he did admit
to a certain attraction to the so-called Platonic
TRETHOWEN
argument of St Thomas, Trethowen was not
convinced by his five ways of proving God's
existence, because they seemed to him to be
deducing the Infinite from the finite by means
of a syllogism. 'Unless the Infinite', he said, 'is
somehow contained in the argument's starting-
point, it cannot emerge in the conclusion'. All
the traditional proofs of God's existence do is
to draw our attention to features in our expe-
rience, which provoke or bring into focus an
awareness of God.
Just as alien to him became the complicated
Thomistic-Aristotelian theory of the knowl-
edge process through sensible and intelligible
species, which seemed to him a prime example
of multiplying entities beyond necessity. Instead
he maintained, and would do so throughout his
life, that human beings have a fundamental
ability that he called 'awareness'. This gives us
a reliable and direct knowledge both of our-
selves and of objects distinct from ourselves,
and is a knowledge which needs no proof apart
from our experience of it. This was always his
answer to those who were sceptical of the pos-
sibility of knowing anything for certain: he
could only invite them to look harder at what
they see, and come to recognize that our knowl-
edge is the direct confrontation of mind with
reality. He invoked Plotinus: 'With knowing
there is nothing in between'. He would not
allow this general confidence to be shaken by
any instances of common illusions that might
be adduced, such as railway lines appearing to
converge, or pains still felt in limbs that, in
fact, have been amputated; our minds have the
self-correcting equipment as well as the expe-
rience for coping with such exceptions.
Likewise our knowledge of God, he said,
following in the Augustinian tradition, comes
not from any inferences our minds make, but
from the contemplation of our human experi-
ence, particularly from our spontaneous recog-
nition of transcendent values in what we
encounter, which points us to the source of all
values. We have an innate and direct awareness
of God's presence within us, which may spe-
cially be arrived at through a recognition of
1056
moral obligation. Our perception of value
cannot help but impose upon us a sense of
moral obligation, an absolute, unconditional
demand to behave in an appropriate way
towards the objects and people we have come
to value. God makes himself known to the
mind as the very condition of its reality. In
lumine tuo videbimus lumen, he often quoted.
This general epistemological position
Trethowen defended against all comers,
sceptics, relativists and reductionists on the one
side, and over-precise Thomists on the other. It
is most clearly expressed in the opening chapter
of his Mysticism and Theology (1975), since in
his Absolute Value (1970) and The Absolute
and the Atonement (1971), lectures he had
given in 1969 at Brown University, USA, his
exposition is obscured for the lay reader by its
format as an ongoing dialogue with many other
philosophers. But it recurs also in all the many
writings on theological questions, since for him
philosophy and theology were a continuous
whole not to be kept apart as was the scholas-
tic tradition.
He was editor of the Downside Review from
1946 to 1952 and again from 1960 to 1964,
and transformed its character from a journal
whose interests were primarily antiquarian into
a forum of independent thinking on theology
and philosophy. This was the means whereby
he fast acquired a circle of partners in dialogue
who included Austin FARRER, Hilary
Armstrong, E.I. WATKIN, H.P. OWEN, H.D.
LEWIS, Hugo Meynell, Alexander Dru, DJ.B.
HAWKINS, James Cameron and Eric MASCALL.
He was unashamed that he felt more at home
with the intellectual climate of France than
with that of this own country, and through the
Review he filtered to an Anglo-Saxon reader-
ship the ideas of Gabriel Marcel, Henri de
Lubac, Eugene Masure, Yves Congar, Maurice
Nedoncelle, Louis Lavelle, Louis Bouyer and
M.D. Chenu. As a translator, he was accurate,
clear and elegant. These writers have since won
general recognition and ecclesiastical approval,
but then they were unknown in England and
suspect in France. When the Second Vatican

Council came he felt himself in broad sympathy
with its spirit and the greater intellectual
freedom it engendered. But he was disquieted
by the rise of process theology and its teaching
that God is not unchanging and timeless, traces
of which he found even in Karl Rahner.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Trans, with F. Sheed), The Philosophy of
Saint Bonaventure (1938).
Certainty, Philosophical and Theological
(1948).
(with C.M. Pontifex), The Meaning of
Existence (1953).
An Essay in Christian Philosophy (1954).
(trans, with A. Dru), M. Blondel, The Letter
on Apologetics and History and Dogma
(1964; Edinburgh, 1995).
The Basis of Belief: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Religion (1961,1966).
Absolute Value: A Study in Christian Theism
(1970).
The Absolute and the Atonement (1971).
Mysticism and Theology: An Essay in
Christian Metaphysics (1975).
Process Theology and the Christian
Tradition: An Essay in Post-Vatican II
Thinking (Still River, Mass., 1985).
Further Reading
A Trethowan bibliography to 1977 is in the
Downside Review (July 1977), pp.
157-63.
Da vies, Brian, New Black friars (December
1993).
Moore, Sebastian, The Tablet (1993), p.
1468.
Daniel Rees
1057
TREVELYAN
TREVELYAN, George Macaulay
(1876-1962)
George Macaulay Trevelyan was born at
Welcombe, near Stratford-upon-Avon on 16
February 1876 and died in Cambridge on 20
July 1962. He was educated at Harrow School
(1889-93) before going up to Cambridge to
read for the History Tripos at Trinity College.
At Cambridge he was a contemporary of
Bertrand RUSSELL and G.E. MOORE, and studied
under the great Whig historian Lord Acton.
He took his degree with first class honours in
1896. Soon after submitting a fellowship dis-
sertation, he was elected a fellow of Trinity
College in 1898. He vacated his fellowship in
1903 to spend the next quarter century as an
independent historian. In 1924 and again in
1936 he lectured at a number of universities in
the United States and Canada. In 1927 he was
appointed Regius Professor of Modern History
at Cambridge. In 1940 he was elected Master
of Trinity College, Cambridge (1940-51). A
great many honours were bestowed upon him
during his lengthy career, the most distin-
guished being the Order of Merit in 1930. He
was awarded thirteen honorary doctorates,
including Harvard and Yale.
Trevelyan, a great nephew of Lord
Macaulay, is best remembered for his
numerous publications on British history that
support the late nineteenth-century liberal inter-
pretation of history. Although not of the
opinion that there is a 'philosophy of history'
(An Autobiography and Other Essays, p. 82),
he wrestled with a recurring ethical issue: to
what extent should the historian make moral
judgements regarding the historical record? He
always arrived at the same conclusion, believ-
ing that one should judge history with the
objective of bettering the human condition.
Nowhere is this more evident than in his
England in the Age of Wycliffe (1899), England
under the Stuarts (1909), Lord Grey of the
Reform Bill (1920), and his trilogy on mid-
nineteenth-century Italian republicanism,
Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic
TREVELYAN
(1907), Garibaldi and the Thousand (1909)
and Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (1911),
all of which argue that each epoch in history
improved the political, social and economic
welfare of humankind over the previous era.
From the start of his career at the beginning
of the twentieth century until his death in the
early 1960s Trevelyan always believed that
strong historical writing incorporates both
science and art. Reacting against what he felt to
be the cold, staid nature of contemporary his-
toriography, he wrote that responsible histori-
cal writing can only be achieved by balancing
careful scientific investigation with the 'art of
writing, and literary skill' (History and the
Reader', p. 13). Trevelyan rarely wavered in
his adherence to the Whig interpretation of
history. He believed that one of the primary
purposes of studying history is to find workable
solutions to contemporary problems. He cau-
tioned, however, that we must also remember
that 'the value of History to the solution of
present-day problems is indirect' (The Present
Position of History, p. 5). Trevelyan always
believed that both the historian and reader
must survey the evidence critically, and view
with scepticism scholarship that appears to be
used for propagandistic purposes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
England in the Age of Wycliffe (1899).
England under the Stuarts (1904).
Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic
(1907).
Garibaldi and the Thousand (1909).
Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (1911).
The Life of John Bright (1913).
Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (1920).
British History in the Nineteenth Century
(1922).
History of England (1926).
The Present Position of History [inaugural
lecture] (1927).
England Under Queen Anne, 3 vols
(1930-34).
The English Revolution, 1688-89 (1938).
English Social History (1944).
1058
History and the Reader (1945).
An Autobiography and Other Essays (1949).
Other Relevant Works
David Cannadine, G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in
History (1992).
John W. Clarke, Jr
TRUSTED, Jennifer Lesley (1925-)
Jennifer Trusted was born in Cambridge on
28 March 1925. She was educated at the Perse
Girls School and studied natural sciences at
Cambridge, with a Pt II Tripos in Chemistry.
After marrying and raising a family she took an
MA in the history and philosophy of science
and a PhD (1973) from the University of
Exeter. She wrote her thesis., under the super-
vision of DJ. O'CONNOR, on the epistemolog-
ical function of scientific theories. Her academic
appointments have been as part-time lecturer in
philosophy in the Department of Adult and
Continuing Education at Exeter and as part-
time tutor in the history and philosophy of
science at the Open University.
Trusted writes in the British empiricist tra-
dition and has been influenced by various
philosophers from Hume to A.J. AYER, as well
as by John Searle. Though she has recently
worked in applied ethics, her main interests
have been in epistemology and metaphysics,
and especially in the interaction between the
natural sciences and metaphysics and their
influence on one another. In a number of her
books, drawing on case studies from the history
of science, she has argued that basic presuppo-
sitions that are not themselves empirically jus-
tified play a key role in scientific inquiry.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Logic of Scientific Inference (1979).
An Introduction to the Philosophy of

Knowledge (1981).
Free Will and Responsibility (1984).
Inquiry and Understanding: An Introduction
to Explanation in the Physical and Human
Sciences (1987).
Moral Principles and Social Values (1987).
Physics and Metaphysics: Theories of Space
and Time (1991).
Beliefs and Biology: Theories of Life and
Living (1996; 2nd edn, 2003).
The Mystery of Matter (1999).
Other Relevant Works
'Gifts of Gametes: Reflections about
Surrogacy', Journal of Applied Philosophy,
vol. 3 (1986), pp. 123-6.
'Scientific Quasi-Realism', Mind, vol. 99
(1990), pp. 109-11.
'Whose Life is it Anyway?', journal of
Applied Philosophy, vol. 7 (1990), pp.
223-7.
The Problem of Absolute Poverty', in D.E.
Cooper (ed.), The Environment in
Question: Ethics and Global Issues (1992),
pp. 13-27.
Stuart Brown
TURING, Alan Mathison (1912-54)
Alan Mathison Turing was born in London
on 23 June 1912 and died tragically in
Wilmslow, near Manchester on 7 June 1954.
Turing was a son of the British Empire. His
father served in the Indian Civil Service while
Turing and his brother John remained in
England, raised by strangers and eventually
sent to board at 'public' schools (for Alan,
Sherborne). He saw his parents infrequently,
when they made the lengthy trip back from
India. Turing gave early signs both of genius
and a rather peculiar personality. He taught
himself to read when he was about five years
1059
TURING
old from a primer and was especially preco-
cious in elementary mathematics. He was also
very interested in natural science, especially
chemistry. During a seaside holiday, when
thirteen, he amused himself by extracting iodine
from seaweed with the help of a child's chem-
istry set. He was a withdrawn boy, with few
friends but with the inner resources to occupy
himself.
Turing did not fare well at Sherborne School.
He was the butt of pranks and bullying by the
other students and did not please the teachers,
who regarded him as bone lazy. But he usually
did very well come examination time, save for
Greek, which he was eventually allowed to
drop. Turing never could see the point of
wasting his time on things which did not
interest him. Socially, he finally made a friend,
Christopher Morcom, whom he adored and
with whom he shared scientific and mathe-
matical interests. In 1930 Morcom died
suddenly, devastating Turing.
Failing to win a scholarship to Trinity
College in Cambridge, Turing settled for
King's, coming eighth in their scholarship
examination. He entered the elite 'Schedule B'
mathematics 'Tripos' which involved half pure
and half applied, or scientifically relevant,
mathematics. Turing was now at one of the
world centres of mathematics and mathemati-
cal physics. He was much influenced by the
work of G.H. HARDY, A. EDDINGTON and B.
RUSSELL. The latter's Introduction to
Mathematical Philosophy presented Turing
with the paradoxes of logic and set theory
which his own most significant mathematical
work exploited in novel ways. While still an
undergraduate he proved the 'central limit
theorem' which explains why data is scattered
around the true value in a 'normal' distribution.
This was done in complete ignorance of the fact
that the theorem had already been proved in
1922. It was characteristic of Turing to plunge
into some problem and find his own solution
without particularly caring about researching
existing contributions. In any event, the result
was deemed suitable for a fellowship disserta-
TURING
tion, to which Turing turned after passing the
Mathematics Tripos with distinction.
Turing won the fellowship, which consisted
of £300 per year (a very substantial sum in those
days) and free room and board in King's College.
In 1935 Turing came up with the idea of solving
Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem (roughly, the
problem of showing whether all mathematical
questions can be rigorously decided by strict
axiomatically based reasoning) via the con-
struction of an ideal kind of computing machine.
By 1936 he had a draft of his most famous paper
'On Computable Numbers, with an Application
to the Entscheidungsproblem'. But Turing had
been scooped again, though not by a decade
this time. That very year, Alonzo Church had
used his Lambda calculus to show that there
were undecidable mathematical problems.
Though the two methods were intertranslat-
able, Turing's efforts were on quite different
lines and opened up mathematical (and tech-
nological) vistas entirely distinct from Church's
work.
Turing arranged to visit Princeton to work
with Church and spent the years 1936 to 1938
there. As well as working on computability
and various recondite problems of pure math-
ematics, Turing earned a PhD for a dissertation
on ordinal logics and their relation to Godel's
incompleteness results. Returning to
Cambridge as war loomed, he was increasingly
caught up with the work of the Government
Code and Cypher School, which was trying
with little success to unscramble German
military communications, encoded with the
powerful Enigma machine. Turing's efforts at
breaking the German code system and his
development of calculating machinery which
made possible the rapid decoding of Enigma
transmissions are now quite well known.
Suffice it to say that Turing has a good claim to
being the intellectual figure who contributed
most to victory in Europe.
After the war, Turing was instrumental in the
development of the first British programmable
computing machine (credit for the very first
seems to belong to Konrad Zuse in prewar
1060
Germany). Working in Manchester, he had his
own computing laboratory for a time, but
began to lose interest in the engineering aspects
of computer development. In 1950 he pub-
lished his famous paper on machine intelli-
gence and in 1951 was elected a fellow of the
Royal Society (nominated by B. Russell and
M. Newman). He maintained interests in a
wide variety of mathematical and scientific
fields, and did some highly innovative work in
the mathematics of biological development.
Turing's life took a terminal turn for the
worse with his arrest for 'gross indecency' in
1952. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain at
that time. Turing chose oestrogen hormone
therapy over a prison term and served out this
peculiar sentence. He was barred from all gov-
ernment cryptographical work, and was the
target of security investigations thereafter, but
retained his academic positions. In 1954 he
committed suicide by eating an apple he had
laced with cyanide.
Most of Turing's work was mathematical,
scientific, cryptographical or in a kind of theo-
retical engineering, but the seminal idea of com-
putability has immense philosophical signifi-
cance. It has also led to deep philosophical con-
troversies about the nature of mind and its
place in the physical world.
Turing strove to represent mathematical rea-
soning in the most simple way possible. The
result was the 'Turing machine'. Such a device
(purely notional as described but effectively
inhabiting all modern personal computers)
consists of a scanner/writer unit and a tape (of
indefinite length) which serves as input device,
computational work-space and output device.
The scanner can read an alphabet of symbols,
write onto or erase symbols from the tape, and
move, one step at a time, up or down the tape.
The operation of the machine is defined by a
state table, which describes precisely which
actions it will perform depending upon what it
finds upon the tape and its current state. Since,
by definition, state tables must be finite, Turing
machines can be described with complete pre-
cision and listed in some canonical order. It is

a remarkable fact that, so far as any one has
been able to tell, the computational power of
Turing machines is equivalent to that of any
well-defined system of computation. This is a
crude statement of the Church-Turing thesis
which is unprovable because of unclarity about
what the limits of 'well-defined computation'
might be.
What Turing proved was that there were
mathematical problems which could be pre-
cisely stated but that could not be solved by any
Turing machine (and hence, given the thesis
above, not by any system of well-defined com-
putation). For example, we might wonder
whether a particular Turing machine given a
particular input will halt after a finite time or
continue shuttling about its tape forever (any
reader who has had their computer go into an
'infinite loop' will recognize that this is not just
a theoretical issue). Adapting the diagonal
method invented by G. Cantor, Turing derived
a contradiction from the assumption that some
Turing machine, call it T, could solve this
'halting problem'. The proof is so elegant it
can be outlined here. We can suppose that T
works by taking two numbers as input: first,
the index number of the Turing machine it is
investigating and, second, the input which is
going to be fed to the target machine. T then
outputs 1 or 0 depending on whether the target
machine halts or not. That is, T(n,m) = 1 if
Turing machine number n halts with input m
and T(n,m) = 0 otherwise. Now, it can be easily
shown that there is a Turing machine, call this
one S, which generates an output of 1 when
given input 0, and which responds to an input
of 1 by simply filling its tape endlessly with Is
(that is, S fails to halt if it gets input (1). It can
also trivially be shown how to link Turing
machines together so that the output of one is
the input to the next. In particular, T(n,m) +
S(o) forms a Turing machine which will output
0 if Turing machine n halts with input m and
fails to halt otherwise. Since T + S is a Turing
machine in its own right it will have a number
on the canonical list of Turing machines. Let's
say that the number is 126. Now, suppose we
1061
TURING
ask what happens if Turing machine number
126 gets the input (126,1)? If it halts then T will
feed 1 to S and then S will not halt. But T + S
is Turing machine 126, so T + S does not halt
if T + S does halt, and vice versa. The incon-
sistency shows that it is impossible to compute
whether or not an arbitrary program will halt
or not. The halting problem is a well defined
mathematical question whose answer is unde-
cidable.
This has interesting philosophical conse-
quences. For example, it means that any natural
system which can instantiate arbitrary Turing
machines will not be predictable except by
running a simulation of that system. For if the
system was predictable then one could predict
the behaviour of the instantiated Turing
machines and thereby solve the halting
problem.
But this point raises the question of whether
all natural systems are bound by this 'Turing
limit' on computation and the issue of whether
all simulation is equivalent to simulation on a
Turing machine (or digital computer). It is easy
to imagine systems that might be able to
compute beyond the Turing limit. If, say,
certain natural parameters take on exact irra-
tional values then no Turing machine could
simulate certain conceivable processes depen-
dent upon those parameters (e.g., suppose some
process could fork in two directions depending
upon whether x and y - irrational numbers -
were exactly equal; even if x and y are both
computable numbers, no Turing machine could
reliably simulate the evolution of such a
process). It is also possible that nature involves
processes describable only by non-computable
functions. Turing himself was not unreceptive
to the idea of computation beyond the Turing
limit, and did some pioneering work on it. It is
now the focus of interesting speculative work
in physics and the philosophy of computation,
mind and consciousness.
The most famous of Turing's contributions
to philosophy is without doubt the 'Turing
Test' for machine intelligence which appeared
in his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and
TURING
Intelligence'. This paper contains an excellent
lay introduction to digital computers (then
extremely novel devices) in addition to its philo-
sophical content. The test attempts to 'opera-
tionalize' intelligence. Turing introduced the
test through what he called the imitation game,
in which two contestants - a man and a woman
- both try to convince an observer into thinking
that they are actually the woman. The observer
is linked to the contestants solely by teletype
and can ask any question he or she wishes, and
the contestants can answer in whatever way
seems to them most likely to help them win.
The male contestant will of course provide mis-
leading answers intended to confuse the
observer. Machine intelligence enters the
picture when Turing allows for the replace-
ment of the male contestant with a computer
program. The program is declared to be intel-
ligent if the observer does no better at correctly
selecting the woman when the computer is
playing than against male contestants. Why
Turing chose such an elaborate set-up instead
of the straightforward game of a teletype con-
versation with a single contestant, either human
or computer as the case may be, is an interest-
ing question, but one that is probably not
relevant to machine intelligence.
Most of the paper is devoted to Turing's
replies to various objections against the possi-
bility of machine intelligence. Some of these
are aimed at the adequacy of the test itself as a
criterion for intelligence, others at supposed
essential failings of machines which will prevent
them from ever passing the test. Turing does
not see much substance in the objections
against his test. He says 'the original question,
"Can machines think?" I believe to be too
meaningless to deserve discussion' ('Computing
Machinery and Intelligence', p. 442). He, rather
too quickly, argues that if his test is inadequate
then we will have to admit that we also do not
know that other human beings have minds.
Many of the objections he considers are still
at the centre of the debate about artificial
minds. One is that there are mathematically
mandated limitations to the cognitive abilities
1062
of machines. Some influential thinkers argue for
this from Godel's incompleteness theorems.
Turing quickly replies that we have no proof
that humans are not subject to similar limita-
tions, but then goes on to a more sophisticated
analysis which involves a sequence of increas-
ingly capable machines. Other thinkers, as we
have seen, suspect that some natural processes
transcend the computational limits of Turing
machines and that one locus of transcendence
may be the human brain. Turing touches on
one aspect of this when he discusses the conti-
nuity of the nervous system, but he seems to
regard it as always possible for a Turing
machine to simulate any 'analogue' computer.
Another objection is that passing the test is not
indicative of any consciousness in the machine.
Though Turing grants that consciousness is
mysterious, he takes the line that intelligence is
separable from consciousness so that the issue
is, in a way, irrelevant to his present concerns.
Curiously, the objection which Turing
appears to take the most seriously stems from
the idea that human beings have certain para-
normal mental abilities, such as telepathy.
Turing asserts that 'statistical evidence, at least
for telepathy, is overwhelming' ('Computing
Machinery and Intelligence'., p. 453). It seems
less so today, but in any event Turing quite
sensibly considers that one can be intelligent
without telepathic powers and invites us to run
his test in a 'telepathy proof room.
Finally, Turing is famous for one spectacu-
larly wrong prediction about artificial intelli-
gence. In the 1950 paper he bets that 'in about
fifty years time it will be possible to programme
computers with a storage capacity of about
109 to make them play the imitation game so
well that an average interrogator will not have
more than 70 per cent chance of making the
right identification after five minutes of ques-
tioning' (ibid., p. 442). Although current
storage capacity far exceeds one gigabit there is
still no prospect of building a computer that
could pass the Turing Test. It is entirely symp-
tomatic of the field of artificial intelligence to
underestimate the speed at which computer

capability will grow while wildly underesti-
mating the difficulty involved even in simulat-
ing human intelligence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'On Computable Numbers, with an
Application to the Entscheidungsproblerrf,
Proceedings of the London Mathematical
Society, 2nd ser., vol. 42 (1936), pp.
230-65. A correction to this paper appears
in the Proceedings, vol. 43 (1937), pp.
544-6.
'Computability and Lambda-Definability',
Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol. 2 (1937),
pp. 153-63.
'Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals',
Proceedings of the London Mathematical
Society, 2nd ser., vol. 45 (1939), pp.
161-228.
'A Method for the Calculation of the Zeta-
Function', Proceedings of the London
Mathematical Society, 2nd ser., vol. 48
(1943), pp. 180-97.
'Intelligent Machinery' [1948], in C. Evans
and A. Robertson (eds), Cybernetics: Key
Papers (Baltimore and Manchester, 1968).
'Computing Machinery and Intelligence',
Mind, vol. 49 (1950), pp. 433-60.
Other Relevant Works
Ince, D. (ed.), The Collected Works of A. M.
Turing: Mechanical Intelligence
(Amsterdam, 1992).
Saunders, P. (ed.), The Collected Works of A.
M. Turing: Morphogenesis (Amsterdam,
1992).
Britton, J. (ed.), The Collected Works of A.
M. Turing: Pure Mathematics (Amsterdam,
1992).
Gandy, R. and C. Yates (eds), The Collected
Works of A.M. Turing: Mathematical
Logic (Amsterdam, 2001).
Further Reading
Boolos, G. and R. Jeffrey, Computability and
Logic, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1980).
Copeland, J. and R. Sylvan, 'Beyond the
1063
TURNER
Universal Turing Machine', Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 77 (1999), pp.
46-66.
Davis, M., Engines of Logic (New York,
2000).
Hodges, A., Alan Turing: The Enigma (New
York, 1983).
Moor, J. (ed.), The Turing Test: The Elusive
Standard of Artificial Intelligence
(Dordrecht, 2003).
Penrose, R., The Emperor's New Mind
(Oxford, 1989).
William Seager
TURNER, John Evan (1875-?)
John Evan Turner was born to Welsh parents
in the Everton district of Liverpool on 28
December 1875 and grew up there, working
for some time in his father's draper's shop. He
obtained BA and MA degrees from the
University of Liverpool and by 1919 was a
lecturer in philosophy and psychology for the
University Extension Board. He was awarded
a PhD from the University of Liverpool in 1926
and in the same year was appointed reader in
philosophy. He taught at the university until his
retirement in 1941.
Turner was a fluent writer and wrote a series
of eight books in which he developed and
defended his 'general standpoint' in philosophy.
His first publication was a critique of William
James's pragmatism and pluralism, which he
holds to be inconsistent. Turner's own idealis-
tic monism, which was indebted to Hegel and
BOSANQUET, was already present and became
prominent in his second book, on the founda-
tion of moral obligation. In his published
doctoral thesis, A Theory of Direct Realism ...
(1925), Turner argues that Hegel's position,
so far from being opposed to realism, is com-
patible with 'the most realistic of modern
TURNER
realisms, so far as these bear upon the inde-
pendent existence of the perceived physical
universe' (ibid., p. 289).
In this work, which represents an important
development in Turner's philosophy, he rejects
the view that matter and mind 'are merely coex-
istent within a dualistic universe' (ibid., p. 293),
as Descartes and others had maintained. He
already embraced what was to become, for
him, a leading principle: that what we call the
mind has emerged through the evolution of
matter. Turner takes to be obvious that evolu-
tion is towards an ever higher state: The later
in time is universally the higher in organisation'
(ibid., p. 292). In a hostile review, however,
John LAIRD dismissed this claim as 'incredibly
naive' (p. 108).
Turner was aware that his speculations about
evolution needed the support of experts in other
fields and believed he had found it in 1925,
when he read a collaborative work to which
many distinguished scientists had contributed,
entitled Evolution in the Light of Modern
Knowledge. Several of the contributors -
notably Conwy Lloyd MORGAN and William
McDougall - defended a view of emergent evo-
lution as consistent with Darwinism. This book
seems to have provided the stimulus for
Turner's Personality and Reality (1926) and
he acknowledged its importance for that book
in the Preface to the sequel, The Nature of
Deity (1927). Turner argues in the first of these
books that an eternally evolving mechanism,
such as the world is, 'necessarily implies the real
existence of a mind which so dominates the
realm of matter as progressively to embody
therein ... its own constructive ideas'. 'Such a
mind', he concludes, 'is a supreme self - the
personal factor of the psycho-physical universe
within which it is omnipotent' (Personality and
Reality, p. 158).
1064
Turner's oddly named The Revelation of
Deity (1931) - which would have been more
aptly entitled 'Human Knowledge of God' -
contains some reflections on how his 'general
standpoint' is confirmed, as he saw it, by the
writings of eminent scientists, such as those of
Sir James JEANS. His last monograph, Essentials
in the Development of Religion (1934), was
begun as far back as 1925 and is an extension
of his general philosophy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An Examination of William James's
Philosophy: A Critical Essay for the
General Reader (Oxford, 1919).
The Philosophic Basis of Moral Obligation:
A Study in Ethics (1924).
A Theory of Direct Realism and the Relation
of Realism to Idealism (1925).
Personality and Reality: A Proof of the Real
Existence of a Supreme Self in the Universe
(1926).
The Nature of Deity: A Sequel to Personality
and Reality (1927).
The Revelation of Deity (1931).
Essentials in the Development of Religion: A
Philosophic and Psychological Study
(1934).
Other Relevant Works
(Trans.), Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion
in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in
Phenomenology [Phanomenologie der
Religion] (1938).
Further Reading
Laird, John, Mind, vol. 35 (1926), p. 108.
Stuart Brown
 u
URMSON, James Opie (1915-)
James Opie Urmson was born in Hornsea,
Yorkshire on 4 March 1915. He was educated
at Kingswood School, Bath and Corpus Christi
College, Oxford, where he gained a first class
in literae humaniores in 1938. He won the
Oxford University John Locke Scholarship in
Mental Philosophy in the same year. In World
War II he served in the Duke of Wellington's
Regiment in France, North Africa (where he
was awarded the Military Cross) and Italy, and
was a prisoner of war from 1944 to 1945. His
principal academic appointments were: student
of Christ Church, Oxford (1946-55); Professor
of Philosophy, Queen's College, Dundee (St
Andrews University; 1955-9); fellow and tutor
in philosophy, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
(1959-78; emeritus fellow, 1980-); Stuart
Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University
(1975-80; emeritus professor, 1980-).
Urmson's philosophical work was paradig-
matic of the Oxford tradition of Greats phi-
losophy, which combines treatment of a wide
range of topics in different fields of the subject
with detailed study of earlier, especially ancient,
philosophers, where the primary interest is
critical and analytical, rather than historical in
the narrow sense. His particular contribution to
this tradition was the application to a range of
traditional questions in epistemology and moral
philosophy of the method of 'ordinary
language' philosophy developed primarily in
Oxford in the immediate postwar period by a
number of philosophers including Urmson,
1065
R.M. HARE, GJ. WARNOCK and J.L. AUSTIN. In
Urmson's case this did not lead to the devel-
opment of any philosophical system, or the
publication of any single major book, but to a
number of articles on subjects as diverse as the
justification of induction ('Some Questions
Concerning Validity, 1953), the nature of eval-
uation ('On Grading', 1950) and the founda-
tions of epistemology ('Parenthetical Verbs',
1952), where detailed examination of the actual
phenomena of the language employed in these
areas identified oversimplification produced by
overconfident theorizing and led to clearer iden-
tification of the real issues. A striking feature of
his work is the number of articles which opened
up fruitful new areas of investigation for explo-
ration by others: notable examples are 'The
Interpretation of the Moral Philosophy of J.S.
Mill' (1953), which set the distinction between
act and rule-utilitarianism firmly at the centre
of the discussion of utilitarianism, and 'Saints
and Heroes' (1958), which revived the
neglected topic of supererogation to the benefit
of subsequent treatments of consequentialism
and deontology. His historical work, notably
on Aristotle's ethics, remains standard on all
reading lists, and in his later years he was a
leading figure in the development of aesthetics
as an area of major interest for analytic philoso-
phers.
In addition to his own work he made a sig-
nificant contribution to the development of
twentieth-century philosophy as editor of the
posthumous works of his close associate J.L.
Austin, most notably in his reconstruction from
URMSON
Austin's manuscript notes of the latter's pio-
neering essay in speech act theory, How to Do
Things with Words.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Philosophical Analysis: Its Development
Between the Two World Wars (Oxford,
1956).
(Ed.), The Concise Encyclopedia of Western
Philosophy and Philosophers (New York
and London, 1960; 2nd rev. edn, 1975).
(Ed. with GJ. Warnock), J.L. Austin,
Philosophical Papers (Oxford, 1961; 2nd
enl. edn, 1970; 3rd, further enl. edn,
1979).
(Ed.), J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with
Words (Oxford, 1962; with M. Sbisa, 2nd
rev. edn, 1975).
The Emotive Theory of Ethics (1968).
Berkeley (Oxford, 1982).
Aristotle's Ethics (Oxford, 1988).
Other Relevant Works
'On Grading', Mind, vol. 59 (1950), pp.
145-69; repr. in A. Flew (ed.), Logic and
Language, 2nd ser. (Oxford, 1959) and (in
German trans.) in G. Grewendorf and G.
Meggle (eds), Sprache und Ethik
(Frankfurt am Main, 1974).
'Parenthetical Verbs', Mind, vol. 61 (1952),
pp. 480-96; repr. in A. Flew (ed.), Essays
in Conceptual Analysis (New York, 1956)
and in C.E. Caton (ed.), Philosophy and
Ordinary Language (Urbana, Illinois,
1963).
The Interpretation of the Moral Philosophy
of J.S. Mill', Philosophical Quarterly, vol.
3 (1953), pp. 33-9; repr. in P. Foot (ed.),
Theories of Ethics (1967); repr. in J.B.
Schneewind (ed.), Mill (1968); in M.D.
Bayles (ed.), Contemporary Utilitarianism
(New York, 1968); in S. Gorovitz (ed.),
Mill: Utilitarianism (New York, 1971); in
T.K. Hearn, Jr (ed.), Studies in
Utilitarianism (New York, 1971); and (in
German trans.) in O. Hoffe (ed.),
Einfiihrung in die utilitaristiche Ethik
1066
(Munich, 1975).
'Some Questions Concerning Validity', Revue
Internationale de Philosophie, vol. 7
(1953), pp. 217-29; repr. in A. Flew (ed.),
Essays in Conceptual Analysis (New York,
1956) and in R. Swinburne (ed.), The
Justification of Induction (1974).
'Saints and Heroes', in A.I. Melden (ed.),
Essays in Moral Philosophy (Seattle,
1958), pp. 198-216; repr,. in J. Feinberg
(ed.), Moral Concepts (1969).
'Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean', American
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 10 (1973),
pp. 223-30; repr. in A.O. Rorty (ed.),
Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (Berkeley, Los
Angeles and London, 1980).
'Representation in Music', Philosophy and
the Arts [Royal Institute of Philosophy
Lectures], vol. 6 (1971-2), pp. 132-46.
Further Reading
Dancy, J., J.M.E. Moravcsik and C.C.W.
Taylor (eds), Human Agency: Language,
Duty, and Value: Philosophical Essays in
Honor of J.O. Urmson (Stanford,
California, 1988). Contains complete
bibliography to 1988.
C.C.W. Taylor
URQUHART, William Spence (1877-1964)
W.S. Urquhart was born in Southampton on 8
May 1877 and died in Torphins, Aberdeenshire
on 16 July 1964. Of Scottish origin and five
generations of clergy, he was educated at the
University of Aberdeen (MA first class in
mental and moral philosophy, 1897), where
he was a student of W. Ritchie SORLEY.
Urquhart studied divinity at New College,
Edinburgh, and travelled to Marburg and
Gottingen, attending the lectures of Rudolf
Otto - with whom he remained in contact

throughout the latter's life. Urquhart later
received a DPhil from Aberdeen (1916), and
honorary degrees from the Universities of
Calcutta (DL, 1930), Aberdeen (DD, 1930),
and St Andrews (LL D, 1937)
In 1902 Urquhart was appointed Professor of
Philosophy at Duff College, Calcutta, incorpo-
rated into the Scottish Churches College (SCC)
in 1908. SCC was pre-eminent in Bengal in
teaching philosophy, and Urquhart counted
Swami Abhay Bhaktivedanta (founder of the
International Society for Krishna Consciousness)
- on whom he had a profound influence -
among his students. He became Principal of SCC
(1928-38), served as Dean of Arts (1927 and
1931) and Vice-Chancellor (1928-30) of the
University of Calcutta, and edited the Calcutta
Review, an important literary and cultural
journal (1913-21).
At sixty, Urquhart left India, teaching at
Aberdeen (1937), Knox College, Toronto
(1938-9) and Oxford (Wilde Lecturer in Natural
and Comparative Religion, 1942-5). He gave
the Croall Lectures at Edinbugh in 1939, and the
Riddoch Lecture at Aberdeen in 1944 and 1946.
He spent his last years in Scotland in retirement.
Characteristic as he was of the many 'philoso-
pher missionaries' teaching in India at the turn
of the nineteenth century, Urquhart's early essays
and books deal with the relation between Indian
philosophy and Christian thought - particularly
on pantheism. In Pantheism and the Value of
Life (1919), based on his doctoral thesis,
Urquhart argued that, while it is found in both
the West and the East, India was home to
'Pantheism in its purest form'. Pantheism affects
both the moral and the practical sphere, and the
Indian philosophical tradition from its origins -
continuing into modern Vedanta - reflects a
distrust of experience, moral quietism and a
tendency to ignore the demands of practical life.
Urquhart notes that, while some modern
thinkers, such as Rabindranath Tagore, reflect a
spirit of progress, others, such as Swami
Vivekananda, are reactionary - advocating
world-denying or pessimistic views, and refusing
to engage in social improvement. For Urquhart,
1067
URQUHART
'a radical transformation of Indian thought is
necessary if India is to advance mentally,
morally, and religiously'; for this, European (i.e.
Christian) ideas are needed. Critics responded
that Urquhart's appreciation of Hindu thought
was too narrow, exaggerating the import of
Vedantic tradition and ignoring the influence of
Buddhism.
Urquhart gradually came to engage Indian
thought more positively. The Vedanta and
Modern Thought (1928), which brings together
some of his earlier work, focuses on Sankara and
Ramanuja. Urquhart notes several parallels
between 'Western' and Vedantic thought (e.g.,
between Sankara's philosophy and Western
accounts of the Absolute). While Urquhart
argued that 'India has had, and still has, a most
important contribution to make to the thought of
the world', and while his views are more sympa-
thetic than John McKenzie's 1922 Hindu Ethics,
he continued to be criticized for writing Veiled
propaganda for Christianity' (C.D. Broad).
In several essays Urquhart introduced
Western philosophers to Indian philosophy -
particularly the Vedantic systems of Hinduism
(not surprising, given the early influence of
Sorley's 'personalistic' idealism) - and provided
one of the earliest studies of communalism in
India. His concern for the practical, however,
is evident throughout, and in his 1929 presi-
dential address to the Indian Philosophical
Congress, 'The Comprehensive Nature of
Philosophy', Urquhart called for all philoso-
phers - Indian and Western - to engage with
concrete as well as theoretical issues.
In his later years Urquhart wrote relatively
little. Humanism and Christianity (the Croall
Lectures, not published until the end of the
war) was a remarkable attempt to steer a
middle course between Karl Barth's view of
religion as sui generis, and the purely secular
analysis of faith. Urquhart insists on a need for
a new humanism - echoing the French Catholic
philosopher Jacques Maritain's Integral
Humanism.
Urquhart's writings are more philosophical
than apologetic, and are an early effort to find
URQUHART

value in the traditions of Indian philosophy. Further Reading

Urquhart's lasting contribution, however, is Dr. Urquhart: Commemoration Volume.
indirect: like many of the British philosopher Essays, Addresses and Appreciations
missionaries who staffed Indian educational (Calcutta, 1937).
institutions in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Urquhart played an impor- William Sweet
tant role in forming future leaders for India, and
particularly in training succeeding generations
of Indian philosophers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Philosophical Inheritance of
Rabindranath Tagore', International
Journal of Ethics, vol. 26 (1916), pp.
398-^13.
Pantheism and the Value of Life, with Special
Reference to Indian Philosophy (1919).
Theosophy and Christian Thought (1922).
'Religion and Communalism', Hibbert
Journal, vol. 25 (1926-7).
The Vedanta and Modern Thought (1928).
Humanism and Christianity (1945).

1068
 V
VESEY, Godfrey Norman Agmondisham
(1923-)
Godfrey Vesey was born in Harrogate on 22
June 1923, the son of an Anglican clergyman.
He was educated at King's School, Macclesfield
and St Catherine's College, Cambridge, where
he obtained a first in both parts of the Moral
Sciences Tripos, graduating BA in 1950. He
then proceeded to an MLitt. In 1952 he was
appointed lecturer in philosophy at King's
College London and became a reader of the
University of London in 1965. He spent the fol-
lowing year as visiting professor at Carlton
College, Minnesota and at the University of
Oregon. In 1969 he was appointed Professor of
Philosophy at the recently created Open
University, where he remained until he retired
in 1985.
Vesey was assistant editor of Philosophy
from 1964 to 1969 and Honorary Director of
the Royal Institute of Philosophy from 1965
until 1979. In this latter capacity he was largely
responsible for bringing the Institute into the
mainstream of British analytical philosophy.
He negotiated the annual publication of the
Institute's weekly lecture series and edited most
of them himself. These volumes, to which he
always contributed a thoughtful introduction,
indicate the breadth of his philosophical inter-
ests. They included such titles as The Human
Agent (1968), Talk of God (1970), The Proper
Study (1971), Philosophy and the Arts (1973),
Understanding Wittgenstein (1974),
Impressions of Empiricism (1976), Human
1069
Values (1978), Idealism, Past and Present
(1982) and The Philosophy in Christianity
(1989). He also instituted the series of confer-
ences sponsored by the Institute and subse-
quently published by Cambridge University
Press. When he retired as Director he was given
the exceptional distinction of a fellowship of the
Royal Institute of Philosophy in recognition of
his outstanding services.
Vesey became widely known outside the
narrow confines of the academic world as a
teacher of philosophy for the Open University.
He made more than forty radio or television
broadcasts for the university, many of which
involved a dialogue with other leading philoso-
phers. He also enjoyed constructing or adapting
historical dialogues such as that between
Princess Elizabeth and Descartes and even
giving them his own conclusion, as in his 'Hylas
Fights Back', where he rewrote the argument of
part of Berkeley's Three Dialogues. Some of
these early contributions were included in his
collection of Open University broadcast tran-
scripts, Philosophy in the Open (1974). He
wrote or contributed to a large number of
teaching books for different courses, including
specialist philosophy courses. For instance, he
wrote on Other Minds and Personal Identity
for a course on 'Problems of Philosophy'
(1973), and on Berkeley for one on the history
of modern philosophy entitled 'Reason and
Experience' (1982). He wrote a book on
Meaning and Understanding: Locke and
Wittgenstein for an advanced undergraduate
course Thought and Reality: Central Themes
VESEY
in Wittgenstein's Philosophy' (1976). He also
wrote introductory books on Descartes and on
Kant's critical philosophy. Vesey was a skilful
committee chairman and during his time at the
Open University he served as a Pro-Vice-
Chancellor as well as Acting Vice-Chancellor.
After his retirement he became an emeritus
professor.
Vesey's main area of special interest was in
the philosophy of mind, as is reflected by his
early books: The Embodied Mind (1965),
Perception (1972) and Personal Identity
(1974). His first book provides a critical survey
of some theories of body and mind. Perception
is also critical of dualism and, specifically, of the
causal theory of perception. Personal Identity
takes its point of departure from Hume's
problems. Vesey himself acknowledged a deep
debt to WITTGENSTEIN and indeed some of his
main papers are expositions of Wittgenstein's
thought. A number of his main papers, as well
as some shorter ones, were included in the col-
lection he produced under the title Inner and
Outer: Essays on a Philosophical Myth (1991).
The myth, which many of his writings are con-
cerned to dispel, is that of dualism, that people
consist of two distinct things - one that is 'inner'
and mental, and another that is outer and
'physical'. This myth manifests itself in all three
of the areas into which Vesey himself divided his
collected papers: voluntary action, perception,
communication. In the case of voluntary action
it finds expression in the theory that my raising
my arm consists of two distinct things, a view he
criticized particularly in his early paper on
'Volition' (1961). In the case of perception, it
appears as the 'representative' theory according
to which we do not strictly perceive outer things
but only the inner things ('ideas') that represent
them. Vesey criticized this view in his book on
Perception. In the case of communication, the
myth expresses itself in the suggestion that saying
something involves translating inner things
(thoughts) into outer things (sounds). He
addressed this suggestion in his inaugural lecture
at the Open University, subsequently published
as 'Is Talk a Mode of Transport?'
1070
Vesey's interest in the traditional problems of
philosophy has been combined with attention
to the thought of historical figures, such as
Descartes, Hume, Berkeley and Mill. Some of
his later writings focus on problem of free will.
He engaged in a published debate with Antony
FLEW, Agency and Necessity (1987), in which
he defended a distinct version of compatibilism.
The language of physical causes is, according to
Vesey, different from that in which we talk of
agents. But our choice of one language rather
than the other has no basis such that one
language should be preferred to the other on
metaphysical grounds.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Seeing and Seeing As', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 56 (1955-6), pp.
109-24.
'Volition', Philosophy, vol. 36 (1961), pp.
352-65.
'Knowledge without Observation',
Philosophical Review, vol. 72 (1963), pp.
198-212.
The Embodied Mind (1965).
'Wittgenstein on the Myth of Mental
Processes', Philosophical Review, vol. 77
(1968), pp. 350-55.
'Sensations of Colour', in J.B. Schneewind
(ed.), Mill (New York, 1968), pp. 111-31.
Perception (New York, 1972).
Personal Identity (1974).
'Locke and Wittgenstein on Language and
Reality', in H.D. Lewis (ed.),
Contemporary British Philosophy, 4th ser.
(1976), pp. 253-73.
'Wittgenstein on Psychological Verbs', in
Donald F. Gustafson and Bangs L.
Tapscott (eds), Body, Mind and Method
(Dordrecht, 1979), pp. 115-28.
'Of the Visible Appearances of Objects', in
John Fisher (ed.), Perceiving Artworks
(Philadelphia, 1980), pp. 42-58.
'Is Talk a Mode of Transport?', The Gadfly,
A Quarterly Review of English Letters,
vol. 5 (1982).
'Hume on Liberty and Necessity', in Godfrey
 VON LEYDEN

Vesey (ed.), Philosophers Ancient and
Modern, Royal Institute of Philosophy
Lectures, vol. 20 (Cambridge, 1986), pp.
111-27.
'Concepts of Mind', in Peter A. French et al.,
Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 10
(Studies in the Philosophy of Mind)
(Minneapolis, 1986), pp. 531-57.
(with Antony Flew), Agency and Necessity
(Oxford, 1987).
Tree Will', in A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.), Key
Themes in Philosophy, Royal Institute of
Philosophy Lectures, vol. 20 (Cambridge,
1989), pp. 85-100.
Inner and Outer: Essays on a Philosophical
Myth (1991). Includes bibliography.
George Berkeley [Open University correspon-
dence text for course A 311 'Reason and
Experience'] (Milton Keynes, 1982).
'Teaching Philosophy in Britain's Open
University', Teaching Philosophy, vol. 1
(1975), pp. 21-8,125-33.
(with Paul Foukes), Collins Dictionary of
Philosophy (1990).
Stuart Brown
VON LEYDEN, Wolfgang, see Leyden

Other Relevant Works

(Ed.), Body and Mind (1964).
(Ed.), Philosophy in the Open (Milton
Keynes, 1974).

1071
 w
WADDINGTON, Conrad Hal (1905-75)
Conrad Hal Waddington was born in Evesham
on 8 November 1905 and died in Edinburgh on
26 September 1975. He attended Cambridge,
where he studied visual art, poetry, philoso-
phy and natural sciences, and ultimately did his
doctoral research in palaeontology, but never
presented his thesis. Nonetheless, he held a
number of significant scientific posts including
the Chair of Animal Genetics at Edinburgh
(from 1945), and the Albert Einstein Chair in
Science at the State University of New York
Buffalo (1970-72).
In 1929 he received a research fellowship to
Strangeways Laboratory, where, inspired by
Hans Spemann's research into the 'organizer'
region in amphibian embryos, he began
grafting experiments resulting in a series of
papers during the 1930s demonstrating a
similar area in birds and mammals.
Throughout the 1930s, Waddington extended
his interests from embryology to genetics, cul-
minating in a research fellowship to Caltech to
work with Drosophila flies, and the publication
of his important book on embryonic induc-
tion, Organisers and Genes (1940).
Throughout the 1950s, Waddington devel-
oped his theory of genetic assimilation.
Through heat shock experiments on flies, he
was able to establish that a trait which initially
developed through environmental stimulus can
become genetically determined and inherited in
the genome. Such a discovery posed problems
for the modern synthesis and gave credence to
1072
Waddington's belief that once in a lifetime
exposures and physiological processes must be
considered when discussing evolutionary devel-
opment.
In Strategy of the Genes (1957) Waddington
explained his revolutionary idea of the 'epige-
netic landscape' - the paths an embryonic cell
might take in its development to its final state
in which the cell is 'nudged' through develop-
mental branches by homoeotic genes or
inducing factors, taking pressure off the
genome to be the ultimate agent of develop-
mental processes. This concept of divergent
developmental pathways was highly influen-
tial and instrumental in the incorporation of
embryology into evolutionary theory. In the
early 1960s Waddington was given funding to
start a laboratory for the study of epigenetics,
and in 1965 the Epigenetic Research Group
was opened, with Waddington as Honorary
Director.
Waddington was greatly influenced by
WHITEHEAD, and philosophy was never far
removed from his science. Notably in The
Ethical Animal (1960), Waddington argued
that human ability to ethicize is a product of
evolution extended to the realms of cultural
transmission and behaviour. These abilities
mark a secondary mechanism by which evolu-
tion can be brought about through a 'socio-
genetic' system. Here ethics function to mediate
the progress of human evolution, in particular
to reinforce notions of authority and bring
humans into a condition for receiving trans-
mitted information.

Waddington also ventured into the realm of
art theory with his book Behind Appearances
(1969), a comparative study of painting and
science. Waddington speculated about con-
nections between developments in art and
science such as the collapse of the billiard ball
model of matter and the end of representa-
tional styles. He concluded that art and science
are related parts of human exploration of the
world, and that both can inform and reveal a
knowledge of the structure of material things
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An Introduction to Modern Genetics (1939).
Organisers and Genes (1940).
The Strategy of the Genes (1957).
The Ethical Animal (1960).
Behind Appearances (1969).
Evolution of an Evolutionist (1975).
further Reading
Gilbert, Scott, 'Diachronic Biology Meets
Evo-Devo', American Zoologist, vol. 40
(2000), pp. 729-37.
Robertson, Alan, 'Conrad Hal Waddington',
Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the
Royal Society, vol. 23 (1977), pp.
575-622.
Slack, Johnathan, 'Conrad Hal Waddington',
Nature Reviews Genetics, vol. 3 (2002),
pp. 889-95.
Speybroeck, Linda Van, 'From Epigenesis to
Epigenetics', Annals of the New York
Academy of Sciences, vol. 981 (2002), pp.
61-81.
Peter Schmidt
WAISMANN, Friedrich (1896-1959)
Friedrich Waismann was born in Vienna and
died in Oxford. He was educated at the
University of Vienna, where he took a degree in
1073
WAISMANN
physics in 1922. From that time until 1936 he
held no formal academic position, making a
living as philosophy faculty librarian and as a
private tutor. However, he was closely associ-
ated with Moritz Schlick, Professor of the
Inductive Sciences at the University of Vienna,
who was, in 1929, to found the Vienna Circle.
He was also to a large extent dependent on
him for employment. Schlick had been greatly
influenced by WITTGENSTEIN'S Tractatus logico-
philosophicus, and throughout the 1920s orga-
nized intensive discussions of the work of
Wittgenstein with close colleagues, including
Waismann, in many of which Wittgenstein
himself took part. Eventually, the meetings
involved only Waismann, Schlick and
Wittgenstein, and Waismann took shorthand
notes of the discussions that took place. Schlick
decided that Waismann should be the Vienna
Circle's expositor of Wittgenstein's ideas, and
it was planned that he should, in consultation
with Wittgenstein, embody these ideas in a
book entitled Logik, Sprache, Philosophie.
However, as Wittgenstein's philosophical views
developed away from the Tractatus logico-
philosophicus, the planned cooperation became
increasingly difficult and Wittgenstein
withdrew from the project in 1934. The book
was not to see the light of day until 1965, but
in 1936 Waismann did publish Einfuhrung in
das mathematische Denken, an account of
mathematical thinking from a Wittgensteinian
perspective.
With the murder of Schlick in 1936, and the
'Anschluss' (Waismann was a Jew), Waismann
decided to emigrate to the United Kingdom,
where he lectured in Cambridge periodically
from 1937 to 1939. In these lectures he con-
tinued to expound some of the views of
Wittgenstein, who was also in Cambridge.
However, Wittgenstein disapproved of this,
partly on the ground that he had already given
up or developed further the views Waismann
was expounding. This led to friction between
the two.
Waismann moved to the University of
Oxford in 1940, and shortly after, like many
WAISMANN
immigrant Jews, was interned for a couple of
months as an enemy alien. He did not hold a
regular university position until 1945, when
he became university lecturer in the philosophy
of science and mathematics. In 1950 he was
appointed reader in the philosophy of mathe-
matics and in 1955 reader in the philosophy of
science, and in the same year he was appointed
a fellow of the British Academy. He did not
publish extensively during his lifetime, but
much of his writing has been published since his
death.
Throughout his life Waismann retained his
allegiance to Wittgensteinian ways of thought,
and indeed he is largely remembered for his
attempt to systematize and expound
Wittgenstein's views, although in his later years
he was also influenced to some extent by the
'linguistic philosophy' of such thinkers as
Gilbert RYLE and J.L. AUSTIN. His approach to
philosophy was through the careful analysis of
language, in the belief that philosophical
problems were the result of linguistic confusion,
confusion about the 'grammar' of language,
the rules for the use of words. Cartesian scep-
ticism about memory, for instance, is to be
dealt with by observing that questions about
the reliability of memory make sense only
against a background in which there are criteria
for settling this question, criteria which refer to
states of affairs that are accessible to us.
Waismann believed that the sceptic had severed
the 'problem' of the reliability of memory from
all such criteria; his question is thus 'a logical
confusion dressed up as a problem' (The
Principles of Linguistic Philosophy, p. 22).
Though not a notably original thinker,
Waismann did make some important contri-
butions. Probably his most influential idea was
that of the 'open texture' of language. Our
empirical concepts typically have perfectly good
rules for their use, rules that in normal cir-
cumstances determine when they do and do
not apply. We can always, however, imagine
circumstances in which we would be unsure
whether they applied: if my cat were suddenly
to talk, should we then still want to call it a cat?
1074
The rules for the use of this concept do not
require us to answer 'Yes' or 'No'. We do not
have 'rules ready for all imaginable possibilities'
(see 'Verifiability', p. 41 in How I See
Philosophy). This phenomenon, Waismann
believed, prevented empirical statements from
being completely verifiable, for 'we cannot
foresee completely all the circumstances' in
which a statement that uses open-textured
concepts will be true or false. He held that it
also doomed reductive programmes such as
behaviourism and phenomenalism.
More broadly, he thought that such pro-
grammes were in any case misguided because
they ignored the fact of what he called
'language strata' (see the article of that title,
1946). Language is divided into different strata;
each stratum has its own set of concepts with
a characteristic nature (they may, for instance,
be open textured or not), its own method of
verifiability and its own conception of truth.
The language of sense-data, for instance,
belongs to a different stratum from the logic of
material object statements, and this prevents
any translation from the one to the other.
Similarly, the language of human action
belongs to a different stratum from that of the
language of physical events, and there is thus no
prospect of understanding the one in terms of
the other. This does not mean that an action is
not regarded as a physical event, but rather
that it 'may be viewed as a series of movements
caused by some physiological stimuli ... or
[alternatively] as something that has a purpose
or a meaning ...'. In the former case it is deter-
mined by causes, in the latter by reasons and
motives. If we understand this, Waismann
claimed, we should be able to see that motives
are not a special kind of cause, a view that was
later to become a central po int of contention in
the philosophy of mind.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Einfiihrung in das mathematische Denken
(Vienna, 1936); English trans.,
Introduction to Mathematical Thinking
(New York, 1951).

'Verifiability', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 19 (1945), pp. 119-50.
'Language Strata', Synthese, vol. 5 (1946),
pp. 221-9.
'Analytic-Synthetic', Analysis, vol. 10 (1949),
pp. 25-40; vol. 11 (1951), pp. 25-38,
49-61,115-24; vol. 13 (1953), pp. 1-14,
73-89.
The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy, ed.
Rom Harre (1965).
How I See Philosophy, ed. Rom Harre
(Macmillan, 1968).
Philosophical Papers, ed. Brian McGuinness
(Dordrecht, 1977).
Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle:
Conversations Recorded by Friedrich
Waismann, ed. Brian McGuinness, trans,
from the German by Joachim Schulte and
Brian McGuinness (Oxford, 1979).
Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics,
ed. Wolfgang Grassl (Amsterdam, 1982).
(with Ludwig Wittgenstein), The Voices of
Wittgenstein: The Vienna Circle, ed.
Gordon Baker (Routledge, 2003). Consists
of dictations by Wittgenstein, and texts of
dictated material redrafted by Waismann.
Further Reading
Hampshire, Stuart, Triedrich Waismann',
Proceedings of the British Academy
(1960).
Anthony Ellis
WALKER, Leslie Joseph (1877-1958)
Leslie Walker was born in Birmingham on 18
October 1877 and died there on 22 September
1958. He was educated at King Edward's
School, Birmingham, became a Roman
Catholic in 1898, and a year later entered the
Society of Jesus. He studied subsequently at
various Jesuit colleges and at London
1075
WALKER
University. After serving in World War I as a
chaplain, he went to Oxford, where, for forty
years, he was successively philosophy tutor,
Dean and senior tutor at Campion Hall, and
lectured on the history of medieval philoso-
phy. The University of Oxford conferred on
him the degree of MA by Decree of
Congregation in 1928.
Walker's first important work was his MA
thesis at London University, published as
Theories of Knowledge: Absolutism,
Pragmatism, Realism (1910). 'Absolutism' was
the name he gave to the theories of knowledge
found in Hegel and Schelling, and in neo-
Hegelians such as the English idealists. Both
absolutism and pragmatism, he argued, had
their roots in Kant's philosophy, although they
developed in different directions. Absolutism
was a theory of knowledge transformed into a
theory of reality; pragmatism, a subjectivist
philosophy which sacrificed truth. Realism,
which for Walker meant Aristotelian or
scholastic realism, was the only epistemology
which reconciled the subjective element in
knowledge with the absolute ground upon
which knowledge must ultimately depend. The
universe is an objectively structured one which,
nonetheless, exists for humanity.
Another major work, and a work of out-
standing scholarship, was Walker's translation,
with Introduction and notes, of Machiavelli's
Discourses (1950). The translation is, in his
own words, 'as literal as possible so that the
reader may have before him what Machiavelli
actually says' (Discourses, vol. 1, p. 162). The
second volume, which consists entirely of notes,
tables and indices, displays an extraordinary
range of learning. Published when Walker was
seventy-three, it must be regarded as a life's
work and a labour of love.
His writings in general reveal a very wide
range of interests. One of these was the philo-
sophical significance of developments in theo-
retical physics, such as relativity and quantum
theory, which were discussed in 'A New Theory
of Matter' (1922-3) and 'The Physical World'
(1929). The theory of evolution was consid-
WALKER
ered, favourably, but with an awareness of its
methodological weaknesses, in Science and
Revelation (1932).
Walker also wrote extensively, although not
in book form, about various medieval philoso-
phers: Augustine, Anselm, Eriugena, Aquinas,
Scotus. His wide-ranging mind remained active
into his seventies, and could still be seen at
work in 'Gilbert Ryle and Jean-Paul Sartre'
(1950).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Theories of Knowledge: Absolutism,
Pragmatism, Realism (1910; 2nd edn,
1911).
Science and Revelation (1932).
(Trans, with intro. and notes), Niccolo
Machiavelli, Discourses, 2 vols (1950).
Other Relevant Works
The Nature of Incompatibility', Mind, vol.
16 (1907), pp. 343-61.
'Martineau and the Humanists', Mind, vol.
17 (1908), pp. 305-20.
The Revival of Learning in the Eighth
Century', The American Catholic
Quarterly Review, vol. 33 (1908), pp.
301-13.
'Humanism and the Ethics of Martineau',
Mind, vol. 18 (1909), pp. 407-10.
'Concerning Einstein', The Dublin Review,
no. 166 (1920), pp. 256-76.
The Philosophy of Viscount Haldane', The
Month, no. 138 (1921), pp. 289-97.
'Is Mr Bertrand Russell Becoming an
Aristotelian?', The Month, no. 139 (1922),
pp. 207-17.
'Miguel de Unamuno, A Spanish Humanist',
The Dublin Review, no. 171 (1922), pp.
32-43.
'A New Theory of Matter', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 23 (1922-3),
pp. 93-110.
'A New Aristotle', The Month, no. 145
(1925), pp. 442-6.
The Theistic Philosophy of Erigena and
Anselm', The Dublin Review, no. 179
1076
(1926), pp. 256-79.
'Duns Scotus in Fiction and in Fact', The
Dublin Review, no. 182 (1928), pp.
46-58.
The Physical World', Philosophy [Journal of
Philosophical Studies], vol. 4 (1929), pp.
314-24.
The Philosophy of St Augustine', The Dublin
Review, no. 187 (1930), pp. 104-18.
'Augustinianism in the Thirteenth Century',
The Dublin Review, no. 187 (1930), pp.
216-35.
'Aquinas', Philosophy, vol. 10 (1935), pp.
279-88.
The Logical Basis and Structure of Religious
Belief, Philosophy, vol. 14 (1939), pp.
387-409.
'Gilbert Ryle and Jean-Paul Sartre', The
Month, no. 189 (1950), pp. 432-43.
Peter Gallagher
WALSH, William Henry (1913-86)
William Henry Walsh was born in Leeds and
died in Oxford. He was educated at Bradford
and Leeds grammar schools. In 1932 he gained
a classical exhibition at Merton College,
Oxford, with which he would have a lifelong
connection. Highlighting his successful under-
graduate career, there was a first in honour
moderations and the Gaisford Greek Prose
Prize in 1934, and a first in literae humaniores
('Greats') in 1936, a year v/hich also saw him
win a junior research fellowship. Gifted in both
history and philosophy, and influenced by his
famous tutor, G.R.G. MURE, Walsh eventually
turned to the history of philosophy, and to
Kant, Hegel and the British idealists in partic-
ular. After serving in the Royal Corps of Signals
from 1940 to 1941 and in the Foreign Office
from 1941 to 1945, Walsh was briefly a
lecturer in philosophy at University College,

Dundee in 1946. The following year he
returned to Merton College as fellow and tutor
in philosophy and lecturer at the University of
Oxford, where he remained until 1960. In 1960
he became Professor of Logic and Metaphysics
at the University of Edinburgh. There he was
instrumental in restructuring the rigid separa-
tion of the study of logic and metaphysics from
moral philosophy, strengthening the teaching of
logic, placing a greater emphasis on tutorials,
and expanding the number of postgraduate
students and programmes of graduate work. At
the University of Edinburgh he also served as
Dean of the Faculty of Arts (1966-8) and as
one of the University's three Vice-Principals
(1975-9). Upon retiring in 1979 from the
University of Edinburgh as professor emeritus,
Walsh returned to Oxford as emeritus fellow of
Merton College.
Walsh received many honours throughout
his career. In 1963 he was the Dawes Hicks
Lecturer in Philosophy in the British Academy,
to which he was elected fellow in 1969. From
1964 to 1965 he served as President of the
Aristotelian Society. In 1978 he became a
fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In
addition, Walsh held honorary degrees from
the University of Edinburgh and the University
of Rochester, as well as a number of visiting
professorships in the United States. In a long
and distinguished career of professional service,
Walsh was a member of the board of editors of
Kantstudien and History and Theory, and on
the programme committees of a number of
International Kant Congresses. In 1979 he
helped to found the Hegel Society of Great
Britain, on whose council he served.
Walsh belongs to the Oxford idealist tradi-
tion of BRADLEY, JOACHIM, PATON and Mure. In
his first book, Reason and Experience (1947),
he argued for a modified Kantian position con-
sistent with rather than eclipsed by pragmatic
and analytic philosophy, a position that would
inform much of his later work on Kant. In
Metaphysics (1963) he defended the impor-
tance of metaphysical ideas in contemporary
philosophy, whose attempts to repudiate them
1077
WALSH
in fact concealed metaphysical assumptions
that were left undefended. In other words,
Walsh presented idealism as posing real philo-
sophical challenges to the analytic philosophy
of his contemporaries, while also modifying
idealist positions in light of analytic insights.
This tendency is clear in the two major strains
of his work: the philosophy of history and Kant
scholarship.
Walsh's Introduction to the Philosophy of
History (1951) was probably his most influen-
tial work. He divided that book into two main
discussions, treating 'critical' and 'speculative'
philosophy of history. The former concerns the
nature of historical explanation, truth in
history, and the possibility of historical objec-
tivity; the latter concerns attempts to give a
metaphysical or speculative interpretation that
uncovers the meaning and purpose of the
overall historical process. While Walsh's dis-
cussion of the latter is informative, he remained
ever sceptical of such overarching theories,
developing instead an idealist critical philoso-
phy of history that attempted to overcome his
predecessors' shortcomings and oppose the so-
called scientific history that he took to descend
from the nineteenth-century positivists. As he
would later put it, he was attempting 'to find a
plausible version of the Idealist theory of
history' ('Colligatory Concepts in History',
p. 134).
Following COLLINGWOOD, Walsh empha-
sized that history is 'properly concerned with
human thoughts and experiences' (Introduction
to the Philosophy of History, p. 48). Historical
explanation therefore cannot be content with
merely 'external' relations of regularity between
events, from which the historian induces
general laws describing those regularities.
Instead, historical events must be explained as
internally related in the sense that they are, at
least in part, expressive of the intentions and
policies of the agents who brought them about.
Historical events, in other words, are to be
explained largely by their reasons and not mere
causes for coming to be. And this fact necessi-
tates, on Walsh's view, a teleological grasp of
WALSH
history, even if not of the implausible specula-
tive kind. As Walsh put it, 'historians [look] not
at, but through, historical phenomena, to
discern the thought within them' (ibid., p. 56).
By providing an account of this 'inside' of his-
torical phenomena the historian explains the
coherent whole or 'significant record' of his-
torical events.
But Walsh rejected as outlandish what he
took to be Collingwood's thesis that the histo-
rian grasps the thought or intention of which
the historical event is expressive, in a single act
of intuitive insight. Rather, Walsh argued that
successful historical explanation finds concepts
that 'colligate a considerable number of events',
and proceeds to 'demonstrate that all or most
of the events of the period are intelligible in light
of them' (The Intelligibility of History', p. 134).
Because history is expressive of human
purposes and policies, the events brought
together under colligating concepts are grasped
as belonging together in a historical process
defined by the purpose or policy. Colligation
therefore finds those ideas in terms of which a
set of historical events becomes a meaningfully
integrated whole, instead of an extrinsically
related set of events.
Of course, Walsh was not maintaining that
all historical events were the product of self-
consciously directed policies. In fact, he came to
see his initial formulation of colligating
concepts as having overemphasized the notion
of a planned policy, underestimating the extent
to which chance and opposition affect the
course of purpose and intention in history. For
that reason Walsh came to think of process,
movement, and development as more appro-
priate primary colligating concepts. His early
emphasis on policy also tended to underesti-
mate the social and collective aspects of his-
torical processes. He later came to see the social
and not the individual person as the primary
subject of history. Nor did Walsh think of col-
ligation as the only activity of the historian.
Nevertheless, he continued to regard colligation
to be essential to the study of history, best cap-
turing its necessarily teleological aspects.
1078
Walsh went so far as to see the identification
of fundamental developments and processes as
much a matter of historical interpretation as
explanation. Indeed, he ultimately came to see
history as occupying a role somewhere between
science and literature. For history inevitably
requires judgements about what features of a
set of events best define the integrated process
that actually occurred. Furthermore, since for
Walsh action was part of the fundamental
content of history, he denied that we could
dispense with the language of agency and still
render historical events intelligible. But includ-
ing the language of agency tends to make
history a normative enterprise, since finding
agents intelligible requires us to assess the
appropriateness of their motives. Finally, ren-
dering human actions intelligible also requires
general conceptions of human nature, which
are often non-empirical moral and metaphysi-
cal ideas. Because the intelligibility of history
requires evaluation and general conceptions of
human nature, historical theories, while starting
from verifiable truths, remain unavoidably
open to interpretive challenge. Hence, contrary
to the aspirations of so-called scientific history,
of whose rising prestige Walsh proved to be an
important critic, what the historian reports will
inevitably entail an assessment if it is to be a
successful explanation of the historical phe-
nomena.
Walsh's work on Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason also contributed significantly to the
body of research that made Scotland a centre of
Kant scholarship in the twentieth century. As a
reader of Kant, Walsh generally sought 'to
detach [the work] from its background and
bring out the truth of what it has to say'
('Philosophy and Psychology in Kant's
Critique', p. 198). He attempted to interpret the
central objectives of Kant's Critique in a
manner at once scholarly and philosophically
stimulating. The general questions that arose
out of Kant's account of our intellect as dis-
cursive, all of whose content is provided from
outside it by intuitions yoked to the forms of
our sensibility, occupied him particularly. How,

given the fact that our discursive intellect
cannot produce its own objects, can we think
and experience an objective world at all? What
is necessary, in other words, for our concepts
and intuitions to be united in our experience of
an object?
In a series of articles spanning several decades
and culminating in Kant's Criticism of
Metaphysics (1975), Walsh reconstructed what
he took to be Kant's central aims in the first
Critique. Emphasizing the B-Deduction's dis-
placement of the psychological concept of syn-
thesis of representations with the epistemolog-
ical concept of judgement, Walsh made two
decisive moves in assessing Kant's analysis of
the operations of intellect and intuition in our
experience. First, he abandoned the notion of
intuitions as objects of any kind, identifiable
independently of judgement. Intuition is 'a
mode of experience which is sui generis-,
without it experience of particulars would be
impossible, thought it is false to describe it as
presenting particulars for description' (Kant's
Criticism, p. 14). Indeed, 'it is only for conve-
nience of analysis that we distinguish the having
of intuitions and the application of concepts as
separate stages in the process of knowing'
('Kant's Transcendental Idealism', pp. 90-91).
In this way, Walsh takes Kant (not always
clearly or consistently) to deny that the problem
of synthesizing intuitions and concepts can even
arise, since intuitions are not independent
objects of any sort. Second, Walsh took the T
of the transcendental unity of apperception to
refer not to any individual consciousness psy-
chologically synthesizing a manifold of repre-
sentations, but to 'an impersonal conscious-
ness', or 'ideal subject' (Kant's Criticism, p. 50)
'driven' to constitute the order of its experience
in judgement. The experience allegedly neces-
sitating the pure concepts of the understanding
is therefore 'experience for a "mutual us", expe-
rience which is shared or shareable, rather than
something which is essentially private' (Kant's
Criticism, p. 42). By casting the experience
from which the Transcendental Deduction
proceeds as shareable experience, Walsh made
1079
WALSH
Kant's Deduction turn on the conditions for
intersubjectively acceptable knowledge claims.
For Walsh Kant therefore offers us a logical
account of our cognitive processes, not a psy-
chological account of their origin. Kant's
concept of experience is governed by judge-
ment, whose elements may be isolated in
analysis, but do not exist in isolation. Walsh
continued his interpretation by arguing that in
the main sections of the Analytic Kant shows
the activity of judgement to be constitutive of
our experienced world. For instance, Walsh
interpreted schemata as a procedure for mas-
tering concepts in which 'you know how and in
what circumstances to apply [the concept], a
process which involves having the power to
envisage a range of possible instances' (Kant's
Criticism, p. 74). He was critical whenever
Kant strayed into the language of faculty psy-
chology, speaking of the schema as a 'third
thing' or a 'mediating representation'. Likewise,
the Analogies provide 'proofs' for a priori syn-
thetic principles by arguing from the 'practical'
necessity of assuming these principles in order
to inhabit a world of shared experience and
objective knowledge. We could not, in other
words, take given experiences as real unless
also presupposing that these principles could be
applied to them, though we cannot know in
advance what the result of that application
would be.
So Walsh defended in Kant a form of tran-
scendental idealism in which the mind that
'makes' nature is the impersonal T of apper-
ception and the nature made 'is a world of
facts constituted in judgment' (ibid., p. 160).
Judgement is an activity that 'arises on a basis
which is personal, namely the occurrence of
sensory content in this or that mind, but
proceeds by rules which hold without distinc-
tion of persons; its products are accordingly
impersonal' (ibid.). The reading therefore
depends on Walsh's interpretation of sensible
intuition as sui generis, which admittedly finds
little textual support in Kant, but which is also,
Walsh claimed, a theory to which Kant could
and should have committed himself.
WALSH
Furthermore, Walsh took the reading to entail
that Kant should have abandoned talk of
'noumena' and 'phenomena', since the experi-
enced world is simply constituted in judgement,
whose analysis entails no awareness of a reality
independent of it.
This fact places Walsh alongside others, such
as Graham BIRD and Henry Allison, who deny
that Kant makes any transcendent metaphysi-
cal claims in the first Critique. Its appeal is
evident, short-circuiting as it does the problem
of synthesizing intuitions and concepts while at
the same time establishing the foundations of a
shared world of knowledge and experience. It
has not, however, become standard. Some
critics found in it too much WITTGENSTEIN, illic-
itly availing Kant of pragmatic solutions to
some of his most pressing questions.
Nevertheless, Walsh subjected Kant to a critical
reading that renders Kant's idealism more
defensible in light of the epistemological pre-
occupations of Walsh's contemporaries. His
reading earned serious attention in Kant schol-
arship, where his reconstructions of the
Deduction, Schematism, Analogies and
Antinomies have been especially influential.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reason and Experience (Oxford, 1947).
An Introduction to the Philosophy of History
(1951).
Metaphysics (1963).
Hegelian Ethics (1969).
Kant's Criticism of Metaphysics (Edinburgh,
1975).
Other Relevant Works
The Intelligibility of History', Philosophy,
vol. 17, pp. 128-43.
'Categories', Kantstudien, vol. 45, pp.
274-85.
'Schematism', Kantstudien, vol. 49, pp.
95-106.
'Kant's Moral Theology' [Dawes Hicks
Lecture on Philosophy], Proceedings of the
British Academy, vol. 49, pp. 263-89.
'Philosophy and Psychology in Kant's
1080
Critique', in I. Heidemann and E.K. Specht
(eds), Einheit und Sein: Gottfried Martin
zum 65. Geburtstag (Cologne, 1966), pp.
186-98.
'Colligatory Concepts in History', in W.H.
Burston and D. Thompson (eds), Studies in
the Nature and Teaching of History
(London and New York, 1967), pp.
65-84.
'Kant on the Perception of Time', The
Monist, vol. 51, pp. 376-96.
'The Notion of an Historical Event',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 43, pp. 153-64.
'The Causation of Ideas', History and
Theory, vol. 14, pp. 186-99.
'The Structure of Kant's Antinomies', in
Proceedings of the Ottawa Congress on
Kant (Ottawa, 1976).
'Kant's Transcendental Idealism', in W.L.
Harper and R. Meerbote (eds), Kant on
Causality, freedom, and Objectivity
(Minneapolis, 1984), pp. 83-96.
Further Reading
Guyer, Paul, Review of Kant's Criticism of
Metaphysics, Philosophical Review, vol. 86
(1977), pp. 264-70.
Pompa, L. and W.H. Dray (eds), Substance
and Form in History (Edinburgh, 1981).
Erin E. Flynn
WARD, James (1843-1925)
James Ward was born in Hull on 27 January
1843 and died in Cambridge on 4 March
1925. He came from a large family of
Congregationalists and became determined to
become a minister representing their biblical,
Calvinist theology. After art apprenticeship as
an architect to help alleviate his family's finan-
cial difficulties, he entered Spring Hill College

(near Birmingham) to begin his theological
training in 1863. Ward took the University of
London BA degree at the same time and gradu-
ated from both courses of study in 1869. By this
time he was beginning seriously to question
his religious beliefs and obtained a scholarship
for a year's further study in Germany, rather
than immediately beginning work in the
church. The combination of Isaac August
Dorner's speculative theological lectures in
Berlin and his studies with Rudolf Hermann
Lotze in Gottingen caused him to question his
fundamental beliefs. Lotze was extremely influ-
ential in defining a framework that combined
scientific, philosophical and religious questions.
Lotze's ideas were mechanistic and anti-
Hegelian, but at the same time he maintained
that mechanism could not explain reality,
which had to take into account aesthetic and
moral values. This sensitivity both to the
demands of exact science and to moral and
religious values greatly affected Ward.
After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian
War, Ward returned to England with his head
filled with unsettling metaphysical speculations.
Although, never ordained, he preached for
Emmanuel Congregationalist Chapel,
Cambridge from January 1871 to March 1872.
This became the unhappiest year of his life as
he struggled with his Christian convictions,
amidst an atmosphere of suspicion that his
sermons were too liberal and lacked familiar
doctrinal affinities. He resigned his office and
at the age of twenty-nine sought solace in the
life of a university academic. He gained an
open scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge
in 1873 and a year later had gained a first class
in the Moral Sciences Tripos. With the help of
his mentor, and later friend, Henry Sidgwick,
he was elected to a fellowship at the college in
1875, where he remained for the rest of his
life. By 1878 he was lecturing for the Moral
Sciences Tripos, becoming a college lecturer in
1881. In 1897 he was the first appointment to
a new Chair in Mental Philosophy and Logic.
Ward was one of the original members of the
British Academy and an important contributor
1081
WARD
to the Synthetic and Aristotelian societies. He
was awarded an honorary degree by the
University of Edinburgh and after a slow start
had one of the most impressive academic
careers of his era.
Ward's life was full of contradictions and
involved some major changes in vocational
direction as he moved from Congregationalist
preacher to physiologist to psychologist and
finally philosopher. He grappled with issues of
faith in God throughout his career and after
rejecting all institutionalized religion he began
to search for new foundations for his faith in a
psychology and philosophy which rejected
associationism and materialist science, and
attempted to show the limits of physiological
psychology's attempts to describe the human
mind. After his brief foray into the physiolog-
ical laboratories of Leipzig and Cambridge in
the 1870s he began to doubt the ability of con-
temporary science to explain the unique and
subjective nature of individual consciousness, as
he had doubted that the Puritan faith could
survive in a climate of scientific naturalism in
the decade before. T.H. Huxley praised his
work on the nervous system of crayfish in 1879
but by the early 1880s his physiological mentor
Michael Foster described him as a 'physiologist
spoiled'.
After contributing an entry on Herbart
(1880-81) to the ninth edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica and a series of
articles on 'psychological principles' to the
recently founded journal of psychology and
philosophy, Mind, Ward got a lucky break.
The editor of Mind, George Groom Robertson,
was unable to write a new entry on 'psychol-
ogy' for the Britannica in order to fulfil its new
policy of being up to date with recent advances
in science. When James Sully also refused,
Ward was approached and accepted the chal-
lenge to provide a bold and definitive assess-
ment of the fledgling discipline. Ward devel-
oped a sophisticated anti-associationist, anti-
physiological text that at once became hugely
influential for both teaching and research. It
solidified Ward's controversial position in the
WARD
ongoing debate about the scientific status of
psychology.
Ward argued for an 'internal sense' in
addition to the physical senses, and played this
up as the most important part of mental expe-
rience. He saw it as different from the passive,
conventional senses in that it organizes and
recognizes the data produced by the other
senses. The 'internal sense' plays an active role
in determining mental experience and is qual-
itatively distinct from its other components.
Ward distinguished three types of experience:
attention, feeling and presentation. Each of
these modes of experience requires a subject
that is actively or passively engaged with par-
ticular objects. Ward emphasized attention as
the most important facet of mental experience
and developed the argument (along the lines of
the Oxford idealist, T.H. Green) that in order
to exercise attention one needs to posit a subject
to do the attending. Ward was mounting a
dual attack against the passive, mechanistic,
highly technical languages of associationism
and physiological psychology, and insisting
upon a return to a specifically psychological
language. However, as the principal spokesman
for contemporary associationism, Alexander
Bain, pointed out in his highly cordial response
to the Britannica article, Ward was harking
back to a Kantian project that denied the pos-
sibility of a science of psychology and produced
idealist arguments that devalued the merits of
empirical research into the human mind.
In his 'general analysis' of mind Ward
emphasized that the 'standpoint of psychology
is individualistic; by whatever method, from
whatever sources its facts are ascertained they
must - to have psychological import - be
regarded as having a place in, or as being part
of some one's consciousness' ('Psychology',
p. 38). Presentation of an object to a subject
requires a conscious mind that is not a passive
recipient of presentations but feels and acts.
As a consequence of this definition of the
subject as actively attending to presentations,
psychology cannot transcend the realm of the
individual subject in its explanations as the
1082
other sciences do. Because psychology could
never transcend the limits of the individual, its
principal method has to be introspection.
Psychology is distinct from the biological
sciences that study living organisms objectively
because psychology deals not with some part of
experience (like the natural sciences), but all of
experience from the point of view of the indi-
vidual subject.
Ward waited thirty-two years to put his psy-
chological ideas in book form. Psychological
Principles finally appeared in 1918, expanding
upon his Britannica article but with only minor
modifications to the general argument. One
interesting change in Principles was Ward's
move back towards scientific explanations in
terms of genetics and heredity. He developed
arguments for a genetic, biological model of the
development of the mind to replace the
mechanical and atomistic account of associa-
tionism in Heredity and Memory (1913). In
the final chapters of Principles, Ward elimi-
nated the fictional concept of 'the psychologi-
cal individual' and replaced it with the German
term for inherited dispositions, Anlage. He then
used this concept to consider mental inheri-
tance and to provide an account of individual
psychology, analysing the concepts of person-
ality, temperament and character
In the meantime Ward switched his atten-
tions from psychology to the philosophical
underpinnings of contemporary science. He
developed his thought in two series of subse-
quently published Gifford Lectures: Naturalism
and Agnosticism (given 1896-8) and Realm of
Ends; or, Pluralism and Theism (given
1907-10), delivered before the University of
Aberdeen and the University of St Andrews
respectively. It was a considerable honour to be
invited to give the Gifford Lectures twice. In his
Naturalism and Agnosticism lectures Ward
joined the ranks of Henri Bergson, William
James and Edmund Husserl in critiquing the
adequacy of the nineteenth-century positivistic
and mechanistic analysis of nature. He
described his lectures as attempting 'to discuss
in a popular way certain assumptions of

"modern science" which have led to a wide-
spread, but more or less tacit, rejection of ide-
alistic views of the world' (Naturalism and
Agnosticism, 1899, vol. 1, p. v). Ward criticized
the abstractions made in the theories of mech-
anism, evolution and psychophysical paral-
lelism expounded by the prominent naturalist
authors Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall and
T.H. Huxley. Ward had shown in his psychol-
ogy that human beings did not dwell in the
realm of symbol and abstraction, but in a par-
ticular time and place with unique and concrete
mental experiences. He criticized the confusion
of science with history, symbol with experi-
ence and mechanism with life. Mechanism itself
was a mental construct with its details carefully
selected, and could not encompass all of expe-
rienced reality. Ward concluded that 'the
mechanical theory of the universe, then, begins
with abstractions, and in the end has only
abstractions left; it begins with phenomenal
movement and ends by resolving all phenom-
ena into motion' (ibid., vol. 1, pp. 152-3).
Furthermore, because mechanism dealt only
with abstractions, it failed to describe or inter-
pret the reality of life experienced by concrete
human beings.
Ward saw Spencer's concept of mechanical
evolution at odds with the subjective selection
that rendered psychological development pur-
poseful. He believed in natural selection but
saw it as teleological at the micro-level rather
than mechanistic. He also criticized the basis of
physiological psychology, psychophysical par-
allelism, as the confusion of two different kinds
of experience: that of the individual mind and
that of the general experience of race brought
about by 'intersubjective intercourse'. The
second part of his lecture series targeted the
philosophical ally of mechanistic theories:
agnosticism. Ward argued that the untenability
of materialist monism had caused naturalist
authors to replace it with a neutral monism,
which 'suspended belief about the ultimate
reality of the universe. For Ward this agnostic
type of monism did not fit with human expe-
rience. Because physical nature was amenable
1083
WARD
to human ends and nature was conformable to
human intelligence, Ward insisted upon his
own 'spiritualistic monism' that allowed a role
for an active mind as well as matter.
This position owed much to Leibniz in that
it interpreted the whole of reality from the side
of the subject whose objects are monads or
arrangements of monads. In his second series of
Gifford Lectures, The Realm of Ends, Ward
developed his subjectivist view. He began with
a discussion and criticism of the varieties of
pluralism before arguing for a panpsychist
position that all individual things are animated,
although in diverse degrees. Ward saw a unity
of the whole from a theistic standpoint because
reality consisted of active subjects of experience
interacting with an environment of other spir-
itual monads; these active beings all having a
tendency towards goodness. In a manner
similar to that of William James, Ward rejected
the possibility of the proof of theism, but
argued that our experience can only be coor-
dinated by the idea of God. This led him back
to concerns about the cosmology of theism,
which had been so important to him as a young
man.
Ward's last major work was a return to his
philosophical roots with A Study of Kant
(1922), written at the age seventy-nine. Ward's
work was well respected during his lifetime by
writers from diverse schools of psychological
thought, including G.F. STOUT, John Dewey
and Bernard BOSANQUET. After his death his
considerable contributions to the philosophy of
mind were soon forgotten. Ward himself was
in part responsible for the loss of interest in his
work in that his critique of reductionist natu-
ralism had been so effective that the naturalis-
tic philosophy of the twentieth century had
little in common with that of the nineteenth.
His metaphysics had become outdated and few
of his constructive ideas to replace Victorian sci-
entific naturalism were taken up. Furthermore,
the role that he had played as a general philo-
sophical psychologist was soon eclipsed by the
new psychological specialisms of behaviourism
and psychoanalysis. Although his work lived on
WARD
in the distinctive philosophical system created
by his gifted pupil, G.F. Stout, two dynamic
successors to his chair at Cambridge, G.E.
MOORE and Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN, would
bring new ways of thinking that would make
Ward's grand philosophical system seem very
old-fashioned.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Psychology', in Thomas Spencer Baynes
(ed.), Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edn
(Edinburgh, 1886), vol. 20, pp. 37-85.
Naturalism and Agnosticism, 2 vols (1899;
2nd edn, 1903; 3rd edn, 1906; 4th edn,
1915).
Realm of Ends; or, Pluralism and Theism
(Cambridge, 1911; 2nd edn, 1912; 3rd
edn, 1920).
Psychological Principles (Cambridge, 1918;
2nd edn, 1920).
A Study of Kant (Cambridge, 1922).
Essays in Philosophy, ed. W.R. Sorley and
G.F. Stout (Cambridge, 1927).
Other Relevant Works
(Ed.), Henry Sidgwick, Philosophy, Its Scope
and Relations (1902).
, Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant
(1905).
Heredity and Memory (Cambridge, 1913).
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) (Oxford,
1923).
Psychology Applied to Education, ed. G.
Dawes Hicks (Cambridge, 1926).
Further Reading
Harriett, E.G., 'James Ward, 1843-1925',
American Journal of Psychology, vol. 36
(1925), pp. 449-53.
Campbell, Olwen Ward, 'Memoir', in Essays
in Philosophy, pp. 3-96.
Hernshaw, L.S., A Short History of British
Psychology 1840-1940 (Westport,
Connecticut, 1964).
James Ward Commemoration Number, The
Monist, vol. 36, no. 1 (1926).
Johnson, W.E., 'Professor James Ward,
1084
1843-1925', British Journal of
Psychology, vol. 16 (1925-6), pp. 1-4.
Murray, A. H., The Philosophy of James
Ward (Cambridge, 1937).
Rylance, Rick, Victorian Psychology and
British Culture 1850-1880 (Oxford,
2000), pp. 318-24.
Sorley, W.R., 'James Ward', Mind, vol. 34
(1925), pp. 273-9.
, 'The Philosophy of James Ward',
Mind, vol. 34 (1925), pp. 280-89.
Turner, F.M., Between Science and Religion:
The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in
Late Victorian England (New Haven,
1974), chap. 8.
Francis Neary
WARNOCK, Geoffrey James (1923-95)
Geoffrey James Warnock was born in Chapel
Hill, Leeds on 16 August 1923 and died in
Axford, Wiltshire on 8 October 1995. He was
educated at Winchester College, and went on to
New College, Oxford after service in World
War II with the Irish Guards. In 1948 Warnock
took a first in PPE. In 1949 he was elected by
examination to a fellowship in philosophy at
Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1950 he took up
a position as fellow and tutor at Brasenose. He
returned to Magdalen College in 1953, where
he remained a fellow and tutor until his election
as Principal of Hertford College, Oxford in
1971. Hertford College flourished during
Warnock's tenure and from 1980 to 1985 he
also served as Vice-Chancellor of the university.
Warnock was knighted in 1986 and retired in
1988. He was married from 1949 to his death
in 1995 to the distinguished moral philosopher
Mary WARNOCK (later Baroness of Weeke).
Although there are some points of connection
between the spouses' work in moral philoso-
phy, the orientation of Geoffrey Warnock's

work is primarily meta-ethical, and his argu-
ments are best understood against the back-
ground of his previous work on perception and
the philosophy of language.
Warnock began his intellectual life as a
philosopher of language, working in what
would now be known as pragmatics (issues
arising from or in connection with the way
language is used). He arrived at Oxford during
a crucial period in the development of linguis-
tic analysis as a philosophical method and later
became an influential intellectual biographer
of the analytic movement. Warnock was
strongly influenced by J.L. AUSTIN, and
although he later came to the conclusion that
emphasis of linguistic usage could be as mis-
leading in its own way as emphasis of referents,
one of the main strands running through
Warnock's philosophical argument is an insis-
tence on the informativeness and adequacy of
ordinary uses of language. After Austin's death,
Warnock published a reconstruction of Austin's
lectures on perception under the title Sense and
Sensibilia (1962). One of Warnock's last major
works was the book J.L. Austin (1989), in a
sense bringing his intellectual life full circle.
Warnock's philosophical work can be
grouped into three categories: history of phi-
losophy; language and mind; and moral phi-
losophy. His work in the history of philosophy
was driven by his interest in particular philo-
sophical questions. He is best known for his
books Berkeley (1953) and English Philosophy
since 1900 (1958), but he also wrote on Kant's
metaphysics.
In Berkeley the question that interested
Warnock was whether close attention to the use
of language can help to resolve philosophical
puzzles about perception. Warnock argued that
Berkeley's rejection of abstract ideas is at the
heart of his philosophical project. According to
Warnock, Berkeley's rejection of abstract ideas
is grounded in the conviction that commitment
to such ideas arises from linguistic confusion:
specifically, a mistake about what it is that our
statements about sensations actually reference.
In this Berkeley's rejection of abstract ideas is
1085
WARNOCK
reflective of a larger commitment to simplify
philosophy by showing that many of the
problems philosophers face in their attempts to
understand phenomena like perception can be
resolved by insisting on a stricter use of
language.
In Kant the question that interested Warnock
was whether it is possible to know the truth or
falsity of a metaphysical claim. Warnock
argued that a crucial element in understanding
Kant's treatment of perception is his view of the
epistemological status of metaphysical claims.
According to Warnock, in holding that meta-
physical claims cannot be known to be true
but must simply be accepted as so, Kant intro-
duces an important and under-appreciated dis-
tinction between how we acquire information
about the world and how we reason about it.
This distinction fit well with Warnock's own
view of the proper analysis of perceptual state-
ments and later served a crucial role in
Warnock's moral philosophy.
It is important to bear in mind that in his dis-
cussion of historical figures, Warnock was
engaged not only in elucidating and criticizing
the views of the particular figures he treated,
but also in the larger project of consolidating
the shift awa^from idealism that he saw as the
great accomplishment of post 1920s British
philosophy. Warnock also used his interpreta-
tion of historical figures to make the case that
British philosophy's best path forward lay in
the direction of ordinary language philosophy.
This larger project is explicit in English
Philosophy since 1900, where he named G.E.
MOORE rather than Bertrand RUSSELL as the
prime mover behind the analytic movement,
but it may also be observed in his interpreta-
tions of Berkeley and Kant, where Warnock
presents philosophical views that on their face
seem to belong to the idealist tradition as in fact
part of an intellectual tradition that is wary of
linguistic confusion and sceptical of the cogency
of metaphysical arguments. These historical
philosophers are not only claimed as ancestors
of the analytic method, but further used to
illustrate both the problems and possible ways
WARNOCK
forward for contemporary views. For example,
Warnock uses his interpretation of Berkeley to
demonstrate both the value of close attention to
language, and the problems inherent to strate-
gies that attempt to resolve philosophical
problems by repudiating ordinary language in
favour of a stricter or more technical idiom.
In his writing on perception and the philos-
ophy of mind, Warnock was convinced both
that linguistic use held the key to resolving
philosophical puzzles regarding perception and
truth, and that what it is about attention to lin-
guistic use that can resolve these issues is its
indication of the gap between what is said and
what is communicated. Warnock argued that
attempts to resolve philosophical problems
once and for all by developing a better, more
technical language for their treatment mistak-
enly attributed problems in drawing inferences
about what is true from what is or can be said
to the limits of ordinary language, when in fact
the problem lies in the limits of language itself.
A recurring theme in his writing on perception
in particular is that language is best thought of
as a tool for (among other things) articulating
what is known about phenomena; but it is not
the basis of that knowledge, nor should its
workings be treated as a template for how one
comes to know. Another recurring theme is his
insistence that perception is distinct, both cog-
nitively and phenomenologically, from beliefs
in general and knowledge in particular. For
Warnock, to analyse perception is not in itself
to make claims about knowledge; nor can one,
simply in developing an understanding of what
makes for good beliefs, take oneself to have
given an analysis of perception. He was con-
vinced that failure to make this distinction lay
at the heart of much confusion in contemporary
epistemology and philosophy of mind.
Warnock's work in pragmatics and the phi-
losophy of mind made him especially well-
suited to take on what he saw as a pervasive
and pernicious mistake in the meta-ethical
assumptions in debates current at that time
about what moral properties consisted in, and
whether they were real and external or contin-
1086
gent on the internal states of subjects. As a
philosopher of language and mind, Warnock
was well aware of the limits of linguistic
analysis, even in terms of sentence use, for
explaining even the most obvious perceptual
propositions. Thus he was unmoved by the
claim that moral propositions' intractability to
analysis made them special in some regard. If
moral propositions are distinctive, Warnock
argued, it is in virtue of the subject to which
they refer, and not the manner or terminology
they use in their reference. For this reason also,
in his own writing on morality, Warnock
undertook to identify what the subject-matter
of morality is and from this to develop an
account of what it is one is saying when one
makes claims about morality. He took this to
be a necessary first step towards identifying
which moral claims are true; but, he insisted, to
identify what morality is about is only a first
step and it is not the same thing as saying which
moral claims are true.
Warnock's great insight was to recognize
that in the analysis of morality, as in the
analysis of all human experience, it is crucial to
distinguish between what makes a claim true,
how one comes to know a claim is true, and
how the language that one uses structures the
claims that are made. Warnock argued that
what makes moral claims true - what it is that
moral claims are about - is the; soundness of the
connection they posit between an action and
amelioration of 'the human predicament' - the
inherent propensity of human beings to make
decisions that result in things going badly for
oneself and/or others. What makes the use of
terms such as 'good', 'bad', 'right', 'wrong',
'virtue' or 'vice' a moral use is not the situation
or its motivation, but its figuring in a judgement
about the whether an action or principle will
improve or exacerbate this propensity of
human beings to make decisions that result in
things going badly. Such judgements are well
grounded when the considerations that produce
them - the reasons on which they are based -
stand up to scrutiny as a means-end argument,
where the end is to 'improve the human

predicament', and the means is adopting or
rejecting the principle in question, or perform-
ing or refusing to perform the action.
The most controversial aspect of Warnock's
view is his argument that morality does not
and in fact cannot consist in a set of rules.
Warnock argued that there are two features of
rules that make it impossible for them to
explain the content of morality. First, the con-
ceptual structure of a rule is such that its
content is derived from something outside of
itself. In the case of a formal rule, the content
is given by the authority or procedure by which
it is imposed. In the case of an informal rule, the
content is given by the activity or purpose out
of which it emerges. In both cases, Warnock
argued, what explains the content of the rule is
something outside of and apart from it. Thus,
insofar as a moral philosopher takes herself to
be explaining the content of morality and not
only describing it, she cannot take herself
simply to be delineating a set of rules.
The second essential characteristic of a rule
is that it purports to direct action indepen-
dently of considerations of the particular merits
of particular cases. This is what makes some-
thing a rule as opposed to a consideration: the
rule's content rather than an actor's judgement
determines what happens. In saying this
Warnock was not arguing that there is no
judgement involved in the choice or application
of a rule. Rather, he is arguing that to apply a
rule is to mark a space beyond which judge-
ment is suspended and the rule substituted in its
place, and that the realm of the moral has no
such spaces. The nature of the subject-matter
that morality encompasses is such that context
and the merits of particular cases must always
be taken into account.
It is crucial to note what Warnock was
arguing in this claim. His argument was not
that morality consists in context-specific judge-
ments about whether a behaviour improves
human well-being. Rather, his argument was
that moral judgements are always judgements
regarding the relationship that a particular
action or principle bears to the goal of improv-
1087
WARNOCK
ing the human predicament as he has defined it
- the human tendency to make decisions that
have bad consequences for oneself and others.
To be a moral judgement is thus to be an
argument of a certain sort: it is to be an
argument that the action one is considering
instantiates a principle that, if adopted, will
improve (if the judgement is that the action is
good) or exacerbate (if the judgement is that the
action is bad) the human predicament. Moral
reasons, then, are supporting considerations in
an argument regarding the relationship between
an action and the human predicament.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'Concepts and Schematism', Analysis, vol. 9
(April 1949), pp. 77-82.
Berkeley (1953).
English Philosophy since 1900 (Oxford,
1958; 2nd edn, 1969).
Contemporary Moral Philosophy (1967).
The Object of Morality (1971).
Morality and Language (Oxford, 1983).
J.L. Austin (19S9).
Other Relevant Works
'Metaphysics in Logic', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 51 (1950-51), pp.
197-222.
'Verification and the Use of Language',
Revue Internationale de Philosophic, vol. 5
(1951), pp. 307-22.
'Criticisms of Metaphysics', in D.F. Pears
(ed.), The Nature of Metaphysics (1957),
pp. 124-41.
(Reconstructed from manuscript notes), J.L.
Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford,
1962).
'Kant', in D.J. Connor (ed.), A Critical
History of Western Philosophy (1964), pp.
296-318.
(Ed.), The Philosophy of Perception (Oxford,
1967).
(Ed. with J.O. Urmson), J.L. Austin,
Philosophical Papers (Oxford, 1970).
'Seeing and Knowing', Mind, vol. 79, no. 314
(April 1970), pp. 281-7.
WARNOCK
'Hare on Meaning and Speech Acts',
Philosophical Review, vol. 80, no. 1
(January 1971), pp. 80-84.
'On Passive Obedience', History of European
Ideas, vol. 7 (1986), pp. 555-62.
Further Reading
Cherry, Christopher, 'Describing, Evaluating
and Moral Conclusion', Mind, vol. 83, no.
331 (1974), pp. 341-54.
Cox, H.H., 'Warnock on Moore', Mind, vol.
79, no. 314 (April 1970), pp. 265-9.
Frey, R.G., 'Moral Rules', Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 26 (April 1976), pp.
149-56.
Goodin, Robert, 'Loose Laws: The Ethics of
Vagueness versus the Politics of Precision',
Philosophica, vol. 23 (1973), pp. 79-96.
Hare, R.M., Practical Inferences (1971).
Loudfoot, Eileen, 'Morality and the Human
Situation', Ratio, vol. 17 (1975), pp.
112-17.
Magee, Bryan, 'A Conversation with
Geoffrey Warnock: The Philosophies of
Moore and Austin', in Modern British
Philosophy (1971), pp. 84-99.
Ruben, David Hillel, 'Warnock on Rules',
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 89
(October 1972), pp. 349-54.
Whitely, C.H., 'Mr. Warnock on Ordinary
Language', Mind, vol. 68, no. 271 (1959),
pp. 396-8.
Cindy L. Holder
WARNOCK, Helen Mary, Baroness
Warnock of Weeke (nee Wilson: 1924-)
Mary Warnock was born Mary Wilson on 14
April 1924 in the City of Winchester. She was
educated at St Swithin's School, Winchester
and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and was
married in 1949 to the philosopher Sir Geoffrey
1088
WARNOCK, who died in 1995.. She was a fellow
and tutor in philosophy at St Hugh's College,
Oxford from 1949 to 1966, proceeding from
there to occupy the post of Headmistress of
Oxford High School (GPDST) from 1966 to
1972. From 1972 to 1976 she was Talbot
Residential Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall,
Oxford (to which she was appointed honorary
fellow in 1984), and from 1976 to 1984 was
senior research fellow at St Hugh's College,
Oxford (to which she was appointed honorary
fellow in 1985). She was also Mistress of
Girton College, Cambridge from 1984 to 1991.
Although many distinguished twentieth-
century British philosophers have made sig-
nificant contributions to the wider worlds of
public life and policy, surely few could match
Mary Warnock's achievements in this regard.
Indeed, Warnock's notable public reputation
undoubtedly rests on her high-profile role as
chair of or contributor to numerous official
commissions of enquiry into a wide range of
issues of pressing contemporary concern.
These have included committees of enquiry on
special education (1974-8, leading to the
influential Warnock Report), environmental
pollution (1979-84), animal experimentation
(1979-85), human fertilization (from
1982-4), public sector higher education
(1984), teaching quality (1990), bioethics
(1992-4) and medical ethics (1992-present).
She was made a life peer in 1985 and took the
title Baroness Warnock of Weeke. She was
Gifford Lecturer at Glasgow University in
1991 to 1992 and Reid Tuckwell Lecturer at
the University of Bristol in 1992. She was also
Leverhulme Fellow from 1992 to 1994, as
well as fellow of numerous Royal Societies,
and she holds honorary degrees from many
British universities and colleges.
In addition to these achievements, however,
Warnock has written over twenty books and
published lectures, as well as many book
chapters and journal articles, on an extraordi-
nary range of philosophical and public policy
issues. Although it is not easy to do full justice
to the full range of interests evident in this

prolific output, I shall for the purposes of this
short profile consider Warnock's published
work under three or four broad, albeit over-
lapping, headings. The first heading covers
those works expressive of her long-standing
interest in the history of philosophical thought,
and of an abiding educational concern to com-
municate the value and purposes of philosophy
to a wider public. One major strand of her
work in this field, from the publication of her
first work Ethics since 1900 (1960) to her more
recent Intelligent Person's Guide to Ethics
(1998) and Nature and Morality (2003), has
been on the nature and purposes of moral
enquiry - although her work The Uses of
Philosophy (1992) and a more recent edited
selection of readings under the title Women
Philosophers (1996) bear witness to philo-
sophical interests ranging well beyond the
moral or ethical to questions of metaphysics
and philosophical psychology. One might also
mention here Warnock's editing of and intro-
duction to a still widely used edition of the key
essays of J.S. Mill (Utilitarianism, 1970).
However, another aspect of Warnock's more
general historical interests is apparent in a
focus, somewhat unusual for an Oxford ana-
lytical philosopher of her time, on mainland
European currents of philosophy - though she
has since made it clear (see Pyle) that such
interest was not entirely self-initiated. Although
this focus is most apparent in such early works
as The Philosophy of Sartre (1963),
Existentialist Ethics (1966) and Existentialism
(1970), Warnock has continued to be exer-
cised by the philosophical problems and pre-
occupations of phenomenologists and existen-
tialists in many later works - especially those
concerned with the nature of imagination,
memory and time.
It is arguably Baroness Warnock's extensive
exploration of these topics that represents her
most significant mainstream philosophical
legacy, and the next area of her work to be con-
sidered here. In her earliest excursion into this
territory, Imagination (1976), Warnock pre-
cisely sets out to explore what had until then
1089
WARNOCK
been and still continues to be relatively
uncharted philosophical issues of the nature
and developmental significance of imaginative
capacities. Although her treatment of these
issues starts from fairly conventional analytical
explorations of the work of Kant and Hume, it
proceeds to give more unusual attention (for
that time) to the work of such phenomenolo-
gists and existentialists as Merleau-Ponty and
Sartre (with substantial nods also in the direc-
tions of RYLE and WITTGENSTEIN) . However, on
the journey from Enlightenment to modern
philosophy, Warnock also devotes even more
uncommon attention (at any rate in the litera-
ture of analytical philosophy) to the work of
such romantic poets as Coleridge and
Wordsworth. Although it is nowadays less
unusual to find philosophers, especially so-
called 'applied' philosophers, drawing on a
diversity of philosophical traditions, or even
upon non-philosophical literary sources, such
wide-ranging interests were less common at
the time of Warnock's early work on imagina-
tion, and seem already indicative of a bold and
independent philosophical spirit. In her work
Memory (1987), moreover, Warnock returns to
issues and problems closely related to those of
Imagination. Treating memory as essentially a
species of imagination, this work explores the
implications of both memory and imagination
for our understanding of self and personal
identity via exploration of such other neglected
topics as autobiography. More recently still, in
her Imagination and Time (1994), based mainly
on her 1991/2 Gifford and 1992 Reed Tuckwell
lectures, Warnock has attempted a further more
integrated development of these key themes of
imagination, memory, personal identity, auto-
biography and narrative. Warnock's original
and distinctive approach to these topics - not
least her skilful interweaving of insights from
diverse, literary as well as philosophical, tradi-
tions - has also retained much of its freshness,
and these works may still be considered useful
philosophical points of departure for contem-
porary work on the philosophical psychology of
imagination and memory.
WARNOCK
The third key area of Warnock's work for
present attention relates to her more public
career as a professional educationalist, and as
ethical consultant on a wide range of official
committees convened to address issues of
general public concern and policy. This field,
which might nowadays be called that of applied
ethics, covers two principal areas of concern.
On the one hand, in A Question of Life (1985)
and Making Babies (2002) as well as in her
more recent Intelligent Person's Guide to Ethics
and Nature and Morality', Warnock has been
significantly exercised by questions of how
recent advances in modern medicine - such as
in vitro fertilization and embryo research -
might be normatively addressed and evaluated
with a view to the framing of (broadly liberal-
democratic) public policy and legislation, and
the appropriate regulation of medical practice.
However, while A Question of Life (essentially
a 1985 republication of the 1984 HMSO
Report of the Committee of Enquiry into
Human Fertilization and Embryology) mainly
addresses the normative complexities and
policy implications of such medical advances as
artificial fertilization, surrogate motherhood
and cloning, and the earlier parts of Intelligent
Person's Guide to Ethics cover these as well as
related issues of the legitimacy or otherwise of
abortion, Warnock's more recent Making
Babies extends the moral debate to the further
question of the right to have children - or more
specifically the right of those who cannot nat-
urally reproduce to artificial assistance. On the
other hand, in the light of a long-standing
involvement with professional education -
including six years as a headmistress of an
Oxford school - it is hardly surprising that an
even larger proportion of Warnock's applied
ethics output has been devoted to the analysis
of a range of issues of educational theory, policy
and practice. In this connection she has over the
years produced a string of notable works on
issues of basic schooling, higher education and
professional teacher education and training,
namely: Schools of Thought (1977), (with T.
Devlin) What Must we Teach? (1977),
1090
Education a Way Ahead (1979), Teacher
Teach Thyself'(a Dimbleby Lecture) (1985), A
Common Policy for Education (1988) and
Universities: Knowing our Minds (1989).
The distinctiveness and originality of
Warnock's thought on educational policy and
practice also clearly owes much to her other
philosophical work on ethics, aesthetics and
imagination. Indeed, one of Warnock's key
concerns is that education and teaching should
above all aim to stimulate and engage the imag-
ination of learners. In this connection, she has
been variably receptive to certain postwar
trends towards common (albeit variably acces-
sible) curricular provision in general school-
ing. Despite the impact on present-day British
(English and Scottish) curriculum policy and
planning of a widely influential postwar liberal
educational view of education as broad rational
initiation into a range of logically distinct forms
of knowledge and understanding, Warnock
has been sceptical of the alleged epistemic
grounds of such a view - questioning the very
coherence of generic 'scientific' or 'artistic'
forms of reason - and has doubted whether any
'one size fits all' approach to educational pro-
vision is appropriate to the needs of every
young person. Thus, in her paper 'Towards a
Definition of Quality in Education' (1973),
Warnock maintains that such broad initiation,
at least at the later stages of compulsory edu-
cation, may be achieved only at the expense of
real depth of understanding, and so conse-
quently fail to engage the imagination and com-
mitment of young people - further arguing that
it may be better for some to leave school with
'one genuine enthusiasm' rather than a shallow
acquaintance with a wider range of subject
content. However, this theme also clearly
connects with other emphases in Warnock's
writings on the importance of developing the
emotions through artistic and cultural initia-
tion, and with her early advocacy of a broadly
Aristotelian virtue-ethical approach to moral
development. Although virtue-ethical
approaches to moral education with their
marked emphasis on the development of char-

acter and feeling have gained ground in recent
years, Warnock was one of the first postwar
educational philosophers to defend such an
approach in opposition to the prevailing cog-
nitive developmentism of liberal theories of
moral education. Likewise, in further antici-
pation of more recently fashionable views,
Warnock was also - though without reneging
(in the manner of some latter-day utilitarians)
on the general ideals of liberal education - an
early advocate of the motivational as well as
economic value and importance of a strong
vocational element in common schooling.
However, Warnock has written insightfully on
a great many other educational issues - includ-
ing higher education and professional teacher
training - which are impossible to pursue in
detail here.
In sum, Warnock's place and reputation in
twentieth-century British philosophy is a fairly
singular one. While it is certainly possible to
think of other contemporary philosophers who
have sought to apply their ideas to wider
problems of policy and practice, and whose
reputations have consequently extended
beyond the narrow confines of philosophical
academia, it is hard to think of any who have
in the manner of Warnock combined extraor-
dinary academic fertility - in such a wide diver-
sity of philosophical fields - with a no less
extraordinary extra-academic public and pro
fessional profile. In the course of a long and dis-
tinguished career, Warnock has not only con-
tributed significantly to philosophical progress
on a variety of problems, but has also suc-
ceeded in raising the quality of non-academic
debate on a range of issues of deep public and
professional concern with an industry and a
commitment which surely few others could
achieve in a single lifetime.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
'The Justification of Emotions', Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 3.
(1957), pp. 43-58.
Ethics Since 1900 (Oxford, 1960; 3rd edn,
1978).
1091
WARNOCK
The Philosophy of Sartre (1963).
Existentialist Ethics (1966).
The Concrete Imagination', Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology, vo.l.
(1970), pp. 6-12.
'Imagination in Sartre', British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 10 (1970), pp. 323-36.
Existentialism (Oxford, 1970).
(Ed.), John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1970).
Towards a Definition of Quality in
Education', in R.S. Peters (ed.), The
Philosophy of Education (Oxford, 1973),
pp. 112-22.
The Neutral Teacher', in M. Taylor (ed.),
Progress and Problems in Moral Education
(Slough, 1975), pp. 103-12.
Imagination (1976).
Schools of Thought (1977).
(with T. Devlin), What Must we Teach?
(1977).
The Concept of Educational Need [Charles
Gittins Lecture] (Swansea, 1978).
Education a Way Ahead (Oxford, 1979).
A Question of Life (Oxford, 1985).
Teacher Teach Thyself [Dimbleby Lecture]
(1985).
The Education of the Emotions', in D.E.
Cooper (ed.), Education, Values and Mind:
Essays for R.S. Peters (1986), pp. 172-87.
Morality and the Law: Some Problems [Lord
Morris Memorial Lecture] (Cardiff, 1986).
Memory (1987).
A Common Policy for Education (Oxford,
1988).
Universities: Knowing our Minds (1989).
The Uses of Philosophy (Oxford, 1992).
Imagination and Time (Oxford, 1994).
The Educational Obligations of the State, in
J.J. Haldane (ed.). Education, Values and
the State [Victor Cook Memorial Lectures]
(St Andrews, 1994).
(Ed.), Women Philosophers (1996).
An Intelligent Person's Guide to Ethics
(1998).
(Ed. with Mark Wallinger), Art for All: Their
Policies and Our Culture (2000).
The Foundations of Morality [Royal Institute
WARNOCK
of Philosophy Annual Lecture] (2002).
Making Babies (Oxford, 2002).
Nature and Morality: Recollections of a
Philosopher in Public Life (2003).
Other Relevant Works
Mary Warnock: A Memoir (2000).
Further Reading
Brown, Andrew, The Practical Philosopher',
The Guardian, 19 July 2003.
Pyle, Andrew, Conversations with Key
Philosophers: The Cogito Interviews
(1999), interview with Mary Warnock.
David Carr
WARRENDER, James Howard (1922-85)
Howard Warrender was born in Leek,
Staffordshire on 25 April 1922 and died in
Sheffield on 22 February 1985. He was
educated at Wolstanton Grammar School,
Staffordshire and at Keble College, Oxford,
where he took a first in PPE in 1943. In 1946
Warrender took up a position as lecturer in
political science at the University of Glasgow,
where he later served as senior lecturer, reader
and Head of the Department of Political
Science, which he established. In 1959
Warrender moved to Queen's University,
Belfast, where he took up a Chair in Political
Science and (again) founded a Political Science
Department. In 1972 Warrender moved to the
University of Sheffield, where he served as
Professor of Political Theory and Institutions
and Head of the Department of Political
Science until his death in 1985.
Warrender is best known for his work on
Hobbes. His 1957 book Political Philosophy of
Thomas Hobbes provoked a renaissance in
Hobbes scholarship, combining a controver-
sial thesis about the origins of natural law with
1092
comprehensive and detailed textual analysis.
Warrender argued that subjects of a Hobbesian
sovereign have obligations to obey his directives
that derive from their prior obligations to
follow natural law. According to Warrender,
Hobbesian obligations are fully normative,
such that a person who deviates from the will
of the sovereign may be criticized and his or her
decision described as wrong and not just
deviant.
Many of Warrender's critics characterized
him as arguing that all obligations in Hobbes
trace back to a first obligation to conform to
the will of God, so that one's duty to obey the
sovereign, although immediately grounded in
the dictates of natural law, is ultimately
explained by its being God's will. In fact,
Warrender argued that there are at least three
possible explanations for the obligation to
follow natural law: (1) the expectation of divine
sanction; (2) the inherent authority of the will
of God; and (3) the inherent authority of
natural law itself. Warrender read Hobbes as
favouring the first of these explanations (the
expectation of divine sanction), but leaving
room for the other two. Warrender himself
favoured the third explanation (adherence to
natural law), arguing that since the cornerstone
of the Hobbesian account of political obligation
is the content of natural law and its com-
pellingness, it is in principle possible to make
the will of God superfluous.
Although Warrender argued that civil laws
are binding on the Hobbesian subject because
of the dictates of natural lav/, he did not suggest
that Hobbes treats them as extensions of
natural law nor did he suggest that the
Hobbesian sovereign gains his authority from
God or nature. Warrender argued that under
conditions of sufficient security, natural law
directs one to authorize the sovereign, which
authorization entails full (non-suicidal) obedi-
ence to his dictates. Insofar as God has a role,
it is in explaining why individuals follow
natural law's directives.
Nonetheless, as some of his critics pointed
out, there is something strange about calling

compulsions to obey such as Warrender
describes genuine obligations. Warrender
describes natural laws as obligatory in that
when an individual clearly sees her situation she
cannot help but obey. This seems to make
natural laws more like rules that describe what
a person will do than rules that describe what
a person should do.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: His
Theory of Obligation (Oxford, 1957).
The Study of Politics: An Inaugural Lecture
delivered before the Queen's University,
Belfast on 8 March 1961 (Belfast, 1961).
(Ed.), De cive: The Latin Version, by Thomas
Hobbes (Oxford, 1984).
(Ed.), De cive: The English Version, by
Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 1984).
Other Relevant Works
'Philosophical Surveys III: A Survey of
Publications in Political Philosophy,
1945-50', Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 1
(1951), pp. 356-66.
'Obligations and Rights in Hobbes',
Philosophy, vol. 37 (1962), pp. 352-6.
'A Reply to Mr. Plamenatz', in K.C. Brown
(ed.), Hobbes Studies (Oxford, 1965), pp.
89-100.
Further Reading
Barry, Brian, 'Warrender and his Critics',
Philosophy, vol. 42 (1968), pp. 117-37.
Plamenatz, John, 'Mr. Warrender's Hobbes',
in K.C. Brown (ed.), Hobbes Studies
(Oxford, 1965), pp. 73-88.
Trainor, Brian, 'Warrender and Skinner on
Hobbes', Political Studies, vol. 36 (1988),
pp. 680-91.
Tuck, Richard, 'Warrender's De cive\
Political Studies, vol. 33 (1985), pp
308-15.
Cindy L. Holder
1093
WATERHOUSE
WATERHOUSE, Eric Strickland
(1879-1964)
Eric Waterhouse was born in Peatling Magna,
Leicestershire and died in Epsom on 10 April
1964. He entered the Methodist ministry in
1901, being trained at Richmond College to
which he was later to return in 1920 as a tutor
He then spent the rest of his active ministry
there, becoming Principal in 1940 until retire-
ment in 1951. In 1951 he was also appointed
Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at the
University of London.
Waterhouse was the foremost Methodist
philosopher of religion of his era. The most
important statement of his overall position as
a philosopher is to be found in his Fernley-
Hartley Lecture of 1933, published as The
Philosophical Approach to Religion (1933). In
it he surveys all the major classical and con-
temporary questions relating to theism and reli-
gious belief. He combines scepticism as to the
absolute value of the traditional 'proofs' of the
existence of God with an acceptance of their
supportive value within the framework of the
commitment of faith and an ability also to
demolish many of the arguments used against
them. Thus, for example, in discussing the 'tele-
ological' argument, he avers that 'in order to
argue against the existence of purpose and
adaptation, it is needful to beg beforehand one
great adaptation, that between our minds and
reality' (Philosophical Approach to Religion,
p. 92).
Waterhouse, influenced no doubt by the
experientialism of the Wesleyan tradition and
his own very considerable interest in and
knowledge of psychology, took religious expe-
rience very seriously, stating 'if we take expe-
rience as the basis for philosophy, then we
cannot ignore religious experience'. He was
very careful to delineate the limits of evidence
of any sort. In a deft attack on the argument of
certain contemporary psychologists and psy-
choanalysts against religion, he said, They have
assumed their conjecture that God is an expres-
sion of desire, or the father image carries with
WATERHOUSE
it the corollary that therefore He does not
objectively exist' (ibid., p. 107).
Waterhouse wrote in the confidence that
many of the more facile arguments against
religion, dating from the second half of the
previous century, were in the process of being
undermined. He was quite clear that the origin
of religion lay in a genuine instinctual sense of
awe and not in either fear as such, or a meta-
physical backing for the requirements of prim-
itive society. He asserted the fideistic basis of all
kinds of knowledge and argued that a dogmatic
agnosticism must logically stop not only inves-
tigation of religion but any phenomena con-
nected with intuition or telepathy.
On the question of reason and revelation,
Waterhouse refused to make rigid distinctions.
He argued that 'in a sense, all knowledge is rev-
elation', a point 'specially true of our ideals'
(ibid., p. 203). He argued 'revelation is a psy-
chological process ... knowledge depends on
search and revelation needs active reception to
be effective' (ibid.). He distinguished between
that which has been traditionally seen as the
result of pure intellectual activity and that
which has been seen in a narrower sense as
revealed by comparing knowledge of the beat-
itudes with that of relativity: 'one is a matter of
spiritual insight, the other of intellectual
insight'.
He argues that there is a symbiotic relation-
ship between revelation and reason. Reason
cannot arrive at the Sermon on the Mount but,
'there is nothing in it which is unreasonable or
offends against our intellect'. However, 'reve-
lation, or spiritual insight, judges reason ... We
no longer quote Scripture against science, but
we can and should use the Sermon on the
Mount against theories of man, society and
morality which conflict with it' (ibid., p. 205).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Modern Theories of Religion (1910).
The Philosophy of Religious Experience
(1923).
An ABC of Psychology (1927).
Psychology and Religion (1930).
1094
What is Salvation? (1932).
The Philosophical Approach to Religion
(1933).
Psychology and Pastoral Work (1945).
David Carter
WATKIN, Edward Ingram (1888-1981)
Edward Ingram Watkin was born in Sale on 27
September 1888 and died in Paignton, Torbay
on 5 March 1981. He was educated at St Paul's
School in London and from 1907 attended
New College, Oxford, where he graduated with
a first in Greats in 1912. He was initially an
Anglican but converted to Catholicism in 1908.
After finishing his education, Watkin lived in
Oxford and then in Sheringham, Norfolk,
where he wrote philosophical and historical
books as an independent scholar. He joined
the pacifistic organization The Guild of the
Pope's Peace in 1916 to help promote a
peaceful solution to World War I, and was
later on the founder and President of the Pax
Peace Society in England. His key works were
his Philosophy of Mysticism (1920) and A
Philosophy of Form (1938),.
Watkin was one of the few non-Thomist
Catholic philosophers of the early twentieth
century. Although Aquinas had held that
humans have a faculty of intuition (intellect) by
which they intuit the first principles of logic and
morals, Watkin greatly expanded the domain
of truths known intuitively. Indeed, for Watkin
all knowledge occurs through the intuition or
direct mental apprehension of the form of an
object by the intellect. Watkin catalogues many
types of intuition. Some intuitions are mediate,
abstract and obscure, such as sense-perception
or metaphysical intuitions. We also have intu-
itions which are abstract and clear. These
include the intuitions of discursive reasoning
(logic), mathematics and science. Finally, there

are intuitions which are immediate, concrete
and obscure such as our intuitions of beauty
(aesthetic intuition of significant form), moral
values (axiological intuition) and mystical expe-
rience
Not surprisingly, Watkin also held that the
traditional proofs of God are best thought of as
metaphysical intuitions of the divine form in
nature, or what he calls monstrations, instead
of discursive demonstrations. In other words,
God's existence is not demonstrated but is
rather intuited or shown (monstrated - from
the Latin word monstrare, to show). Thus the
five ways of Aquinas are reinterpreted by
Watkin as intuitive insights into aspects of
limited being which imply an absolute being,
God.
Watkin also critiques the Thomist notion of
analogy. Watkin claims that God infinitely
transcends the world and so is incomprehensi-
ble to reason. Hence God is more unlike than
like creatures. Creaturely perfections exist in
God but in a manner of infinite excess, so there
is no resemblance or proportion between crea-
tures and God; God is infinitely more than
even the highest creature. This has the conse-
quence that we cannot know what the perfec-
tions of God are like on the basis of our worldly
experience as there is an infinite distance sepa-
rating our concepts of being, unity, goodness
and beauty from God.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Philosophy of Mysticism (1920).
The Bow in the Clouds: An Essay Towards
the Integration of Experience (1932).
Theism, Agnosticism, and Atheism (1936).
A Philosophy of Form (1938; 3rd edn, 1951).
The Balance of Truth (1943).
Further Reading
Burns, Tom, 'E.I. Watkin', The Tablet, vol.
232, no. 7210,16 September 1978, p. 899.
, 'E.I. Watkin', The Tablet, vol. 235,
no. 7340,14 March 1981, p. 258.
Coffin, Magdalen, 'My Volume, Your
Volume, Our Volume ...', The Downside
1095
WATKINS
Review, vol. 103 (October 1985), pp.
256-75.
-, 'Fighting Under the Lash', The
Downside Review, vol. 113 (July 1995),
pp. 203-18.
Sullivan, James, 'E.I. Watkin: Herald of the
New Spring', Crisis, vol. 16 (May 1998),
pp. 32-5.
Trethowan, Illtyd, 'E.I. Watkin at Ninety',
The Tablet, vol. 232, no. 7211, 23
September 1978, pp. 914-15.
Alan Vincelette
WATKINS, John William Neville (1924-99)
John Watkins was born in Woking on 31 July
1924 and died while sailing on the Salcombe
Estuary on 26 July 1999. He was educated at
the Royal Naval College Dartmouth, and
entered the regular Navy in 1941, being
awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for
sinking a German destroyer in 1944. After
demobilization, he studied at the London
School of Economics (LSE) and Political Science
(BSc(Econ) with first class honours, 1948) and
Yale University (MA, 1950). He was assistant
lecturer, later lecturer in government at the
LSE, then reader in the history of philosophy
and, from 1966 until his retirement in 1989,
Professor of Philosophy at the University of
London. He edited the British Journal for the
Philosophy of Science and was Head of the
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific
Method. He worked in the philosophy of
science and of social science, on human
freedom, and on the philosophy of Thomas
Hobbes. His lifelong service to the LSE was
marked by the dedication, in 2003, of the John
Watkins Plaza near the LSE library. He and his
wife Mickey had four children.
How is human freedom of action possible in
a world of cause and effect? Watkins was con-
WATKINS
cerned with this question, call it Kant's
Problem, for the whole of his working life as a
philosopher. He first essayed it in an Encounter
dialogue with Maurice CRANSTON in 1955, and
had just completed work on a systematic treat-
ment of the matter (Human Freedom after
Darwin) at the time of his death in 1999. His
approach, unlike Kant's, was constrained by a
thoroughgoing naturalism about human beings
and their lives: the reconciliation of human
freedom and natural necessities was not to be
engineered by positing, as Kant did, another
transcendent realm. Nor was human freedom
to depend on or be reduced to chance. Watkins
resolutely refused what he called 'Hume's fork':
either necessity or chance, and strove, in this
matter, as in others, to develop a 'third way'.
What is the relation between the individual
human agent and the social institutions and
cultural norms in relation to which she acts?
Watkins's (Popperian) answer to this question,
call it Weber's Problem, was articulated as a
principle of methodological individualism and
first brought him to prominence as a philoso-
pher. In characteristic fashion, he developed
his own ideas by considering and replying to
the objections of his opponents - in this case,
prominently, Ernest Gellner, Maurice
Mandelbaum and L.J. Goldstein. Briefly,
Watkins argued that human social and cultural
forms are explanatorily secondary in relation to
the explanatorily primary behaviour and beliefs
of individual human agents. Of course, under-
standing, as he did, the teachings of POPPER'S
friend Friedrich von HAYEK, Watkins was not
an intentionalist about human social institu-
tions. These are often and in some cases (like
the market, for instance) crucially the unin-
tended by-products of actions and attitudes
directed towards other ends than their creation
or sustenance. Indeed, Watkins's later enthusi-
astic embrace of Darwinism gave him a model,
which he also applied in his investigations of
Kant's Problem, in which selection can mimic
or simulate intentionality.
What are the relations between metaphysics,
science and normative claims of ethics and
1096
political theory? This too is a question with
which Watkins was preoccupied for a great
many years. Indeed, it is in this area, arguably,
that Watkins has made his most lasting contri-
bution to philosophy. As early as 1957,
Watkins argued, in 'Epistemology and Polities',
that both empirical and metaphysical proposi-
tions can have (indirect) implications for nor-
mative propositions of ethics and politics. The
following year, in 'Confirmable and Influential
Metaphysics', he showed the ways in which
some untestable and hence, according to
Popperian ideas, non-empirical propositions can
nevertheless be influential in the development
of properly testable and hence scientific theories.
These profound results in applied elementary
logic provided the skeleton of argumentation in
the 1965 book Hobbes's System of Ideas, but,
more importantly, represented an important cor-
rective to positivist teachings about the mean-
inglessness of metaphysics and of normative
claims. That metaphysical propositions can influ-
ence scientific theorizing was also, of course, an
important element of the 'methodology of sci-
entific research programmes' which was devel-
oped, roughly contemporaneously with
Hobbes's System of Ideas, by Watkins's col-
league and friend Imre LAKATOS.
How is the progressive enhancement of
genuine knowledge of the world possible given
the fallibility of human perceptual and cognitive
faculties? This question, call it Popper's
Problem, was one which W'atkins attacked in
collaboration with Popper, Lakatos and others
(e.g., Alan Musgrave) and in opposition, as he
saw it, to Thomas Kuhn, Lakatos's friend Paul
Feyerabend, and others influenced by them.
Watkins's work on this topic culminated,
though it did not end, with the 1984 book
Science and Scepticism, in v/hich he attempted
to defeat scepticism about rationality (of theory
choice) in an unusual and yet characteristic
way. Briefly, Watkins identified an aim for
science and argued that there is a method of
pursuing that aim which can be applied to
superintend non-arbitrary choice among rival
scientific theories.

Watkins's significance as a philosopher is
shown, perhaps, more prominently in his
methods and attitudes than in the particular
propositions which he defended. Three virtues
stand out clearly: Watkins was logically acute,
historically aware and intellectually open.
Watkins's logical acuity is shown most
prominently in his campaign, against a
dominant positivism and even causing some
consternation within the Popperian circles
which he frequented, to rehabilitate 'meta-
physics' and normative theorizing. Where pos-
itivists saw both metaphysics and morals as
meaningless and Popperians saw them as non-
empirical, Watkins was able to show that
untestable metaphysical statements could be
confirmed and could lend support to non-trivial
normative principles. If a metaphysical state-
ment M figures as premise in an argument sup-
porting a testable scientific theory T, then, if T
survives strenuous attempts to refute it, M
acquires, of course defeasible and indirect, 'con-
firmation'. The situation with morality and
metaphysics is more complex. Although
Watkins accepted Hume's dictum that we
cannot derive ought from is, he also noted that
there are cases where the derivational work,
when it comes to a specific normative claim N,
is being done, not so much by a more general
or higher-order normative principle P from
which N is derived, but, rather, by the factual,
perhaps even metaphysical claim F, which
figures, along with P, in the logical derivation
of N. Insofar as P is 'trivial' or uncontroversial,
we can consider N an implication of F and,
hence, as part and parcel of a system of ideas
which includes F.
Watkins's historical awareness is shown
perhaps even more profoundly in Science and
Scepticism and Human Freedom after Darwin
than it is in the explicitly historical text
Hobbes's System of Ideas. Although the two
(chronologically) later works are not primarily
works in the history of philosophy, both build
the history of philosophy into the development
and assessment of contemporary doctrines. For
instance, in Science and Scepticism, Watkins
1097
WATKINS
looks to optimistic early modern theorizing
about science, what he called 'the Bacon-
Descartes ideal', for his views about 'the
optimum aim for science'. What, of that which
Bacon, Descartes and others thought about the
prospects for scientific knowledge, survives our
improved understanding of human limitations
and potentialities? We may need to modify
what Bacon and Descartes taught in the light of
subsequent scientific (and philosophical) devel-
opments, but we should look to their work as
a source of insights into the problems we now
are concerned with, and which we have, to a
considerable degree, inherited from them. (A
structurally similar move dominates part 2 of
the posthumous Human Freedom volume.)
Finally, Watkins was intellectually open in at
least two different ways. First of all, Watkins
drew on non-philosophical as well as philo-
sophical knowledge in his theory building. This
is most marked, perhaps, in his work on human
freedom, but is also displayed in his thinking
about human decision making and the ratio-
nality displayed in ordinary human actions.
Watkins was familiar with, had understood,
and had often understood well enough to crit-
icize, work in evolutionary biology, cognitive
psychology, economic theory, modern and
indeed contemporary physics, political theory
and political science, probability and confir-
mation theories, and so on. Secondly, Watkins
was, to a notable degree among his contempo-
raries, open to the ideas, especially perhaps to
the critical ideas, of others. He welcomed the
intellectual inquisitiveness of his students and
colleagues, and learned from them as much as
he taught them. Indeed, his teaching, like his
research and scholarship, was less substantive
than procedural. He taught his students how to
be philosophers, not what to think. His legacy
is not embodied, then, in doctrines, but in prac-
tices and the virtues which sustain them.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hobbes's System of Ideas: A Study in the
Political Significance of Philosophical
Theories (1965; 2nd edn, 1973).
WATKINS
Science and Scepticism (1984).
Human Freedom after Darwin: A Critical
Rationalist View (1999).
Other Relevant Works
'Epistemology and Polities', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society (1957), pp.
79-102.
'Confirmable and Influential Metaphysics',
Mind, vol. 67 (1958), pp. 344-65.
'Ideal Types and Historical Explanation' and
'Historical Explanation in the Social
Sciences', repr. in John O'Neill (ed.),
Modes of Individualism and Collectivism
(1973).
Further Reading
D'Agostino, Fred and Ian Jarvie (eds),
Freedom and Rationality: Essays in Honor
of John Watkins (1989).
Lakatos, Imre, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1,
The Methodology of Scientific Research
Programmes, ed. John Worrall and
Gregory Currie (1978).
Fred D'Agostino
WATLING, John Leonard (1923-2004)
John Watling was born in East Sheen, near
London on 18 December 1923 and died at his
home in Petersham, Surrey on 10 July 2004.
His mother, taking God to be no better than
Santa Glaus, brought John up as an atheist.
After gardening at a pacifist land community,
he entered University College London in 1946,
took first class honours in psychology and,
through James THOMSON'S stimulus, attended
AJ. AYER'S logic seminars. Watling worked on
induction, knowledge and probability, receiv-
ing a doctorate in 1953. He became one of
'Ayer's boys', that is one of the talented young
philosophers that awoke University College's
1098
Philosophy Department from its impoverished
slumbers. Watling remained with the depart-
ment, contributing to its radically rising stock,
until retirement in 1985. He became reader in
1970 and Head of Department in 1983. He
retained both his atheism and pacifism - and
feelings for the natural world, with a special
love for mountains and Ireland. He was a prac-
tical man who built boats yet was sensitive to
Proust, wild flowers and humanity.
Watling's greatest admiration was for G.E.
MOORE, with his careful attention to common
sense and getting things right, and his resis-
tance to squeezing thought into ill-fitting logi-
cians' footwear. Although Watling wrote on
Descartes - he deals meticulously with the
Cogito, exposing its errors - and published
valuable work on RUSSELL'S early philosophy,
stressing the significance of Russell's retreat
from propositions, his papers deal mainly with
contemporary philosophical concerns. He was
an early advocate of a reliability theory of
knowledge, and an original explorer of sub-
junctive conditionals and their irreducibility to
the truth functional. Responding to Zeno's
tortoise paradox, he argues that an infinite
number of tasks can be finished in finite time.
The performance of every task involves per
forming one more task than any finite number,
not one more task than an infinite number and,
indeed, not one last task.
In opposition to Ayer and others, Watling, in
'The Importance of "If" (1991), stresses the
significance of non-truth-functional conditional
facts about which we can have knowledge. In
assessing plans, we need to know what would
happen if ... - not what will happen. From
'Either she will not run or the bus will stop' one
might conclude that if she runs, the bus will
stop; it might be the case, though, that were she
to run, the bus would not stop. Watling clear
away confusions here, though in 'Are Causes
Events or Facts?' (1973-4) he challenges
Donald Davidson's anomalous monism, con-
cluding that the causal relation paradoxically
cannot hold between causes and effects.
Although particulars can be terms of a causal

relationship - the sun and earth stand in such
a relationship - they themselves are neither
causes nor effects.
Watling was a devoted and inspiring
teacher. This partly explains why his output
did not do justice to his breadth and depth,
and why his work did not receive the attention
it deserved, save from colleagues who recog-
nized his powerful philosophical acumen. His
writings are subtle, meticulous and often
original, with much to recommend them - as
are his values.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Sum of an Infinite Series', Analysis, vol.
13, no. 2 (1952), pp. 39-46.
'Inference from the Known to the Unknown',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
55 (1954-5), pp. 83-108.
The Problem of Contrary-to-Fact
Conditionals', Analysis, vol. 17, no. 4
(1957), pp. 73-80.
Bertrand Russell (Edinburgh, 1970).
'Are Causes Events or Facts?', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, vol. 74 (1973-4),
pp. 161-70.
'Doubt, Knowledge and the Cogito in
Descartes' Meditations', in Godfrey Vesey
(ed.), Philosophers Ancient and Modern
(Cambridge, 1986).
The Importance of "If", in A. Phillips
Griffiths (ed.), A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays
(Cambridge, 1991).
Other Relevant Works
'Chance', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 43 (1969), pp. 37-48
Peter Cave
1099
WEATHERHEAD
WEATHERHEAD, Leslie Dixon
(1893-1976)
Leslie Weatherhead was born in Harlesdon,
North London on 14 October 1893 and died
in Bexhill, Sussex on 3 January 1976. Educated
at the Alderman Newton School, Leicester, he
trained for the Methodist ministry at Richmond
College, London. He later gained an MA
(Manchester) and a PhD (London), and was
awarded an honorary DD by Edinburgh
University. Ordained in 1916, after a brief pas-
torate in Farnham, he was sent to the
Georgetown Church in Madras. From 1917
to 1919 he served in the Indian Army in
Mesopotamia, first as a Political Liaison Officer
with the Arabs and then as chaplain to the
Devonshire Regiment. He returned to India
until 1922, when he was appointed to a church
in Manchester. In 1925 he went to the
Brunswick Church in Leeds, where he gained
an international reputation as a popular and
controversial preacher, writer and broadcaster.
From 1936 to 1960 he was minister of the
Congregational City Temple Church in
London. There he established his Psychological
Clinic, which bought together the insights of
medicine, psychology and theology.
He wrote over thirty books. His first, After
Death (1923), was written in response to the
effects of World War I on people's religious
beliefs. In this he rejected traditional ideas of
heaven and hell, defining them as 'one spiritual
world ... according to the spiritual condition of
the soul which passes through the veil'. A uni-
versalist, he believed in the 'ultimate triumph of
Love' since nothing could finally defeat the
purpose of God for every human life.
Devotional books with such titles as The
Transforming Friendship (1928) and Jesus and
Ourselves (1930) gained him a wide readership,
but his unorthodox views, and especially his use
of psychology and hypnotism as well as his
interest in psychic research, spiritualism and
reincarnation attracted much criticism. The
explicitness of his The Mastery of Sex through
Psychology and Religion (1931) shocked many.
WEATHERHEAD
During World War II - in which the City
Temple was destroyed - through books such as
Thinking Aloud in Wartime (1939) and The
Will of God (1944) he spoke to ordinary people
whose faith was shaken by the war.
His book, Psychology, Religion and Healing
(1951) was greeted as the most comprehensive
work yet published in this field, and established
his reputation as a leading authority on psycho-
somatic diseases. It examined every known non-
physical method of healing, from the miracles of
Jesus to Lourdes, spiritualism, Christian Science
and healing missions, and the psychological
systems of Freud, Adler and Jung. The book
had a considerable influence in the revival of
the ministry of healing in all churches.
The Christian Agnostic (1965) encouraged
those with doubts to follow their own insights
in arriving at religious truths. He insisted on the
'necessity of God' as vital to belief in the
universe as rational, purposeful and moral. His
liberal views provoked criticism, as he rejected
such orthodox doctrines as the Virgin birth
and discarded much of the Old Testament as
contrary to the spirit of Christ. He was open to
ideas from any source which were attractive to
him, measured only by his understanding of
truth as he interpreted it in the life and teaching
of Jesus.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
After Death (1923).
The Transforming Friendship (1928).
Psychology in the Service of the Soul (1929).
Jesus and Ourselves (1930).
The Mastery of Sex through Psychology and
Religion (1931).
Why Do Men Suffer? (1935).
Thinking Aloud in Wartime (1939).
The Will of God (1944).
Psychology, Religion and Healing (1951).
The Christian Agnostic (1965).
Further Reading
Davies, Horton, Varieties of English
Preaching 1900-1960 (1963).
Price, Lynne, Faithful Uncertainty (Frankfurt,
110.0
1996).
Travell, John, Doctor of Souls (Cambridge,
1999).
Weatherhead, Kingsley, Leslie Weatherhead,
A Personal Portrait (1975).
John C. Travell
WEBB, Clement Charles Julian (1865-1954)
Clement Charles Julian Webb was born in
London on 25 June 1865 and died in Oxford
on 5 October 1954. He was the son of
Benjamin Webb, a noted ecclesiologist and cler-
gyman inspired by Tractarian ideals. His
maternal grandfather, William Hodge Mill,
was Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge.
Webb was educated at Christ Church, Oxford,
and was tutor and fellow of Magdalen College
in the same university between 1889 and 1922,
and an honorary fellow from 1938. From 1920
to 1930 he was the first Oriel (now Nolloth)
Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian
Religion. He was elected a fellow of the British
Academy in 1927, and held honorary doctor-
ates from St Andrews, Uppsala and Glasgow.
Webb was a student of J. COOK WILSON
during the latter's idealist phase, and in general
his early philosophical schooling was in the
new idealism established at Oxford by T.H.
Green. Webb modified British idealism both by
his extensive historical studies and by bringing
it in contact with current thought. These mod-
ifications were related, inasmuch as one of the
most prominent new developments was pre-
cisely a new emphasis on the importance of
the historical form of knowledge and of critical
historical method, and the philosophy of
history. Webb made pioneering contributions
to the development of medieval studies at
Oxford, notably through his annotated editions
of John of Salisbury's Policraticus (1909) and
Metalogicon (1929), and his Studies in the

History of Natural Theology (1914). He was
thus well prepared for theoretical debates on
the philosophy of history which took place in
the 1930s with thinkers such as Benedetto
Croce, J.A. SMITH and R.G. COLLINGWOOD,
whose career at Oxford Webb, alongside
Smith, was instrumental in promoting. Webb
was not a historical relativist, but concerned to
demonstrate the continuity and universality of
religious experience and thought, as well as the
unity of the European mind. His position in this
regard was set out in the late work The
Historical Element in Religion (1935).
Webb considered himself custodian and
interpreter of the metaphysical tradition from
Plato, Aristotle and the Christian Fathers that
was a part of the Greats curriculum at Oxford.
He thus explained and defended the distinct
classico-Christian synthesis and its distinct rela-
tionship of philosophy and theology, reason
and faith, nature and Grace, human and God.
He defended the cognitive truth-value of
religion, and reason's independence from outer
authority, against the new forms of fideism as
well as against renewed empiricism and the
new psychologism. Because of this faith in the
competence of philosophical reason in religion
and theology, his faith in the principle of
freedom within the church, and his insistence
on experience, Webb, who was a close friend of
Baron F. VON HUGEL, supported religious mod-
ernism to a considerable extent, but rejected left
Hegelian criticism and many of the specific
positions of the modernists, for example on
revelation and the importance of the church as
an institution. Against individualism in religion
and the dangers of the Rousseauan element in
modern idealism, Webb sought to reinforce
religious authority. With his emphasis on clas-
sical and medieval philosophy and with his his-
toricism, Webb also turned against distinctly
modern forms of rationalism, and bent modern
idealism into convergence with the older syn-
thesis, transcending much of the legacy of
Descartes and the unhistorical nature of
Kantianism. Idealism for Webb did justice to
the whole of human experience.
1101
WEBB
While defending the tradition, Webb also
redefined natural theology as the interpreta-
tion of the facts of religious experience: it pre-
supposes the specific experience of a historical
religion, and is the result of reflection upon it.
The ultimate goal of speculation is a system
which presupposes all the religious experience
of mankind. The language of religious experi-
ence was for Webb not just imaginative and fig-
urative. Against Hegel and Croce, he insisted
that philosophy must acknowledge religion as
an autonomous form of experience. It is inner,
personal religious experience that is intelligible
and represents real knowledge, and knowledge
of God is possible only in and through such
experience. The classical 'proofs' and argu-
ments cannot prove God in the full sense, but
in the light of experience they acquire a new sig-
nificance. In Group Theories of Religion and
the Individual (1916) Webb sought to refute E.
Durkheim's reductionistic sociological expla-
nations.
In epistemology, Webb retained a degree of
Kantian dualism: what is apprehended cannot
ultimately exist apart from the act of appre-
hension, but must still in some sense be inde-
pendent of it. The truth cannot be abstracted
from the nexus of knower and known. This is
especially true of the relation of personal inter-
subjectivity. Webb's personalism, and the inter-
pretation of the whole synthesis of broadly ide-
alistic philosophy and Christianity in its terms
are the defining characteristics of his thought.
This is because religious experience is for Webb
primarily an experience of personal relationship
and intercourse. This personalism found its
most mature expression in his two series of
Gifford Lectures in 1918 and 1919, God and
Personality and Divine Personality and Human
Life.
Beyond sensual experience, Webb defended
intuition as a higher apprehension by reason, a
higher form of experience, distinct from dis-
cursive reason, and he agrees with Descartes
that an implicit consciousness of God is given
with our self-consciousness. In contradistinc-
tion to H. RASHDALL, Webb argued that the
WEBB
existence of God and other human selves is
not inferred through an argument from
analogy. We have an immediate consciousness
of our own continuous self as well as of inter-
course with other selves. Mediation and the
exercise of reason are in both cases necessary,
but presuppose immediate experience. 'Human
consciousness is from the first a social con-
sciousness, the consciousness of an objective
world common to one's own self with other
selves, through our intercourse with whom this
consciousness is developed' (Divine Personality
and Human Life, pp. 183-4).
Against naturalism and absolute idealism
Webb defended, with similar 'personal ideal-
ists', the immunity of the person 'from disso-
lution either into movements of matter or into
categories of thought' (ibid., p. 193).
Personality is for Webb not only a precondition
of knowledge, but the highest form of life,
which cannot be explained or understood by a
study of lower levels of existence. Like
Rashdall, Webb explored the historical
meaning of the concepts of person and per-
sonality, but differed from him by accepting,
like J.R. Illingworth, a 'social' interpretation of
the Trinity. He argued that the idea of the per-
sonality of God is a modern one, different from
the older idea of personality in God. Yet accept-
ing the idealist concept of the Absolute, identi-
fying it with God and understanding it as com-
prising a plurality of finite persons in relation
to God, he rather accepted both ideas as truly
Christian, although he preferred the more
cautious formulation, 'a God with whom we
can stand in personal relations' to 'a personal
God' (ibid., p. 153), and stated that God is
more than what we know and enter into
relation with.
Philosophically, Webb sought to show that
there is no necessary contradiction between the
concepts of the Absolute and personality. Along
with most British and American personal ide-
alists, Webb here to some extent followed R.H.
Lotze. In ourselves, we experience personality
in an imperfect form, but we are also aware of
an ideal of perfection of personality, free from
1102
the limiting obstacles to the realization of its
proper nature - an ideal that must be realized
in the personality of God. Personality must be
defined both as the inner core of our being, irre-
ducible to thought, whose experienced inde-
pendence of relations is the precondition of its
entering into them, and as part of the moral
sphere of social intercourse,. Like Illingworth,
Webb differed from Lotze in emphasizing the
latter dimension. As a person, God can be both
infinite and absolute and related to other
persons, since the distinctions of persons fall
within his unity and the relations are thus not
external: 'the activity in which the Absolute is
known or worshipped is not and cannot be
something which falls outside of the Absolute,
for if it were this, the Absolute would not be the
Absolute' (God and Personality, p. 154); our
personal intercourse with the ultimate reality is
not accidental to the latter's essence, but 'an
admission to participation in what is from all
eternity its inner activity' (ibid., p. 239). For
that reality is not 'dependent for what is intrin-
sically necessary to its nature' - namely, 'the
highest personal activities ... of knowledge and
love' - 'upon beings less exalted' (ibid., p. 238),
since in the self-sufficient unity of the Trinity it
is already personally differentiated.
For Webb, this does not exclude the essential
religious sense of difference and distance
between human and God. He insisted both on
the distinction, expressed by the metaphor of
creation, and on the kinship, expressed by the
metaphor of generation, and held that both
are intelligibly united in the doctrine of a
mediator (Christ) and our relation to him. The
experiential fact of personal communion pre-
cludes both exclusive transcendence, as in
Aristotle, and exclusive immanence, as in
Spinoza - both of whose philosophies were
markedly, and significatively, impersonal. God
as person is not wholly separate, does not
exclude indwelling. In love, even among human
souls, mutual exclusiveness is to some extent
transcended, while at the same time awareness
of personality and distinction is at its fullest:

it is ... in the instance of personal character
that we come nearest to understanding how
perfection might not exclude the desire of
self-communication; since in this instance
the notion of a self-sufficient perfection
strikes us as displeasing, and as really con-
tradictory of our notion of what would be
perfect in that kind.
(God and Personalityr, p. 210)
Webb sought to steer clear of the tendencies to
pragmatism, vitalism, empiricism and radical
nominalism evident in the alternative version of
Oxford personal idealism represented by H.
STURT. In divine personality, 'desire and will are
completely coincident with the requirements
of Reason' (ibid., p. 250). But he denied the
antithesis of reason and personality, inherited
from the universalism of classical and scholas-
tic reason, which contributed to the absolute
idealists' denial of the personality of the
Absolute. Not only values but reason itself exist
only in the activity of persons. Webb sought to
show that Green's spiritual principle, the imper-
sonal reason of German idealism, common to
all rational beings, is unreal in itself, and, by its
'mechanistic' consequences, unworthy as a
moral ideal. Everything real is individual and
unique, but since everything is, through the
specific relations to which it is described, set
within a larger system of reality as a whole
which is potentially infinite, it is also correct to
say that 'reality is throughout individual and
universal; not in part one and in part the other;
but both alike throughout and at every point'
(ibid., p. 96). Universality and particularity are
comprehensible only as mutually correlative,
and this correlation is experienced in the human
soul as a conscious mystery. As a principle of
unity, the Absolute is best understood, with
Plato, as Reason and Goodness together, not as
a Universal, as Substance, or as Life. The
Absolute is a systematic whole which cannot be
understood in terms of the abstraction of the
mathematical genus (e.g., a triangle) which
determines its various species. Rather, the idea
of a systematic whole can be studied in 'a
1103
WEBB
complex work of art' or in 'a rich and many-
sided character', which thus, as 'eminently indi-
vidual' (ibid., p. 222), give us a better idea of
the Absolute. 'In the creative activity of the
artist we seem to see Personality and Reason no
longer contrasted but reconciled and at one'
(ibid., p. 268). The understanding of evolution
as creative confirms that 'the Intelligence which
is manifested in the world-process must be
thought of rather after the analogy of the
dramatist than after that of the geometer' (ibid.,
p. 270). Expanding on these arguments, Webb
sought to show that no kind of impersonal
order can be supreme. Finding both Plato and
Kant deficient in this respect, he restated the
doctrine of God as moral lawgiver, revealed in
the conscience of moral obligation. For Webb,
such 'theonomy' was not 'heteronomy' in
Kant's sense, since God is immanent in our
reason and will as well as transcendent. The
absolute idealists' interpretation of the evan-
gelical principle of self-realization through self-
surrender is untenable, for 'we are unable to
conceive those principles, causes, or communi-
ties for which persons sacrifice themselves as
actually existing otherwise than as they are
embodied in persons, are carried out by
persons, or consist of persons' (Divine
Personality and Human Life, p. 243).
Against the Hegelian understanding of the
Absolute as a result, actualizing itself in history,
Webb insisted, in agreement with Green, on God
or the Absolute as a real concrete being, apart
from the historical process of the world, 'an
actual God, already possessing all to which we
can aspire' (God and Personality, p. 203). The
instance of personal character shows that per-
fection and a living activity, exhibiting 'ever new
and unexpected manifestations of power and
wisdom and goodness' (ibid., p. 211), are not
incompatible. The self-actualization of the finite
soul is not, as in Green's work, a mere copying
of the absolute experience, but a dynamic process
of communion with a living God.
Webb also wrote a very considerable number
of important reviews. He was regarded by C.S.
LEWIS as a model of the Christian scholar.
WEBB
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Ed.), John of Salisbury, Policraticus (Oxford,
1909).
Problems in the Relations of God and Man
(1911).
Natural and Revealed Religion (Oxford,
1912).
Studies in the History of Natural Theology
(Oxford, 1914).
Group Theories of Religion and the Individual
(1916).
God and Personality [Gifford Lectures]
(1918).
Divine Personality and Human Life [Gifford
Lectures] (1920).
(Ed.), John of Salisbury, Metalogicon (Oxford,
1929).
The Historical Element in Religion [Lewis Fry
Lecture] (1935).
Other Relevant Works
(Trans.), The Devotions ofStAnselm (1903).
The Notion of Revelation (1908).
A History of Philosophy (1915).
A Century of Anglican Theology and Other
Essays (Oxford, 1923).
'Outline of a Philosophy of Religion', in J.H.
Muirhead (ed.), Contemporary British
Philosophy (1925), vol. 2, pp. 335-59.
Kant's Philosophy of Religion (Oxford, 1926).
Religious Thought in the Oxford Movement
(1928).
Pascal's Philosophy of Religion (Oxford,
1929).
Religion and the Thought of Today [Riddell
Lectures] (1929).
The Contribution of Christianity to Ethics
[Stephanos Nirmalendu Ghosh Lectures]
(Calcutta, 1932).
John of Salisbury (1932).
A Study of Religious Thought in England
from 1850 [Olaus Petri Lectures] (Oxford,
1933).
Religion and Theism [Forwood Lectures]
(1934).
Religious Experience (1945).
1104
Further Reading
Grensted, L.W., Preface, in Religious
Experience. This book contains a biblio-
graphy of Webb's work up to 1944.
Sell, Alan P.P., Philosophical Idealism and
Christian Belief (Cardiff, 1995). With a
bibliography.
Langford, Thomas A., In Search of
foundations: English Theology
1900-1920 (Nashville, Tennessee, 1969).
Patrick, James, The Magdalen Metaphysicals:
Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford,
1901-1945 (Macon, Georgia, 1985).
Jan Olof Bengtsson
WEBB, Martha Beatrice (nee Potter:
1858-1943)
Beatrice Potter was born at Standish House in
Gloucestershire on 22 January 1858 and died
at Pasefield, Hampshire on 20 April 1943. Her
father, a wealthy businessman with both polit-
ical and intellectual interests, numbered Herbert
Spencer among his close friends. Spencer's plan
to make Beatrice his literary executor was aban-
doned in 1892 when she married Sidney WEBB,
a leading figure in the Fabian Socialist Society.
Despite Spencer's disapproval and wide dis-
parities in social class, upbringing and glamour,
the marriage was a great personal and intellec-
tual success. The Webbs were a devoted couple
and their 'partnership' (as Beatrice later termed
it) gave rise to a large number of weighty and
well-researched studies in economic, social and
administrative history.
In common with a number of her contem-
poraries Beatrice Webb's early intellectual and
political interests were closely related to a loss
of conventional religious faith combined with
a felt need for a creed to give meaning and
purpose to human life. She was attracted to
ideas of the 'religion of humanity' that were

associated with English followers of Auguste
Comte in the mid to late Victorian period. She
linked this to a conception of duty that focused
on an ethic of social service and the need to
resist the temptations of high society. This ethic
originally gave rise to involvement in the work
of the Charity Organization Society (COS) and
in poor relief schemes that placed an absolute
premium on individual responsibility.
Ironically, these interests prompted empirical
investigations of the living and working condi-
tions of the working classes that undermined
Webb's attachment to COS values, and encour-
aged her to focus on systemic exploitation
rather than the failures of 'character'. Webb's
first statement of these ideas was made in an
article titled 'A Lady's View of the Unemployed
at the East End' published in the liberal Pall
Mall Gazette in January 1886. In 1889 Webb
made a significant contribution to Charles
Booth's Life and Labour of the People in
London and then embarked on an indepen-
dent study of the cooperative movement in
Britain.
This project reflected the religious tone of
Webb's social philosophy. In her diary she
noted that cooperative societies were never
merely economic agencies. On the contrary,
the movement was an expression of a 'religious
element of work for humanity ... it ...
embodied in its creed the ethics of industry,
purity of goods, equal payments and care for
the workers' (Diary', vol. 1, p. 302). This study
marked the beginning of Webb's construction
of a body of sociological literature that was
designed to provide an empirically grounded
and historical alternative to what was seen as
the 'abstract' approach of economics. Both
cooperative societies and trade unions (the
focus of a later study undertaken with Sidney)
attempted to temper the influences of market
forces; an understanding of their role and of
other agencies, such as local government and
systems of state-regulated poor relief, was nec-
essary if socialism was to be constructed on a
scientific basis. The requirements of scientific
method also highlighted the limitations of con-
1105
WEBB
ventional Benthamite utilitarianism. '[TJhey
omitted from their calculation some of the most
powerful impulses of human nature: reverence
for mystery, admiration for moral beauty,
longing for the satisfaction of an established
expectation, custom and habit, tradition, sense
of humour, sense of honour, passionate longing
for truth, loyalty ...' (Our Partnership<, p. 211).
Beatrice Webb never held public office but
she played a central role on the Royal
Commission on the Poor Law, opposing in a
Minority Report the COS-influenced conclu-
sions of the majority of the commission. She
was also an active promoter of the fledgling
London School of Economics. Originally
opposed to female suffrage, a position that she
later explained by reference to her lack of
personal experience of gender-based discrimi-
nation, Webb quickly came to regret having
made a public stand in what she saw as a mis-
guided position. In a public letter to pro-
suffrage campaigner Millicent Fawcett in early
November 1906, Webb argued that open
dissent by proponents of women's suffrage
made it clear that any feeling of consent on the
part of women had now evaporated: women
now sought to 'more effectually ... fulfil their
functions by sharing the control of state action
...' (Our Partnership, p. 363).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain
(1891).
My Apprenticeship (1926).
Our Partnership, ed. Barbara Drake [and]
Margaret (1948).
The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, ed.
N. Mackenzie, 3 vols (1978).
The Diary of Beatrice Webb, ed. N.
Mackenzie and J. Mackenzie, 4 vols
(1982-5).
Other Relevant Works
(with Sidney Webb), Industrial Democracy, 2
vols (1898).
(with Sidney Webb), The Break-Up of the
Poor Law, 2 vols (1909).
WEBB
(with Sidney Webb), The History of Trade
Unionism (1911).
(with Sidney Webb), Methods of Social Study
(1932).
Further Reading
Harris, Jose, Beatrice Webb: The Ambivalent
Feminist (1884).
Harrison, Royden J., The Life and Times of
Sydney and Beatrice Webb: 1858-1905,
the Formative Years (1999).
MacBrair, A.M., Fabian Socialism and
English Politics, 1884-1918 (Cambridge,
1962).
, An Edwardian Mixed Doubles: The
Bosanquets versus the Webbs; a Study in
British Social Policy, 1910-1929 (Oxford,
1987).
McKenzie, Jeanne, A Victorian Courtship.
The Story of Beatrice Potter and Sydney
Webb (1979).
Nolan, Barbara, E., The Political Theory of
Beatrice Webb (New York, 1988).
Romano, Mary Allen, Beatrice Webb
(1858-1943): The Socialist with a
Sociological Imagination (Lampeter,
1998).
John Morrow
WEBB, Sidney James (1859-1947)
Sidney Webb was born in London on 13 July
1859 and died at Passfield Corner on 13
October 1947. He left school at the age of
fifteen and shortly afterwards entered the
Colonial Office of the Civil Service, where he
received rapid promotion due to his outstand-
ing performance in their examinations. At the
same time he studied for an external degree
with the University of London, and later qual-
ified as a barrister. He met George Bernard
Shaw, who persuaded him to join the Fabian
1106
Society, and thereafter he and his wife Beatrice
(WEBB), whom he married in 1892, devoted
themselves to the socialist cause. In 1918 he was
the unsuccessful Labour Party candidate for the
University of London, but four years later he was
elected as a Labour MP, sponsored by the
Miners' Union. He was appointed as President
of the Board of Trade, and in the 1929 Labour
government led by Ramsay Macdonald he was
invited to become Colonial Secretary. In 1932
and 1934 Webb travelled to the Soviet Union,
and was favourably impressed by their political
system. In 1938 he suffered a stroke and retired
from politics, dying at Passfield Corner four
years after the death of his wife. In December of
that year, the ashes of both were reinterred in
Westminster Abbey.
By 1900 Webb had already developed his
social and political theory. His early dissatisfac-
tion with Christianity and its ethical doctrines
had led to a rejection of the religious approach,
and instead he embraced a stringent version of
utilitarianism, which was that maximal happi-
ness could be achieved by carrying out one's
social duty. He adopted an evolutionary
approach to sociology and psychology, main-
taining that what promoted the development
and integration of societies was their coopera-
tion. Society is logically prior to its individual
members, who are formed by the communities
in which they grow up and are educated. All
adults then have the duty to use their talents to
the betterment of their communities, and of the
whole world.
Webb's fully developed position on the
economy was that of promoting collectivization.
His theory of evolutionary sociology led him to
draw a parallel between biological and social
organisms: both needed the integration and
cooperation of their parts to work at maximum
efficiency. He favoured the gradual replacement
of competitive capitalism by state control, in
particular by taxation and the redistribution of
wealth on public projects such as the provision
of state education.
In the practical arena Webb made a great con-
tribution to education and social welfare. Under

the auspices of the Fabian Society, he used its
receipt of a substantial legacy to found the
London School of Economics. As a member of
the Royal Commission into the Poor Laws, he,
together with his wife, wrote a Minority Report
outlining the causes of poverty and unemploy-
ment, and proposed a social security system
similar to that later adopted in the Beveridge
Report. Webb founded the left-wing political
journal The New Statesman, and in 1918 helped
to draw up a new constitution for the Labour
Party. For well over a century, until the present
day, Webb's influence on social and political
theory and practice has been enormous.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Facts for Socialists (1887).
Socialism in England (1890).
(with Beatrice Webb), The History of Trade
Unionism (1894).
(with Beatrice Webb), Industrial Democracy',
2vols(1897).
Problems of Modern Industry (1898).
(with Beatrice Webb), English Local
Government from the Revolution to the
Municipal Corporations Act, 10 vols
(1906-29)
(with Beatrice Webb), The Minority Report
of the Poor Law Commission, 2 vols
(1909).
(with Beatrice Webb), The Prevention of
Destitution (1911).
Labour and the New Social Order (1918).
(with Beatrice Webb), A Constitution for the
Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain
(1920).
(with Beatrice Webb), The Consumers Co-
operative Movement (1921).
(with Beatrice Webb), The Decay of
Capitalist Civilisation (1923).
(with Beatrice Webb), Methods of Social
Study (1932).
(with Beatrice Webb), Soviet Communism: A
New Civilisations', 2 vols (1935).
(with Beatrice Webb), The Truth about
Soviet Russia (1942).
1107
WELBOURNE
Other Relevant Works
The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, ed.
Norman Mackenzie and Jean Mackenzie, 3
vols (1978).
Further Reading
Bevir, Mark, 'Fabianism, Permeation and
Independent Labour', Historical Journal,
vol. 39 (1996), pp. 179-96.
Cole, Margaret, The Webbs and Social
Theory', British Journal of Sociology, vol.
12 (1961), pp. 93-105.
Radice, L, Beatrice and Sidney Webb (1984).
Simey, T.S., The Contribution of Sidney and
Beatrice Webb to Sociology', British
Journal of Sociology, vol. 12 (1961), pp.
106-23.
Stapleton, Julia, 'Localism Versus Centralism
in the Webbs' Political Thought', History
of Political Thought, vol. 12 (1991), pp.
147-66.
Wolfe, Willard, From Radicalism to
Socialism (1975).
Kathryn L. Plant
WELBOURNE, Michael (1933-)
Michael Welbourne was born in Rochdale,
Lancashire and was educated at Kingswood
School in Bath and at Magdalen College,
Oxford (BA literae humaniores, 1958; BPhil,
1960). He was assistant in moral philosophy at
Edinburgh (1960-61), and lecturer in philoso-
phy at Magdalen and Christ Church, Oxford
(1961-3). He was lecturer at Bristol University
from 1963, where he was Head of the
Department before retiring.
Welbourne writes about topics in contem-
porary epistemology and the history of episte-
mology, especially Plato, Locke and Hume. In
a series of articles beginning in the late 1970s
he, along with Tony Coady (1992), sparked
WELBOURNE
renewed interest in the epistemology of testi-
mony. His first major statement of his views on
the topic was his 1986 monograph, The
Community of Knowledge. His second major
statement was his 2001 textbook, Knowledge.
Welbourne, along with Coady, rejected the
dominant approach to testimony inherited
from the Enlightenment that an inquirer is jus-
tified in believing what the inquirer takes
another to testify, assert, state, tell or otherwise
convey only if the inquirer has adequate first-
hand knowledge of the reliability of her infor-
mant. Welbourne instead holds that an inquirer
is default justified in believing the speaker. It is
only when the inquirer has reason to believe
that this speaker is not sincere or not knowl-
edgeable that she would not be justified in simply
believing the speaker. What is distinctive about
testimony, and unlike other cases of relying upon
signs as evidence for distant states of affairs, is
that testimony commons knowledge via the
mechanism of believing a speaker, if you believe
a speaker who sincerely states what he knows,
then you come to know what he knows; testi-
mony thus makes knowledge common. A hearer
believes a speaker when the hearer believes what
she takes the speaker to say because the hearer
recognizes the competence and authority of the
speaker. This is analogous to a soldier obeying
the command of a superior. It is a socially con-
ditioned response to a certain kind of speech
act. But such a response is not automatic. If the
hearer has reason to believe the speaker is neither
sincere nor competent, then the hearer will not
believe the speaker.
Another central strand of Welbourne's
thinking on testimony is that our concept of
knowledge arose out of the practice of relying
upon others for information, and in particular
for knowledge. The concept is not, he thinks,
reducible to a three or four-clause analysis, as
most working epistemologists would hold, but
is instead to be explained by its role in our
practice of seeking knowledge from others and
in spreading it through communication. To
understand the concept of knowledge one must
first, or at the same time, understand testi-
1108
mony. (Such a view can also be found in Craig,
1999, among others.) Part of Welbourne's
reason for thinking this is that whatever we
say about the nature of knowledge, we must
explain why it should be of value. If we seek
things that we value, and in inquiry we turn to
others for knowledge, then knowledge must
be something of value. For an account of testi-
monial knowledge that differs from Welbourne
on testimony as commoning knowledge, and
on the connection between testimony and the
analysis of knowledge, see Graham (2000).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Community of Knowledge (Aberdeen,
1986; reiss., 1993).
Knowledge (Montreal, 2001).
Other Relevant Works
Coady, C.A.J., Testimony: A Philosophical
Study (Oxford, 1992).
Craig, Edward, Knowledge and the State of
Nature (Oxford, 1999).
Graham, Peter J. 'Conveying Information',
Synthese, vol. 123 (June 2000), pp.
365-92.
Peter J. Graham
WELDON, Thomas Dewar (1896-1958)
T.D. Weldon was born in London on 5
December 1896 and died in Oxford on 13 May
1958. He was educated at Tonbridge School
and Magdalen College, Oxford. He served
from 1915 to 1918 in the Royal Field Artillery,
was wounded, and reached the rank of acting
captain. He was awarded the Military Cross
and Bar. Weldon went up to Magdalen in
1919, took a first in literae humaniores in 1921
and became a fellow in 1923. He was a Rhodes
Travelling Fellow in 1930 and a University
Lecture in Philosophy. During World War II he

served as a civil servant in the Air Ministry, and
then as wing commander in the RAF at Bomber
Command HQ from 1942 to 1944. Weldon
spent his entire academic career at Oxford, and
died, suddenly, at Magdalen, in May 1958.
In moral philosophy Weldon published an
Introduction to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
(1945), in which he discusses the Critique
within the historical context of the ideas of
Kant's predecessors. He summarizes the
philosophers who influenced Kant, and offers
a realist interpretation of the 'analytic',
combined with an attempt to bring together the
view of space and time in the Critique with
that found in the Aesthetic.
Weldon's major work in political philosophy
is States and Morals: A Study in Political
Conflicts (1947), which is an attempt to engage
the categories of political philosophy with the
world immediately after World War II. In
States and Morals Weldon argues for a version
of the thesis that theories of the state are essen-
tially contested. That is, no single claim about
what the state is, or ought to be, can command
universal assent, since different and incompat-
ible political philosophies are sincerely held
and logically coherent. Weldon divides theories
of the state into two main groups, depending on
whether they regard the state as prior to indi-
viduals or individuals as prior to the state. The
organism theory, in which the state is funda-
mental, is attributed to Aristotle, Rousseau and
Hegel. The machine theory, in which the indi-
vidual conies first and the state is conceived
instrumentally, comes in two versions: the force
theory, which is attributed to Hobbes and
Marx, and voluntaristic theories.
Weldon then attempts to match up these theo-
retical paradigms against actually existing
states. He finds that Russia is not a Marxist but
an organic state, and that some states show
evidence of characteristics of both theoretical
models. However, because the two theories
rest on incompatible beliefs about the moral
value of the state and the individual, the
straightforward spread of liberal democratic
and individualist institutions is to be viewed
1109
WELDON
rather sceptically. States and Morals is a work
preoccupied with the problems of its time, and
particularly with the confrontation between
'totalitarian' and 'democratic' regimes, even
though both those terms are rather undertheo-
rized. Nonetheless, it is an admirable attempt to
introduce clear distinctions into a febrile dis-
cussion, and is particularly insightful where it
emphasizes the undecidability of some of the
key disputes in political philosophy.
Weldon's Vocabulary of Politics (1953) was
an explicit attempt to apply Austinian and
Wittgensteinian tools of linguistic analysis to
political philosophy. Weldon aimed to demon-
strate that many of the problems of philosophy
were the result of the 'confused formulations of
purely empirical difficulties' (Vocabulary of
Politics, p. 193). It was rather less well received,
eliciting a highly critical review in Mind by
Richard WOLLHEIM. Perhaps Weldon's diffi-
culty lay in combining the techniques of lin-
guistic analysis with the political passions of the
immediate postwar period.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An Introduction to Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason (Oxford, 1945).
States and Morals: A Study in Political
Conflicts (New York, 1947).
The Vocabulary of Politics (1953).
'The Justification of Political Attitudes',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vol. 39 (1955), pp. 115-30.
'Political Principles', in Peter Laslett (ed.),
Philosophy, Politics and Society (New
York, 1956).
Further Reading
Deininge, Whitaker T., 'T.D. Weldon on
Politics and Philosophy', The Western
Political Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 1 (March
1960), pp. 19-30.
Wollheim, R., Review of The Vocabulary of
Politics, Mind, vol. 64, no. 255, pp.
410-20.
Jon Pike
WELLS
WELLS, Herbert George (1866-1946)
H.G. Wells was born in Bromley, Kent on 21
September 1866 and died in London on 13
August 1946. He won a scholarship to the
Normal School of Science in South Kensington,
where he studied with T.H. Huxley. After a
successful first year, Wells left without a degree,
although he would eventually earn a Bachelor
of Science degree from London University. By
1896 he had achieved financial and literary
success as a science fiction novelist. In 1901 he
published Anticipations, the first of a series of
non-fiction works portraying his vision of a
Utopian future. This success led to his intro-
duction to the socialist Fabian Society - a rather
middle-class movement which found Wells's
ideas for reform too radical - and he left the
Society in 1908. In A Modern Utopia (1904) he
expanded upon his vision of an ideal society
first presented in Anticipations. Though he ini-
tially supported World War I as a means to
unify countries, its desolation convinced Wells
that war could only lead to the destruction of
humanity. He campaigned for the establish-
ment of the League of Nations and started to
invoke his idea of the World State. In the 1920s
he was qualifiedly sympathetic to both fascist
and communist agendas, though his loathing of
both militarism and nationalism along with his
Nietzschean emphasis on the power of the
creative individual ultimately made both move-
ments untenable to him.
For Wells, the key to change was education.
To this end, he published three works designed
to address various social aspects. His most suc-
cessful, Outline of History (1920), is a blueprint
for a new world history, which denounces war
and religion and celebrates humanity's shared
achievements. It was an international best-seller
but was also criticized for its Darwinist, anti-
Catholic slant, as well as its lack of academic
rigour. The second work, The Science of Life
(1932), was written with his son and the biol-
ogist Julian HUXLEY and attempted to synthe-
size all the accumulated knowledge of biology.
The last book, The Work, Wealth and
111.0
Happiness of Mankind (1932), focused on eco-
nomics and industrial planning.
Though not an original or systematic thinker,
Wells had great power to disseminate ideas,
and over the course of his career moved from
comic novelist to prophet of the twentieth
century. He was one of the first Victorian
literary figures to shape himself into a modern.
He rejected Christianity and organized religion,
and criticized conventional marriage. Wells's
socialist and Utopian visions stem from both his
early frustration with his social position and his
Huxlean belief that human beings are animals
who have the potential to evolve to a better
state of being. He envisaged a universal republi.
adapted to the new needs and conditions of
modern civilizations - not a democracy, but a
government of intellectual aristocracy. Still,
Wells retained a liberal democratic notion of
individual education and the right to use
knowledge freely. Education liberated Wells,
and he considered it the chief means for human
advancement.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical
and Scientific Progress upon Human Life
and Thought (1901).
A Modern Utopia (1904).
The Outline of History, Being a Plain
History of Life and Mankind (1920).
(with J. Huxley and G.P. Wells), The Science
of Life: A Summary of Contemporary
Knowledge about Life and its Possibilities
(1929).
The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of
Mankind (1932).
Other Relevant Works
Belloc, Hillaire, A Companion to Mr. Wells's
Outline of History (1926).
Mr Belloc Objects to the Outline of History
(1926).
Further Reading
Hammond, J.R., Herbert George Wells: An
Annotated Bibliography of His Works

(New York, 1977).
Scheick, WJ. and J.R. Cox, H. G. Wells: A
Reference Guide (Boston, 1988).
Eric Susser
WERNHAM, Archibald Garden (1916-89)
Archibald Garden Wernham was born in
Kirkcaldy in 1916 and died in Aberdeen on 7
May 1989. He was educated at Robert
Gordon's College in Aberdeen, at the University
of Aberdeen and at Balliol College, Oxford. In
1945 Wernham was appointed lecturer in
moral philosophy at St Andrews University.
He was promoted to senior lecturer and then
reader shortly thereafter. In 1960 he returned
to the University of Aberdeen after being
named Regius Chair of Moral Philosophy, a
position he held until 1981. Wernham also
served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts from
1970 to 1973.
Wernham was a Spinoza scholar with a
special interest in Spinoza's political philoso-
phy. He is best known as the editor and trans-
lator of the first comprehensive English edition
of Spinoza's political writings. Spinoza: The
Political Works, which included the entire
Tractatus politicus, part of the Tractatus theo-
logico-politicus and a lengthy Introduction by
Wernham, appeared in 1958. Before its publi-
cation there had been no reliable English
edition of Spinoza's political writings, and
Wernham's work did much to spark interest in
them. Wernham was especially interested in
the connections between Spinoza and Hobbes.
He saw Spinoza's political philosophy as 'the
product of critical reflection on Hobbes's
theory' (Spinoza, p. 1), and he traced the ways
in which Spinoza adopted Hobbes's ideas and
terms while amending or subverting them. For
example, he pointed out that while Spinoza
agrees with Hobbes that political theory must
1111
WERNHAM
begin by describing a pre-political state of
nature, Spinoza sees this state not as one of
perfect liberty, but as one of enslavement to the
passions. Furthermore, whereas Hobbes thinks
that almost any political arrangement is prefer-
able to the brutality of the state of nature,
Spinoza argues that 'peace is hardly worth the
name if it is achieved in ways which debar the
individual from attaining the life of reason and
living by the right of his own nature alone'
(ibid., p. 22). Wernham also maintained that
Spinoza's debts to Hobbes became less impor-
tant as his thought matured. The Tractatus
theologico-politicus, Wernham argued, is a
straightforward piece of social contract theory,
while the later Tractatus politicus abandons
the social contract altogether. This claim has
been hotly contested by other Spinoza scholars,
but it succeeded in provoking a great deal of
lively debate.
Apart from Spinoza: The Political Works,
Wernham published little - a handful of
articles, but no other books. His translations
are little used today, having been supplanted
by more recent ones. Steven Bar bone and Lee
Rice, editors of the most recent English edition
of the Tractatus politicus, criticize Wernham's
version on a number of grounds, including
what they see as his 'dubious interpretation' of
Spinoza's contractarianism. Yet they also
praise his 'short, to-the-point' introduction to
Spinoza's political writings. In any case,
without Wernham's pioneering efforts, it is
unlikely that Spinoza's political philosophy
would have become as widely studied in the
English-speaking world as it currently is.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Spinoza: The Political Works (Oxford,
1958).
Other Relevant Works
'Philosophical Surveys VII: A Survey of Work
on 17th Century Rationalism, 1945-1952.
Part II: Spinoza', Philosophical Quarterly,
vol. 3 (1953), pp. 76-9.
'Liberty and Obligation in Hobbes', in K.C.
WERNHAM
Brown (ed.), Hobbes Studies (Oxford,
1965), pp. 117-39.
Robert Piercey
WESTERMARCK, Edward Alexander
(1862-1939)
Edward Westermarck was born in Helsinki on
20 November 1862 and died in Lapinlahti,
also in Finland, on 3 September 1939. Born
into an academic family of Swedish extraction,
he attended Helsinki University, receiving his
PhD in 1890. From 1890 to 1906 he was a
lecturer in sociology at Helsinki University,
becoming Professor of Moral Philosophy from
1906 to 1918. In 1904 he was also appointed
university lecturer in sociology at London
University. In 1907 this lectureship was con-
verted into a Chair of Sociology, which
Westermarck held until 1930, spending two
terms of the year on his Helsinki teaching
duties, and one term in London. He was also
the first Head of the Abo Academy, the
Swedish-language university in Finland, from
1918 to 1921, and the Professor of Moral
Philosophy there from 1918 to 1930. During
Westermarck's long career in England and
Finland, he taught many students who went on
to became prominent intellectual figures in their
own right, such as Bronislaw Malinowski,
Morris Ginsberg and Rafael Karsten. In recog-
nition of his intellectual contributions,
Westermarck was awarded honorary LL Ds
from the universities of Aberdeen and Glasgow,
and an honorary PhD from the University of
Uppsala.
As Westermarck's career indicates, his intel-
lectual interests encompassed more than one
academic discipline. While he is now best
remembered as a sociologist and anthropolo-
gist, he also made a significant contribution to
twentieth-century thought as a moral philoso-
1112
pher. His most important works are The
History of Human Marriage (1891), in which
he studied the primitive origins of marriage,
and The Origin and Development of the Moral
Ideas (1906-1908), where he presented a
theory of ethical subjectivity. A later book,
Ethical Relativity (1932), was his most strictly
philosophical work, in which he defended his
earlier theory from critics and extended some
of his arguments from the earlier work.
While an undergraduate at Helsinki
University, Westermarck was introduced to the
writings of some of the exponents of English
empiricism, such as Herbert Spencer and J.S.
Mill. He also became deeply interested in evo-
lutionary theory and Darwinism, which were to
underpin his thinking for his entire career.
These interests resulted in his first visit to
England in 1887, with the purpose of collect-
ing material in the library of the British
Museum for a book on the genesis of human
marriage. The History of Human Marriage
was published in 1891, and received wide-
spread scientific acclaim for its depth and
breadth of learning. The book was character-
ized by Westermarck's use of the comparative
method of social investigation, comparing
examples of behaviours from many different
cultures to support his theories. Further study
visits to England in 1893:, 1897 and 1903
cemented his position within British intellectual
circles, and as a result, he was appointed to the
lectureship in sociology at London University.
For the remainder of his life, Westermarck
divided his time between Finland, England and
Morocco, where he carried out fieldwork for
his anthropological studies.
The success of his first book encouraged
Westermarck to embark upon what was to be
his longest and most important work, The
Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas.
This was a combination of philosophy and
sociology, in which the comparative method
employed in his first book was used to examine
the variations in morality across many soci-
eties. Westermarck was influenced by the moral
philosophy of the eighteenth-century British

thinker Adam Smith, who argued that
sympathy was the basis for people's feelings of
moral approval and disapproval. By developin.
Smith's idea, Westermarck arrived at his most
philosophically significant theory. He argued
that all moral judgements rest on emotions,
and as emotions are always subjective, there
can be no objective moral truths: 'there can be
no moral truth in the sense in which this term
is generally understood. The ultimate reason for
this is, that the moral concepts are based upon
emotions, and that the contents of an emotion
fall entirely outside the category of truth'
(Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas,
vol. 1, p. 17).
In Westermarck's view, moral subjectivism
changed the whole basis of the study of ethics.
He suggested the focus of the moral philoso-
pher should be the psychological and socio-
logical study of morality, rather than the search
for moral truths. Many critics protested that
Westermarck's application of social investiga-
tion to questions of morality was not moral
philosophy at all. However, Westermarck
clearly intended it as such, and continued to
argue for a scientific examination of the origin
and development of moral judgements, as the
main agenda for the discipline of ethics.
If there are no moral truths it cannot be the
object of a science to lay down rules for
human conduct, since the aim of all science
is the discovery of some truth ... If the word
'ethics' is to be used as the name for a science,
the object of that science can only be to study
the moral consciousness as a fact.
(Ethical Relativity, p. 61)
Generally, Westermarck's statement of the sub-
jectivist position met with considerable oppo-
sition. In response to those who claimed that a
subjectivist theory of ethics was detrimental to
the human condition, Westermarck denied that
this was necessarily the case, instead empha-
sizing the positive consequences of taking a
subjectivist stance. 'Could it be brought home
to people that there is no absolute standard in
1113
WESTERMARCK
morality, they would perhaps on the one hand
be more tolerant and on the other hand more
critical in their judgments' (ibid., p. 59).
Westermarck's arguments have suffered from
considerable misinterpretation by his critics.
Often, his theory has been associated with an
untenable naive subjectivism, in which an indi-
vidual's moral judgements are regarded as
simply the result of that person's immediate
feelings. Westermarck's subjectivism was much
more nuanced and sophisticated than this, and
in particular, his discussion of how subjective
emotions become 'objectivized', resulting in
apparently objective moral judgements, was
an important response to some of the argu-
ments of moral objectivism. Westermarck's
moral philosophy is an important, if often mis-
understood and overlooked, contribution to
the tradition of ethical subjectivism in the twen-
tieth century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Origin and Development of the Moral
Ideas, 2 vols (1906-1908).
Ethical Relativity (1932).
Other Relevant Works
Ginsberg, Morris, The Life and Work of
Edward Westermarck', The Sociological
Review, vol. 32, no. 1-2 (January-April
1940), pp. 1-28.
Edel, Abraham, 'Westermarck's Formulation
of Ethical Relativity, in Twentieth Century
Perspective', Acta Philosophical Fennica,
vol. 34 (1981), pp. 71-99.
Stroup, Timothy, 'In Defense of
Westermarck', Journal of the History of
Philosophy, vol. 19 (1981), pp. 213-34.
Further Reading
Edwards, Paul, The Logic of Moral
Discourse (Glencoe, 1955).
Katrina Ford
WHITE
WHITE, Alan Richard (1922-92)
Alan R. White was born in Toronto on 9
October 1922 and died in Nottingham on 23
February 1992. He completed his undergradu-
ate training at Trinity College Dublin, and his
PhD at the University of London under the
supervision of AJ. AYER. Having obtained firsts
in classics and mental and moral philosophy at
Trinity College, he is said to have scored over
100 per cent in his exams by taking some of
them in Gaelic, for which extra credit was
given. In 1961 White became the Ferens
Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Hull and retained the chair until 1989. He
served as Secretary of the Mind Association
from 1960 to 1969, and President of the
Aristotelian Society from 1979 to 1980. With
J.L. AUSTIN, Gilbert RYLE, J.O. URMSON, P.P.
STRAWSON and H. Paul GRICE, White was a
leading figure in post World War II 'ordinary
language philosophy', a movement so named
for its emphasis on paying careful attention to
everyday linguistic usage as a means of making
philosophical progress.
Philosophy properly conceived was, for
White, conceptual analysis. As such, its dis-
tinctive theoretical aim consisted in his view of
the discovery of logical relations between
concepts of philosophical interest - or (speaking
in the material mode) of laying bare the essen-
tial features of things such as knowledge,
goodness, truth, mind, responsibility, neces-
sity, etc. A common means to this end,
employed by White throughout his writings
and characteristic of ordinary language philos-
ophy, involved examination of the various
ways in which the everyday expression of an
analysandum can or cannot be sensibly quali-
fied. In everyday speech, for example, it would
be natural to talk about having come to realize
that one had for years felt jealous of another,
but nonsense to talk of having come to realize
that one had for years felt pain in one's back.
This then, on White's view, would count as
evidence for distinguishing mental concepts
such as feeling jealousy from those such as
1114
feeling pain, and for giving distinct philosoph-
ical treatments of each sort. Another common
means involved exploring examples of the
kinds of situations in which an analysandum
clearly does, or does not, apply, by considering
what we would ordinarily be inclined to say
about such situations. Thus, there would be
little inclination to describe a situation in which
one digs up Peace in the garden, believing that
one was digging up Masquerades, as one in
which one disturbed Peace by accident; it was
rather a mistake. By contrast, a situation in
which one tramples on Peace in an effort to dig
up the Masquerades may well be described as
one in which one disturbed Peace not by
mistake, but by accident. There is, accordingly,
some reason to distinguish the concept of effect-
ing something by mistake and that of effecting
it by accident; the one will presumably involve
different logical relations to other concepts,
and hence demand a different analysis than the
other (The Philosophy of Mind, 1967).
White was unimpressed with the revisionist
spirit in philosophy, according to which it is
properly part of the philosopher's central task
not merely to analyse everyday concepts of
philosophical interest, but further to revise or
correct their everyday usage in the light of such
analysis. This, for White, was akin to the
natural scientist not merely changing her
theories and specialized terminology in order to
cope with a natural phenomenon to be
explained, but in fact attempting to tamper
with the latter itself. As he put it:
The actual behaviour of the concept [under
philosophical investigation] is itself the test of
the Tightness or wrongness of theories about
it, just as the properties of a chemical sub-
stance furnish the criterion of scientific
theories about it. One can be pretty sure that
a philosopher who conclud es from his study
of a concept that there is something wrong
with it that he has made some mistake about
it.
('Conceptual Analysis')

In other words, philosophy, for White, was
primarily a project of understanding, not one of
validation: it seeks not a general validation or
legitimization of the everyday concepts it inves-
tigates, but rather an understanding or expla-
nation of their logical nature.
The fact that White wrote on a broad array
of philosophical topics makes it impossible here
to canvass, even briefly, all of his main philo-
sophical conclusions. Some of the more note-
worthy, however, should be mentioned. In epis-
temology, he defended an account of knowl-
edge according to which it involves two indi-
vidually necessary and jointly sufficient condi-
tions, viz. having a grasp on some feature of
reality and acquiring the grasp via an accredited
route (The Nature of Knowledge, 1982). Since
for White the grasp of reality (even in cases of
so-called propositional or factual knowledge)
need not involve belief, and acquiring the grasp
via an accredited route need not involve having
justification, this analysis of knowledge runs
against many contemporary treatments in
denying that belief and justification are even
necessary for knowledge. In metaphysics, he
argued for a version of the correspondence
theory of truth - where the relevant corre-
spondence relation was one of corresponding to
as opposed to corresponding with (Truth,
1970) - and for a unified account of modal
notions according to which all modality is de re,
never de dicto (Modal Thinking, 1975). In the
philosophy of mind White developed an exter-
nalist account of central consciousness-related
concepts such as that of attention, thus hinting
away from theories of consciousness which
attempt to reduce it to intrinsic features of
subjects (Attention, 1964). He also indicated a
potential resolution to the problem of other
minds with his claim that the distinction between
the bodily expression of a mental state and the
mental state itself is best thought of as a
form/what-is-formed distinction as opposed to a
sign/what-is-signified distinction (The
Philosophy of Mind)-, if that is right, the claim
that knowledge of the mental states of others can
be found in the observation of the bodily expres-
11.15
WHITE
sion of those states might not be far off. And in
(meta-)ethics White argued for a realist view of
rights as entitlements, irreducible to duties, oblig-
ations, claims, liberties or abilities, and moreover
that the only rights-bearers are those to whom
we can attribute the full language of rights -
agents capable of enjoying, demanding, insisting
on, giving, securing, waiving, surrendering, etc.
rights (Rights, 1984).
A frequent criticism of White's early philo-
sophical works was that they emphasized
painstaking analysis to the exclusion of dis-
cernible systematicity and implications for tra-
ditional philosophical problems. He appears
to have taken the criticism to heart in his later
works, where there is a more obvious attempt
at illuminating systematicity and connection
to traditional problems, and the criticism in
published reviews is less common. Harvard
philosopher Hilary Putnam once remarked that
to be able to grip us, philosophy needs both
vision and arguments. White's impressive
philosophical output might reasonably be
described as progressing from an earlier stage
in which the dominance of arguments obscured
to a later one in vision became clearer.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Attention (Oxford, 1964).
The Philosophy of Mind (New York, 1967).
Truth (New York, 1970).
'Conceptual Analysis', in C.J. Bontempo and
S.J. Odell (eds), The Owl of Minerva:
Modal Thinking (Oxford, 1975).
Philosophers of Philosophy (New York,
1975), pp. 103-18.
The Nature of Knowledge (Totowa, 1982).
Rights (Oxford, 1984).
Other Relevant Works
G.E. Moore: A Critical Exposition (Oxford,
1958).
Explaining Human Behaviour: An Inaugural
Lecture Delivered in the University of Hull
on 24 January 1962 (Hull, 1962).
Grounds of Liability: An Introduction to the
Philosophy of Law (Oxford, 1985).
WHITE
Methods of Metaphysics (1987).
The Language of Imagination (Oxford,
1990).
Misleading Cases (Oxford, 1991).
Further Reading
'A Brief History of the Department',
University of Hull Department of
Philosophy, http://www.hull.ac.uk/
philosophy/BRIEF_HI.HTM, accessed
November 2004.
Anon., Trof Alan R. White', The Times, 7
March, 1992.
Bogart, J.H., Review of Grounds of Liability:
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law,
Ethics, vol. 97, no. 3 (April 1987), pp.
673-4.
Grice, H. Paul.'Post-War Oxford
Philosophy', in Studies in the Way of
Words (Cambridge, Mass. 1987), pp.
171-80.
Hamlyn, D.W., Review of Modal Thinking,
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 105
(October 1976), pp. 367-9.
Harrison, Jonathan,'Recent Work in
Epistemology', Philosophical Quarterly,
vol. 35, no. 138 (January 1985), pp.
95-104.
Hope, V., Review of Truth, Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 89 (October 1972),
p. 373.
Nagel, Thomas, Review of Attention,
Philosophical Review, vol. 76, no. 3 (July
1967), pp. 406-409.
Regan, Tom, Review of Rights, Nous, vol.
23, no. 1 (March 1989), pp. 112-14.
Shoemaker, Sydney, Review of The
Philosophy of Mind, Philosophical Review,
vol. 78, no. 4 (October 1969), pp. 516-18.
Urmson, J.O., Review of G.E. Moore: A
Critical Exposition, Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 43 (April 1961), pp.
190-91.
Williams, Christopher, 'Professor Alan R.
White', The Independent, 28 February,
1992.
David J. Matheson
11166
WHITEHEAD, Alfred North (1861-1947)
Alfred North Whitehead was born in Ramsgate
on 15 February 1861 and died in Cambridge,
Massachusetts on 30 December 1947. He
entered Trinity College in 1880 with a schol-
arship in mathematics; in 1884 he was elected
fellow in mathematics with a dissertation (now
lost) on Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and
Magnetism and started teaching mathematics
and mathematical physics. In 1910 he resigned
his lectureship and moved to University College
London for a year, and then to the Imperial
College of Science and Technology, where he
taught the same subjects until 1924, when he
was invited to join the Philosophy Faculty of
Harvard University. Emeritus in 1937,
Whitehead continued to work at a slower pace
until his death. He was cremated and his ashes
scattered in the graveyard of Harvard's
Memorial Church, where a service was held for
him on 6 January 1948.
The development of Whitehead's thought
can be divided into three periods which placed
emphasis respectively on logic, epistemology
and metaphysics. The examination of his three
'canonical' epochs reveals that Whitehead
respectively contemplates (1) the logico-math-
ematical field sub specie totalitatis; (2) geometry
as a physical science; and (3) metaphysics under
the category of creativity.
Before perusing these epochs, let us say a
word of his lasting philosophical outlook,
which is characterized by a constant desire to
question the meanings of 'simple obvious state-
ments' and to reorganize general ideas in order
to attain higher orders of abstractions - while
being critically aware of the limitations of
language. This broad perspective is nourished
by a twofold tension: towards, on the one hand,
a radical empiricism, and, on the other, a
complete formalism. The former is essentially
made of pluralism and interconnectedness of
events; the latter had various guises during his
career. His formalizations remained indeed
open to the conceptual revolutions of his time:
the early Whitehead was particularly sensitive

to the recent foundational developments in
algebra and geometry; his middle period par-
ticularly tackled electromagnetism (including
the nascent quantum mechanics, as in Planck,
Einstein and Bohr) and Einstein's relativities;
the late Whitehead also shows the influence of
contemporary thinkers such as S. ALEXANDER,
H. Bergson, F.H. BRADLEY, C.D. BROAD, J.
Dewey, L.J. Henderson, W. James, J.
McTAGGART, G.H. Mead, G. Santayana and,
of course, B. RUSSELL (the intertwining of
Russell's and Whitehead's thoughts being a
subject by itself). In the background, the
systems of Aristotle, Descartes, Galileo, Hume,
Kant, Leibniz, Locke, Newton and Plato stand
out as well. (Both lists are not exhaustive.)
A Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898) con-
stitutes his first book. It is largely founded on a
thorough investigation of Grassmann's calculus
of extension (Ausdehnungslehre, 1844),
Hamilton's Quaternions (1853), Boole's algebra
of logic (Symbolic Logic, 1859) and Riemann's
Manifold ('Uber die Hypothesen, welche der
Geometric zu Grundeliegen', 1867).
Furthermore, as its title displays, Leibniz's
shadow (under the guise of the 'Ars combinato-
ria') leads him to the quest of a 'universal calculus
to facilitate reasoning in connection with every
province of thought, or of external experience'
(Treatise on Universal Algebra, p. 5). (Let us
note that Russell's and Couturat's Leibnizian
inquiries have yet to come.) His thesis is that
mathematics (in its widest signification) is not
simply the science of number and quantity, but
a highly efficient universal engine of investigation
of the possibilities of thought and reasoning.
Whitehead's algebra avoids the restriction of vari-
ables to symbols for particular numbers (cf. also
his interest in projective geometry) to elaborate a
fully fledged logic of propositions ('the sole
concern of mathematics is the inference of propo-
sition from proposition'). The planned second
volume never appeared, being factually replaced
by the co-authorship of the Principia mathemat-
ica (1910-13).
'On Mathematical Concepts of the Material
World' (1906) is a cautious comparative study of
11717
WHITEHEAD
five logical constructs describing the possible
ways of conceiving a priori the structure of the
physical world. It is written with the reformed
symbolism of the forthcoming Principia (itself
based on Peano's conventions). Whitehead
looks for nothing less than the 'fundamental
relations' acting between 'ultimate existents'.
The monograph launches the heavy criticism of
Newtonian materialism that will mainly occupy
his next epochs and introduces various other
forthcoming features as well (e.g., the 'theory of
interpoints' that anticipates his 'method of
extensive abstraction').
Russell came up to Trinity in 1890 and
followed Whitehead's lectures. In 1903 he pub-
lished The Principles of Mathematics and soon
discovered the possibility of a synergy between his
planned second volume and the second volume
of the Universal Algebra that was still in the air.
As a result, the authors decided to unite their
efforts. Principia mathematical bold programme
of deducing mathematics from a set of logical
axioms stems from the above-mentioned works
plus Peano's theory of natural numbers
(Arithmetices principia novamethodo exposita,
1889; Formulario di mathematico, 1895),
Cantor's transfinite arithmetic (Grundlagen einer
allgemeinen Mannichfaltigkeitslehre, 1883) and
Frege's foundational inquiries (Grundlagen der
Arithmetik, 1884). According to Russell,
Whitehead especially contributed the treatment of
'apparent variables' (sect. IB), 'identity' (sect. IB),
'cardinal arithmetic' (pts II and III), 'convergence
and limit of functions' (sect. VC) and 'quantity'
(sects VIB and C). He concludes: 'In most parts
of the book, there was, in the end, very little for
which either had sole responsibility' (Russell, pp.
137-8; for a non-technical introduction to the
Principia, see Whitehead's Aims of Education
or Russell's Introduction to Mathematical
Philosophy, 1919). On the whole, Whitehead
was especially active in parts II (where he was
responsible for the blunder on the restriction of
the number of individuals), V and VI.
Thanks to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem,
it is now accepted that logicism - understand-
ing of arithmetic (and much more mathemat-
WHITEHEAD
ics) as an extension of deductive logic - is
mistaken. However, Principia mathematica
remains an intellectual landmark of the twen-
tieth century, not only for its famous Theory of
Types, but also as the final break away from the
Aristotelian subject-predicate logic.
Let us mention An Introduction to
Mathematics (1911), an intermediate work of
vulgarization insisting on the empirical basis of
mathematics. It constitutes a straightforward
introduction to the methods and applications of
mathematics (broadly understood). Written for
the layman, it is nevertheless very instructive of
Whitehead's lasting philosophical outlook.
The fourth volume of the Principia was
supposed to be written by Whitehead alone. In
order to be able properly to discuss the
geometry of the world, he launched around
the year 1905 a series of new inquiries, that
were to culminate in a personal reassessment of
Einsteinian relativity (i.e. the replacement of
the real curvature of space-time by multiple
time systems). In other words, the completion
of the Principia was simply postponed and
Whitehead began his journey in epistemology.
The genesis of non-Euclidean geometries
(Gauss, Lobachewsky, Bolyai, Riemann,
Helmholtz) had occupied Whitehead during
his entire life; now he went on to exploit philo-
sophically the concepts of 'field' and Vector' as
well.
The years 1911 to 1924 saw the publication
of three books of similar inspiration: An
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural
Knowledge (1919), The Concept of Nature
(1920) and The Principle of Relativity (1922).
Their goal was to be useful for mathemati-
cians, scientists and philosophers. Throughout
their development, the basic questions
remained: what is 'Nature' (i.e. the object o
perceptual knowledge); how are time and space
rooted in direct experience; what shape could
(should) the simplest generalization take from
immediate evidence? The answers took the
form of a careful study of the presuppositions
of modern science, with special attention given
to Newton, Maxwell, Lorentz, Minkowski and
1118
Einstein. Whitehead insisted on the necessity of
satisfying both science and common sense.
Hence the two main features of his epistemol-
ogy: the systematization of the concepts of
event and object, and their instrumentalization
by the 'Method of Extensive Abstraction',
which constitutes a skilled generalization of
the instinctive procedure of habitual experi-
ence in the light of the Fregean definition of
cardinal numbers with equinumerical classes.
Both features result from his denunciation of
the 'bifurcation of nature', i.e. of the Galilean
dichotomization between nature as sensed and
nature as postulated by science and of the
Lockean bifurcation between primary and sec-
ondary qualities. Substance-oriented physics,
dualistic in essence, is obliterated by an eventful
physics at three complementary levels: exten-
sion does not express disconnection any more
but connectedness; instants are replaced by
durations; and absolute space is replaced by a
relational/connectionist account of spatio-tem-
porality.
In the Preface to the second edition of the
Principles of Natural Knowledge (dated August
1924), Whitehead was already stating that he
hoped 'in the immediate future' to embody the
standpoint of his epistemological inquiries 'in a
more complete metaphysical study'. And he
did this in a rather revolutionary way. What
begins to matter indeed is the intelligence of the
ontological conditions of possibility of the
'creative advance of nature'. The full heuristic
answer will be given by Process and Reality
(1929); but three other works are worth pre-
senting as well - Science and the Modern World
(1925), Religion in the Making (1926) and
Adventures of Ideas (1933).
Science and the Modern World embodies
perhaps the first ever critical historico-concep-
tual study of the development of modern
science, starting with the Greeks, overviewing
2,500 years of techno-scientific struggles with
'stubborn facts', and devoting special attention
to the Einsteinian upheaval and nascent
quantum mechanics. It also constitutes
Whitehead's earliest careful exploration of the

everlasting ontological problem - how to
understand the 'coming-to-be and passing-
away' of actualities? Here he underlined his
special indebtedness to S. Alexander and C.L.
MORGAN. The pure phenomenological stand-
point of his previous period was not satisfying
any more, leading to a deepening of the
event/object polarity with the actual
occasion/eternal object polarity. On the one
hand, the pure phenomenological continuous
transition is atomized in ontological units of
experience; on the other, the quasi-Platonic
notion of eternal object embodies potentialities.
Moreover, the axiomatization of the process of
actualization asks for a threefold immanent
'principle of limitation' working together with
a transcendent-immanent 'Principle of
Concretion' - God - grounding value and order
in an eventful universe. The discussion of the
concept of God occurs thus in a totally dispas-
sionate context, independently of religious or
even ethical concerns. What matters more is the
'ontological priority' of flux over permanence
and the grounding of actuality in a 'sea' of
potentiality.
Religion in the Making resumes that task by
naming the three 'formative elements' implicit
in Science and the Modern World: creativity or
substantial activity', eternal objects or pure pos-
sibilities, and God or the Principle of
Concretion. The Timaeus categories are obvi-
ously still haunting his mind (Whitehead
exploits a threefold categorialization somewhat
similar to Plato's in the Timaeus}. Anyway, it
is the concept of religion that is on the hot seat
here, especially from the perspective of the cor-
relation of the history of religion with the
general history of knowledge. Process and
Reality (being the Gifford Lectures of 1927-8)
disrupts this threefold Platonician framework
by recentring it around the concept of 'creativ-
ity'.
Although Process and Reality constitutes
Whitehead's most imposing work, undoubt-
edly the acme of his speculations, it was - and
is still - badly welcomed and drastically mis-
understood. As a matter of fact, the lectures
11.19
WHITEHEAD
were a debacle, and the book itself is usually
fragmented in order to make it seizable for
hurried readers. It consists of five strictly inter-
dependent parts: I, 'The Speculative Scheme'; II,
'Discussionsand Applications'; III, 'The Theor.
of Prehensions'; IV, 'The Theory of Extension';
and V, 'Final Interpretation'. The first part
shelters the famous 'categoreal scheme' that is
'practically unintelligible' apart from the inves-
tigation of the entire book. Part II mainly
studies the classics and Kant from the perspec-
tive of its reformed subjectivism. Part III
analyses 'genetically' the coming into existence
of new actualities. Part IV analyses 'coordi-
nately' the being of actualities (and defines
straight lines without reference to measure-
ment). Part V reinterprets the ontological
system so far adumbrated, starting with the
rebalancing of the God/World relationship.
The ill success of Process and Reality seems
to have suggested a renewal of the expository
style of Science and the Modern World.
Adventures of Ideas elucidates the categories of
Process and Reality with the help of a vast
picture of the major ideas haunting civiliza-
tions. We have here not only a philosophy of
history insisting on the concept of persuasion,
but also an assessment of the impact of the sci-
entific worldview on European culture, and a
renewed exposition of the ontology of process.
According to the philosopher, a civilized society
is to exhibit the qualities of Truth, Beauty,
Adventure, Art and Peace.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Treatise on Universal Algebra. With
Applications (Cambridge, 1898).
'On Mathematical Concepts of the Material
World', Philosophical Transactions, ser. .,
vol. 205 (1906), pp. 465-525.
(with Bertrand Russell), Principia mathemat-
ica (1910-13; 2nd edn, 1927).
An Introduction to Mathematics (London
and New York, 1911).
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of
Natural Knowledge (Cambridge, 1919;
2nd edn, 1925).
WHITEHEAD
The Concept of Nature [Tarner Lectures]
(Cambridge, 1920).
The Principle of Relativity. With Application
to Physical Science (Cambridge, 1922).
Science and the Modern World [Lowell
Lectures] (New York, 1925).
Religion in the Making [Lowell Institute
Lectures] (New York and Cambridge,
1926).
Symbolism, its Meaning and Effect [Barbour
Page Lectures] (New York and Cambridge,
1927).
Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology
(Cambridge and New York, 1929; corr.
edn, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W.
Sherburne, 1978).
The Aims of Education and Other Essays
(New York and London, 1929).
The Function of Reason [Louis Clark
Vanuxem Foundation Lectures] (Princeton,
1929).
Adventures of Ideas (New York, 1933).
Modes of Thought (New York and
Cambridge, 1938).
Essays in Science and Philosophy (New
York, 1947).
Other Relevant Works
The Axioms of Protective Geometry
(Cambridge, 1906).
The Axioms of Descriptive Geometry
(Cambridge, 1907).
The Organisation of Thought, Educational
and Scientific (London and Philadelphia,
1917).
(Ed. with an Introduction by Allison Heartz
Johnson), The Interpretation of Science.
Selected Essays (New York, 1961).
Further Reading
Cobb, John B., Jr and David Ray Griffin,
Process Theology. An Introductory
Exposition (Philadelphia, 1976).
Grattan-Guinness, Ivor, The Search for
Mathematical Roots, 1870-1940. Logics,
Set Theories and the Foundations of
Mathematics from Cantor through Russell
11.20
to Godel (Princeton, 2000).
Hampe, Michael und Helmut Maafien,
Materialen zur Whiteheads Prozess und
Realitdt, vol. 1, Proze$, Gefuhl und Raum-
Zeit; vol. 2, Die Gifford Lectures und ihre
Deutung (Frankfurt am Main, 1991).
Harrell, Martha, 'Extension to Geometry of
Principia Mathematica and Related
Systems IF, Russell, vol. 8 ns (1988), pp.
140-60.
Lowe, Victor Augustus, Understanding
Whitehead (Baltimore, 1962).
, A. N. Whitehead. The Man and his
Work, vol. 1,1861-1910-, vol. 2,
1910-1947 (Baltimore and London, 1985,
1990).
Nobo, Jorge Luis, Whitehead's Metaphysics
of Extension and Solidarity (New York,
1986).
Palter, Bob, Whitehead's Philosophy of
Science (1960).
Price, Lucien, Dialogues of A. N. Whitehead,
with an Introduction by Sir David Ross
(Boston and London, 1954).
Russell, Bertrand, 'Whitehead and Principia
Mathematica', Mind, vol. 57, no. 226,
(1948), pp. 137-8.
Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), The Philosophy of
Alfred North Whitehead (1941; 2nd edn,
New York, 1951).
Sherburne, Donald W., A Whiteheadian
Aesthetic. Some Implications of
Whitehead's Metaphysical Speculation,
with Foreword by F.S.C. Northrop (New
Haven, 1961).
Woodbridge, Barry A. (ed.), A. N.
Whitehead. A Primary-Secondary
Bibliography (Bowling Green, Ohio,
1977).
Three main sites are especially devoted to
Whitehead's thought:
http://www.alfred.north.whitehead.com:;
http://www.ctr4process.org; and
http://www.espt.de, accessed November
2004.
Michel Weber

WHITELEY, Charles Henry (1911-98)
C.H. Whiteley was born in Hull on 6 August
1911 and died in Birmingham on 19 May
1998. He was educated at Hymers College in
Hull and at Queen's College, Oxford, where he
was awarded a first in Greats as well as in PPE.
He was later awarded a PhD by Birmingham
University, where he spent his teaching career,
first as a lecturer in philosophy (1935-52), then
as reader (1952-69) and Professor (1969-75).
He presented several papers to the Aristotelian
Society and was its President (1973—4).
Whiteley's early philosophical interests, in
epistemology and metaphysics, were reflected
in Introduction to Metaphysics (1950), which
deals with materialism and the mind-body
problem, perception and phenomenalism, to
which he added four chapters on arguments for
the existence of God. This book was, in its
time, one of the best available texts for the
novice, and ran in to several editions. Later he
became more interested in ethics and in defend-
ing the place of reason in moral debate.
Together with his wife, Winifred May Joselin,
he wrote two books addressed to lay people -
The Permissive Morality (1964) and Sex and
Morals (1967). In the former book there is a
chapter in which he defends the role of the
philosopher in pronouncing on such matters
against what he admits to be the prevailing
opinion of 'most professional philosophers'.
Whiteley's most important work, perhaps, is
his Mind in Action (1973), in which he sought
to correct a number of then widely held views
in the philosophy of mind: notably that human
consciousness and purposive action cannot be
causally explained and are not suitable matters
for scientific investigation. The book addresses
a number of other topics, such as behaviourism,
mind-brain identity theory, freedom of the will
and personal identity. Whiteley rejected both
the identity theory of the mind-body relation-
ship and Cartesian dualism.
Whiteley is remembered as an effective and
committed teacher and contributor to confer-
ence discussions. His obituarist in The Times
1121
WHITELEY
wrote of him that he 'represented many of the
best, though often the least regarded, values of
[philosophy] in British universities: clarity,
logical acuity, candour, patience, unfailing
courtesy and absolute intellectual honesty'
(Anon., p. 23).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Causal Theory of Perception',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society', vol.
40 (1939-40), pp. 89-102.
The Relation between Mind and Body',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society', vol.
45 (1944-5), pp. 119-30.
'Can Philosophical Theories Transcend
Experience?', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society', suppl. vol. 20 (1946),
pp. 119-30.
An Intoduction to Metaphysics (1950).
'Rationality in Morality', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, vol. 50 (1949-50), pp.
1-14.
'On Duties', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, vol. 53 (1952-3), pp. 95-104.
'Behaviourism', Mind, vol. 70 (1961), pp.
164-74.
(with Winifred May Whiteley), The
Permissive Morality (1964).
(with Winifred May Whiteley), Sex and
Morals (1967).
'Epistemological Strategies', Mind, vol. 78
(1969), pp. 25-34.
'Sense-Data', Philosophy, vol. 44 (1969), pp.
187-92.
Mind in Action: An Essay in Philosophical
Psychology (1973).
The Justification of Morality', Philosophy,
vol. 57 (1982), pp. 435-51.
Further Reading
Anon., 'Professor C.H. Whiteley: Obituary'
The Times, 28 May 1998, p. 23.
Stuart Brown
WIDGERY
WIDGERY, Alban Gregory (1887-1968)
Alban G. Widgery was born in Bloxwich,
Staffordshire on 9 May 1887 and died in
Winchester, Virginia on 22 March 1968. He
entered St Catharine's College, Cambridge in
1905 (BA, 1908; MA, 1912). Among his
teachers were W.E. JOHNSON, J.M.E.
MCTAGGART, James WARD, W.R. SORLEY and
W.R. INGE; the latter three had a particular
influence.
Widgery taught at the University of Bristol
(1908-10), but received a Burney Fellowship
from Cambridge (1910), travelling to Jena (for
lectures by Rudolf Eucken) and to Paris. He
returned to England (1912), teaching secondary
school in Nottingham, before being appointed
assistant to the Professor of Moral Philosophy at
St Andrews, A.E. TAYLOR (1914). In 1915 he
became Professor at Baroda College (of the
University of Bombay) in India. He established
a close relationship with the Maharajah and co-
founded and edited The Indian Philosophical
Review - the first such journal in English in
India. In 1922 he was elected Stanton Lecturer
in Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge, remain-
ing there (but for brief trips to India in 1924 and
1926) until taking a visiting post at Bowdoin
College in the United States (1928). He taught at
Cornell University (1929-30) and, in 1930,
established the Philosophy Department at Duke
University. He lived in America for the rest of his
life (returning briefly to England to give the 1937
Upton Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford),
retiring from Duke in 1952. He taught at
Amherst College (1953-4), but remained active
in research until his death.
Widgery was initially influenced by the
idealism of Sorley and McTaggart (and, indi-
rectly, A.S. PRINGLE-PATHSON). His earliest pub-
lications included translations of Eucken's
Life's Basis and Life's Ideal (1911) and
Heinrich Weinel's Jesus in the Nineteenth
Century and After (1914). In these volumes
Widgery reveals his own perspective - what he
calls personalism or personal idealism - though
he later abandoned it.
1122.
Widgery's years in India were productive,
focusing on the philosophy of religion (e.g.,
Human Needs and the Justification of Religious
Beliefs, 1918; Immortality, and Other Essays,
1919; and Outlines of a Philosophy of Life -
based on discussions with the Maharajah of
Baroda, 1920; 1923). By the time of his depar-
ture from India, he had given up idealism and
embraced dualism.
At Cambridge, Widgery began to develop a
'comparative' philosophy of religion. The
Comparative Study of Religions (1923) - based
on lectures given in Baroda and Mysore - gave
a 'scientific' statement of the different major reli-
gious systems in their own terms, without
attempting a general theory of religion or a com-
parison to Christianity. Towards a Modern
Philosophy of Religion' (1929) and What is
Religion? (1953) continued this approach,
treating all major traditions on a par. Modern
philosophy of religion was a 'critical and con-
structive discipline', and Widgery insisted that
philosophers of religion should start with religion
as it is found in individual consciousnesses and
'embodied socially in the historical religions'.
Such a philosophy of religion was also a neces-
sary part of a philosophy of life.
Widgery's writing is direct and readable, and
many of his publications have an introductory
character. The Contemporary Thought of
Great Britain (1927) presents a clear, if idio-
syncratic, statement of five leading philosoph-
ical schools of the early twentieth century - as
well as an indirect explanation of his aban-
donment of idealism. The irreconcilability of
these traditions - at least in practice - suggests
to Widgery the adoption of a 'theistic eclecti-
cism'- an eclecticism with a comprehensive-
ness (or maximalism) that is theistic. A maxi-
malist theistic view, WTidgery argued in his 1940
American Philosophical Association
Presidential address, The Christian Faith of a
Contemporary Realist', is also a realist one.
Widgery also wrote on ethics, editing and
adding a chapter to the sixth edition of Henry
Sidgwick's Outlines of the History of Ethics
(1931), and authoring a lengthy volume of his

own (Christian Ethics in History and Modern
Life, 1940 - based on Stanton Lectures in
Cambridge - in which he maintained that
Christian ethics 'can claim to be not merely
the equal of, but superior to, any other form of
ethics'). Though long interested in the philoso-
phy of history, he wrote on the subject only late
in life. Interpretations of History: Confucius
to Toynbee (1961) provides a summary of
major theories of history, attentive to the ref-
erences to religion within them. The 'sequel' -
The Meanings of History (1967) - presents a
more critical account.
While not an original thinker, Widgery's
breadth, clarity and openness to non-Western
traditions provided a basis for later cross-
cultural philosophy. A fair account of his intel-
lectual itinerary is found in his autobiography,
A Philosopher's Pilgrimage (1961).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Goods and Bads: Outlines of a Philosophy
Of life (Baroda, 1920).
The Comparative Study of Religions (1923).
Christian Ethics in History and Modern Life
(New York, 1940).
What is Religion? (New York, 1953).
A Philosopher's Pilgrimage (1961).
William Sweet
WIGGINS, David (1933-)
David Wiggins was born in London on 8
March 1933. He was educated at St Paul's
School (1946-51) and Brasenose College,
Oxford (1951-5), where he read literae human-
lores^ obtaining a first both in Classical Honour
Moderations and in the final honour school.
After doing National Service (1955-7), he
joined the Home Civil Service (1957-8),
becoming assistant principal in the Colonial
Office. Having been a visiting fellow at
1123
WIGGINS
Princeton in 1958, he returned to Oxford, this
time to New College, first as lecturer in phi-
losophy (1959) and then as a tutorial fellow
(1960). He remained there until 1967, when he
took up the Chair of Philosophy at Bedford
College, London. He returned again to Oxford
in 1981 as fellow and praelector in philosophy
at University College, remaining there until
1989, when he became Professor of Philosophy
at Birkbeck College, London. He returned
finally to Oxford in 1993, when he was
appointed Wykeham Professor of Logic, a post
from which he retired in 2000. He has held
appointments at Harvard, Stanford, Brown,
the University of California at Santa Barbara,
Padua University, New York University and
Boston University. He was made a fellow of the
British Academy in 1978, became a member of
the Institut International de Philosophie in
1984 and was elected foreign honorary
member of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in 1992.
Wiggins has contributed to many areas of
philosophy. He is widely known for his meta-
physical writings on substance, identity and
personhood, especially Identity and Spatio-
Temporal Continuity (1967), Sameness and
Substance (1980) and Sameness and Substance
Renewed (2001). But he has made no less influ-
ential contributions to ethics - see in particular
the essays collected in his Needs, Values, Truth
(1987) - and produced significant, if somewhat
scattered, writings in the philosophy of
language, notable examples being 'On Sentence
Sense, Word Sense and Difference of Word
Sense: Towards a Philosophical Theory of
Dictionaries' (1971), 'Frege's Problem of the
Morning Star and the Evening Star' (1976),
'"Most" and "All": Some Comments on a
Familiar Programme, and on the Logical Form
of Quantified Sentences' (1980), 'Putnam's
Doctrine of Natural Kind Words and Frege's
Doctrines of Sense, Reference and Extension.
Can they Cohere?' (1993), 'Natural Languages
as Social Objects' (1997) and 'Marks of Truth:
A Normative cum Realist View' (2002). He
has also made contributions to epistemology,
WIGGINS
the philosophy of mind and action, aesthetics
and political philosophy, as well as to the
history of philosophy, where the main focus of
his attention has been on Plato and Aristotle,
Leibniz, Hume and Kant, and Frege and Peirce.
As Wiggins himself admits in his 'Replies'
(1996) - a useful conspectus of much of his
work up to 1996, which also contains an illu-
minating autobiographical essay - it is hard to
find a unifying theme to his philosophical
writings. But at least one thought that has
underlain them almost from the beginning,
either implicitly or explicitly, is his rejection of
the idea of philosophy as conceptual analysis.
This is not to say that he is someone who works
outside the analytical tradition: his abiding
interest in the problems of analytical philoso-
phy and his sustained use of its logical resources
locate him firmly within it. What he is resistant
to is the idea that it is possible to find, for
important, non-technical concepts of interest to
philosophy, necessary and sufficient conditions
framed solely in terms of more basic concepts.
This resistance is partly the result of the failure
of all such attempts in interesting cases (see
'Marks of Truth', sect. 2). But it also derives
from his belief that 'there is no particular
problem about the ordinary knowing of
ordinary sorts of thing' ('Replies', p. 222).
Given this belief, there is no temptation for
him to fall into the kind of foundationalism
about knowledge which requires our ordinary
concepts to be built out of simpler, more basic
ones. This does not mean that we cannot say
anything worthwhile about non-technical but
philosophically important concepts. But for
any given such concept, we must allow that at
best we may only be able to provide what he
calls an elucidation of it - something that 'illu-
minates [it] by employing it in a set of true
judgments that involve it revealingly and inter-
estingly with distinct, coeval, collateral
concepts' (Truth, and Truth as Predicated of
Moral Judgments', n. 4). The method of eluci-
dation, of finding such elucidations, permeates
his work; and it can be seen to considerable
effect in his metaphysical writings.
1124
Consider, in the first instance, identity.
Throughout almost all his philosophical career,
Wiggins has been a stout defender of the clas-
sical conception of identity, understood at least
in part using Leibniz's Law (in one form, the
claim that any property of an object is a
property of anything identical to that object),
and the Law of Identity (the claim that any
object is identical to that object). He does not,
however, think that identity can be analysed in
terms of such principles. A full analysis of
identity would require not only necessary con-
ditions, like the above pair, but also a general
sufficient condition; and the suggestion most
favoured by advocates of such an analysis is
simply the converse of Leibniz's Law - the so-
called Identity of Indiscernibles. But while
Wiggins accepts this principle, at least when the
notion of a property is interpreted widely
enough, he does not think it can furnish an
analysis. For it is only indisputably true when
the properties themselves, at least indirectly,
involve identity.
Identity, therefore, remains unanalysable for
Wiggins, though elucidatable in terms of the
above principles. It should be noted, however,
that even if these principles did furnish an
analysis, it is inconceivable that finite mortals
like us should ever recognize identities as true
by using them. In particular, we could hardly
proceed via the condition the Identity of
Indiscernibles embodies, that is work through
all the properties of a pair of objects, see that
what is had by one is had by the other, and then
conclude that they are identical. And this brings
us to a second important feature of Wiggins's
metaphysics of identity. For him, we recognize
identities as holding by first recognizing the
objects involved - however inchoately - as
belonging to individuative kinds, and then
employing information relating to the identity
and persistence of objects of those kinds which
accompanies such recognition. Notice that, for
Wiggins, every object must belong to such a
kind. Notice also that any genuinely individu-
ative kind will do here. As he demonstrates, on
the basis of variants or consequences of

Leibniz's Law and the Law of Identity, objects
that are the same f must be the same g,
provided one or other is a g, at least for indi-
viduative kinds, f and g. (For a detailed defence
of these claims, see Sameness and Substance
Renewed^ chaps 1-2.)
Of course, in adopting such a view, one
incurs an obligation to say something about the
information which accompanies someone's
recognition that an object belongs to an indi-
viduative kind and which then enables him or
her at least in principle to come to recognize the
truth or falsity of particular identity claims con-
cerning it. Much here depends on the kind of
thing in question. But restricting himself to the
category of substance, Wiggins suggests that for
a natural kind at least the information concerns
the 'characteristic activity' of its members; and
for an ordinary artefact kind, it concerns their
'characteristic function'.
The functional information associated with
artefact kinds, relating as it must to what their
members are typically able to do, is relatively
unproblematic. Such information will gener-
ally be as available to ordinary users of the
artefacts as it is to their designers or makers.
But what about the 'characteristic activity' of
members of a natural kind? Following Hilary
Putnam (amongst others), Wiggins thinks the
principles governing such activity will exploit
the nomologically grounded causal and dispo-
sitional properties of members of the kind. And
this means that for the most part only experts
at best will be in a position to appreciate fully
the individuative information associated with
the kinds. However, this does not prevent lesser
mortals from acquiring conceptions of the
kinds that can more or less do duty for that
information. It is through such informal con-
ceptions that even non-experts are able to rec-
ognize members of the kinds, and thence to
observe the truth or falsity of particular identity
claims.
Wiggins calls the general view just adum-
brated conceptualist realism, see Sameness and
Substance Renewed, chap. 5. It is conceptual-
ist since individuating an object, singling it out
1125
WIGGINS
requires one to form, or to have formed
already, a conception of the object; and it is
realist since singling out an object requires the
object already to be there: one hardly creates an
object by singling it out, even if in so doing one
forms or deploys a conception of it. But
Wiggins also takes the view to embody, thirdly,
a form of essentialism. At its heart is another
conclusion he draws from his elucidation of
identity. This is the claim that identical objects
are necessarily identical, a claim that was
already familiar from Saul Kripke's work,
though Wiggins's defence of it is different in
detail. Like Kripke, Wiggins also attempts to
argue for the view that objects belong to their
individuative kinds, and (in consequence) are
subject to their general principles of activity, etc.
essentially. If they cease to belong to those
kinds, or cease to be subject to their principles
of activity, etc., they cease to exist. He dis-
tances himself, however, from other Kripkean
essentialist theses, such as that particular arte-
facts must be comprised of broadly the matter
they are actually comprised of, and that human
beings must necessarily have come from the
actual sperm and egg that they did come from.
(Wiggins's arguments for his particular brand
of essentialism are to be found in Sameness
and Substance Renewed, chap. 4.)
One important application of Wiggins's
metaphysical doctrines is to be found in his
work on the concept of person. Traditional
writings on this topic have tended to emphasize
the psychological properties of persons at the
expense of their physical properties or vice
versa. But Wiggins has always stressed the
essential unity of persons - they are just the
kind of thing that admits of both mental and
physical properties. Thus in Identity and
Spatio-Temporal Continuity he writes (p. 57)
that 'a person is an animal who has, or has the
biological capacity for, experience memory,
sufficient self-awareness, etc.'; and later, in
effect developing this suggestion, he suggests
that persons are creatures of a kind whose
members have a sufficiently rich psychological
and behavioural profile to allow them 'to be the
WIGGINS
subjects of fine-grained interpretation by us,
who are human beings, and to be the putative
exponents of fine-grained interpretation of us'
('Replies', p. 245).
In themselves these suggestions do not supply
us with identity or persistence conditions for
persons, since neither animal nor creature is
an individuative kind. But such can be provided
for us at least when it is remembered that we
are all human beings. For the kind human being
is an individuative kind, one whose members
have a characteristic activity, drawn in part
from the science of biology, which will yield
rich identity conditions. This ensures that what
makes us persons is that we are human beings,
without requiring that the concepts of person
and human being are either identical or even
(necessarily) coextensive. Nothing in the
account logically precludes (say) dolphins, alien
life-forms or even biological machines from
being persons: their identity conditions will be
determined by the principles of activity of the
underlying kinds to which they belong, and
whether they are persons will be determined in
accordance with the characterization in the
previous paragraph. However, Wiggins warns
against taking it to be a trivial matter to
conceive of their being such. What we think we
can imagine from our existing conception of a
person, drawn as it is from our own case, may
well turn out not to be possible at all when
thought through or examined fully and con-
cretely. This cautious attitude to what we seem
able to conceive also informs his treatment of
various puzzle cases of fission and fusion that
philosophers of personal identity have claimed
to be able to envisage as genuine possibilities.
His most considered discussion is to be found
in Sameness and Substance Renewed, chap. 7.
Wiggins's writings in metaphysics reveal a
complex network of connections between
important philosophical concepts, and illus-
trate well the power of the method of elucida-
tion. His work in the philosophy of language is
similar. His main concerns within this branch
of philosophy have been, on the one hand, with
general questions of meaning, notably how
1126
meaning is related to other notions such as
truth and reference; and on the other, with
how to construe particular forms of words: he
has written on adverbs, quantifiers and the
copula, and devoted much effort to the under-
standing of names and kind words. Important
contemporary influences on his work are
Davidson, DUMMETT, Putnam and Kripke. But
perhaps his most lasting influence is to be found
in the writings of Frege, two of whose central
ideas have inspired a great deal of his work.
The first idea, long championed by Wiggins,
is encapsulated in the two-part thesis that (1)
the meanings of the declarative sentences of a
language are given by the conditions under
which those sentences are true; and (2) the
meanings of its words are the systematic con-
tributions they make to the truth-conditions
of declarative sentences containing them. It was
given considerable impetus by Davidson and
others in the 1960s and 1970s, who saw that
the methods used by Tarski for defining truth
for particular formal languages could be
adapted and incorporated within a wider inter-
pretative framework to explain the precise way
the meanings of sentences of natural languages
are given by their truth-conditions, and what
contributions particular forms of words make
to such truth-conditions. Wiggins seized upon
these additions and refinements - for his con-
sidered formulation of the upshot, see his
'Meaning and Truth Conditions', esp. p. 18;
and his work on the particular forms of words
mentioned above - adverbs, quantifiers, etc. -
was always conducted broadly within this
framework.
It is again important to note that nothing in
Wiggins's version of the truth-conditional
account of meaning involves conceptual
analysis. Indeed, while some have been tempted
to think of such an account as effecting a reduc-
tion of meaning not merely to truth and other
semantic concepts involved in the construction
of Tarskian truth definitions, such as reference,
but also (by virtue of the introduction of the
wider interpretative framework) to psycholog-
ical and behavioural facts about speakers of the

relevant languages, Wiggins himself will have
none of it. Like Davidson, he certainly does not
think that facts about speakers' behaviour or
psychology can, even partially, constitute the
meaning of expressions - though obviously they
may be called upon as evidence of meaning. But
as we shall see presently, truth for Wiggins is
coeval with meaning. Each elucidates the other;
so neither admits of conceptual analysis.
The second Fregean idea that has informed
a good deal of Wiggins's work in the philoso-
phy of language emerges from consideration of
yet another puzzle about identity: how it is that
a sentence like 'Hesperus = Phosphorus' can be
informative, yet 'Hesperus = Hesperus' not be,
even though the names 'Hesperus' and
'Phosphorus' refer to the same thing. Frege's
considered answer to this puzzle was to claim
that the names have different meanings or
senses. But for a long time Wiggins rejected
this answer. Not that he thought that names
didn't have sense: like the senses of all other
words, theirs were simply the contributions the
words made to the truth-conditions of sen-
tences containing them. Rather he thought that
co-referential names always had the same sense:
they made exactly the same contribution to the
truth-conditions of sentences containing them,
namely to refer to their common referent.
To understand why Wiggins took this view,
it is important to remember that according to
the complete Fregean picture, the sense of a
name, its contribution to the truth-conditions
of sentences containing it, is given by the way
in which it refers to its referent. For Frege,
therefore, co-referential names with different
senses refer in different ways, such ways con-
stituting those senses. But as Wiggins argued
from very early on, although one can specify
the referent of an ordinary name in countless
different descriptive ways, no set of descrip-
tions will capture its meaning. (See in particu-
lar 'Identity Statements', p. 66, n. 3, which
predates Kripke's famous attack on descrip-
tivism about names; this view is again all of a
piece with his rejection of philosophy as con-
ceptual analysis.)
1127
WIGGINS
The unstated premise in this argument,
however, is that if co-referential names can
ever have different senses, then such senses - the
ways in which they refer to their common ref-
erents - must be understood descriptively. An.
eventually Wiggins came to think that this need
not be so. Co-referential names can have dif-
ferent senses, according to his later picture, by
virtue of the fact that the ways in which they
refer to their common referents are non-descrip-
tive. They consist in, or are such as to impart,
different, not wholly descriptive conceptions
of the referent of the name. Such an idea he
then carried over to natural kind terms in a
manner all of a piece with his views on the
kinds themselves discussed above. Accepting
Putnam's and Kripke's arguments against
descriptive or instrumentalist accounts of such
terms, Wiggins endorses a Fregean model of
their meanings. In particular, he takes their
senses to consist in, or to be such as to impart,
possibly different, not wholly descriptive con-
ceptions of their referents, which on the Fregean
model are concepts. (For his later views, see
'Putnam's Doctrine of Natural Kind Words'.
His earlier views about sense and reference can
be found in 'Essentialism, Continuity and
Identity'; see also 'Frege's Problem of the
Morning Star and the Evening Star'.)
Wiggins, then, accepts two major Fregean
theses in the philosophy of language. But he
also accepts a third, the idea that truth is inde-
finable. He argues explicitly against traditional
attempts at defining truth - notably those
offered by defenders of correspondence, coher-
ence and deflationist theories. But he also
argues that truth and meaning are best under-
stood through mutual elucidation. As already
indicated, he thinks that truth - in the cloak of
a Tarskian truth definition - can certainly be o
assistance in understanding meaning. But he
also thinks that we can make progress in the
other direction by trying to answer the follow-
ing question: 'What must sentences that are
true in a language be like (what properties must
they have) if their meaning is to be given in the
manner indicated by the truth-conditions
WIGGINS
theory?' Clearly in seeking to identify marks of
truth in this way, we must take meaning itself
for granted - and hence in sum take meaning
and truth to be mutually elucidatable.
What marks does he think truth has? Noting
that sentences will be true just in case the judge-
ments or beliefs they express are true, he argues
for the following (amongst others): (1) that
truth is 'the primary dimension of assessment'
of things that are truth-evaluable; (2) that truths
'will under favourable circumstances command
a convergence of opinion among those properly
placed to judge [such matters], and the best
explanation of this convergence will require
[that they be true]'; and (3) that truths have
content, and that the truth of something with
content 'cannot only consist in its being a state
of belief, or [its] simply being something that is
believed or hoped or ...' ('Marks of Truth',
sect. 12). Surprisingly, it is in his treatment of
ethical discourse that we find Wiggins deploy-
ing these marks to greatest effect.
Perhaps the most important theoretical
concern in Wiggins's ethical writings is to artic-
ulate and defend a credible brand of moral
cognitivism, one according to which, for at
least some moral judgements that are 'found to
be worthy of being affirmed', (a) the judge-
ments are candidates 'to be known' and can-
didates for 'plain truth', and (b) the judge-
ments 'stand or fall for acceptance according
as [they] attain that status' ('Truth, and Truth
as Predicated of Moral Judgments', p. 141).
Crucially, however, Wiggins does not insist, for
moral cognitivism to be correct, that all moral
judgements that are found worthy of being
affirmed must satisfy (a) and (b). He is drawn
to the idea that certain value judgements which
are so found - that x is brave, say, or malicious
or ignoble - will tend to satisfy (a) and (b); but
he is less convinced by practical judgements
which are so found - for example, that I must
do such and such, or I ought to do it, or it
would be best or right, all things considered,
for me to do it. To fill out these thoughts, he
considers whether judgements of both differ-
ent kinds do indeed satisfy the marks of truth,
1128
when they have been found worthy of being
affirmed.
Of the marks he mentions, it is probably
most difficult to demonstrate that judgements
of any sort satisfy the second, which requires a
convergence, in appropriate circumstances, that
is best explained by reference to the truth of the
judgements. But as already indicated, he feels
reasonably optimistic about being able to do so
in the case of such value judgements as that x
is brave, malicious, etc. He begins by noting the
fact that our responses to the value properties
corresponding to these judgements - responses
to bravery, malice, etc. - will often have evolved
so as to be sensitive to the presence of precisely
those properties. Indeed, he thinks, not only
will such properties be properly describable
only by reference to the responses they invoke
in us (which prompts Wiggins to refer to his
view as a form of subjectivism); but equally, in
some cases, the responses may be adequately
describable only by reference to the properties
themselves. Thus a woman's action will count
as brave just in case it is the sort of thing that
will, in sensitive subjects, call forth or make
appropriate, for example, certain feelings of
admiration. But such feelings of admiration
will not be merely generic or relate to her
prowess at gardening (say); rather, they will
concern precisely the braveiy of her action. In
this example, the subjects' responses will be
explicable, via their general sensitivity to such
matters, by reference to the action's being
brave. Moreover, because their responses are of
such a kind as to be explicable in this way, we
can expect appropriate convergence, and hence
that the mark will be satisfied.
Undogmatically, it should be said, Wiggins
does allow that not all value judgements found
worthy of affirmation need admit of such con-
vergence. Indeed, since our opinions may jus-
tifiably alter as new factors emerge, it follows
that, whatever the value judgement, where
there was once convergence there may subse-
quently be divergence. (All such matters, as
Wiggins puts it, are essentially contestable - a
conclusion which links him ideologically with

such liberal pluralist thinkers as Isaiah BERLIN.)
In practice, however, much will depend on the
value property in question. Roughly speaking,
the less specific the kind of response appropri-
ate to a value property, the more difficult it will
be to justify a claim to convergence; compare
here the property of goodness.
Furthermore, it is for related reasons that he
remains generally pessimistic about conver-
gence in practical matters. For practical judge-
ments will often be grounded in a wide range
of more specific evaluations, each with its own
responses; and some of these may conflict. As
a result, one man may properly judge that it is
right, all things considered, for him to do some-
thing, even though another, in circumstances
that are in all relevant respects indistinguish-
able, judges equally properly that it would be
right, all things considered, for him to do some-
thing different: the first may see one evaluative
factor as being the salient one, the second ma.
see another, conflicting factor. Consequently,
there may be no convergence on what is the
right thing to do in those circumstances.
(Wiggins's moral cognitivism is discussed in
detail in 'Truth, Invention and the Meaning of
Life', 1976, 'Truth, and Truth as Predicated of
Moral Judgments', 1987, and 'A Sensible
Subjectivism', 1987.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity
(Oxford, 1967).
Sameness and Substance (Oxford, 1980).
Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the
Philosophy of Value (Oxford, 1987; 2nd
rev. edn, 1991; 3rd edn, exp. and further
rev., 1998).
Sameness and Substance Renewed
(Cambridge, 2001).
Other Relevant Works
'Identity Statements', in RJ. Butler (ed.),
Analytical Philosophy, 2nd ser. (Oxford,
1965).
'On Being in the Same Place at the Same
Time', Philosophical Review, vol. 77
1129
WIGGINS
(1968), pp. 90-95.
'On Sentence Sense, Word Sense, and
Difference of Word Sense: Towards a
Philosophical Theory of Dictionaries', in
D. Steinberg and L. Jakobovits (eds),
Semantics: An Interdisciplinary Reader
(Cambridge, 1971).
'Essentialism, Continuity and Identity',
Synthese, vol. 28 (1974), pp. 321-59
'Frege's Problem of the Morning Star and the
Evening Star', in M. Schirn (ed.), Studies
on Frege II: Logic and Philosophy of
Language (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1976).
Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life',
Proceedings of the British Academy, vol.
62 (1976), pp. 331-78. Revised version in
Needs, Values, Truth.
'"Most" and "All": Some Comments on a
Familiar Programme, and on the Logical
Form of Quantified Sentences', in M. Platts
(ed.), Reference, Truth and Reality (1980).
'A Sensible Subjectivism', in Needs, Values,
Truth.
'Truth, and Truth as Predicated of Moral
Judgments', in Needs, Values, Truth.
'Putnam's Doctrine of Natural Kind Words
and Frege's Doctrines of Sense, Reference
and Extension. Can they Cohere?', in A.W.
Moore (ed.), Meaning and Reference
(Oxford, 1993).
'Meaning and Truth Conditions: From
Frege's Grand Design to Davidson's', in B.
Hale and C. Wright (eds), Blackwell
Companion to the Philosophy of Language
(Oxford, 1996).
'Replies', in Sabina Lovibond and S.G.
Williams (eds), Essays for David Wiggins:
Identity, Truth and Value (Oxford, 1996);
repr., with corrections, as Identity, Truth
and Value: Essays for David Wiggins
(Oxford, 2000).
'Natural Languages as Social Objects',
Philosophy, vol. 72 (1997), pp. 499-52..
'Marks of Truth: A Normative cum Realist
View', in R. Schantz (ed.), What is Truth?
(Berlin, 2002).
WIGGINS
Further Reading
Lovibond, Sabina and S. G. Williams (eds),
Essays for David Wiggins: Identity, Truth
and Value (Oxford, 1996); repr., with cor-
rections, as Identity, Truth and Value:
Essays for David Wiggins (Oxford, 2000).
S.G. Williams
WILKES, Kathleen (or Vaughan-WUkes:
1946-2003)
Kathleen Vaughan-Wilkes was born in Radley
on 23 June 1946 and died in Oxford on 21
August 2003. She was the daughter of an
Anglican vicar who had been a master at Eton
before becoming Headmaster of Radley. Wilkes
(who dropped the Vaughan part of her name as
a student) was educated at Wycombe Abbey
School and then St Hugh's College, Oxford,
where she took a first in Greats in 1969. From
1969 to 1972 she was a graduate student at
Princeton, being supervised in her thesis by
Professor Thomas Nagel, and receiving her
doctorate in 1973. She was briefly a research
fellow at King's College, Cambridge before
being elected as fellow and tutor at St Hilda's
College, Oxford in 1973, where she remained
until her death thirty years later, teaching phi-
losophy of science, especially brain and behav-
ioural sciences, philosophy of mind and classi-
cal philosophy.
Wilkes combined the life of an Oxford don,
researching and publishing in the philosophy of
mind and science, with a clandestine second
philosophical career. In 1979 she responded
to an invitation to visit from dissident acade-
mics in Prague and held unofficial seminars
there. Her success at this venture led to repeated
visits, during which she smuggled in banned
philosophical works, and to the establishment
of the Jan Hus Foundation. Banned by the
Czech authorities, Wilkes became a mainstay of
1130
the Inter-University Centre (I-UC) and its
annual philosophy of science conferences at
Dubrovnik in Croatia (then in Yugoslavia)
throughout the 1980s. From 1988 to 1996 she
was Chair of the I-UC executive committee,
and founder and co-editor of the journal
International Studies in the Philosophy of
Science. During the 1991 war between Serbia
and Croatia, Wilkes remained in Dubrovnik
under siege, and subsequently worked to resus-
citate the postwar city and its university. In
1995 she became President of the British-
Croatian Society. For her contributions to
Croatian life and education she was made an
honorary citizen of Dubrovnik in 1993 and
awarded a doctorate honoris causa by Zagreb
University in 2001. (Her ashes were scattered
in the Old Harbour of Dubrovnik in 2003.)
Wilkes's philosophical work centred upon
the philosophy of mind and the relevance to it
of modern scientific developments. Her
doctoral research resulted in Physicalism
(1978), an attempt to dissolve the traditional
mind-body problem, eliminating impracticable
forms of physicalism, and substituting a func-
tionalist analysis that would enable an adequate
description of human behaviour in terms of
psychology and neuro-psychology. Such a
psycho-physiological functionalism, she
believed, 'allows for no class of mental events,
states or processes that can be set in any inter-
estingly problematic relation to a class of
physical events, states and processes'
(Physicalism, p. 114). For Wilkes held that the
traditional category of mental events divided
into those picked out by our ordinary language
talk of the mental (irrelevant to psychology as
a science), and those that play a part in the
conceptual apparatus of scientific psychology
which 'belong firmly and ineliminably to the
molar levels of a single and unitary science of
psychophysiology' (ibid.). Her physicalism did
not reduce psychological explanations to the
physical - an anti-reductionism that she share.
with Nagel - but rather correlated those psy-
chological terms that could be defined in terms
of the scientific with the physical descriptions

of neurology, uniting 'the two into one science'
(ibid., p. 66). Ordinary language descriptions of
the psychological were treated to what Wilkes
referred to as 'a touch of eliminative material-
ism' (ibid., p. 112). As a coda, she identified her
psycho-physiological functionalism as being
substantially identical to Aristotle's view of the
mind.
This interest in making the philosophy of
mind consistent with neuroscience led Wilkes to
a consideration of the problem of personal
identity. In Real People (1988) she argued that
the increasingly problematic nature of the
debate over the continuing identity of persons
was substantially due to the methodology used,
the testing of concepts and intuitions by
thought-experiments. Too often these imagi-
nary cases were under-described, lacking in
background or of unclear modal status, the
intuitions supposed to result from them unre-
liable. The debate had, she said, lost touch with
reality. In place of this, Wilkes generated
problems of identity via a consideration of
actual cases - fugue-states, multiple personality,
commissurotomy, etc. - saying that 'basing our
argument on actual cases allows us to check our
imagination against the facts, and our intu-
itions get strengthened and rendered more
trustworthy' (Real People, p. 48). This scientific
realism, combined with her Aristotelian insis-
tence upon the person being intrinsically social,
led her away from the implicit Cartesianism of
the Lockean tradition and towards a view of
'person' whose paradigm instance is the sane
adult human being rather than any of the more
tenuous constructions out of mental relation-
ships that have been a central feature of the
modern debate. Against the modern insistence
on the essential unity of consciousness of the
person, she appealed again to the classical
Greek tradition going back as far as Homer
that allowed a considerable psychological
disunity within the individual. For Wilkes our
everyday notion of personhood was captured
by Aristotle and is 'only marginally contami-
nated ... by scientific and philosophical
theories' (Real People, p. 228): it remains
1131
WILKES
flexible enough to accommodate most of the
actual problem cases that Real People discusses.
We should therefore resist the temptation to
undermine this robust understanding through
the constant application of implausible and
even impossible hypothetical cases.
At the time of her death Wilkes was working
on a book on the autonomy of psychology.
Her work can be seen as an attempt to bring a
much-needed clarity to some philosophical
areas by forcing philosophy to take more
account of the developments in relevant areas
of science. Above all she strove to do this by
seeking to turn back the philosophical clock,
rejecting the Cartesian view of the mental in
favour of what she regarded as the clearer and
scientifically more useful classical view of
Aristotle. ('I find the Aristotelian psuche so
manifestly superior to the Cartesian mens\
Real People, p. 217.) Her work did not suffer
from the scientistic belief that philosophy can
be reduced to or replaced by empirical science,
and Wilkes continued to hold that philosophy
had much useful work to do. But she believed
that this work could only be prevented from
going astray if it continued in the tradition of
Aristotle. In the case of the philosophy of mind
this meant engaging with real minds, testing
one's theories against the fruits of research in
psychology, neurology and medicine, in the
hope that philosophical clarity of theorizing
would assist these empirical disciplines. Real
People may thus be regarded as a case study in
what Wilkes regarded as the proper, mutually
supportive, relationship between philosophy
and science.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Physicalism (1978).
Real People: Personal Identity without
Thought Experiments (Oxford, 1988).
Other Relevant Works
'Functionalism, Psychology and the
Philosophy of Mind', Philosophical Topics,
vol. 12 (1981), pp. 147-68.
'Pragmatics in Science and Theory in
WILKES
Common Sense', Inquiry, vol. 27 (1984)
pp. 339-62.
The Relationship between Scientific
Psychology and Common-Sense
Psychology', Synthese, vol. 89 (1991), pp.
15-39.
Tsuche versus the Mind', in Martha C.
Nussbaum and Amelie O. Rorty (eds),
Essays on Aristotle's De anima (Oxford,
1992).
'Losing Consciousness', in Thomas
Metzinger (ed.), Conscious Experience
(Thorverton, 1995).
Talking to Cats, Rats and Bats', in John
Preston (ed.), Thought and Language
(Cambridge, 1997).
'Know Thyself, Journal of Consciousness
Studies, vol. 5 (1998), pp. 153-65
Further Reading
Brennan, Andrew, Review of Real People,
Mind, vol. 99, no. 394 (April 1990), pp
305-308.
Hellmann, Geoffrey, Review of Physicalism,
Philosophical Review, vol. 89, no. 4
(October 1980), pp. 625-31.
Madell, Geoffrey, Review of Real People,
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 157
(October 1989), pp. 515-18.
Smart, J.J.C., Review of Physicalism, The
British Journal for the Philosophy of
Science, vol. 30, no. 4 (December 1979)
pp. 403-10.
Jerry Goodenough
WILLIAMS, Bernard Arthur Owen
(1929-2003)
Bernard Williams was born in Westcliff, Essex
on 21 September 1929 and died in Rome on 10
June 2003. He was educated at Chigwell
School, Essex and Balliol College, Oxford.
1132
After National Service in the RAF, he returned
to Oxford as a fellow of All Souls College
(1951-4), and then of New College (1954-9).
In 1959 he moved to London, first as lecturer
in philosophy at University College (1959-64),
and subsequently as Professor of Philosophy at
Bedford College (1964-7). The middle part of
his career was spent at Cambridge University,
as Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy
(1967-79) and Provost of King's College
(1979-87). In 1988 he moved to the USA as
Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at
the University of California, Berkeley. From
1990 he divided his time between Berkeley and
Oxford, where he was White's Professor of
Moral Philosophy (1990-96) and fellow of All
Souls College (1997-2003). Also active in
British public life, Williams served on a number
of government committees of enquiry, chairing
the Committee on Obscenity and Film
Censorship (1977-9); he was a member of the
Board of Sadler's Wells Opera (later the English
National Opera) from 1967 to 1986. He wa
knighted in 1999.
One of the most significant British philoso-
phers of the twentieth century, Bernard
Williams was a wide-ranging and synoptic
thinker, whose work encompasses metaphysics,
epistemology, the philosophy of mind and
language, the philosophy of action, the philos-
ophy of value and culture, the history of phi-
losophy and the history of ideas. However, he
will chiefly be remembered as a philosopher of
ethics and (especially through his later work) as
the defender of a distinctive post-Nietzschean
project - a project of historically informed
meta-philosophy, examining the nature of the
philosophical enterprise and its relation to
cultural explanation.
Williams was not a system-builder: his phi-
losophy does not involve the construction of
explanatory or justificatory structures based
upon a number of sharply articulated, funda-
mental principles. Rather, his philosophical
outlook is largely defined by its opposition to
this kind of systematizing ambition. During his
lifetime, he was most widely known as a critic

of utilitarianism, and also of the Kantian moral
theories that had been regarded as the natural
alternatives to it. In Ethics and the Limits of
Philosophy (1985) this criticism is extended
into a more general argument against the aspi-
ration to resolve the questions of normative
ethics by recourse to any comprehensive ethical
theory. This aspiration he saw as involving a
kind of cultural myopia - a blindness to the
way in which our ethical conceptions are local
to a particular, historically conditioned
outlook. Within the ethical outlook we cur-
rently inhabit, a great variety of ethical con-
siderations have reason-giving force for us: that
force cannot be captured by attempting to
derive it from the principles of a theoretical
structure that claims to capture, trans-histori-
cally, the truth about ethics. Perhaps the major
theme uniting his work as a whole is the impor-
tance of theorizing about human experience in
a way that is consistent with recognizing the
local perspective from which that theorizing is
done. This surfaces in various places - for
example, it is at the heart of his criticisms of
evolutionary theories of epistemology, and anti-
individualist theories of social explanation.
However, this theme is developed most fully in
Williams's discussion of the proper forms and
limits of theorizing about ethics. In explaining
Williams's distinctive contribution to philoso-
phy, this is the place to start.
Williams's contribution to ethical philoso-
phy is sometimes described as being to turn it
away from an exclusively 'meta-ethical'
concern with the structure and function of
ethical discourse and back to an engagement
with normative ethical questions themselves.
Often cited in this connection is his complaint
(in Morality) that 'contemporary moral phi-
losophy has found an original way of being
boring, which is by not discussing issues at all'.
However, the practical re-engagement of moral
philosophy was well under way by the time
Williams wrote these words - not least in the
influential utilitarianism advocated by R.M.
HARE, JJ.C. SMART and others. It is as a critic
of the utilitarian view that Williams first came
1133
WILLIAMS
to prominence, and his early work attacking it
- especially 'A Critique of Utilitarianism' (1973)
- remains the most accessible introduction to
his philosophy.
Central to Williams's attack on utilitarian
moral theories is the accusation that they are
hostile to the deliberation and agency that con-
stitute a well-lived life. In 'A Critique of
Utilitarianism' this objection takes the follow-
ing form. Utilitarianism instructs me to count
my own interests as merely those of one
amongst all the different people whom my
actions could affect. Doing what is morally
right, it claims, is a matter of producing the
outcome that is best from a point of view that
is impartial between the interests of everyone.
But to accept this as an agent, Williams com-
plains, would be to adopt a strangely instru-
mental attitude towards my own life - to view
it as a vehicle for producing impartially prefer-
able outcomes. That would mean alienating
myself from the distinctive attachments and
commitments that make it my life rather than
someone else's.
To this objection - the objection that delib-
erating as a utilitarian would be a personal
disaster - utilitarians have replied in two
broadly different ways. One has been to accept,
heroically, that this would be a disaster for me,
but to insist that I am only one person amongst
many, and suffering an alienated life may well
be the price I have to pay in order to do what
is best overall. The other, more common reply
has been to distinguish between the use of util-
itarianism as a theory of the moral justification
of action, and its use as a method for actually
deliberating about what to do. Utilitarianism
can serve as a theory of moral justification
without being proposed as a method of delib-
eration. After all, as a theory of moral justifi-
cation, it tells us we are justified in deliberating
in whatever way produces the best results; and
that may not be by deliberating directly in util-
itarian terms. Indeed, if deliberating directly in
utilitarian terms would be a personal disaster,
that may itself supply a good utilitarian justifi-
cation for not doing so.
WILLIAMS
Williams's responses to these two options
for utilitarianism take us deeper into his ethical
philosophy. To think that the first 'heroic'
option is available, he argues, is to fail to appre-
ciate the depth of the disintegration that would
result from trying to think of my own interests
as only those of one amongst many people,
each of whom has an equal claim to my atten-
tion. It is not just that it would be unsatisfying
for me to live this way: it would destroy the
reasons I have for living at all. Williams's most
forceful expression of this point is in the widely
cited paper 'Persons, Character and Morality'
(included in his collection Moral Luck, 1981).
If I am to recognize a reason to pursue anything
at all, I must see my own life as worth living;
but I cannot do that if I abandon my commit-
ment to those people and projects that are of
special significance to me. 'Life has to have
substance if anything is to have sense, includ-
ing adherence to the impartial system; but if it
has substance, then it cannot grant supreme
importance to the impartial system.' This,
Williams argues, is a fundamental objection to
the impartialist ambitions not only of utilitar-
ianism but of Kantian moral theories too.
In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
Williams presses the point further. Our reasons
are the considerations that provide compelling
recommendations in favour of action. There is
a host of considerations that have this force for
us. But their having this force is not a matter of
their being answerable to the demands of some
underlying theoretical structure.
We may be able to show how a given
practice hangs together with other practices in
a way that makes social and psychological
sense. But we may not be able to find anything
that will meet a demand for justification made
by someone standing outside those practices.
We may not be able, in any real sense, to justify
it even to ourselves. A practice may be so
directly related to our experience that the
reason it provides will simply count as stronger
than any reason that might be advanced for it.
Given the considerations that we do count as
strongly supporting our actions, anything that
1134
an abstract theory can come up with can only
be weaker than them, and thus provide us with
less compelling reasons than the ones we have
already.
Thus, the target of Williams's attack extends
beyond utilitarian and Kantian moral theories
in particular, to encompass all purported justi-
fying ethical theories. There are two core
elements of this attack. One concerns the rela-
tionship of the theorizer to her own theory. A
theory the acceptance of which is incompatible
with the perspective of an agent towards her
own life is not a philosophical contribution to
answering the normative questions that need to
be answered in living a reflective life. An ethical
philosophy that deserves to be taken seriously
must be one that is compatible with the per-
spective of agency. For Williams, this, ulti-
mately, is what is wrong with the attempt to
separate utilitarianism as a theory of ethical
justification from the non-utilitarian methods of
practical deliberation that it recommends. This
distinction, he argues, cannot be sustained as
part of a stable perspective on one's own life. I
might, as a utilitarian theorist, hold that there
is a utilitarian justification for you to value
your friends in a non-utilitarian way; but I can
hardly say that I have a utilitarian justification
to value my friends in a non-utilitarian way -
once I become an agent, I cannot sustain the
distinction my theory is instructing me to make.
The second core element in Williams's attack
on ethical theory comes from his theory of
reasons for action - often characterized as
'Humean' because of the close connection it
insists on between the considerations that
provide an agent with good reasons for action
and the considerations that are effective in
actually motivating that agent. This theory,
explicitly presented in the paper 'Internal and
External Reasons', has deservedly received a
great deal of attention amongst philosophers of
practical reason. Less often noticed is the way
in which it is fundamental to the thesis pre-
sented in Ethics and the Limits of'Philosophy',
where Williams's complaint is that the ethical
considerations that already compel our atten-

tion in thinking about how to live are more
forceful and engaging motivators of action than
the abstract considerations of an ethical theory.
Williams's view is not that we ought to make
a crude identification of motivation with justi-
fication. To be a good reason for me to act, it
is not enough simply that a consideration does
motivate me: it must be a consideration that
does or would motivate me to the extent that I
deliberate rationally and knowledgeably about
it. However, Williams argues that what quali-
fies as a reason under these conditions will
depend on my own personal motivational ten-
dencies - my 'subjective motivational set'. He
cautions us not to underestimate the extent to
which, on this picture, our reasons will
converge. Many of our motivational peculiar-
ities are due to failures of rationality and
knowledge (a class of failures under which he
prominently includes failures of imagination).
But that convergence is unlikely to be complete.
And it will be local, since the considerations
that are available to us as the motivators of
action are culturally specific.
Williams's principal philosophical project in
the 1970s and 1980s, summarized above, had
a deflationary aim. It sought to puncture the
claims to practical authority of the most promi-
nent forms of ethical theorizing, and to do so
by means of a distinctive kind of internal
critique. An examination of the force of ethical
reasons, Williams argued, shows that they are
inaccessible to certain ethical theories: the
acceptance of those theories is itself incompat-
ible with a proper recognition of that force. A
conclusion he insisted on was the unavailabil-
ity of an 'Archimedean point' from which to
validate our ethical commitments - a perspec-
tive external to those commitments from which
they can be justified. However, his acceptance
of this conclusion was conditioned by two
further concerns. One was to reject those forms
of relativism that undermine the seriousness of
ethical commitment. To reject the idea of an
'Archimedean point' for ethics is not to
succumb to the view that the ethical opinions
we happen to have inherited are no better than
1135
WILLIAMS
any alternative set. The second was to reject
equally a conservative complacency about those
ethical opinions. Our ethical outlook can be
criticized from within. A central role in that crit-
icism can be played by our reflection on the
history of this ethical outlook - how and wh.
it has developed into the form it currently takes.
Filling in some of that history, while showing
that it does not lead to a destructive relativism,
was the dominant concern of the latter part of
Williams's career.
In Shame and Necessity (1993) Williams
examines the relationship between our ethical
conceptions and those of the ancient Greeks.
Paying close attention to the texts of Homer
and the great tragedians of the fifth century
BCE, he argues that the discontinuities between
their outlook and ours have been exaggerated.
Our fundamental ethical conceptions of agency,
responsibility, shame and freedom are the same.
What is noticeably absent from these ancient
writers, however, is a sharp distinction between
moral and non-moral motivation, marked by a
concern with duty. The germ of this distinction,
Williams argues, comes from Plato, whose
picture of the soul as a battleground between
reason and desire gave rise to a tradition in
which the 'will' is seen as a self-directed moti-
vator of moral action. This conception of the
will, which receives its purest expression in
Kant, Williams sees as metaphysically confused,
and as transmitting its confusions to our prac-
tices of blame and punishment. However, this
is not to say that the right response for us is
simply to attempt to reinhabit the ethical
outlook of the ancient Greeks: that is a fantasy
which our cultural difference makes impossible.
Rather, the right conclusion to draw is that we
need to reconstruct our own ethical outlook,
from the materials we have to hand, in a way
that removes its indefensible elements. Perhaps
the central mistake from which we need to free
ourselves is the idea of the truly moral self as
characterless - as constituted merely by an
awareness of the requirements of morality and
an effective will. The peculiarities of my char-
acter, on this false picture, are external to the
WILLIAMS
free agency of the rational self. Under the influ-
ence of this picture, we have wrongly displaced
the core ethical emotion of shame - the aware-
ness of those aspects of myself that properly
elicit the contempt or derision of others - in
favour of guilt - the awareness of my actions as
proper objects of anger or resentment. It is not
that we should be aspiring somehow to elimi-
nate guilt from our ethical experience. But it is
shame, as the emotion of personal inadequacy,
that provides us with the guidance we need in
order to understand ourselves, our relations to
our actions and the social world we inhabit,
and what we can become.
Williams's use of historical reflection on the
peculiarities of our modern ethical outlook to
ground a critique of that outlook has strong
affinities with the philosophical project of
Nietzsche. As in Nietzsche, we are offered a
genealogy of the central components of modern
morality - 'the morality system' as Williams
refers to it at several points in his writings -
with the aim of undermining them. And as in
Nietzsche, it is the Greeks who provide the
principal object of comparison. It is not as
though the fact of our being able to show that
our ethical conceptions are historically contin-
gent itself casts doubt on them. To take the
historical self-awareness of Nietzsche in the
direction of ethical nihilism, Williams main-
tains, is an error that pervades the contempo-
rary intellectual landscape - an error he attacks
in his last book, Truth and Truthfulness (2002).
However, as he points out in that book, there
is a kind of genealogical explanation that is
destructive - one that exposes the origins of
those features of morality that purport to be
self-sufficient. To criticize modern morality is
not to abandon ethical commitment altogether:
that is to commit the nihilistic error. Williams's
claim, again like Nietzsche, is that it is the
morality of duty, obligation and the
autonomous will that stands exposed by this
critique. Williams's target is not specifically
Christian conceptions of morality, as it is in
Nietzsche, but rather the kind of impartialism
he finds common to utilitarianism and Kant.
1136
And Williams's ethical destination is a version
of liberalism rather than Nietzsche's perfec-
tionism. But what he shares with Nietzsche is
the conviction that effective ethical criticism
can be achieved through historical self-under-
standing.
In Truth and Truthfulness Williams's aim is
to show that the search for this kind of self-
understanding is not destructive of a concern
for the truth - and, concomitantly, of our
serious commitment to ethical ideals. In this
final book he proposes that the genealogical
method can be used to do this too. He claims
to lay out a 'vindicatory' genealogy of truth and
truthfulness - one that explains our need for
these ideas, and shows how they make sense.
For Williams, this is once more an ethical
investigation. His genealogy is a genealogy of
truthfulness, which he understands as a pair of
associated virtues: accuracy (the endeavour to
acquire true beliefs) and sincerity (the commit-
ment to revealing what you believe in what
you say). Having this pair of virtues requires
valuing the truth, and doing so intrinsically
rather than merely instrumentally. According to
Williams, two conditions are jointly sufficient
for something to have intrinsic value: 'first, it is
necessary (or nearly necessary) for basic human
purposes and needs that human beings should
treat it as an intrinsic good; and, second, they
can coherently treat it as an intrinsic good'. A
genealogical explanation of our activity of
valuing the truth, he maintains, can contribute
to showing that both of these conditions are sat-
isfied. To satisfy the first, it can point to a cul-
turally universal need for the pooling of infor-
mation. The necessity of our being able to
develop relations of trust with each other is the
core of the virtues of truthfulness. The cross-
cultural variations around this basic core are the
results of changing, culturally localized concep-
tions of privacy, rivalry and cooperation, which
bring with them different understandings of the
access to information that we can properly
demand of each other. Turning to the second
condition, Williams sees his genealogical account
as satisfying this by showing that truthfulness

'has an inner structure in terms of which it can
be related to other goods'.
One of the immediate legacies Williams
leaves to philosophy will be to assess the success
of this positive genealogical project. One kind
of argument he deploys against those he calls
'the deniers of truth' - those who hold that
truth discourse, the activities that surround it
and the norms that govern those activities are
of purely instrumental value - is that their view
is ultimately incoherent. To hold that the norms
constraining our beliefs are instrumentally
valuable is to commit oneself to the truth of
claims about the values to which those norms
are purportedly instrumental. This is reminis-
cent of the kind of internal critique he used
earlier against ethical theorists. However, this
leaves open a question, to be debated by
Williams's successors, about whether there is a
further, distinctively genealogical argument that
can vindicate claims concerning intrinsic value.
A second important question over which
there has already been much debate concerns
Williams's 'Humean' theory of practical reason.
A widespread reaction has been that the objec-
tivity of our reasons - an objectivity which it
was part of Williams's concern to uphold -
carries with it a requirement that they be inter-
preted in a desire-independent way that is
incompatible with the 'Humean' theory. And if
his theory of reasons is inadequate, that
arguably affects the success of his attack on
ethical theories.
More important is the assessment of
Williams's broader philosophical project - the
project of reconciling a reflective awareness of
the contingent, local character of the normative
questions we face with a commitment to the
seriousness of those questions, and the objec-
tivity that this seriousness requires us to
attribute to them. The first part of his philo-
sophical career was spent arguing against those
forms of ethical theorizing he saw as lacking the
first kind of awareness; the latter part was spent
defending the second commitment. It is too
early to judge the success of Williams's own
efforts to carry this through. He was grappling
1137
WILLIAMS
with what on some accounts is the intellectual
problem of modernity: his attempts to resolve
it will be of enduring interest.
Williams was an agile and sometimes elusive
but always stimulating writer. The animating
spirit of his work can be described as a kind of
ethical realism, in the popular rather than the
technical sense. He denied that the objectivity
of ethics requires a commitment to metaphys-
ical realism in relation to ethical values.
However, his thought was governed by a
concern to be true to our ethical experience,
seeking to identify the ways in which philoso-
phy distorts that experience, and those in which
it provides clarity. In his lifetime his contribu-
tions to many other topics sparked much sec-
ondary discussion and debate. In addition to
the work upon which this article has concen-
trated, he will be remembered for his detailed
study of Descartes's epistemology, and a wide
range of stimulating short papers on topics
including personal identity, the relationship of
luck to moral assessment, moral conflict, and
the relationship of culture and biology within
the explanation of human action.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Morality: An Introduction to Ethics
(Cambridge, 1972).
'A Critique of Utilitarianism', in J.J.C. Smart
and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For
and Against (Cambridge, 1973).
Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers
1956-1972 (Cambridge, 1973).
Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry
(Harmondsworth, 1978).
Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers
1973-1980 (Cambridge, 1981).
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985).
Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, 1993).
Making Sense of Humanity and Other
Philosophical Papers 1982-1993
(Cambridge, 1995).
Plato: The Invention of Philosophy (1998).
Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in
Genealogy (Princeton, 2002).
WILLIAMS
Other Relevant Works
Altham, J.E.J. and Ross Harrison (eds),
World, Mind and Ethics: Essays on the
Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams
(Cambridge, 1995).
Garrett Cullity
WILLIAMS, Christopher John Fardo
(1930-97)
CJ.F. Williams was born in Walsall on 31
December 1930 and died in Bristol on 25 March
1997. After going to school at Shrewsbury he
went up to Oxford to read Greats at Balliol
College, where his tutor was R.M. HARE. While
at Oxford, Williams became a convert to Roman
Catholicism, and upon graduating in 1953 he
began to train for the secular priesthood, first at
a seminary in Birmingham and then at the
Gregorian University in Rome. But he gradually
realized that he would be more at home within
the Benedictine Order, and in 1955 he entered
Downside Abbey as a novice. Within two years,
however, Williams contracted severe polio,
which left him paralysed from the waist down,
and life as a monk was no longer possible. R.M.
Hare arranged with the Oxford authorities for
Williams to read for a philosophy doctorate
remotely; under the supervision of I.M.
CROMBIE, and with encouragement from Peter
GEACH (who, according to Williams, would reg-
ularly send him comments on his work by return
of post), he wrote his thesis on 'existence and
definability'.
Williams started his professional career in phi-
losophy at Hull University, where he taught fo.
three years from 1962. He then moved to the
University of Bristol, where he was first lecturer
(1965-72) and then reader (1972-89) before
being awarded the personal chair, which he
occupied until his retirement in 1996. Williams
was an elegant, almost Edwardian, figure and he
1138
had an exceptionally sunny disposition. His
lectures and seminars were full of laughter, and
there was no shortage of helpers eager to push
his wheelchair. Despite his disability he trav-
elled widely, lecturing in Poland, teaching for a
semester at the University of Notre Dame, and
for many years taking holidays among his
friends, the Benedictine nuns, at Bee in
Normandy, where St Anselm had once been
Abbot.
Williams published many articles in various
philosophical journals, and was himself editor of
Analysis for five years (1971-5). He also pub-
lished books within his two areas of specializa-
tion - ancient and medieval philosophy, and
philosophical logic. His translation of and com-
mentary on De generatione et corruptione came
out in 1982 as part of the Clarendon Aristotle
Series, and he was working on an annotated
translation of Philoponus's sixth-century com-
mentary on the same text at the time of his
death. In 1991 he published the first modern
translation of part the Logica magna by Paul of
Venice.
As a philosopher of logic, Williams was con-
cerned to make maximally explicit the ways in
which words like 'true', 'be', 'same' and T
function, and in doing so to clear up conceptual
muddles, some of them of very long standing. He
worked squarely in the tradition of Frege and
RUSSELL, and in his three main books in this area
he acknowledged also the profound influence of
Arthur PRIOR. His first book, What is Truth?
(1976), is mainly a development of RAMSEY'S
and Prior's so-called prosentential theory of
truth. The broad answer given to the book's
title question is that a full account of what the
word 'true' means is provided by quantification
of propositional variables in sentences of the
form: 'for some p, both Percy says that p and /?'
(What is Truth?, passim). Williams's second
book, What is Existence? (1981), examines what
is involved in many aspects of such quantifica-
tion. Here he elaborates the view that existence
is 'a second-level predicable', properly applying
only to classes and not to individuals. He also
presents an original account of how the same

word, 'be', can have both a copulative and an
existential function, and of the 'analogical'
nature of the connection between these two func-
tions (ibid., pp. 300ff.). The third book in the
series, What is Identity? (1989), begins with a
defence of WITTGENSTEIN'S denial that identity is
a relation. But it dissents from Wittgenstein's
accompanying view that there is no need for a
sign of identity:
Consideration of intentional contexts seems to
make clear that the concept of identity requires
verbal expression. What is important,
however, is that the expression required is not
one that belongs to the category of two-place,
first-level predicable, an expression whose
purpose is to form a proposition when
attached to a pair of names. Rather, it belongs
to a category whose function is, roughly
speaking, to form a one-place out of a two-
place predicable.
(What is Identity?, p. vii)
Williams represents his identity operator by the
capital Greek Xi, similar to, but not the same as,
the identity symbol used by Frege in
Begriffschrift. The books in this trilogy con-
tained large amounts of logical symbolism (much
of it in the Polish notation) which some readers
found off-putting, and so Williams subsequently
produced a less technical condensation in one
volume under the title Being, Identity, and Truth
(1992).
Latterly, Williams's work on the general
concept of identity led him to concentrate on the
particular problem of the self, and, like his friend
and former colleague Richard SWINBURNE, he
opposed the reductionist accounts of Derek
PARFIT and others. According to Williams,
analysis of the logical behaviour of the first-
person pronoun T shows that personal identity
over time is in principle irreducible to psycho-
logical and/or bodily continuity.
At least three threads in Williams's life were
drawn together, with characteristic verve, on
the occasion of his inaugural lecture. There,
under the title They're Trying to Get Rid of
1139
WILLIAMS
Me', he jointly deplored the Parfitian reduction
of the self and Margaret Thatcher's then current
hostility towards British universities, likening
the latter to Henry VTIFs dissolution of the
monasteries.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
What is Truth? (Cambridge, 1976).
What is Existence? (Oxford, 1981).
(Trans, with notes), Aristotle, De generatione
et corruptione (Oxford, 1982).
What is Identity? (Oxford, 1989).
'On Sameness and Selfhood', in Harry A.
Lewis (ed.), Peter Geach: Philosophical
Encounters (1991).
(Ed. with English trans, and notes), Paul of
Venice, Logica Magna [pt 1, fasc. 8],
Tractatus de necessitate et contingentia
futurorum (Oxford, 1991).
Being, Identity, and Truth (Oxford, 1992).
Other Relevant Works
Numerous journal articles including:
'On Dying', Philosophy, vol. 44 (1969), pp
217-30.
'Prior and Ontology', Ratio, vol. 15, no. 1
(1973), pp. 291-302.
'Aristotle's Theory of Descriptions',
Philosophical Review, vol. 94 (1985), pp
63-80.
'Myself, Ratio, vol. 1 (1991), pp. 76-89.
'The Prosentential Theory of Truth', Reports
on Philosophy, no. 15 (1995), pp. 147-54.
Further Reading
'An Interview with C.J.F. Williams', Cogito,
vol. 11, no. 1(1997), pp. 5-10.
Anon., The Tablet, 26 April 1997.
Frapolli, M.J., 'Ramsey's Theory of Truth and
the Origin of the Prosentential Account' in
P.P. Ramsey: Critical Reassessments (2005).
Swinburne, R., The Independent, 29 March
1997.
'They're Trying to Get Rid of Me', Cogito,
vol. 5, no. 2 (1991) pp. 73-81.
Philip de Bary
WILLOCK
WILLOCK, Sophie, see Bryant
WILSON, Colin Henry (1931-)
Colin Wilson was born in Leicester on 26 June
1931. His formal education ended when he
left school at the age of sixteen and he then
worked in a series of jobs: as a laboratory assis-
tant, a labourer, a civil servant, a dishwasher
and a factory hand. From 1949 to 1950 he
was in the Royal Air Force but was discharged
on medical grounds. While travelling in Europe
he met Alfred Reynolds and for a while became
interested in The Bridge, an anarchically
oriented organization some of whose members
were ex-Nazi prisoners of war. From 1950 to
1951 Wilson lived in Strasbourg and Paris. By
1953 he was married and living in poverty in
London. He spent his days reading and writing
in the British Museum Reading Room, and at
night worked as a dishwasher. His first and
best-known book, The Outsider (1956), was
published in May 1956. It received immediate
acclaim and became a best-seller, bringing him
almost overwhelming publicity. His second
book, Religion and the Rebel (1957), which
appeared just one year later when he had
moved to Cornwall, was rejected by critics and
public alike. He became classified as one of the
group of 'Angry Young Men' whose icono-
clastic writing dominated popular intellectual-
ism for several years in the Iatel950s and which
included John Osborne, Kenneth Tynan,
Bernard Levin and Kingsley Amis.
Wilson has continued to live in Cornwall
and write prolifically on a wide range of topics
for over half a century, often producing two or
three books a year, as well as numerous papers
and articles. He has remarked that he has
written the same book seventy times, always
pursuing his interest in the psychology and con-
sciousness of persons who live and think
1140
'outside' the borders of society. He has written
novels, literary criticism, criminology, science
fiction and biography, and has dealt with para-
psychology, sex and the occult. He has attacked
most forms of academic philosophy from Plato
to Derrida, wishing to supplant mainstream
ideas with his own anti-rationalist, inspira-
tional psychology that critically examines and
devises ways of controlling human conscious-
ness. His thought in this area was influenced by
the psychologist, Abraham Maslow, whose
term 'peak experiences' he adopted to describe
those moments of sudden and intense happiness
that may sometimes arise in us unbidden and
which can transform, usually only temporarily,
our relationships with life, persons and the
world. Wilson saw such experiences as the key
to meaningful living, and having rejected what
he described as the pessimistic existentialism of
Sartre and Camus, he propounded his own
'new existentialism', grounded on his convic-
tion that 'peak experiences' can be cultivated or
evoked at will. By 1958 he had set himself the
task of discovering specific ways in which that
could be done, and his life since then has been
spent in studying innumerable examples of
disjunct experiences and unusual personalities,
and analysing the mechanisms and activities
of human subjectivity.
The Outsider became a paradigm for all of
Wilson's subsequent writing. Using a continu-
ous stream of vivid examples from literature, it
points up the feeling of being a misfit, a failure
and a rebel who nevertheless is sometimes
transformed by a sublime epiphany. Wilson
always writes in opposition to systems, con-
vention, containment and the dominance of
unchallenged rationality. He does not accept as
a norm the fractured, mundane and disparate
character of much human experience. His
mission is to analyse, and then overcome and
control, the despair that can haunt and ruin
ordinary human consciousness. His writing is
often highly polemical and opinionated and
his knack of presenting another person's view
in a somewhat glib or inadequate summary
has provoked critical disapproval. At the same

time, the vigour and eloquence with which he
states his own position is attractive, and many
people must have been drawn to read the works
of literature and philosophy he refers to in
pursuing his investigations. Nevertheless, the
radicalism, cogency and originality that his
writing seems to betoken are generally held to
be qualities of his style rather than of his ideas.
Herbert READ heard a lecture by Colin
Wilson at the ICA, and said of him: 'He has
broken his shell before his feathers have
sprouted.'
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Outsider (1956).
Religion and the Rebel (1957).
The Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963).
Introduction to the New Existentialism
(1966).
Voyage to a Beginning: A Preliminary
Autobiography (1969).
Poetry and Mysticism (1970).
New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and
the Post-Freudian Revolution (1972).
Wilhelm Reich (1974).
Anti-Sartre, with an Essay on Camus (San
Bernardino, 1981).
An Essay on the 'New' Existentialism
(Nottingham, 1986).
Existentially Speaking: Essays on Philosophy
and Literature (San Bernadino, 1989).
The Books in My Life (Charlottesville, 1998).
After Life: Survival of the Soul (St Paul,
Minnesota, 2000).
Further Reading
Dossor, Howard F., Colin Wilson: The Man
and his Mind (1990).
Bendau, Clifford P., Colin Wilson: The
Outsider and Beyond (1979).
Diane Collinson
1141
WILSON
WILSON, John Boyd (1928-2003)
John Wilson was born in London on 6 October
1928 and died on 29 August 2003. He was the
son of Percy Edward, an Anglican clergyman.
He earned a Master of Arts at New College,
Oxford, where he studied under Herbert HART
and Stuart HAMPSHIRE. He taught at the King's
School in Canterbury and served as Second
Master from 1959 to 1962. From Canterbury,
Wilson moved to the University of Trinity
College in Toronto, where he served for a year
as Professor of Religious Knowledge. After
serving as a lecturer at the University of Sussex
from 1963 to 1965, he was named the first
Director of the Farmington Trust Research Unit
at Oxford. Wilson remained a tutor at Oxford
after being elected to a fellowship at Mansfield
College in 1973. At Mansfield College he served
as Director of the Warborough Trust Research
Unit.
As Director of the Farmington Trust Research
Unit on moral education at Oxford, Wilson
and his colleagues, a psychologist and sociolo-
gist, published a seminal work, Introduction to
Moral Education (1967), which sought to define
a 'morally educated person' through a defined
set of 'moral components'. The components
were based on a simple framework:
PHIL: the degree to which one regards others
as equals, and looking after their interests.
EMP: the ability to know the feelings and
interests of oneself and others.
GIG: the attainment of factual knowledge and
being able to put those facts into practice.
DIK: the prescribed moral principles to which
one commits oneself.
KRAT: the actions or behaviours that result
from one's moral principles.
These components were considerably refined
and elaborated on during the following years.
In The Assessment of Morality (1973) there
were seventeen components listed. DIK had been
removed and the other components were sub-
divided for precision and clarity.
WILSON
During the 1960s and 1970s Wilson's
taxonomy provided a multidisciplinary
approach for teachers and researchers to gain
a clearer view of the philosophical foundations
and practices of moral education. Wilson
proposed that progress could only be made
through the difficult process of developing
criteria that govern teaching and research in
moral education.
The criteria of moral education come into
play when we ask how we should take into
account the feelings and interests of others.
The aim of moral education is to give pupils the
tools to make good choices and act upon them.
Teachers are faced with the challenge of under-
standing the criteria and help with the moral
development of the pupils, both in terms of the
subject-matter taught and the discipline that
they exercise over their pupils (Dialogues on
Moral Education, p. 133). Thus, Wilson
extolled the enhancement and status of teachers
as 'leaders of the next generation' (Introduction
to Moral Education, p. 415).
The level of acceptance of Wilson's ambi-
tious 'mapping' of moral education varies
widely. Many critics of Wilson's taxonomy
view his approach as being too narrow in its
conception of morality. Indeed, it neglects a
range of insights provided by other perspectives
and virtues. Also, there are complex matters
involved in helping teachers grasp the
taxonomy in terms of aims and the moral com-
ponents. However, Wilson's contributions to
moral education are commendable in connect-
ing theory with practice.
Acknowledging the influence of Richard
Hare (Halstead and McLaughlin, 2000a, p.
273), Wilson viewed morality as a form of
thought and life with distinctive principles and
aims. These moral principles must be prescrip-
tive and overriding. The basis for these princi-
ples must be on treating others as we ourselves
would want to be treated. However, Wilson did
not view toleration and respect for others as
adequate progress in morality. What one
should feel is just as important as what one
should do.
1142
In Love between Equals (1995) Wilson
points out that treating others as equal to
oneself is the heart of the enterprise of moral
education. A great deal of love, trust and
intimacy is required for the practices and prin-
ciples of moral education to be initiated
(Learning to Love, p. 373). Furthermore, this
love between equals should not be used to gain
power or have an ulterior motive. We must
consider how we can do justice to the person
while still caring for them as equal. Wilson
applies many of these same principles in a
deeper romantic love. A central premise to
Love between Equals is that 'love is the child of
want'. Love is based on an ongoing strong
desire for another (Love between Equalis,
p. 33). A person must be committed to sharing
him or herself with another on an equal basis.
Wilson's writings remain influential in the
discussion of approaches to moral learning and
education. His work draws upon philosophy of
moral development and the empirical evidence
of teaching students for more than thirty years
at Oxford. Wilson brought a multidisciplinary
approach to the subject.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Language and the Pursuit of Truth
(Cambridge, 1956).
Reason and Morals (Cambridge, 1961).
Thinking With Concepts (Cambridge, 1963).
(with Norman Williams and Barry
Sugarman), Introduction to Moral
Education (Baltimore, 1967).
Moral Education and the Curriculum (1969).
Practical Methods of Moral Education
(1972).
The Assessment of Morality (Slough, 1973).
Fantasy and Common Sense in Moral
Education (1979).
(with Barbara Cowell), Dialogues on Moral
Education (Birmingham, Alabama, 1983)
A New Introduction to Moral Education
(1990).
Love between Equals (1995).
Learning to Love (New York, 2000).

Other Relevant Works
Language and Christian Belief (1958).
Logic and Sexual Morality (Baltimore, 1965).
Education and the Concept of Mental Health
(1969).
Education in Religion and the Emotions
(1971).
Preface to the Philosophy of Education
(1979).
What Philosophy Can Do (1986).
A Preface to Morality (1987).
Further Reading
Halstead, J. Mark and Terence H.
McLaughlin, 'An Interview with John
Wilson', Journal of Moral Education, vol.
29, no. 3 (September 2000a), pp. 269-83.
, 'John Wilson on Moral Education',
Journal of Moral Education, vol. 29, no. 3
(September 2000b), pp. 247-68.
Mark L. McCallon
WILSON, John Cook, see Cook Wilson
WILSON, Mary, see Warnock
WINCH, Peter Guy (1926-97)
Peter Winch was born in London on 14
January 1926 and died in Illinois in April 1997.
He was educated at Leyton County High
School. During World War II, when he was a
1143
WINCH
sonar operator on destroyers in the Royal
Navy, his interest in philosophy was aroused by
an officer on one of his ships. While on shore
patrols in postwar Germany, he began to
perfect his German, a mastery of which was dis-
played in his editorial work on and transla-
tions of the papers of WITTGENSTEIN, of whose
literary estate he became an executor. On
demobilization in 1947 he attended the
University of Oxford, where he was much influ-
enced by Gilbert RYLE. From 1951 to 1964 he
taught at Swansea, where he was first assis-
tant lecturer, then lecturer, then senior lecturer.
In 1964 he was appointed to a readership at
Birkbeck College, London, followed, in 1967,
by his election to the professorship of philoso-
phy at King's College London, where he devel-
oped a department of lasting distinction. On
retirement, in August 1985, he took a senior
appointment at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. He was a noted editor of
Analysis, a President of the Aristotelian Society,
and President of the Central Division of the
American Philosophical Society. It was on
returning from a meeting of that body that his
sudden death occurred in 1997.
Winch's entire oeuvre is a sustained endeav-
our to attain to an understanding of
Wittgenstein's insights. He once wrote that
'anything I have to say ... is grounded in such
understanding as I have of Wittgenstein's phi-
losophy' (Trying to Make Sense, p. 1). This
interest in Wittgenstein was fostered at
Swansea, where Wittgenstein's friend and
executor Rush RHEES was an influential figure,
and it manifested itself in two ways (in addition
to the work as literary executor and translator
that has already been mentioned). To begin
with there is Winch's exegetical work on the
corpus of Wittgenstein's writings, often offered
with the intention of correcting what he
believed to be erroneous views of that work. An
example is his detailed argument to show that
the often-supposed, absolute rift between
Wittgenstein's earlier work, as presented in
Tractatus logico-philosophicus and the later
work as represented by Philosophical
WINCH
Investigations, ignores continuities between the
phases of his thought. And at the very end of his
life Winch was offering criticisms of Norman
Malcolm's construal of certain views, suppos-
edly derived from Wittgenstein, about religion.
He also sought to apply his understanding to
questions not always explicitly dealt with in
Wittgenstein's writings; questions, for example,
about ethics, the nature of social science,
anthropology and religion. To understand
Winch's work is to understand, first, what he
thought himself to have taken from
Wittgenstein and, second, how he applied it.
Winch begins by rejecting a common view of
a philosopher as, in Locke's words, an under-
labourer whose task is 'clearing the ground a
little, and removing some of the rubbish that
lies in the way of knowledge'. Suppose, for
example, we find a term used unclearly in one
of the special sciences: 'cause', say, in physics.
On the under-labourer view, the philosopher
will clarify the meaning of this term and then
let the scientist get on with the job of using it
to bring knowledge. But suppose that someone
wonders not, say, about whether Loch Ness
monsters exist, but whether anything really
exists. To raise that question is to damage the
under-labourer view, according to which phi-
losophy has problems only because the special
sciences have problems. For we do not have to
await the development of those sciences in
order to have puzzles about the reality of things
as such. The question is not about the exis-
tences of certain kinds of flora and fauna on
this or any other world but, as Winch put it in
his most famous work, The Idea of a Social
Science (1958), about the concept of reality,
about what it is for something to be real.
It is often claimed that for something to be
real is for it to be available to the kinds of
empirical observational methods used in
everyday life and refined in the empirical
science of physics. Certainly, if one makes sci-
entific empirical observation the yardstick by
which to test claims about reality, then religion,
for one, is in trouble. As AJ. AVER tartly
enquired, what observation of the world
1144
around us could support claims about a deity
wholly transcendent to that world? Winch,
however, asserts that we need an argument for
the claim that science provides the only viable
notion of reality. This is a claim about science
and therefore not one for science to arbitrate.
Hence for Winch 'it is evident that the expres-
sion ... "independent reality" ... cannot... be
explained by reference to the scientific universe
of discourse', as this would 'beg the question
whether science does provide the only measure
of reality' (Ethics and Action, 1972, p. 13). In
fact, Winch claimed, it is a 'disastrous' mistake
universally to apply the methods of empirical
science, for 'science is one such mode [of social
life] and religion is another; and each has
criteria of intelligibility peculiar to itself (The
Idea of a Social Science, 1958, p. 100). Winch
was not anti-science, a position he thought
'ridiculous', nor did he think that there were no
scientific questions about societies. However, he
rejected the claim that there were only scientific
criteria of intelligibility and reality.
To replace the view that science determines
reality and intelligibility, Winch adopts an
account derived from Wittgenstein. Language
is not invented. It developed as we developed
(and will continue in that way), and fits the
capacities we acquire in adjusting ourselves to
the situations in which we find ourselves. For
example, as we evolved as creatures making
certain sorts of visual sortings, so the colour
language evolved. As error and correction are
part of our developing history, so there is a
language of error and correction.
With that goes an account of language acqui-
sition: we are born into developed linguistic
communities and we learn the language of
those communities because we have certain
evolved capacities and, no less than dogs, can
respond to training. As a result of that training
we use words, without strain, in various ways.
Our language is there, like our lives, and it
reflects the forms that our lives take. To under-
stand uses of language is to understand the
kind of lives into which they are woven and to
which they give expression.

All Winch's philosophical work flows from
these thoughts. In particular, we are told that if
we wish to understand an expression we need to
trace it back to its home in the activities into
which it is woven and from which it gets its
meaning. Thus, suppose the question is 'What is
a fact?' Winch writes:
The concept of factuality is not given; it arises
out of the way men live. We have to consider
the conditions which make it possible for us to
have the concept of 'the facts', which involves
taking into account the modes of human
behaviour, together with the kinds of deci-
sions involved in them, in which the concept
of 'the facts' plays a part and from which it
receives its sense.
(Ethics and Action, 1972, p. 57)
What is true of a term like 'fact' is true also of a
term like 'real'. Winch wrote: 'Our idea of what
belongs to the realm of reality is given for us in
the use of the language we use. The concepts we
have settle for us the form of the experience we
have of the world' (The Idea of a Social Science,
1958, p. 15). And 'The scientist... tries to make
the world more intelligible; but so, too, do the
historian, the religious prophet and the artist; so
does the philosopher ... it is clear that ... the
objectives of each of them differ from the objec-
tives of any of the others' (ibid., pp. 18, 19).
This duly leads to the claim that the criteria that
are relevant when religious people attribute
reality to God need not be those with which the
scientist is concerned. More particularly, it led
Winch to say in his most controversial paper,
'Understanding a Primitive Society', that the
understanding of reality operative in the natural
sciences will not necessarily help us to understand
what is happening when people in other cultures
refer to the reality of things like, say, witches. All
these thoughts come together in this crucial
passage:
Everything I have so far said has been based on
the assumption that what is really fundamen-
tal to philosophy is the question regarding the
1145
WINCH
nature and intelligibility of reality. It is easy to
see that this question must lead on to a con-
sideration of what we mean by 'intelligibility'
in the first place. What is it to understand
something, to grasp the sense of something?
(The Idea of a Social Science, 1958, p. 18)
What is it that makes language possible? One
answer to that question is this: we learn terms in
certain contexts and we project them into new
contexts. A child is trained to apply 'dog' to a
particular thing and then goes on spontaneously
and under correction to project this term in refer-
ring to newly encountered instances. We can
talk because we agree in the projections that we
make. Our language is socially founded. Nothing
ensures that we will make the same projections,
yet social life depends upon the fact that we do.
From this emerges Winch's central thought: that
social behaviour is meaningful behaviour and
meaningful behaviour is behaviour that accords
with rules; which is to say, accords with the pro-
jections we agree in thinking it right to make. An
outsider who cannot understand a football
match or a marriage ceremony lacks that under-
standing because he or she has not understood
the meaning of a subclass of rule-governed
behaviour.
The use of language, then, is rooted in forms
of social life, in the ways different cultures try to
make sense of the world. If we do not share
those forms of social life, we may not be able to
see the sense in the language used by their par-
ticipants, even though we may be able to con-
struct a perfectly adequate dictionary and
grammar for that language. Wittgenstein envis-
aged just that possibility:
One human being can be an enigma to
another. We learn this when we come into a
strange country with entirely strange tradi-
tions: and, what is more, even given a mastery
of the country's language. We do not under-
stand the people ... We cannot find ourselves
in them.
(Philosophical Investigations, p. 223)
WINCH
Winch's thoughts about language and reality
found their first systematic application in his
controversial The Idea of a Social Science, a
study of that species of sociology which seeks
to make intelligible the forms of social life. He
claims that for an enquiry to be well founded
it must operate with a proper understanding of
the nature of the objects it studies. Sociology
studies social behaviour and seeks to make it
intelligible; social behaviour is
oped through the work of Apel and Habermas.
It is important to note the scope of this dis-
cussion of sociology. That it was limited in its
scope is indicated in Winch's reference to 'this
part of sociology'. He did not deny that empir-
ical investigation of social phenomena is
possible. He wrote, for example, '[Compare]...
two children, one of whom does learn the
language of his or her community while the